Tumbleweeds escort our van down the long, grey slash, making my eyes and thoughts roll around in bumpy circles. Everything is beige. This van, its cushioned bench, the flat plain, the blowing sand, the tumbleweeds, my face at the window, and my life—all beige. The colors, you know, they’re behind my eyes (stretched out between my ears) and I also feel them at the spot where my skull meets my spine. They’re invisible right now, but they’d like to come out.
I got these red, yellow and blue-striped jeans for my tenth birthday, and I like wearing them, but the colors don’t stick. Inside them, I’m still beige. My hair is brown. My glasses, with points at the top corners, used to be copper, but now they’re tan. Or, you know, beige. I’m invisible behind them until my grandma gets her film developed, and then there I am, in all my buck-toothed glory. My eyes are green, but only my mom knows that.
As the oldest, I’m the helper. Sometimes that’s a pale orange mist, but more often, just beige fog.

My sister is asleep at the other end of this tan vinyl bench seat, thank goodness. She’s six. Or should I say sicks, since she stunk up the van again an hour ago. I guess Kimmy can’t tell she’s about to be car sick till it’s too late to stop and do it outside. And she’s even the one on the side with the doors. But, two days out, two vomits, and two days to go, and that’s just in this direction.
Joey gets to sleep in the very back, in the bottom of the Palanquin, which is one of the magic tricks my dad built. When we pack the show into the back of the van, the bottom of that trick ends up on top of the stack and makes a sort of tray big enough to hold a small blanket and pillow, and my 4-year old brother.
In the van’s back side windows, which are long rectangles, we stick matching, white wood signs that say, “The Amazing Aladdins”, in fancy red letters and gold glitter, and they keep that part of the car darkish. I wish I was small enough to sleep there like that. It can get a little smelly in the back, though, because of the rabbit cage.
Daddy built all the big illusions from wood, with hinges that you stick Allen wrenches down into. Take the Allen wrenches out, and they easily come apart and store flat. Even I can do it. Mom made the sparkly costumes and painted big, gold-glitter Aladdin’s lamps on the front and sides of all the illusions.
The show starts with a big, blue box that has a smaller yellow box inside it, and even though it looks empty, out of it come Chinese scarves the size of picture windows, a table, a life-size stuffed ostrich that squirts water out of its mouth, and finally, my mom, dressed in turquoise and shimmering gold. There’s a tall, narrow red and black box, with five slots for real stainless steel blades. My mom steps in, gets cut into six pieces, and then steps back out, still dazzling in her silver and black costume and high heels. And there is the Palanquin, a rectangular, green box with curtains on each long side. When the curtains are open, the box is empty. Mom squeezes in wearing gold lamé and glittering gold mesh. The curtains get closed and Daddy turns the box once, and then my mom comes out in blue silk Chinese pajamas. How could she have done that in such a small space?! Then the curtains close again, the box turns again, and out comes…me, in shining turquoise Chinese pajamas! I bow. Again, the curtains close, the box turns, and there’s Kimmy, in Chinese pajamas that exactly match mine. And after the final close-and-turn, my little brother pops out in bright red silk Chinese pajamas and brings down the house. After that thrilling moment, my job is to remind Kimmy and Joey to stay quiet backstage, while rainbow scarves become umbrellas and water turns into red wine. After Pinky and Dinky, our white, red-eyed rabbits appear, we go onstage to make a cage with our arms, so they don’t jump off into the audience.
That’s the show we’ll be doing when we get to the end of this road. For now, my job is to become part of the tan-ness, keep an eye on my sister, and not get car sick.
Yesterday, we’d discovered this desert isn’t the bottom of something. Because everything in Wyoming has been flat, I thought of it like a floor, but then without going uphill, we were suddenly looking down from the top of a plateau. Our destination was an Airstream Trailer convention, and the new floor we saw below us was a gleaming sea of curved silver mirrors that reflected the sunshine painfully back to our eyes. Airstreams are all shiny aluminum, with rounded corners, like big metal caterpillars, and the owners are so excited about them that they get together with other owners to talk about them. I guess they must be nice inside, but we didn’t see that. We unpacked the show into the meeting hall, and after the evening performance, we spent the night in a one-level, straight-line motel. Then back on the road.

Ha! I think this is starting to sound like we’re a travelling road show, and that I’m like a circus kid who doesn’t have a home or school, or friends. My home and school are in Colorado, at the base of sharp blue and bronze mountains, and I do have two friends.
My school is red brick, disguised behind grey steps, grey hallways, grey stairwells, and beige walls. My teacher, Mrs. Newton, wears black dresses and has black hair and a craggy olive face with angry eyes. I wear a dark skirt, like all the other girls, and sit behind a beige desk that’s just like everyone else’s, which is good, because Mrs. Newton doesn’t see me. The kids she sees sometimes get dragged out of the room by their ear. Recess with my two friends means finding a corner on the dusty playground where we can remain inconspicuous without looking obviously pathetic. PE class is where everyone finds out how little everyone else wants me on their team.
Guests at my birthday parties aren’t always people I feel very comfortable around or who play with me much. My parents don’t know other kids don’t like me, because I give them a list to invite. I don’t tell them about PE, or about trying not to be the next victim of something mean. What my parents do know is that they give me the coolest birthday parties in town. I have my own magician, who amazes my guests with bright blue, yellow and red magic tricks, and makes them shout and laugh, and for just a few hours each year, I am cool.
Sometimes, during the summer, I’m Peter Pan, or Robin Hood, in bright green under a vivid blue sky. I save my pink little sister, or the orange kid from across the street, who’s held captive by the older neighbor boy, the blackguard, who wants me dead. I’m often severely wounded during the rescue, but struggle through to become victorious. Summers are not beige.
And once in a while during the bleak school year, my parents pack us kids and Pinky and Dinky into the back of the van with the illusions, and we drive to these wild and exotic places, where we bring color and light to stages and meeting halls. We rehearse in the basement for a bunch of days first, which
means we have to keep repeating our parts over and over, as well as practicing the setup and breakdown of the illusions. Okay, those things are boring. But then to be pulled out of school is the coolest thing, telling people I’m going away to be part of a big magic show…that makes me special. That’s one of the colors behind my eyes. Nobody else gets out of school for anything half so cool.
Daddy packed the car two nights ago, and we left late yesterday afternoon for the Airstream convention. A dark grey rainstorm struck as we came out of the mountains. Around where we live, it doesn’t rain much. More hail and snow than rain. My dad’s is our only umbrella. It’s black and really big, I guess because he wears a grey suit to work that needs to stay looking good. He has a day life, working in a men’s clothing store, and a magic life, where he’s the star of our show. That’s a color, but it’s not mine.
We were getting hungry, tired of driving in the rain, and close to our motel, when we saw a Stuckey’s sign, which means food, but mostly pecan rolls for my mom and fudge for the rest of us. It’s one of the most fun parts of the trips, so we keep our eyes open for the signs.
The rain had let up by the time we pulled into the parking lot. Mom opened the back doors and found the tray of the Palanquin was holding a pool of water that had leaked through the top of the back doors. Joey was lying in the water, shivering and only half awake. My mom practically started crying, because she was so upset that she’d not known about the water and hadn’t rescued my brother earlier. She took us inside and got him into dry clothes in the restroom, while my dad cleaned the water out of the back. After dinner, Joey sat on the front bench seat between Mom and Daddy for the ride to the motel, and when we got there, Mom found a laundry for drying his blanket and wet clothes.
Usually, we only go to one city, then back. This trip, we have a second show in Kansas City, for a big Magic Convention. We are the Saturday night entertainment.
This hotel—it’s excellent! Our room is huge, with a living room with heavy, floor-length curtains and flowery grandmother chairs, and Mom and Daddy have their room on one side, and we have our own room on the other side, and the place is maybe a hundred years old and elegant, but the way some musty old lady’s house would be. It’s like a place for old, rich people.
Everyone here seems to know my dad. He’s shaking hands and laughing with so many people! Mom isn’t a shaking-hand kind of person, but she seems happy to be here, too.
Our room is on the third floor, and at the bottom of the elevator is a secret underground passage to the place where the convention is being held. In the yellow-lighted passageway, the carpet’s roses are orange, with brown leaves, but out the other end the flowers turn pink and green on a beige background.
I came by myself through the passage to a big room with tables and tables of magic tricks to buy. Noise, and brightly painted gadgets, and so many people! Most things here are for real magicians like my dad, but there’s a little black coffin, the size of my hand, with a skeleton that disappears or reappears when
you close the lid and wave this tiny magic wand with gold-painted tips. The little wand is heavy for being so small, and it feels good in my hand.
I run back through the passage and ride the elevator to our room, and then I go down again with money in my hand for the skeleton, and my little sister, so she can see all the wondrous things.
I hear the names of people my dad talks about, president of this or that, or famous for this trick or other, or working in Las Vegas or Chicago or at the Magic Castle. That’s a place where only magicians and their relatives and special friends can get in, and an invisible ghost named Irma plays music by request on a haunted piano. Some of these famous people are performing in tonight’s show, before our act. We are last, because we have the big illusions.
Daddy comes to find us so that we can help set up the show. It won’t take too long, because all the pieces are stacked behind the raised platform and we just have to put them together and set them where they can be rolled onstage when it’s our turn.
After an early dinner in the hotel dining room, we get into our costumes, and Mom puts rouge and lipstick on Kimmy and me, and ribbons in our hair. Kimmy’s ringlets are slow—one curl around Mom’s finger at a time. Then a tiny bit of lipstick and rouge on Joey, too, and with coats over our costumes, we head down for the show.
Mom’s hair is fastened up on top of her head with a big jewel, and that and the gold threads in Daddy’s black sport coat gleam in the yellow-lit underground passageway.
From the floor beside the stage, we get to watch the other magicians perform. Some talk to the audience, others just perform to music, like we do. Then we get into places, all our boxes get rolled onstage, our music starts, and—excuse the pun—the magic begins.
We’ve done this show a lot, and we’ve rehearsed a lot, too, but with magic, there’s always the possibility that something will go wrong. The real trick then is to pretend that whatever happened was miraculous, so that people think they maybe missed something, rather than that we messed up. Tonight, I watch as my father pours water from a pitcher into four wine glasses, and the water magically transforms into…water! Mom gamely points to it as though the wondrous transformation into red wine had occurred, then they pass the tray of glasses offstage to me, and they move on. Every magician in the house knows what was supposed to happen and didn’t, of course. That’s the problem with performing for other magicians. But the rest of the show has been really good.
After the show, Mom brought us up to take off our make up and put us to bed, and then she and my dad went to a party. We’ve had magician’s parties at our house sometimes, and everyone wants to share their newest trick. With so many magicians down there, last night would have been just a sea of magic on the flowered carpet. I was too tired to care that I wasn’t allowed to go.
Today, I’m on my own again. I think I’m someone now, because I was part of the big act last night. I’m short, of course, so not everyone sees me, but sometimes people do see me, and I smile and let the colors come out.
I sit in the audience to watch a guy’s show. Daddy knows him, but not well, I think. He’s bald, not much taller than me, wearing a grey suit and doing the card tricks standing up, instead of at a table, like the sleight-of-hand guys who work at the Magic Castle do. He’s okay, but his jokes are about people I don’t know, and they make me uncomfortable. I’m hoping he’s almost done, when he points at me and thanks me for volunteering to help him onstage. That makes people laugh, of course. And even though I didn’t volunteer, being in show business means knowing what part you’re supposed to play. I know my role now is to pretend I don’t know any magic or showmanship, to be not smart, not clever, not funny. Just to be a beige person. And I’m not allowed to refuse.
All the color in the room is suddenly sucked away. Grey mist descends. I’m alone, I’m visible to everyone, I’m not in my costume, and I don’t know my part. My stomach twists. As I approach him, he holds out a deck of cards and asks me to take them.
The deck is between his fingers, perpendicular to the floor, with the front card and the back card slid slightly up, out of alignment with the rest of the deck. I can see what will happen when I take them; there’s no way to prevent it. Glancing quickly up at his eyes, I see that’s the plan. Nothing I can do now, short of giving away the plan and messing up his act, will keep it from happening. He’s smiling, and he says again, “Just hold these for me.” I want to run, or disappear, or throw up. I’m alone on the school playground, and the mean kid has spotted me.
Through the grey, I reach for the cards, because it’s what I have to do. The front and back cards slide off the deck, and fifty-two cards fall to the stage floor.
“It’s so hard to get good help these days,” he says, as I get on my knees to clean up the mess I made. There is nothing else he needs me to do. I’ve filled my role. I keep my eyes on the floor, but I can’t keep my hot, red face from burning holes through the grey around me.
Daddy pulls into a gas station, and everybody wakes up. “Are we home?” asks my sister, and I hear Joey roll over. He doesn’t have room to sit up, but he’s awake. Daddy gets out, and as he swings open the double back doors, the tumbleweed wind sweeps into the car. I’m the one by the side door right now, so I get out to let them buckle Joey into the middle of the bench for the next stretch. I spot a tumbleweed that’s rolling past the corner of the building and run to catch it.
It used to be green. Maybe it even had pink flowers like the hotel rug. In my hand, it’s just a dead bush. Just dried beige twigs on the move. I drop it and wait for it to resume its journey, but it just lies there.
I get back in the van, and as we pull out of the gas station, the tumbleweed gets caught by the wind. We both roll slowly away, into beige.