Free Other People We Married by Emma Straub Page A

Enchanted Forest’s Ferris wheel all the way from New York City, which was thirty miles south. At least that’s what Abraham liked to say. He was big bellied and big voiced and liked to say a lot of things. Sometimes Greta made lists in her spiral notebook.
Today, Abraham made a speech about different ways to reuse plastic water bottles and it lasted for twenty-six minutes. Almost all of the ideas involved using way more plastic. What if no one wants to go inside a Trojan horse made of garbage?
In her sixteen years, she couldn’t remember ever calling her father by anything but his first name. Abraham’s enormous gray and white speckled beard was reason enough.
    Greta’s parents met in 1975, back when things were cheap. Her mother, Judy, was driving across the country in an old school bus with her then-boyfriend, who was a candlemaker. The boyfriend—Greta could never remember his name, no matter how hard she tried—would set up camp somewhere and make candles long enough to sell them at craft fairs and farmers’ markets, and then, when he’d made enough money to last a few hundred miles, off they’d go. The problem was, one day the bus wouldn’t start, and he decided he’d rather keep moving than stick around and make more candles. He gave Judy the bus and the buckets of wax and all the spools of heavy string for the wicks, and he was gone. For the next month, Judy and the bus sat in the parking lot and made candles on the asphalt. That was, until she met Abraham. The way he liked to tell it, Abraham fell in love with the bus first, then Judy. It was a win-win situation.
    The old yellow bus now sat on the edge of the EnchantedForest parking lot, as though a crowd of fifth graders was on an endless field trip. They’d had it towed. You couldn’t see much of the Forest from the parking lot; that was the point. You had to pay your money before you saw exactly what you were paying for. It was always fun when the lot was full—when she was little, Greta would wander between the parked cars, weaving in and out, trying to count all the states from the license plates. Every now and then there was something exciting, like California or Colorado or Alaska, but mostly it was New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. All the ones she could spell without writing them in the air with her finger.
    Of course, these days if the lot was full enough to have cars from Alaska, it meant that Greta was supposed to be inside, taking tickets or busing tables or walking around smiling at people. She was supposed to be a fairy. Judy had sewn her some wings. The costume really wasn’t so bad. Greta could wear whatever she wanted as long as she had on the glittery wings, which she could put on and take off like a gossamer backpack. Most of the time, Greta put them on over her T-shirt or sweatshirt, depending on the weather. They were adjustable. Here’s what Greta liked to wear: normal clothes. Not the kind that the popular girls wore, the ones whose parents had moved from the city, with brand names glistening off their breast pockets and waistbands, but the kind of clothes you wouldn’t think twice about. That was her goal: to blend. The wings made it more difficult, but when she was at home, what was the point? There was no one to convince.
    During the off-season, the long months between September and May, Abraham made money by going into local publicschools and libraries and doing readings as Walt Whitman. He wore his cleanest clothes and a hat, though the beard and the voice were the real selling points. People would stand up and applaud, except for the small children, who would cower behind their parents’ legs and occasionally burst into tears.
    The tenth grade had read
Leaves of Grass
in English class that spring. Greta knew what was coming. The school wasn’t big; everyone else knew, too. The teacher probably assigned the book because she’d seen Abraham do his shtick at the Enchanted Forest Public Library. High schools were always