Naturally, when Lisa told me she was pregnant I wanted her to get tested, to find out our chances of producing a kid who’ll be gawked at, and beat up, and then, always, dismissed. But she said a baby is not a horse race you bet on, and that knowing the odds doesn’t change them, anyway.

I proposed, too, but she said no. 

“Why don’t we get to know each other a little better before we make any big decisions?” were her exact words, a no in packing peanuts. I’d already gotten to know her better so I said this was a great idea, rather than pointing out that she’d made the big decision to have the baby all by herself.

Lisa’s church, The Warriors of God Missionary Baptist, pitches the sweetest little summer carnival in the county. They’ve got a special banner this year, gold script on navy vinyl strung over with manila rope over the entry gate—75 Years of Family Fun. I’m meeting her tonight at seven, at the Italian sausage stand by the kiddie rides. The peppers and onions prickle up saliva on my tongue every time someone passes by eating one of those subs, and I can already imagine fishing fennel seeds from between my teeth. I hope Lisa has room for soft ice cream, afterwards. I could watch that woman eat with a spoon all night long.

I’m here early after my trip into town to pick up my new contacts. I stopped in a barbershop while I was there—a salon, to be honest—for a dye job. Now I’m disguised as a regular man, with dark brown hair, and baby blues. For eight hours a day this last year, I had to cover over one eye to make the other stronger, with a flesh-colored adhesive patch much darker than my own whitepink skin. At the end of each day, when I removed the patch, my lashes were flattened on one side so people always thought I was winking at them. I almost got in a fight with this trunk-necked guy at the bar.

Midway games’re all rigged—warped basketball hoops, magnetized ring toss. The guy at the goldfish game fills those bowls to the brim, so when your ball hits the surface it’s bounced right across the water, like a skipped stone. See how he goes around with his watering can, filling them to their piecrust rims? The trick is to pick a fish and keep at it, splashing a little bit out each time until the meniscus is gone and your ball has a chance to settle atop your new finned friend.

Five dollars nets you a coffee can of Ping-Pong balls; I pay, choose a fish, and pitch at him for a while. He doesn’t cringe, so I stick with him because he’s stalwart and Lisa will like how his orange and brown splotches bleed together on his belly. He looks like someone spilled paint. Lisa’s got this cat that hangs out in her backyard that she’s just crazy about. It’s got spots like this one. She puts out chicken skin and fat for it and calls it Frank. Genetically, calico cats can only be female, but I hope that doesn’t hold for fish because I have already named him Bert.

Genes are funny things, as anything discovered by a monk with some wrinkled peas is bound to be. Namely: only one in every five thousand people carry this (recessive) trait for albinism, and what were the chances of two of those secret bleachers meeting in 1977, in a crawfish cannery in Marvell, Mississippi? Even then, I had a three in four shot at melanin, but I, Lewis Calvin Scruggs, was born pink-eyed as a bunny.

Feeder goldfish aren’t stable to begin with but when Bert is handed to me he’s got a case of the jitters. He alternates between shimmying up his plastic walls and sinking down sideways into a corner. A walk, perhaps, would do us both some good—nothing like an evening stroll to soothe the nerves, I think they say.

We push upstream, hit a crowd around the latest jock with a string of luck at the Shoot ‘Em Up. Other men clap his back and pass him fives as he prepares to dispatch another row of pop-up clowns. Next to him, a small girl clutches a pink stuffed cheetah-spotted monkey roughly her size. Her face is goofy with love. 

An experiment: I veer into the crowd, wade through, block views. Result: people are annoyed, but no more; I watch people not watching me, their eyes not bouncing from skin to hair to eyes, needing to make sense of me. My hand sweats against the rubberbanded plastic bag with the thrill of absence. 

I skip the rest of the midway and opt for the rows of vendors. They sell everything here—airbrushed tee shirts, your name necklaced out of bent wire. There’s a stand with a red banner: Edward’s Engravings. Edward’s behind the table, surveying his sample handiwork. 47 Chirrup Ln. Harold L Dixon DDS. “Home Sweet Home”—The O’Connors. 

“Hey there,” Edward says. “I’m Ted. You interested in a sign? They’re handsome and waterproofed.” He floats his hands over the samples as he talks, like a Price Is Right girl, except his thumb has a pale strip bordered by gray grime and fuzz. On the ground, next to his boot, a Band-Aid’s face-up, moist and curled.

“You make all these?”

He juts his chin toward the banner above our heads. “Ya read? Course I did.”

I reread it. “Fair enough,” I say. 

“What would you have on your sign?” Tedward asks. It’s a line I can tell he’s worked on, one he believes in, meant to light a person up all slick-eyed with possibility.

Lisa had a sign on her house—just a big, waterlogged 490. It hung off a nail on the gutter above the garage, but one day as we sat on the porch sipping 7-Ups this gust of wind blew it right off the nail and beaned this rabbit that’d stopped to lick at an oil spot. The sign broke and the rabbit died. Lisa felt responsible, so I dug a little hole in the backyard and she covered it with dirt and leaves and knelt by the graveside. I just kind of stood there but she closed her eyes and clasped her hands together and whispered a prayer, and I could hear the hisses of her s’s as she prayed: in “rabbits” and “Lewis” and “save us” and “sign.” She sang a sad old hymn. Her voice is reedy and lovely. 

Sure enough, though, when we got up the next morning, there was Frank with a rabbit’s head in her mouth.

I say, “Lewis and Lisa,” and Ted steps back and gives me a long looking up and down like the coach did senior year of high school when I showed up for football try-outs.

“You Lewis?” he asks.

“I’m Lewis,” I say.

“Who’s Lisa? Your dog? You know,” he says, and leans in close, “some folks name their cars, and put a sign up in the garage. Lisa your car?” He hunches in closer, and nearly whispers, “It’s okay. Some folks do that.”

“Lisa is my girlfriend,” I say. “I’m going to ask her to marry me tonight.”

“No kidding! You got a ring and everything?”

“Yes indeed.” I take it out of my pocket and brush the lint off the velveteen box. Tedward whistles, long and low. The diamond twinkles yellow and blue with the lights of the Ferris wheel behind us. “Same one as last time,” I add.

“Last time what?” he says.

“Last time I proposed. Back in January.”

At this, he settles into a series of quick little nods, like he was right in the first place, shouldn’t have ever doubted himself.

“You think she’s gonna say ‘yes’ this time?” There’s concern in his voice.

“I don’t know. I’m kind of hoping the fish might help. The sign, too. A little show of faith, I guess. Do you think it would?”

Ted bows his head, rocks on his heels. He squirms under the question. 

I grew up with a girl named Tammy Beams. She didn’t mind playing outdoors with me in the summer when I wore my long sleeves and straw hat and sunglasses, and her shoulders were freckled beneath the straps of her sundress, and so I loved her. In the ninth grade I asked her to the homecoming dance, even though she was dating Alan Hardy, a junior rumored to have seen more freckles than those on her shoulders. When, tickets in hand, I began my conversational shuffle into asking her to be my date, a look of betrayal crossed her face. It said: I have been kind to you. Why are you doing this to me? And so I asked her instead if she wanted to share a ride to the dance, and she said that Alan was driving them, so she wasn’t sure, but she’d ask, and after that we never talked much.

So I say to Ted, “You know what? I’ll take one anyway. Fifty-fifty chance, right?”

“I guess so,” he says, and slips me an order form. I set Bert down for a minute so I can fill in the boxes with an OTB pencil.

“Listen,” says Tedward. “I don’t usually do this after folks have paid, but if she turns you down, tell me before you go. I’ll cancel your order and give you a full refund.”

“Thanks a lot, friend,” I say, because it seems like what he needs to hear.

“Don’t mention it. Say, feel free to stop by later if you need some company.”

We shake hands, and Bert and I stroll off to meet Lisa. 

◆

Lisa teaches Kindergarten. The first time we met I was taking my morning constitutional, pacing the shady perimeter of the elementary schoolyard until my sneakers soaked through. She was leading her charges in an exercise of budding citizenship, collecting litter trapped in the lowest diamonds of the chain-link fence. Each child chose an object—a foil candy wrapper, a soggy papered cough drop, an empty bottle of hooch—and placed it, reverent, in the black contractor bag that Lisa slung over her shoulder. They trailed behind her in their neon yellow pinnies. 

One of the kids saw me, then froze, then pointed, then whispered. I watched awareness of me spread through the class, until one of them shouted, “WHY IS THAT GHOST MAN WHITE?”

Lisa looked up from the cardboard sandwich clamshell she was studying. I braced for the shush, the hand clapped over a small mouth, the too-rough steering away by the upper arm. It happens all the time: adults, visibly startled and then embarrassed, cloak their shame with hissed reprimands of children. 

But Lisa didn’t flinch. 

She crouched down by the boy, and spoke to him calmly. Her little crew huddled to hear. “Skin comes in all different colors. That person’s skin is lighter than some people’s. Maybe if we get to know him, he might feel comfortable talking to us about his body,” she said. “As it stands, though, it’s none of our business.”

She walked over to me, and offered her hand. “I’m Lisa,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. We’re still learning how to discuss difference with care for others’ feelings.”

“Happens all the time,” I told her, which was a lie since this had never happened. No one had ever invited me into this conversation, though it had been taking place about and around me my entire life.

I introduced myself to the class. I told them about albinism, about the genes and the peas and the bleachers. The curriculum was probably a little advanced, but Lisa asked for my number at the end. We went out for beers that night.

“You were so good with them,” she said. “So gracious with their questions. You must be so comfortable in your own skin.” 

I wasn’t, but here she was, describing the thing I’d always wanted as already true. 

That was October. She was pregnant by New Years. Condoms prevent pregnancy with a 98 percent rate of success under perfect usage conditions. I cannot vouch for perfection, of course, but it seems sometimes that my genetic material is destined to defy the odds. 

Lisa was a person comfortable in her own skin, but now that is changing. She is uncomfortable much of the time, skin-wise and otherwise. This is not the kind of pregnancy she wants to be having. She wants to be graceful and glowing, and it is insulting to her that she is falling into the trope of waddle and bloat. Neither of us guessed this might happen; when I met her, Lisa was lean as a greyhound. But now she talks, with a self-deprecating laugh, about her sausage fingers and her clown feet and cankles, and she is always hungry but reluctant to feed her expansion. She does not want to be a pregnant woman concerned with being fat. She wants to be a pregnant woman concerned with being healthy, with creating a warm and stable home life, with raising a child who is confident and kind, who loves the Lord with all her heart.

“It must be a girl,” the secretary at her school told her. “Girls take all your beauty away.” Her day is filled with offhand slices like this.

“I feel eyes on me,” she told me. “People just stare. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. They think they can make any comment they want, to my face.”

I thought of the thousands of comments made just seconds out of my earshot. “Maybe it’s better that way,” I tried to soothe her. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Doesn’t covering up a comment at least show respect?”

You will go back, I want to tell her. This change is only temporary. Soon you will feel the relief of invisibility again. Then I’ll be alone. 

Although maybe I’ll have a new companion. He’d blend in the first few years. Strangers would coo over his platinum duckfeathers when we took off his hat indoors. A baby in sunglasses is postcard-adorable. 

But as he grew, their glances would linger. He’d draw stares, then taunting, before he was forgotten entirely. 

Would he and I have a special understanding—something shared between us only? Or would he blame me?

◆

I escort Bert past the pony rides to where the Italian sausage crackles in the grease. There’s Lisa, leaning on a divider, one foot up in a chain link, watching a cartoon dragon pull tykes around a roller coaster. She blends in with the parents, except that her eyes bounce from child to child instead of the permanent protective gluing that monitors for panic, concussion, joy.

I lean next to her; she doesn’t look. “Which one’s yours?” I ask.

Her eyes linger on this platinum blond girl, and she starts to say something but stops, and says instead, “Oh, I don’t have…”

And then she looks up.

“Your hair,” she says.

“You like it?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

This is a surprise, and it takes me a moment to find something to say next. “I won you a fish,” is what I come up with, and I hoist up Bert for her approval. The good sport, he darts right to the surface for her. But she never sees him.

“It’s black,” she says, and starts running her fingers through my hair, parting it, searching. I imagine we look like those monkeys on TV who pick through each other looking for mites. But Lisa’s looking for capillaries. At night, when we stare at each other after we’ve just had sex, she likes to trace her fingertips along those tiny veins. You can see them, through my hair, a net of blood beneath my scalp. “What if,” she said once, “I could collect what’s in the net, and have your thoughts wiggling on a deck for me to sort through?”

“Your eyes,” she says, and starts to cry.

“They’re contacts,” I say. But she keeps crying. She steps back and she stares, like people always do, like no one has today.

“They’re so cold. It’s not you.”

“It’s not permanent.”

“Will you take them out at night?”

“I’m supposed to.”

“Will you take one out now?”

“I might drop it in the dirt. I could lose it.”

“Please take one out. I want to see the real you. Just for a minute. I’ll hold the fish.” She grabs the bag and the water splashes around inside. Bert stays cool. She holds him above her head in two hands, as if to prove she’s keeping her half of the promise.

I tack my lid open and look off to the side as I slide my finger over my eye. The lens folds and pops onto my fingertip, a blue cap of dew. I hold it up for Lisa to examine. She swats at it with Bert.

The ground is not just dusty but also pebbly and finding a contact lens with only one eye in focus and night almost fallen and your girlfriend not helping is no easy task.

“Might as well take out the other,” she says, blocking the light from a popcorn stand.

“I’m keeping it in.”

“You’ll see worse. Your eyes are two different colors.”

“I can squint. I’m keeping it in.” My hands and jeans are covered in dirt, so I stand up, brush myself off. I’d be mad if I didn’t have another eleven pairs on the passenger seat.

“You’re a fool,” she says.

In the west the sun is hazed orange, and the sky in the east is bruised blue; I have half an hour before dark sets in and the fireworks begin, which is when I had planned to ask Lisa to marry me. Thirty minutes to make her forgive me, and love me again, maybe.

“Hey, why don’t we get some food?” I say. “Italian sausages. Snap-crackle.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Some ice cream?” There’s a cardboard box of nesting plastic spoons not ten feet away.

“I need some air,” she says, even though we’re already outside, and she walks to the entry gate for the Ferris wheel. It’s unloading as we get there, and we’re able to walk right on. The punk kid who locks the bar across our seat eyes Lisa, her belly, licks his lips. She stares at him, looks to me for a moment, then shakes her head and turns away, and the ride begins.

And so we rock and rise in silence, fall and swing, Bert nestled between us, a flying fish. When we rise, I look out at the sky purpling its oranges. At the top, I try to discern the exact moment when we stop rising and start falling. And when we fall, I look in at the spokes of the wheel and I alternate eyes—one hazes them into soft arms; other spikes them.

Lisa turns to me, and her eyes make tiny motions as she looks me in the iris: left-right, left-right, compare-contrast. Her fingers drum on the seat bar.

 “I know you don’t like it,” I say. “You’re not used to it yet. But everything was different today.”

“Was it?” 

I think about the crowds, the absence of whispers and stares, and then about Tedward, and the kid who loaded us onto the Ferris wheel. 

“No,” I confess. “But some things were.”

Lisa shakes her head and looks out at the horizon. “Where is the man I fell in love with?” she says to the sky or me. 

I know she means the dye, the lenses. But I wonder if she’s also figured out that she’s seen the best I had to offer in our very first moments. That the rest of me will never live up.

“Did you only like me because I was a freak?” I ask, and she winces. It’s an unkind question, I know, but not an unfair one.

“You’re not a freak,” she says, part reassurance, part reprimand. She takes my hand and holds it tight so that her nails dig into my skin. I rub my thumb softly across her knuckles. 

We circle down slowly, past gradeschoolers bumping their way through the mirror maze, then circle up, again, to the top, and I think “NOW,” because this is the microsecond when we’re suspended between motions. The guy at the bottom must be thinking the same thing because our seat locks right there. We lurch forward, bar in our bellies. There’s a pop. Lisa cries out.

“Sorry,” the guy yells below.

We’re swinging. The horizon’s jumping, and it’s hard to focus. I close my eyes until the swaying slows, then peel open one at a time. With my pink eye, I can see that Lisa’s shorts are wet, and that she’s gripping the seat-bar with locked elbows. With my blue eye, I can see that Bert has slipped from his bag to the treads at our feet.

“Are you all right?” I say. “Is the baby all right?”

She puts her hand on her stomach, and her eyes go soft, to the side and down, like she’s listening for a faint song. Finally, she releases her breath. “She’s kicking,” she says. She feels her shorts between her legs. There, she is dry; it’s only Bert’s water that has dampened us both. 

I am surprised by the wave of relief that rolls from my gut to my throat to my eyes.

Between us Bert’s deflated bag lies leaking on the seat. I look down near our feet for him. He is on his side, motionless but for the occasional pump of gill. In the seats below us, parents are calming their children, teenagers are necking, pairs of laughing boys are trying to rock their chairs to flipping. Finally our chair pitches, and the ride grinds forward. We stutter to the bottom of the wheel. At the base, the guy unchains our bar and stares at us again. 

“What are you looking at?” I ask him. He just shrugs and laughs.

We step out of the chair, and Lisa releases my hand. There are small white crescents in my skin. On the treads Bert has stopped moving, but his eye still shines with life.

“Should we call the doctor?” I say. Another one of those skeletal heartbeat movie shows, our eyes watering in unison, might be just what we need to repair the night.

“I just want to go home. I’ll call him from there.” There are tears pooling at her lashline, too, but she is trying to blink them away.

“Are you okay?” 

“I’m fine,” she says. “Just exhausted. Let’s go.”  

“Sure. Just—give me a minute?” I squat at the base of the Ferris wheel seat and scoop Bert into my hands, then walk over to a hotdog stand, rolling my feet like I learned in marching band so as not to bounce too much. “Can I get a big cup with water in it?” I ask the kid in faded coveralls.

“I got beer and soda in cups. Water comes in bottles.”

“Well, a big cup and a bottle of water, please.”

He gives me a waxed paper cup, and I slide Bert in, then screw open the bottle and let the water trickle down the side. Bert is still at first, just floats, but then he twitches into life. 

I rush, splashing, to the base of the Ferris wheel to show Lisa, but she’s not there. I close my pink eye and scan the gloaming until I see her squeezing through a gap in the fence that marks the parking area. I return to the hotdog stand, grab a lid, and then jog to the field past the cemetery, where she’s parked.

“Lisa! Wait! He’s okay, too, see?” She doesn’t turn around, so I sprint to catch up. I reach for her arm, but my depth perception’s a little off, and I miss. 

“I don’t care about the fish, Lewis,” she says without looking up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going home. Alone.” She roots through her purse, searching for her keys. “I can’t even look at you any more today.” 

I reach into my pocket for the ring, but instead of holding the box out to her I just clench it, tight, in my fist. A test firework whistles through the air.  

“I was going to propose tonight,” I say.

Lisa’s face softens as she raises her head, as she looks me in my mismatched eyes. “Don’t, Lewis,” she says.

“I don’t know what else I can do.”

She opens the car door and slides into her seat. “I don’t know either,” she says, clearing the seatbelt from the door. I think of Tammy Beams, betrayed by her own kindness, by her knowledge that I could never be something else for her. 

“I love you,” I tell her. 

She rests her forehead on the steering wheel, and breathes a long sigh. “I actually love you too, Lewis,” she says, pulling the seatbelt under and across her belly. “But I will not have you making our child feel like a sideshow. Please, don’t come home until you’re back to normal.”

“But the dye’s permanent,” I say.

“You’ll have to figure it out.” She closes the door gently. She backs out over a paper-wrapped ice cream cone and drives away.

I wait for a while in the parking lot, watch the dust contrail settle behind her before I turn around and face the glaring lights of the carnival behind me. I have to cut through the fairgrounds to get back to my parking space on the other side of the church, in the field behind the Sunday school. I don’t know where I’ll go after that. Maybe to the bar.

When I approach Tedward’s booth, he’s brushing lacquer onto a rectangular sign with notches in the corners. He lifts an order form close to his face, frowns, then dips a cloth into a bucket of turpentine, and scrubs to remove the coat. When he sees me, he turns a palm upward in a question, his mouth twisted in reluctant hope. I give him a thumbs-up. 

Grinning, he crosses out to the aisle and slaps me on the back. “I hadn’t started on yours—thought I’d wait a bit, just to be safe. I mean, no sense in wasting good wood, right? Congratulations, friend.”

“Thanks, Ted. Any chance I can just get it delivered? We’re about to head home here.”

“Absolutely. And I’ll tell ya what—shipping and handling’s on the house.”

“I appreciate that, friend,” I say, and we shake hands.

Bert and I wind again through the aisles of rides and vendors, past the Ferris wheel and the fish toss, back to the parking lot. I settle down on the hood of my car and balance Bert’s cup on a rust spot next to me. Beyond the field of cars, the carnival blurs together like the other side of a wet windshield. A pink fuzz of sun touches the horizon between the twinkling lights of The Zipper and The Moon Trip, and the hum of gnats and generators pulses in my ears.

I pry the lid off Bert’s cup. He’s on the bottom, motionless, and I wonder how you can tell if a fish is asleep. I dip a finger into the water and wipe it on my jeans. Then, I slide the contact lens out of my eye. I place it on the nail of my thumb, and flip it like a coin into the dark.