The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  But she is not going to work.

  She’s nineteen and about to climb onto a surfer’s shoulders out in the turquoise waters of a Hawaiian beach. Her name is Teresa.

  There’s a crowd gathering on the sand. She steps into the ocean beside the surfer, paying no attention to the small sharp shells beneath her feet.

  Out into the water then, deeper, until it is time to paddle.

  They climb onto the board belly-first, she below, the surfer on top of her, two sets of arms paddling in tandem. They must move with one another like oars along a canoe. Over the break, farther out to the point where the waves begin swelling enough to catch.

  They are so far out, and then a little farther, and a little farther still. They turn their board toward the shore. She can feel her heart hammering against the wood. Waves pass beneath them, lifting the back and then the front in a gentle roll.

  Mornings when they practice, gulls swoop nearby, small clear fish move in clouds. The pincushion sea stars wink and wave.

  A big swell nears. Teresa looks over her shoulder a few times, checking to see how quickly the wave approaches, how it is rising. The audience holds their hands above their eyes to block the glare. They are ready to be amazed.

  The wave catches hold of the board with a little tug and they begin to fly. She presses herself up, stands quickly, and the surfer behind her does as well. He grips her by the waist.

  She springs up and he lifts her, one fluid motion, her body rising from the board and into the air, her feet at his knees and then she’s nearly to the sky, touching the sun, her head and shoulders bent back as he lifts her waist above his head and then plants her on his shoulders. Her legs bent around his chest, she lifts her arms in the air, sitting high above the water.

  She smiles and waves for the audience. They cannot hear the blood roiling in her temples, the nerves, they cannot feel her hammering heart. She performs fearlessness. The board is unsteady atop the water and the surfer’s legs shake with the effort of balance and she quivers as she flexes her muscles to stay upright, she must stay upright, and still, she keeps one arm up, up, up toward the sky, that kind of queen, pointing at the sun, that high.

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  Day 7 of 150

  World of Wonders

  June 2013

  I’ve just finished Windexing the glass in front of Queen Kong, our giant taxidermy gorilla, when Tommy pops his head into the tent. “You ready to meet the snakes?” he asks.

  The night before, Tommy had gone to negotiate the purchase of two giant boa constrictors from some guy in town—I didn’t know who, or where they came from, or how Tommy knew these snakes were safe to handle, but I knew they were being delivered to our show today.

  It is the night before we open at our first fair. I’ve been with the sideshow for seven days. Our circus tent is up, taut and shining, the banner line is hung, stages built, curtains scrubbed, illusions bolted, ratchets oiled. Fireflies spark and fade. Men in yellow “Safety Is Non-Negotiable!” shirts straddle the metal arms of the scrambler beside our tent, cursing above the blaring pop country hits as they hinge and pin the little metal closures.

  I follow Tommy into the bunkhouse/backstage area, the back end of a semi where we all sleep and eat and live, just a curtain away from the audience when we’ll be performing.

  Tommy unlatches a plastic trunk and inside, coiled around one another, are two boa constrictors.

  “Do you know how to pick them up?” he asks me.

  “Maybe you could show me how you like it done,” I say.

  “Sure,” he says, a half smile across his face that makes me wonder if he believes my e-mail bluff about the snakes at all. “You’ve gotta reach both your hands all the way inside the box, under the bodies of the snakes,” he says, crouched low and elbow-deep in the snake box. I was hoping for some kind of net or gloves. But his hands are right on the scaly bodies. Not even the illusion of protection.

  “The dude I got these beauties from said they’d been handled before, so they should be easy enough to manage. Use both hands to pick them up,” he says, his nearly cartoonish New Jersey accent thick in his voice. “If you pick up a giant snake with one hand, it could kill it. Their backs break, they get paralyzed, and they can’t eat. Last season, one of the snakes died after a performer accidentally picked him up that way.”

  Tommy stands and faces me. His arms are stretched out wide in front of him and the snake, a seven-footer, is draped between his hands, her body making a giant M.

  It is my turn. I should hold out my arms and take the snake. But there is ringing in my ears. I can’t stop swallowing and my heart is pounding and I can’t move toward Tommy. I try to focus on what I see.

  The snake has tan and chestnut diamonds down her back, the shapes outlined in black and cream. She is as big around as a grapefruit. Wrangling these snakes will be one of my primary jobs and one of the skills I listed on my qualifications. I can’t let him know how scared I am. I stretch a smile across my face as wide as I can.

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “No name yet.”

  “Hello, snake,” I say. She does not blink.

  Tommy steps toward me, and without meaning to I step backward. He steps toward me again. I involuntarily step back, trying to throw a casual laugh on top of my ducking and dodging like this little tango is just a joke. After a few steps, though, I’ve come to the wall. My back is cold against the metal-and-wood paneling that runs inside the truck. I feel the film of dust slide against my palms. I try to come up with excuses that might explain why I’m trying to escape the snake, but my mind is nearly blank. I start to sweat.

  “Will she bite?” I ask, desperate to stall.

  “Boas don’t bite,” he says. “They squeeze their prey to death.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “But she won’t do that to you. She knows you’re too big to eat,” he says. “Just make sure she doesn’t get around your throat, of course,” he says. I touch my neck, imagining her body tightening around me.

  I had some idea that because I’d been through so many harder things, once this moment of reckoning arrived—once it was me and the snake, not the imagined fear, not the generic childhood phobia—I’d see she was just another beautiful creature on the earth trying to get by, and I’d find peace.

  I find no peace.

  * * *

  Sideshows are where people come to see public displays of their private fears: of deformity, of a disruption in the perceived gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion. And that is a sideshow’s intention—to frame whoever or whatever is on display as being outside the realm of what’s “normal.” For the snake act, it should appear that I have such chemistry with the creature that we are almost one. That’s what’s interesting to see—the snake/human duo who have overcome the predator/prey divide.

  * * *

  I look at the snake. She is moving her head side to side, trying, I’m sure, to find someone to kill. I’m sweating. A few of the other performers come through the stage curtains and into the truck, rushing right to the snakes with open arms and kissy noises and pet names. They’ve all worked with snakes before.

  “Who’s a snake? Oh, you’re just a snake, that’s right, girl,” Cassie says as she reaches out both hands and takes the snake. She notices me trying to plaster myself to the wall and breathing hard. “The snakes think you’re just a big tree,” she says encouragingly. I nod my head, glance out the door to the darkening escape route where a polka band rehearses “America the Beautiful.”

  “I haven’t actually, uh, spent much time around snakes before,” I say, ready to be chastised, ready, at twenty-nine, to be treated like a fibbing child, but the admission doesn’t seem to faze anyone. Tommy shrugs and Cassie steps toward me.

  “Here’s the little angel,” she says, moving quickly as she drapes the snake around my shoulders.

  The snake is cold and so heavy she fo
rces my neck to bend so I’m looking down at the floor, and I taste blood as I bite the inside of my cheek, knowing, like a sword in my heart, that I cannot do this.

  * * *

  I ended up with a snake around my neck because of a conversation with a giant.

  February 2013.

  Four months before this snake moment.

  Two and a half years after my mom had her stroke.

  A town in Florida where sideshow performers retire.

  I snuck around back behind the circus tent to an old, off-white trailer, peeling, rusted, with all its curtains drawn. I knocked. Something inside bumped the trailer’s wall and the whole thing shook. It was still again.

  I could feel my heartbeat under my tongue, pulsing that soft skin like the belly of a panicked frog. Trespasser. That’s what the man would say, if he ever opened the door.

  I knocked again. Something jostled in the trailer, followed by some clanging. The door opened the width of a human head.

  “Yes?” the man asked. He was huge, his neck bending and back stooping to fit his face into the door’s opening. In the dim trailer light I could just make out that he was wearing droopy underwear and a yellowed T-shirt.

  “Hi,” I said, unsure of what to say next, realizing I hadn’t planned anything beyond this moment. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the sideshow. About your life?”

  He stared at me.

  “I’m a big fan,” I said, and smiled, and didn’t step away from the door despite his silence.

  “I don’t do daylight,” he finally said. His voice was low, and gruff, and gravelly, like a man who’d been shouting into a microphone for a lifetime. Which is exactly what he was.

  “I can come back when it’s dark,” I said. “I’m a student.” I was trying to throw any pieces of my identity toward him that I thought might make him sympathetic. Willing to talk.

  He sighed. “All right, then. Come back when it’s dark.”

  * * *

  I walked around to the front of the tent, paid three dollars, and went inside.

  Steel blades flew from a man’s fingertips and landed inches from a woman turned sideways, her spine arched. Thwack. Knife after knife sliced the wooden board. Stood straight out. A constellation of metal like a saint’s glow. Like she was made of prayers. Thwack. She did not flinch. Stared at her assailant. I had spent a lot of the past few years feeling tired, half-asleep, in the lulls between emergencies. But in this tent, watching the blades make a new shape around the woman’s body, I felt very, very awake.

  The knife-throwing pair was performing on a stage inside the World of Wonders, a sideshow at the Florida State Fair. The World of Wonders, the talker outside had said, was the very last traveling sideshow of its kind. I’d never seen anything like it—the Bay Area, where I grew up, was far too PC for a sideshow. But recently I’d learned that there was a town called Gibsonton that was famous for its sideshow performers, and that there was a sideshow performing at the fair just down the road from Gibsonton. I headed for Florida.

  * * *

  I watched the acts twice through. I smiled and rolled my eyes with the rest of the crowd as a human-headed spider told us she’s just hanging out, covered my eyes as a man hammered nails up into his nostrils. Other performers manipulated their bodies, harming them—or seeming to, or avoiding the harm at just the last moment, when it still felt like things might go very wrong.

  But nothing went wrong. They survived.

  And I witnessed these miracles they were performing. I was not sitting in hospital rooms, or helping with a physical therapy transfer. I was not talking through options for surgeries.

  Instead, I was keeping my eye on the blade as the knife thrower landed the final piercing tip just beside his assistant’s head. He turned to the audience, gently nodded, and walked toward the board to gather his instruments. The knife, somehow, always missed the flesh.

  * * *

  The trailer was dark and musty. There was a three-foot-long shaggy spider leg on the floor beside a torn canvas banner. Painted there, a man swung heavy chains from his eyelids.

  “The work is very hard. Dangerous,” Chris Christ said right away. He co-owned the World of Wonders with his partner, both in business and in life, Ward Hall. They’ve been together since 1967.

  “Putting up and taking down the tent every few days, moving towns. For twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, every day, without stopping. You’re always working,” Chris said. Each word comes out of his mouth wet and heavy, loud enough to be onstage. Which is where he usually is. He’d been a sideshow talker for years, and chimp trainer, knife performer, inventor of new acts. He seemed twice as big as a regular man, like he stayed in the womb for double the allotted time. His ears stood out wide from his head and dark tobacco snuff trails ran down from the corners of his mouth.

  “How’d you get in the business?” I asked him. I pretended to look over his shoulder at the wall as he thought but concentrated all my peripheral vision on his face. This was the face of the sideshow. Creases. Grease. This was a body that chose to take in fire and swords.

  “Where are you from?” I asked him.

  “Did you always want to be a performer?”

  “What does it feel like to eat fire?”

  “Does anyone ever get really hurt?”

  “Have you always felt like the sideshow was a place you fit in?”

  I asked and asked, question after question, until an hour turned into three or four and then he was finally silent. He stared at me across the table where we’d moved once evening light gave way to the pitch-black of late night. He had answered each question I threw at him, asked some of them back to me—surprised, he said, by a young person taking interest in this world. Most people believed it was dying.

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Chris finally said. “Have you learned everything you wanted?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked around the trailer, locked my eyes on the giant spider leg. There was more I wanted to know. I wanted to know how to make sense of my attraction to this world of illusions and danger. Where the work was physically grueling, where the task was to transform into someone else, someone who could transcend a fragile human body. Someone who was and was not herself onstage.

  “You really want to know what it’s like inside a sideshow?” he asked. There was a tone in his voice of, what—annoyance? Amusement? I started to pack my notes.

  “Then come play with us,” he said.

  I met his eyes, sure he was joking. He held my gaze. Raised his eyebrows, expecting my response.

  “Really?”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Well…” I imagined telling my mom that I’d been invited to join a sideshow. That I’d said no.

  I nodded at him. “Okay,” I said.

  * * *

  Four months later, I arrive in Tampa with a suitcase full of family-friendly stripper costumes, selected per my future coworker/stage manager Sunshine’s instructions, which I heave into the fifteen-person passenger van that picks me up at the airport. The World of Wonders Sideshow winters in Gibsonton, known to locals as Gibtown, ten miles from Tampa. We’re meeting there before we load up and head north. We will follow a semi packed with our show all the way to Pennsylvania and the first fair. The 2013 carnival season opens in eight days, and for the next five months, we’ll travel all over the country performing in state and county fairs, living in the semi.

  Chris Christ will stay in Florida for most of the season, managing the show from afar, while Tommy will be in charge of on-the-road operations. Tommy is also the show’s primary talker, not barker—a term that will immediately expose you as an outsider, I learn—and has been with the World of Wonders for nine years.

  After I left Florida with Chris Christ’s invitation to join the show, I began doubting that it was real. Thought maybe I’d misunderstood. I e-mailed him to ask if it was a joke. Nope, he said, come along. There were a few months l
eft before the season started, so as I finished up at school and prepared to graduate, I sent another e-mail to Chris, checking again. Making sure he remembered it was me, not a real performer.

  “I think it would be a great adventure for you,” Chris wrote back. “Plus, we could use a little help with PR. You’re a college girl. Maybe you can write some stuff.”

  * * *

  The van picking me up at the Tampa airport holds Tommy, the road boss and talker, and Sunshine, the stage manager/fire eater. Sunshine, I immediately recognize, was the target half of the knife-throwing act I saw at the Florida State Fair. I feel a little starstruck.

  “You tired?” Sunshine asks as I climb in, exhaling her vapor cigarette, “or do you wanna go to a party? Pipscy’ll be out with us this season. She’s having a going-away party tonight. There’ll be friends, family, other performers.” Her voice is slow and even. She has the round, watery eyes, coiffed hair, and disappointed pursed lips of a silent-film heroine. “Pipscy’s a mermaid.”

  “I love mermaids,” I say. Tommy steers us toward the party.

  The van is clean and white with plush gray seats. Blue fuzzy dice hang from the rearview mirror. Sunshine and Tommy tell me about the previous season’s thirteen-foot albino python. “I wasn’t really paying attention one day,” Sunshine says, waving her hand dismissively, “and Lemon managed to wrap herself all the way around my arms and neck, and then slid down my body, pinning me completely inside her coils. Bad Lemon, I said. Someone had to come unwrap her so I could move again. It was so funny.” She and the boss exchange nostalgic smiles. I hope they don’t notice my blanched cheeks.

  Lining the road are meticulously spaced palm trees, an intrusion of order in a state with so much wild. Soon, the palm trees give way to concrete art: sculpted geese or the outline of a gator, huge against the wild brush in the background. We’re flying.