The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “No Lemon this year, though,” Tommy says. “All the interstate reptile regulations just changed. No pythons across state borders without permits. Pythons and a few other snakes are considered too likely to escape and make new snake colonies wherever they get out. And the permits are expensive.”

  “So no snakes?” I ask, a little too eagerly.

  “Oh, there will be snakes,” Tommy says. “Boa constrictors. No permits required.”

  “Boa constrictors,” I parrot.

  “You like snakes?” Tommy asks, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror with his steady gaze.

  “I’m going to,” I manage.

  Apart from the e-mail I’d sent Tommy in which I’d bluffed my skills, I didn’t know how much Chris Christ had told the crew about who I was—that I’d shown up at his trailer searching for his sideshow story and suddenly found myself inside my own. I didn’t know what they believed I could perform, if the list I’d sent Tommy had been passed around, and I was nervous to ask, to get caught in my lie. I was even more nervous to be thrown onstage with the expectation that I could do something I couldn’t—like the actor’s classic nightmare of being in a play where you don’t know your lines or even what play is being performed.

  “What other acts, exactly, will I be doing?” I ask. My voice shakes a little.

  “You’re our bally girl, which means you’ll stand out on the front stage with the talker, Tommy, and help him get people to buy tickets to come into the show. Bally girls handle the snakes, eat fire, escape from handcuffs, and perform magic,” Sunshine says.

  “Great,” I say, gulping, racking my brain for magic tricks I knew as a kid, for some way to apologize and explain I am not an escape artist.

  “You eat fire, right?” she asks.

  “Yep,” I say. Since I’ve just learned, I look like a fool doing it.

  “Then you’re all set. I’ll teach you some advanced fire-eating tricks, if you want. But we usually just train all the bally girls on everything when they come. You’ll learn the other acts sometime soon.”

  My stomach muscles loosen their clenching just enough that I can smile and nod at Sunshine as she turns to look at me. I don’t believe her. Even if it’s true that they teach many of the performers the acts after they get here, I’m sure they all come with an arsenal of experience I’m lacking.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “Performing the acts is the easy part of making it out here.”

  * * *

  The party for Pipscy is meant to infuse her with love and fun and booze, because, story goes, this will be the first time she’s ever left home and she’s terrified. She’s been performing in the Tampa nightclub circuit a few years, a little burlesque here, Rocky Horror Picture Show there, but now, at twenty-two, she’s going to try to hit the road. That’s all I know about Pipscy when I am introduced to the girl with robin-red hair who is jumping up and down just before she takes a shot of Jagermeister with her roommate, a guy at least twice her age who has just had his leg amputated above the knee. It is wrapped in white gauze, which Pipscy helps change two times a day.

  “Fuck diabetes,” he says, nodding toward his leg. I agree.

  “You’ll never believe what awesome goodbye presents I’m getting,” Pipscy says, pulling me over to a table. She fingers a small pile of neatly stacked bones. “Like this—it’s a choker made of armadillo vertebrae—and this,” she says, gesturing to a painting of a girl’s face hung on the wall, “portrait of me. It’s painted in blood.” She doesn’t say whose.

  I’m introduced to Spif, our show’s knife thrower and assistant stage manager, who is leaning against the kitchen sink with slicked-back hair and a long beard—the point from which he derives his powers, he says. It splays out like the whole world has a static charge.

  I try to mimic his cool lean. “This is gonna be quite an adventure,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, “life on the road’s fucking crazy.”

  “I bet,” I say. “Wait. Like, bad crazy? Like, scary?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Sometimes. But it doesn’t matter ’cause I can’t die.”

  I look over at him and expect a smile, but his face is stoic. “How’s that?”

  “I can’t be killed,” he says. “I’m a juggalo.”

  Juggalos: die-hard fans of Insane Clown Posse, a horrorcore rap group whose listeners drink and spray Faygo soda and, as I just learned, can’t die.

  “Well,” Spif says, “I can die, but not until I have a rusty ax, until I know voodoo, until I have a fat bitch named Bridget, and a little sip of Faygo, too,” he says, his words gaining rhythm, and then he raps a few lines. It’s from one of ICP’s hits, Spif explains, “I Want My Shit.” What a beautiful idea, that death could come only after the right boxes have been checked. I want to tell him I like the lyrics and why, but I don’t want to lay my grief on someone I’ve just met while standing in the middle of a party. Plus, I’m not sure if I am going to tell anyone here at all. What if I kept the door to that story closed here? I pinch my leg and keep my mouth shut.

  Spif fiddles with a horseshoe piercing in his septum, then fingers one of the ten or twelve necklaces he wears on his neck—there are wooden beads, silver chains, an amulet, crystals. “I’m the only half-Mexican I’ve ever met,” he tells me, “who can’t speak any Spanish.” He’s handsome, in his early twenties, with the sort of face you might see carved for the statue of a city’s great battalion leader. I like that snippets of his life seem to tumble out of his mouth without hierarchy, those ICP lyrics delivered with the same passion and intensity as a mention of his teenage homelessness.

  “Oh god, is he telling you about being a juggalo?” Sunshine asks, walking over. “You’ve got to stop him. It will never end.” She elbows him in the ribs. “Cigarette?” she asks, looking at him, but before he can respond, Pipscy throws her arms around his neck from behind and pulls him in close.

  “Hey, love,” he says, burying his nose in her cheek. She purrs. Pipscy’s boyfriend, a Renaissance fair reenactor, stands a few feet away, readying to say goodbye to her for the five months we’ll be on the road. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  “So how do these kinds of long-distance relationships work?” I ask Sunshine a little later. She spends twenty minutes telling me about her boyfriend from a warm perch in Tommy’s lap.

  “I miss my boyfriend a lot, all the time,” she says, exhaling. “It’s really hard.” She gets off the boss’s lap and comes closer to me, lowering her voice. “I can’t wait to leave this show one day and be back with him all the time. Keep it quiet, but I want this season to be my last. It’s my seventh, and I’m tired of this shit.”

  I ask Spif the same relationship question a little later. “Well,” he says, “it’s pretty much a don’t ask, don’t tell situation. What happens on the road stays on the road,” he says. “It’s hard, though. There’s no loyalty anymore.”

  “So you’ve been faithful but other people haven’t been?” I ask.

  He gives a wry smile and looks at me sideways. “I’m not saying nothing,” he says. “But what happens on the road stays there.”

  * * *

  The party carries on around me, people laughing and talking and doing all the normal party things in their dark-colored lipstick as some kind of punk or hardcore plays in the background and people walk up to one another and know the right things to say, have a whole world together that I don’t know how to enter. I feel incredibly far away from everything that’s happening.

  I excuse myself and walk half a block down the street.

  “You make it to Florida?” Devin says when he picks up the phone.

  “Oh shit,” I say.

  “Oh yeah?” he says.

  “Oh shit.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I tell him about the bone necklaces, the blood paintings, the juggalo, the law of infidelity. I tell him everyone’s in black and a few people are speaking carnie and I am in a collared shirt and cowboy boots and I’m
such a square and who do I think I am for believing I can do something like this and who do I think I am for not spending every minute with my mom and I feel out of place, totally, spiritually, physically, Christ, shit, oh shit.

  “Well, yeah, isn’t that the point?” he says. I stay silent.

  Devin’s becoming a techie. As I was shopping in Haight-Ashbury’s sex shops for fishnets and spiked, studded heels, he was in interviews using words like productivity and interface. He asked me to proofread his résumé while I asked him what color wig he liked best.

  “Kid, you can always leave,” he says. This makes something in my soft insides turn to stone. I imagine calling Davy and my mom, telling them that it’s too tough out here, that I don’t fit in. I think about telling this to the woman who performed tricks on top of a surfer’s shoulders, to the woman who worked on an all-male fishing boat in the Pacific a few years later. To the woman patiently O-ing her mouth day after day and hoping a word will come out.

  “No, I can’t,” I say.

  * * *

  On my seventh day with the World of Wonders crew, all my fellow performers’ eyes are on me, the new snake charmer, to see what I do with this beastie around my neck. I will be bold. I touch the snake’s body with my hand. My eyes crest with tears. My chest heaves. I can hardly breathe. I’m trying to tell myself not to be scared, that there is no reason to think the snake might hurt me, that people look far greater terror in the face every day, people who are even at this minute standing very close to me. I dig in deep, try to channel that bravery. Exhale slowly.

  “Okay, nope, enough,” I say, scooting my shoulders out from under the snake. Four sets of arms reach toward me to catch the snake I’m recoiling beneath. They grab the thick body and peel her muscled length from my neck. They move fast. It appears, given the placement of their hands, that they think there is a very good chance I will drop or throw the snake.

  “Off, off, off,” I say, the tears breaking and dribbling down my cheek. My heart won’t slow the pace of its clenching, the thump of its terror.

  “Snake lesson number one,” Tommy says, creating a quick distance between me and the reptile. “That was a good start,” he says, taking in stride my inability to hold the snake, not letting on to any disappointment. “You’ll practice again, and it’ll feel better, and then you’ll be ready to perform with them.” He’s putting the snake back in the trunk.

  “You okay?” he asks. I nod. I am so grateful that Tommy is not the stereotypical boss from the old circus movies who’d throw you from the train in the middle of the night. He doesn’t seem surprised by my fear of the snake, by how little I’d known during setup, by my anxious gulp each time I remind him I don’t know how to perform the escape artist act I’ll be doing tomorrow, or the magic trick.

  It seems that showing up here for the bally girl position without any skills is par for the course. My lying was ignored. Or expected. And maybe so is embellishing your own story.

  It is 8:00 p.m. the night before we open. By the next morning, I have to be ready to hold the snakes for twelve hours a day and to do it again the next day. And the day after that.

  HUMAN HISTORY

  One week after the stroke

  October 2010

  I would paint her nails midnight. That was my next task. Nail polish. I could focus on nail polish.

  Maybe midnight was too dramatic. Maybe coral. Powder blue. A nurse had said—in response to our twenty-fifth question that afternoon about when she might wake up and what a certain toe twitch might mean and what we could be doing to help—“Why don’t you paint her nails?”

  “Oh yes, she’ll be so happy to see some color right when she wakes up,” my aunt said. And so we had brought a Ziploc baggie of polishes. Some lotion to soften the cuticles. My mom’s nails were chewed to hell. It looked strange, actually, that evidence of living and working and stress on a hand that was now unmoving.

  It had been a week since she’d had as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive, as the doctors said. She was put into an induced coma to try to let her brain heal itself a little bit. When she woke up, they’d be able to assess the damage. But don’t hold your breath, they said. It doesn’t look good.

  There were moments when she looked peaceful. Between the ventilator’s wheeze and the heart monitor’s beep, there was this slice of a second where she was still and her eyes were closed. That’s usually when people imagine their loved one is just asleep and will wake right up and be fine. When I started to let my mind wander that way, I cut it off. Blood like an oil spill in her brain. I imagined that instead.

  I could touch four walls from where I stood. The door was locked to my right. It even had a deadbolt. The whole great world falling apart down the hall and this small place with a lock and space for just one person. Not like the hospital room itself, filled by nurses in astronaut suits and noisy machines and panic. It was hard to remember I had my own body when I was in the room with my mom and her body. I held the bathroom sink and made myself look straight into the mirror, seeing my swollen nose. My pink patchy skin and mascara smears.

  “Human fucking history,” I said out loud. “This is the normal cycle of human history,” I said, trying to sound like the reasonable person others believed me to be. Mellow, levelheaded. I was trying to conjure that idea of myself, but my chest and guts were filled with a throbbing, acute pain, hot pain, searing. I started pinching the skin between thumb and pointer finger with my nails. People lose their parents and carry on. Human history. We must have some innate biological coping mechanism that enables the numbing of grief. This wound must be mendable over time, because it has to be—because people go on, because a death happens and eventually it’s Wednesday, and then Thursday, and somebody has to buy coffee filters.

  I brought my face closer to the mirror. I was doing a thing I’d seen people do when they needed to get serious with themselves.

  “This is not special,” I made myself say, looking into my eyes. My face blurred. Idiot crying baby.

  * * *

  When I was thirteen, my mom drove me to interview at a fancy private high school. She’d hated high school, had not done well, hadn’t gone to college more than a semester here or there. She was unwilling to let my education resemble hers in any way.

  We drove farther from our small town’s redwoods and oaks, farther from the golden hills hiding vultures and whitening bones. The houses grew bigger and cleaner the closer we came to the school. Fifteen and then twenty minutes of driving, twenty-five, and the houses shone at the tops of long-necked driveways. And we were there. My mom’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. There was sweat on her face.

  “I guess I’ve forgotten my pearls,” she said as we pulled into the school’s arched entryway. The buildings were ivory, the rolling lawns manicured and plush. She brushed the hair back from her ear, smoothed her shirt and slacks with the palm of her hand. We were dressed up fancy. Earlier that morning I had been instructed to remove the boxers beneath the baggy jeans I was wearing and to instead wear some corduroys, a sweater. Wealthy-people clothes. I needed a full scholarship. I wasn’t sure whether leaving everyone and everything I knew for this new world was what I wanted or not, but my mom was uninterested in my doubt. She pulled into a visitor parking spot, and we sat in silence for a moment. “I never had a chance like this, you know,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled out her lipstick. “But you,” she said, twisting the tube and unfolding her mirror. She stopped what she was doing and looked at me. “You are so goddamned smart.” Her voice was sharp, almost angry. She pressed the color to her lips.

  My fingernails dug into my skin as I surveyed the students in crisp, clean cardigans and new tennis shoes. I took a deep breath and opened the door to get out, but she grabbed my arm. She spoke very quickly. “You are just as smart as anyone here,” she said. “Smarter. Do not let them intimidate you.” She did not take her eyes off mine. “I let people tell me I wasn’t smart my whole life and I bel
ieved them and it almost destroyed me. But you. Go show them. You are very, very special.”

  * * *

  Down the hall, my mother was not dead. The table beside her bed was full of nail polish. Reds. Glitter. Day after day, I sat beside her and painted and then repainted and repainted the nails on her left hand, and her toenails, because they were the only parts of her body we were allowed to touch. The skin on her right hand, the crook of her elbow, and her fingers were covered by tape holding needles in place. There were four different tubes going into her head.

  People die.

  Of course they do.

  And yet, against the lessons of history, against the inevitability of time, against her bleeding brain and how much of her already seemed lost, I felt this small thrumming hope deep in my stomach that she’d recover. It kept me certain that this couldn’t be the end. I was terrified to let the hope grow.

  “You are not special. You are not special. You are not special,” I said to the mirror.

  OPEN THE GATES

  Day 8 of 150

  World of Wonders

  June 2013

  The carnival is waking.

  Music blasts from the Alien Abduction ride just to our right, turns up louder, then shuts back off. We’re in Butler, Pennsylvania. Carnies I’ve seen only in grimy T-shirts in the four days we’ve been setting up at our first fair swagger between rides in bright blue polo shirts, the company uniform, greeting one another with quick nods or, for the older guys, handshakes. This carnival, which includes most of these games and rides, has already played a couple of fairs this season, and the carnies jump from the edge of their rides onto the ground with the ease and comfort of big cats, a strut in each movement, an ownership. We are independent contractors; we travel between carnival companies, working with new folks at each spot.

  In twenty minutes, the 2013 World of Wonders season will officially open and the gates will let the marks inside. I will eat fire, charm snakes, perform magic, and escape from chains for the first time in front of a crowd.