The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  But the World of Wonders is the last traditional traveling sideshow. It only survives because the people who are part of it will not let it die.

  Through palm fronds and the folded masts of a pirate ship in the Gibtown lot, I saw the carcass of our show for the first time. Giant red-paint lettering with a gold shadow covered the side of the truck; gold curlicue embellishments decorated the corners. The entire side of the semitruck read:

  World of Wonders

  The Amazement Show

  About a third of the way down the semi’s container stood a door with a large red star and the printed words Show Personnel Only. A big dumb grin spread across my face that I tried to hide—to the rest of these performers, this was nothing to get excited about—but I couldn’t conceal my merriment. Just a few months ago, I had stood in the audience and gawked at dangerous beauties living a life worthy of this truck. At one moment in that first show, during the bed of nails act, the backstage curtain had blown open and I’d caught a glimpse of a performer backstage. She was sitting on a folding chair, hunched over a cup of instant soup. Noodles dangled from her mouth. There were empty chairs on either side of her and some trash on the ground and everything looked dingy but was flooded with natural afternoon light. The extraordinary ordinariness of it was mesmerizing.

  And now here was the history and the great vagabond life contained in this painted semitruck in a junky storage lot, and all we had to do was clear away the kudzu and we’d be off.

  It wasn’t quick.

  There were critters inside. Rusted fastenings. Sunshine chain-smoked while Spif and Tommy did the heavy grunting, and I was told to sit on the side and watch. Pipscy practiced a burlesque act.

  “Used to be the girls sat in the shade while the boys did all the physical work on the show,” Sunshine said after I offered to help Tommy and he refused.

  “But it took forever. We sat there for hours watching the guys struggle, wasting time, because the bosses—Chris and Ward—didn’t want us getting hurt. Precious flowers, that kind of thing. But one season five years or so ago we had a really tight jump and it didn’t look like we were going to make it to the next fair in time, so we girls just got up and just started helping. And Chris and Ward realized there was some stuff we could do. Some. So we got jobs. There will be plenty of time where we’ll be doing those jobs. They’re not easy. They’re just not these jobs.”

  “It seems like there’s at least something we could do here to help,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really believing her.

  “Chris and Ward still want us in showgirl costumes with feathers in our hair. They’re traditionalists. So we’ve just gotta take what we can and not push it sometimes,” she said.

  * * *

  An hour or so later, the boys had the trailer and cab hitched and we were set to go—less than twenty-four hours after I’d landed in Florida, it seemed we were ready to hit the road.

  “We’ve got to go pick up our indentured servant,” Sunshine said with a straight face.

  We pulled up to a mobile home with a huge canvas duffel bag sitting outside.

  “Big, Big Ben, our working man,” Tommy said. “He’s our muscle.”

  “He’s the sweetest guy in the world,” Sunshine said, “but when he tries to kiss you, yell loudly in his face and smack him. He’ll learn.”

  The cicadas’ heavy chirps pressed into the van as we swung the door open for Big, Big Ben, who lumbered out of the mobile home without looking at the van ahead or calling back to anybody inside. He popped his bag onto his back as if it were empty and loaded it into the trunk. He said nothing. He was in his late twenties, had pink cheeks and a mouth full of crisscrossed teeth.

  “Benny!” Sunshine yelled, and he stifled a smile as he shifted in his seat. He sighed.

  “You ready, Benny?” Tommy asked.

  “I guess,” Ben answered. “I told myself I wasn’t gonna do this again, but here I am,” he said to nobody in particular. He had the thick arms of a gladiator.

  Story goes: he had been working for another carnival company for a few years and had a contract that would have kept him there for a few more, but our bosses bought the contract off the other owner, releasing Ben from his obligation to one company and beginning it with another. As the story was told, Ben smirked, looking out the window. I couldn’t tell how much of the story was real—I didn’t think people used those kinds of contracts for manual labor anymore.

  “Is that story true?” I asked him quietly. He smiled again and shrugged.

  He’s retarded, one of the performers told me later, when Ben wasn’t around. He’s just slow, another corrected. He’s had some head injuries, Tommy said. An accident. And an aneurysm. He’s the sweetest guy in the world, they all agreed.

  “Wait till you see him with a sledgehammer,” Spif said.

  * * *

  After the burly guy on the motorcycle leaves our new spot in Ohio, I ask Tommy about whether he’s going to hire him. “Probably,” Tommy says. “We need someone who can hack it. I knew the last one wasn’t gonna work out.”

  “Snickers?” I ask, surprised. He nods like he’s answering the most obvious question in the world.

  This alarms me—that Tommy can know something like this ahead of time with such certainty. I ask him about it again a few days later, trying to sound as casual as possible.

  “There’s a test I know,” Tommy tells me. We’re out on the bally stage one midweek afternoon. “The test predicts whether a person will stick around through the season or bail.”

  This fair is slow and hot. July in Ohio. People are fanning themselves with 4-H programs and their faces are pink, coated in sweat and seeping grease from funnel cake. They glisten like appetizers.

  “I knew Snickers wasn’t going to make it. Knew it right away.”

  “What’s the test?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he says.

  I sigh, readjust the snake.

  “Fine, but you have to keep it a secret. I don’t want this getting out and giving people insider knowledge,” Tommy says. “There are two things. First, during setup, if someone covers their ears while we’re pounding in stakes, they’re not gonna be able to hack it.”

  I think of the piercing ring of the metal sledgehammers pounding the long, steel tent stakes into the ground, how it first hits your ears as a ting, but before you can even register the whole ting it has shot inside your brain and covered it in metal and each of the individual notes carries its own heavy symphony and even when the sound is over and the men are moving on to the next stake after pounding the first fifteen or twenty times, the ing still dominates the inside of your skull and you have to hope nobody tries talking to you.

  “So if someone covers their ears, they’re too sensitive to hack it?” I ask.

  He nods.

  I turn my face quickly, so he can’t see the blush that’s formed on my cheeks. Did I cover my ears? Was I too sensitive to be out there? I remember on the very first day of setup that I wanted to cover my ears. I wanted to because Pipscy was, and she seemed to fit in so well with the crew—knew some of them already—so I thought I should mimic her much of the time. But I also remember how deeply I had wanted to seem tough, able to withstand whatever was going on. Had I covered my ears?

  “What’s the second?” I ask.

  “The big talkers. If someone comes in talking about how much experience they already have, how tough they are, how working here has always been their dream, whatever. The ones who make it sound like they already know what they’re doing? They’ll never make it.”

  I think back to Snickers on that first day, rattling off shows he’d done and how much he deserved to be here.

  “The work we do isn’t easy. It takes a lot of guts and resilience. Humility. Flexibility. I’m just saying I’ve seen this to be true many times in my nine years here,” he says.

  “Did I cover my ears that first setup?” I ask, trying to make it sound like a jo
ke.

  “I dunno, Tess,” Tommy says with a smirk. “Did you?”

  * * *

  The new working man’s pale, wet biceps are bigger around than the giant poles he’s hauling across the grass. He shows up each day on that motorcycle. His name is Steve. He responds to people calling his name by jutting out his chin at them. But he’s sweating and working hard and only occasionally wincing and reaching down to grip his side, and I want him to stick around. More hands on deck.

  “You from Ohio?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “Seems nice.”

  “It’s shit. Only reason I stay is because of my daughters.”

  “Oh—how many daughters?”

  “Two. They’re a pain in the ass. Child support and all. But I like to get to see them. Saw them just a couple weeks ago.”

  “What did you do before this?” I ask him a little later, when we’re on break. He wipes a mustache of red Gatorade from his lips.

  “I’ve been on disability for a while,” he says. “I got into a real bad accident last Fourth of July.”

  “Fireworks?” I ask.

  “Worse,” he says, lifting his shirt up. The skin across the side of his waist is puckered and crisscrossed, knotted almost. “Cannon fire.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah. My friends bought a small cannon. Civil War kind, I think. And we loaded it up with gunpowder, but for some reason it wouldn’t shoot. I leaned over to fix it, and, yeah…,” he says, trailing off.

  “So you shot yourself with a cannon?”

  “We all loaded it,” he says.

  “Did it make a big hole?”

  “More like a lot of small holes. My daughters thought it was really cool. It was, in a way. My ex-wife helped take care of me for a while. But she was a bitch. I’m so glad she’s gone,” he says, unable to contain the grin across his face. “We got divorced after she walked in on me with two other girls,” he says.

  “I’m surprised she stuck around after the first girl,” Sunshine says. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “She didn’t have a chance. They were at the same time,” he says, the smile erupting through his face like a pimple bursting.

  * * *

  The sideshow men love to show photos of their daughters. They each have a few choice snaps on their phones, which they pull out and swipe through with obvious pride. The first time Spif did this, after setup one night at our first fair, he flashed a photo of a tiny girl in a bathing suit, another photo of her in little running clothes, always smiling up toward the camera.

  “She’s hella smart,” he said. “She looks at a picture of a dog and says woof woof, and she looks at a picture of a shark and says dunna, dunna, you know, like from Jaws.” He looked off into the distance with half-closed eyes and tilted his head, as if he were looking right at his little object of love.

  On our last day of setup in Ohio, I ask him about his daughter again. About the kinds of things she likes. I want to see him light up that way again. “Well, she likes animals,” he says, excited again.

  “Whenever she sees a shark on TV, she says dunna, dunna, dunna dunna.”

  I can’t tell whether this is the only story he wants us to know, or the only story he knows. Maybe whatever else he has, he wants all for himself.

  The little girl, two years old, is at home with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. The daughter doesn’t know Spif is her father. That’s the agreement they have. He can see her every few weeks or months, and she can know him as an uncle.

  “Shark Week is the fucking best,” Cassie says a few days later, backstage during a slow afternoon. The conversation is about the best TV shows to watch stoned.

  “Listen to this. If you ask Becca what a shark says, she’ll say dunna, dunna,” Spif says. “It’s so fucking cute.”

  * * *

  It is hard being on the road and staying connected to the other people in your life.

  After our show closes on our second day performing at the Maumee County Fair in Ohio, I call my mom and Davy. I’m tired and grumpy, but before I can start to whine, Davy details the new off-roading tires he’s attached to Bubbles. The tires are huge, he tells me, monster-truck-size.

  “The streets of Italy are all cobblestone, and we’re gonna have to move quickly to find the best cafés and go to all the museums we wanna go to.”

  I ask him how the planning’s going, and he sends me a sixteen-page document with lists of all the port cities their boat will stop at, key attractions in other cities they are determined to see: the David in Florence, the opera in Venice.

  “It’s great,” he says. “Some water taxis in Venice have ramps that can fit a wheelchair on them. It’s probably for loading goods, maybe wheelbarrows of pastas,” he says, chuckling. “A full wheelbarrow of tortellini.” He sighs. “I wonder if they ever use a crane?”

  “Are you making lists of hospitals in the area?” I ask. I start to sweat. Thinking about them over there, about them remaining over there, makes me feel like I’m sliding out of my body.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says dismissively. “We’ll have all that stuff.”

  “Great,” I say. Pause. “It will be so great.” I spend a lot of time imagining all the things that might go wrong on this stunt. If she has another stroke. If she falls. If she seizes and falls out of her chair and hits her head on the David’s goddamned foot. If Davy has a heart attack and she is alone in the room and she cannot help him and he cannot help her. There are so many ways they might suffer.

  My brother and I have a plan. We have been putting aside money and have credit cards with high limits. We have agreed. Should it be necessary—and it will probably be necessary—we will drop what we are doing and get on a plane to wherever they are. We will rescue them. It’s all we can think to do.

  Nevertheless, I pitch my voice high and enthusiastic on the phone to match their spirits. I don’t want them to know my terror. I want to be as brave as they are, and so, taking a breath and channeling my stage persona, I tell them I’m proud of what they’re doing. The stage performer can be delighted for the adventures they may find. She can be brave and strong. She loves her family and has always told them so. She is not the daughter researching the repatriation of remains.

  They have to get off the phone. Too much to do. I stand alone, offstage, outside the tent in the hot, wet night air, and the tears fall and keep falling.

  * * *

  Sometimes, a sideshow can save a daughter.

  A two-pound baby, deemed a “weakling” by the hospital, is expected to die. It’s 1920, and hospitals do not have neonatal facilities. Story goes: the baby’s father wraps the baby—Lucille Horn is her name—in a blanket, hails a taxi outside the hospital, and heads to the sideshow at Coney Island. The baby’s twin had just died in birth, and he was not willing to lose both children. Up until the second half of the twentieth century, hospitals did not have the equipment to keep premature babies alive.

  When Lucille’s father arrived at the sideshow, a sign charging admission—twenty-five cents—was up over the door. Inside, all along the walls, teensy preemie babies of every race and class were on display in steel-and-glass incubators. Some cried, others slept in a swaddle. The exhibit was run by Dr. Martin Couney, a pioneer in neonatal incubator research. The medical community was more than skeptical.

  Dr. Couney funded his research by charging admission to see the tiny babies in their translucent worlds. Over his long career displaying the babies—from 1896 to 1940—they were also shown at World’s Fairs, amusement parks, and anywhere else he could find an audience. The money enabled Dr. Couney to keep the babies alive without cost to their parents. It’s unclear whether he studied with some of the other pioneering doctors of the time whom he claimed to have studied with, and even more dubious whether he was actually a medical doctor at all. Regardless, he kept thousands of babies alive—6,500 of the 8,000 who came into his care. They would have otherwise died. Dr. Couney passed away in 1950, not long after his inc
ubators were finally accepted by hospitals for regular medical practice.

  After six months in the incubator, Lucille went home with her parents. She lived for ninety-six more years.

  * * *

  Sometimes, a daughter has to step to the side.

  I called my dad when my mom first had her stroke. She was his only marriage—brief, and wondrous, and terrible. They’ve been divorced since I was two.

  She had a massive stroke, I told him.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he said.

  “We don’t know what will happen,” I said, my voice trembling. “It doesn’t look good.”

  There was silence on the other line, the sound of muffled choked breathing. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I was always so sure that we’d end up together as old people in rocking chairs.”

  “Dad—”

  “We’d be chain-smoking on a porch somewhere in a cabin in the middle of the woods.”

  I was shocked. All I knew of what they thought of one another was from their twenty-four divorced years of fighting, threats, legal action, and assertions of the other’s cruelty.

  “I never stopped knowing that would be my future,” he said.

  “You hated each other.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And we loved each other. Just two rocking chairs, and the sounds of birds. That was the plan.”

  I was stunned. Silenced. I was standing in a parking lot. I had walked out there thinking this generic, anonymous space would be a perfect location for my grateful tears when I had a conversation in which my dad finally started showing up like a dad. I had thought maybe I could talk to someone who used to know my mom so well about how scary this time was, how much already felt lost.