The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “Two rocking chairs on a porch sound pretty nice,” I finally said. My voice was not trembling. It had happened so fast—this reminder that he was the person he was. That he would not just start acting like a different person, like some version of a dad I wanted him to be. He had his own pain, his own wishes.

  “She couldn’t wait to start smoking again, once she was old and it didn’t matter anymore,” he said.

  I hadn’t realized between all the times that he told me how much he hated her, how terrible she had been to him and to me, that he also loved her. That most of all, he loved her.

  I felt suddenly extraneous in the conversation, in my father’s idyllic future with his ex-wife.

  This was a new layer of pain I hadn’t anticipated. I had this deep sadness over my mom—losing her, in whatever form that losing was going to take. But then there was a next level, where the people I turned to for help and love, Davy, my dad, were so immersed in their own pain that they had no space for anybody else. There wasn’t anyone left to be the grown-up and help me through but me.

  I thought about what my dad was like when I was young, about what story he would have told if someone had asked about his little daughter. What he would have known. There was one story I could remember he’d told about how when I was three to six months old, every day at 4:00 p.m. I’d get fussy and cry and nothing could stop it. Until one day he set me on his forearm, my head in his giant palm, my butt tucked into the crease of his elbow, walked around our apartment, and sang.

  Old Dan Tucker was a good old man, he sang, my pinched, hysterical face screaming up at his, he washed his face in a frying pan, combed his hair with a wagon wheel, and he had a toothache in his heel. He sang this over and over, the same little song, and eventually my wailing lessened, and I watched him, and listened.

  Maybe this was his shark tale. Maybe when someone mentioned a baby who wouldn’t stop crying, he’d tell his story about fitting his daughter’s tiny head into his palm and walking back and forth across the living room until she was soothed by a nonsense song sung from a father’s mouth.

  MUD

  Day 20 of 150

  World of Wonders

  July 2013

  The bathrooms closest to our tent are also nearest the livestock barn, so by our second day in Maumee, Ohio, the showers are filled with giant clumps of mud and grass, and the lights have acrobatic bugs circling them and dive-bombing human intruders. The 4-H kids clean up here after their time in the pigpens, and then we clean up here to try to look like starlets. As I come out of the shower, avoiding as many of the mud pits as I can, bent over beside a sink with her pants down around her ankles is Cassie, rubbing white cream for heat rash onto her butt cheeks.

  “Oh hey, babe,” she says, looking at me upside down from between her legs. “Need any rash cream?”

  I chuckle and glance over at Pipscy, who is bent over the sink behind Cassie, dousing her hair in red hair dye. So far, she’s changed her hair color twice since we’ve been on the road. Pipscy is wearing a crop top and low-slung cotton pants, and, it appears, has a long string of crusty black pubic hair lining the top of her waistband.

  “Pips, you…,” I start to say, but don’t know how to finish the sentence. I start laughing again, and she glances down to her waistline.

  “My tattoos!” she yells, starting to laugh as well, and up closer I can see them, peeling and smudged temporary tattoos of swords and skulls, rubbing away to black flakes.

  “I can’t get real tattoos because of my acting career, so I put on these temporary ones sometimes,” she says.

  Cassie, butt in the air, calls over, “It looks like an STD is growing from your snatch up your body.”

  Pipscy, in perfect cartoon form, widens her eyes, O’s her mouth, and then leans over to inspect her disease. She starts laughing, and Cassie and I start again, too, Cassie still bent over and rubbing rash cream for babies into her butt cheeks and upper thighs, and the ridiculousness of all this, it all feels perfectly strange, and the easy laughter feeds and builds and becomes louder and harder, laughter that takes over all three of us and works its way toward hysterical, the work and sweat and tears of the last weeks all rushing out of us in a torrent. It is good. In eight hours, we will wake up and hoist the banners and set the props and get into costume and perform each of our acts and then perform them each again and again and again and again and again, until the fair closes its gates at ten or eleven or midnight, with no breaks, no days off, for 130 more days. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, right now, we’re just three people laughing hard in a muddy bathroom.

  Eventually, Pipscy and Cassie walk back to the tent. I stay behind, brushing my teeth, washing my face, rinsing out underwear and my cereal bowl in the sink, trying to learn better laundry and dish-washing techniques as I go. A few people come in and out of the bathroom in the ten or so minutes I’m there, but I must not be paying close enough attention because a woman startles me as she bursts from one of the stalls. She’s wearing her game joint shirt. I know that a lot of folks use the privacy of bathroom stalls to smoke, snort, and shoot things, and in my few weeks on the road I have already seen a few pairs of feet peeking out the bottom of the stalls, toes facing the back wall, the body leaning hard against the stall’s door. I assume some variation of such activity has just taken place, so I keep my eyes on what I am doing in the sink, tempted as I am to look.

  The woman pauses just outside the bathroom stall. She is still as a statue, so I venture a glance. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail so tight it tugs at her skin and makes it hard to identify emotions on her face. I follow her attention to something in her hand, ready to see a pipe or syringe. Carnie stuff.

  It’s a pregnancy test. She keeps her eyes on the small white plastic device for another three or four seconds. She doesn’t move. I don’t breathe. Then all at once, like the video of this moment is finally allowed to play, she steps from the stall and walks quickly over to the large garbage can in the corner of the room. She throws the test inside and walks out the door into the night’s bright lights.

  Either answer on that stick might have been wanted, anticipated. Either might have been devastating. This is a hard place to think about taking care of anyone else, or losing the opportunity to do so. I slow down as I walk past the garbage can on my way out. Maybe I could find her game, befriend her. Offer her—what? I press both palms against the door, push my way out of the bathroom, and send a vague wish up into the starry sky for all daughters.

  * * *

  The next morning, Thursday, the Maumee fair opens with a whimper. A few young mothers with strollers wander the midway, and a couple of old folks smile at us and keep shuffling along.

  “Where’s the section with all the rides?” I ask Tommy.

  He spreads his arms wide to the section we’re in. There’s a Gravitron, a janky Zipper, a boat ride, and that’s it. A small, small country fair. Physically, we’re the largest thing on the midway by a long shot, and the most outrageous, too. On the other side of the pond in front of us, a safe distance from our depravities, are a number of barns full of horses, cows, sheep, ducks—the usual assortment of 4-H kids and their mothers’ apple-pie-baking competitions. The barns stretch across much of the fairground.

  This fair has a cause. I’m not sure if all the fairs have a cause, but this one announces it on the loudspeakers with increasing frequency. “Attention fairgoers,” a nasaly voice calls through the speakers. “Please come to Horse Barn Three at two p.m. for a presentation on pollination awareness.” There are informational sessions. Evening meetings. Another meeting is called the night before we open to discuss what to do with lost fair children. The loudspeaker also announces when we can pick up ice each hour. It announces when Buffo the Clown’s show is about to begin. Someone behind the microphone must have been denied high school announcements, because there is a continual stream coming from the speakers, and between that and the band playing just across from us, covering the 1950s’ greatest hits,
it’s hard to get in a full sentence of our bally on the mic before something cuts us off. We will start to build a tip, a few interested folks stopping to look at the snake, and we’ll reel them in a little closer, but then Buffo the Clown will cruise by on his Segway and the pygmy goat parade will be announced, and the folks who had stopped beside our tent develop wandering eyes and move on.

  We have to pause the inside show six or seven times throughout the day, because despite our best efforts we can’t get anybody to come into the tent. Tommy drops the entry price from three dollars to two dollars. Consults with Red backstage. As the day ends, Tommy’s eyes reach farther and farther down the midway as he searches for an audience to invite over for a bally. If there were a way to throw his voice across the pond to those 4-H barns, for example. If only they could see what wonders we have inside, what fun. Few people come. His upper lip keeps sweating long after the sun has gone down.

  * * *

  “What are your days like?” Davy asks on the phone. It’s hard to know how to answer, how much detail to give.

  “We get up, and perform all day, and then go to bed,” I tell him. “It’s fun,” I add, to make sure they aren’t worried for me.

  “Sounds fun,” he says.

  What I don’t say is:

  8:00 a.m.: Wake up.

  8:10 a.m.: Walk through the fair to the bathrooms, hope they are open. Squeeze in a shower, if you can, or just brush teeth/wash your face/wash out tights or underwear to wear the next day if you didn’t manage to do it the night before.

  8:20 a.m.: Eat breakfast. If you are the first one up, you have first dibs on the mini-coffeepot. Fill the filter with a few scoops from the Folger’s can in your room, pour bottled water into the trough. If you aren’t the first one up, wait until the coffee is poured into someone’s mug or soda cup, or barter: one cup of theirs for one of yours, later.

  8:30 a.m.: Hoist the show’s banners, set the props on inside stages, open the mummy cases and turn all the spotlights on, set up the electrical system on the bally stage, test the sound, test the lights, count out change for the ticket man.

  8:50 a.m.: Get into costume. Fix your hair like a showgirl. Full makeup. Do this all in the dirty back end of a truck.

  9:30 a.m.: Set props on bally stage, make last-minute run to bathroom, count out change if you talk a ding, one of the extra moneymakers inside the show. Ready your individual props.

  10:00 a.m.: Open the show.

  10:02 a.m.: On the bally stage, hold the snake.

  10:09 a.m.: Turn one dollar into a five.

  10:18: Turn one dollar into a five.

  10:33: Turn one dollar into a five.

  10:37: Escape from handcuffs.

  10:44: Escape from handcuffs.

  10:50: Escape from handcuffs.

  10:59: Escape from handcuffs.

  11:02 a.m.: Tommy leaves bally stage, Cassie comes onto bally stage, begins talking.

  11:03: Escape from handcuffs.

  11:12: Escape from handcuffs.

  11:23: Escape from handcuffs.

  11:34: Hold the snake. Try to hypnotize passersby.

  11:49: Escape from handcuffs.

  11:58: Escape from handcuffs.

  12:00: Cassie leaves bally stage, Tommy comes onto bally stage, begins talking.

  12:04: Escape from handcuffs.

  Etc.

  1:30 p.m.: Break. Walk around the tent, up the steps, and into the trailer. Lie on your bunk in the dark room and massage your feet. Eat a granola bar.

  1:45 p.m.: Escape from handcuffs on the bally stage.

  Details: Do this all while standing in high heels on a wooden stage set atop the asphalt midway. The sun will not be so bad in the morning, but as you stand there for an hour, two, four, eight, twelve, the sun will burn your skin despite the sunblock—there’s never enough to last as long as you’ll be out there—and you will sweat and sweat into your corset, down your dress. You are standing onstage, and so you are always displaying yourself as if someone should look at you.

  1:52 p.m.: Escape from handcuffs.

  1:59 p.m.: Escape from handcuffs.

  Details: Listen to the bally, don’t listen to the bally. Know not whether you are listening to the bally or whether the sound track of the bally is just looping in your unconscious. Watch people walk by. Pay attention to their outfits. Count the number of jumbo stuffed prizes. Be surprised by the number of jumbo stuffed prizes. Play games with strangers. They won’t know you’re playing. Look at one as he passes and try to telepathically convince him to buy a ticket. Fail. Fail better.

  Etc.

  Etc.

  Etc.

  4:30 p.m.: Break. Walk off the stage, down the midway to the bathrooms. Back to the trailer. Eat a sandwich.

  5:00 p.m.: Escape from handcuffs.

  Etc.

  8:15 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  8:28 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  8:33 p.m.: Flirt with man in front row who won’t look away.

  8:48 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  8:49 p.m.: Massage cheeks for ten seconds because they ache from smiling.

  8:52 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:00 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:14 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:15 p.m.: Vow to eat fire better than you ever have before, because the turns are too small tonight and you know you need more bodies in the tent.

  9:16 p.m.: Wink to a group of teenagers out front who aren’t sure whether they want to come in.

  9:21 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:24 p.m.: Wave to the same group of teenagers who didn’t come in.

  9:29 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:41 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:48 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:57 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  9:59 p.m.: Beckon the leader of the group of teenagers over and light your fingers on fire just for him. Watch him buy a ticket. Watch the others follow.

  10:00 p.m.: Watch talkers switch places.

  10:07 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:15 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:20 p.m.: Remember that you have forgotten to drink water for a few hours and wonder whether your headache is from dehydration or gas fumes. Chug water.

  10:22 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:36 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:44 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:45 p.m.: Tell the drunk man that you will not give him your number right now but that you will consider it if he goes into the show.

  10:51 p.m.: Light up your torches and eat fire.

  10:59 p.m.: Gather with the rest of the crew around the bally stage. Watch the Ferris wheel.

  Note: At 10:00 p.m. on the luckiest nights, but usually 11:00 p.m. or midnight, and sometimes 2:00 a.m., Tommy will make the call that you are about to perform your last show, and you’ll speed through the acts, cutting the least impressive parts, making sure the last stragglers in the audience feel they got what they came for, and once they go, your crew will come sit out on the bally stage for the last few minutes as the fairgoers leave, smoking cigarettes and comparing notes on the day. Sometimes, when the day has been too long, they sit quietly, all faces turned toward the big wheel. That’s the sign. Nobody on the fairground may shut down under penalty of a big fine until the fairground bosses give the A-OK to the Ferris wheel.

  11:02 p.m.: Wheel’s off. And then the echo down the midway, Wheel’s off! Wheel’s off! Wheel’s off!

  11:04 p.m.: Untie the banners, drop or roll them, unplug the sound system, take the props off the front stage, put the snake away and turn her heated blanket on, close the mummy cases if there is any chance of bad weather. Clear the stages.

  11:22 p.m.: Decision.

  (11:28 p.m.–12:13 a
.m.): Will you grab your shower bag and shower shoes and a few pieces of dirty laundry and run for the showers, hoping the line isn’t too long, hoping the water is warm, hoping someone hasn’t taken a crap in the stall?

  (11:28 p.m.–1:13 a.m.): Will you grab your wallet and hop in the van with Tommy or Sunshine if they are doing a Walmart run, to try to stock up on peanut butter or granola bars or tampons or sunscreen or drinking water because who knows when the next store run will be?

  (11:28 p.m.–12:25 a.m.): Will you think of a friend or lover waiting to hear from you and call them, sprawled on your bunk or on the grass in the tent?

  (11:28 p.m.–2:19 a.m.): Will you relax and chat and have a drink with your fellow performers, shooting the shit, having your tarot cards read, decompressing from the day?

  Whatever you choose, do it fast, because before long if you’re not in bed, the wake-up time will be swiftly approaching and you won’t even be able to believe the idea that you’ll have to do it all again. And you will wake up and swear that tonight, this night, you will go to bed right when the show is over, get a long sleep, “catch up,” as they say, but when the last act is over and the banners are wrapped that night, your body will be buzzing with the adrenaline of performing, with the exhaustion mixed in, but more than that, your brain will be awash in relief for having finished the day and you will forget how tired you are, will feel this overwhelming need to have a little downtime, just a little while to unwind and talk to people other than the audience, and so you will, and will stay up too late, and will go to bed a little more relaxed, and will wake up once more in near disbelief that you have to do it all again.

  * * *

  The next morning I wake up and do it all again.

  “America the Beautiful” wakes me. The recording is old, crackly, broken up behind a woman’s overly vibrato voice. It is 8:00 a.m. I know it is 8:00 a.m. because the rodeo stadium blasts “America the Beautiful” across the fairgrounds at this same time each morning, a carnie alarm, an ironic paean to America’s opportunities that many of the sleeping men within earshot haven’t ever been able to access.

  American carnivals are made up of many non-U.S. citizens: Mexican, Central and South American, South African laborers who are willing to do intensely grueling physical work. I’ve heard a lot of folks in the business praise the melting pot of the American carnival. Whereas the stereotype of the rough-and-tumble carnie usually brings to mind a toothless, tattooed white man, in reality the carnivals are largely run by non-Americans. Away2xplore is a South African company that hires South Africans to work a carnival season in America. We pay for your airfare**, the website advertises. The asterisks let you know that in exchange for your paid airfare and a weekly check—dependent, mostly, on commission from what you sell—you work a full season, which ranges, per the website, from six to ten months. There are no exceptions.