The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  I don’t think our former working man Steve, the moment he came to after shooting himself in the stomach with a cannon, actually thought the worst was over, that he’d succeeded in reaching the most awful moment of his life. That from there, life would be easier. Or the carnie I met in Butler, who woke up from some dream to his toes chewed off and in the mouth of his Chihuahua, believed that he’d found the worst moment of his life. Or the junkie Drew, whose teeth fell past his lips and onto the dirt like magic beans each time he snapped awake. Or even when I learned about my mom’s stroke. That wasn’t the hardest part, that singular moment. There was always more.

  This is one of our collective agreements. To tell each other how bad things could be, how bad something was—really shitty, awful—and move with the dimming sun toward night as if this is the truth, as if we’ve seen the worst even as we ignore the quietly waiting future stretched out ahead like a long, long tongue leading into an open mouth.

  * * *

  In the moments surrounding the tent stake incident, I wasn’t thinking, of course, about my mom. I wasn’t thinking about the way the stake must have looked at its apex, splitting the blue, blue sky in two like the hemispheres of a brain.

  But here’s a story I learned:

  In 1848, Phineas Gage was working for the railroad, blasting rock with a work gang in Cavendish, Vermont. The gang would bore down into the rock, fill it with blasting powder and a fuse, and then pack it in with a tamping rod before lighting. Distracted by something the men behind him said, Gage turned to look back at them over his right shoulder and, for reasons that have never been pinned down, a spark ignited the blasting powder and it exploded, shooting the big metal tamping stick directly into Gage’s head, point first.

  Reports say that the rod whistled as it flew.

  It entered just below his left cheekbone, scraped the back of his left eye and tore through his brain’s left frontal lobe, exiting near his front hairline. Three feet seven inches long. It passed through a man’s head and then sailed through the air, landing straight up like a fencepost twenty-five feet away. It was greasy, one of the other men there said, and had streaks of blood. The force of the blow knocked Gage over, but he never lost consciousness. He twitched a few times on the ground, then rose and continued chatting with his crew as if nothing had happened.

  Can you imagine? I mean, triangular fragments of his skull were sticking out around the hole like a crown atop a head.

  Gage lived for twelve more years, though Gage was “no longer Gage,” according to Dr. Harlow, who followed Gage’s case. This is the part of the story that has had lasting scientific impact and wildly different interpretations. Prior to Gage’s accident, nobody quite understood that different portions of the brain served different functions. There’s not very much direct evidence about what kinds of personality changes Gage underwent, but reports mostly suggest that he became much more profane, lost his ability to manage his money, was prone to changing his mind often and completely, and in general let his animal instincts, the papers reported, take over from his former civilized self. What were they? Humping? Howling at the moon?

  This misunderstanding of neuroscience was the root of some real problems, like the use of lobotomies in the mid-twentieth century. And the belief, for example, that all our amoral behavior is housed in the frontal lobes. That anyone who has an injury there, a stroke, for instance, is necessarily going to revert to animalistic behavior. Untrue. But we have learned that there is some degree of our impulse control housed there. A person with a compromised frontal lobe may not know, for example, where it is or is not polite to scratch in public, or how one might or might not use a spoon when faced with a bowl of cereal.

  Based on Gage’s personality changes, which grew over time, the railroad would not rehire him. Dr. Harlow wrote that the balance between Gage’s “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” was gone. Gage worked a stint in P. T. Barnum’s New York museum, where audience members purportedly paid to part his hair and see his pulsing brain.

  He carried the tamping iron around with him for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Is it ridiculous for me to associate this stake event with what happens in a stroke? Is a stroke a weaponized event, a kind of warfare? An injury? An accident?

  There are two main kinds of strokes. In one, your brain bleeds. In another, your brain clots. My mom had the bleeding kind. It’s called a hemorrhagic stroke, and only 15 percent of strokes are this kind, but they kill a lot more people than the other kind. They’re the serious players.

  The main risk factor for any kind of stroke is high blood pressure. Other risk factors include high blood cholesterol, smoking, drug abuse, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and a few other things.

  She didn’t have any of these.

  Half of people who have had a serious hemorrhagic stroke live less than one year.

  In the corridor and waiting room outside the ICU, where we spent weeks and then months, I read a lot about strokes. Websites, pamphlets, books, essays, research. I was given a book by one of the neighbors called My Stroke of Insight. It’s written by a neuroscientist, a young woman, who has a stroke. The book recounts, in as much detail as she can recall, what it actually physically felt like to have the stroke, the way language and meaning slipped away from her, the way the panic of what was happening flitted away, too, gone down the stream like everything else. The way, for months, she was in some calm, peaceful, timeless float, and how it was actually quite pleasant. I loved that part, thinking that my mom might be somewhere outside time and stress, maybe not even aware of what was lost because of how beautifully things were gained.

  But then the book shifted. This scientist recovered. She regained her speech, and her ability to walk, and she eventually went back to work as a goddamned neuroscientist and wrote this really interesting book about the whole thing and is quite Zen about the experience, like she’s grateful she learned how to slow down in that peaceful golden field of the brain’s nether regions. Maybe, in fact, all the people with serious left hemisphere strokes were in there together, spread out in a field of soft grass and low golden dusk light, running their fingertips across daisies and very sweetly smiling at one another when they passed. But the neuroscientist left. She recovered. Like, fully. I mean, it’s great, it’s amazing, good for her and her family, yada yada, but she became the story of the person who went all the way to the edge and then came back; she left my mom in that field all alone. And what about the rest of us? For those who never quite leave the field completely? Why aren’t there more stories for the other side?

  I’m just scared for her there, in that field, all alone. She probably can’t watch out for snakes anymore. Doesn’t even know what they are. I just wish I could be there, on the edge even, behind a tree so I wouldn’t upset her peace, with a loaded shotgun. I’d have binoculars and ammo slung across my chest and I’d scan the horizon, scoping out the enemy.

  WHERE YOUR NAME IS WRIT

  Day 56 of 150

  World of Wonders

  August 2013

  Between two meat-grinders, we have one small county fair in Wisconsin, a holdover, and it’s time for Pipscy to go. She asks to be dropped off at the bus station before we begin setup, but there’s no time.

  We do not all stand around wishing her well as she gets ready to leave. Many in our crew don’t say goodbye. We start unloading the truck and then she is sort of just … gone. She had called a cab to come pick her up at the fairgrounds, apparently.

  To leave before the agreed-upon time is to become a deserter, a status made permanent by the Sharpie marker that lives in the back end of the semi. On the walls, which form the borders of our backstage area and living space, the backdrop to our lives at all hours of every day, her fate, along with the fates of many others, is written:

  PIPSCY

  Couldn’t hack it

  Those words mesmerize me. Couldn’t hack it. It isn’t just that there is an action you aren’t completing�
��it doesn’t say abandoner, or left early, or anything that externalizes the events. Instead, it is a simple statement about you, your capacity as a person, what you are made of, if you have any guts. Can you do this thing or not?

  TESSA

  Couldn’t hack it

  The possibility is devastating.

  * * *

  The ship arrives in London, and Davy sends an update.

  “Something extraordinary happened last nite. I don’t know exactly what it was or even how to describe it, but at 4am Teresa grabbed my hand and started ‘talking.’ Not words, but stringing together sounds which she had previously only made one at a time and with some concentration. Now they were flowing like a dam had burst. She went on for about 45 minutes. Her tone was excited and happy! She indicated that she wasn’t in pain and didn’t need anything. She was just talking and singing about stuff. We fell back asleep about 5 and slept until 9am.

  “This morning she indicated that she remembered what had happened the night before and it seemed that there was no particular sensation associated with it. So it is a mystery now. We’ll see how it goes today.”

  * * *

  I don’t know if Davy’s interpretation of her actions would be the same as mine if I had been there—did she really string sounds together for an hour, or did he just want her to badly enough that he interpreted a few sounds that way?—but reading this still makes my gut feel like it is filled with moths, then stones. The idea that she might talk is overwhelming in its beauty, in how desperately I wish for it, have wished nonstop for it, until I remember that even if it were true, I would not be there to hear it. They are gone. Maybe she will talk again. Maybe being on the road will enable her to find the words she hasn’t been able to find since her stroke, and maybe Davy will get to hear them and know what she thinks about the sound of the rain on the cobblestone streets, but I won’t. They’re gone.

  * * *

  In Minnesota, there was a dangled carrot. It glimmered, all rooty and infused with beta-carotene dreams, and we wanted it because we were starving.

  After the two weeks at the Wisconsin State Fair and a week at the small Wisconsin county fair, we’d moved on to the biggest meat-grinder of the season: the Minnesota State Fair. And Tommy knew just what to say to keep our gears turning.

  “Finish setup early,” Tommy said, “and we can take a little trip over to the Mall of America.” The idea was astonishing, a vast lighted complex smelling of perfumes and soft pretzels and the starchy carpet-scent of cheap clothing made overseas. Indoor plumbing. The chance to buy new underwear or soap or a bra or a costume piece that didn’t come from Walmart. Forty-three million people per year come to this mall, the largest in the United States, and our presence there, however fleeting it might be, felt like a necessity and a glorious extension of the America we were learning through the fairgrounds. We’d just be regular shoppers, strollers, eaters, not on display any more than everyone else.

  We hang lights at double speed, leap off the ladder halfway up, and unfurl the tent’s sidewalls with a mania that I usually only see when it seems like a neighboring crew has scored something really good. But we had the mall ahead of us. America’s mall.

  * * *

  “You have an hour and a half. Meet back here at seven. We’ll leave without you if you’re not here,” Tommy says as we emerge into the clean, climate-controlled palace. The only places I’ve felt air-conditioning in the sixty days I’ve been with the World of Wonders are Walmart and the occasional fair building I sneak into, so the idea of being left here is intoxicating. I could sneak into the Applebee’s at night and gorge on fruit that’s not deep-fried. Could sleep on a nest of hoodies in a toilet stall—my own toilet stall, with walls. Could find a mall boyfriend to hold hands and share an Orange Julius with. Once I made it past the preteen years, malls had never been places where I’d wanted to spend much time. But I have never been so overcome with a desire to purchase everything within my sight until now. There is a store called Journeys, full of hats and fat sneakers, and I want to put on each of them. Nearby, several tables seem to be piping the overly sweet smell of fake apple pie and vanilla from candles that sit grouped together in small waxy armies.

  Because we’ve been paid only in cash, I have a huge pile of ones and fives. I didn’t count it out, just grabbed a big handful from the envelope where I keep all my cash, stashed deep in my duffel bag tucked under my bunk, which always makes me nervous. I’ve heard about plenty of carnies getting robbed, but the number of us crammed into one truck means there’s always someone around to keep an eye out.

  Spif and Sunshine immediately lock arms and skip down the tiled hallway, the blinking sale signs they pass on each side like an enchanted forest they can’t wait to explore. They laugh at each other. I take a sharp turn and disappear into the maze of H&M, touching every piece of clothing I pass—tankinis, bralettes, wispy purple scarves, plastic heels, boho sweaters with tassels to the floor. I narrow in quickly on the racks that hold clothes in blacks and grays, torn and tough. Much of the rest of the cast dresses like they’re in a hardcore band when we’re not performing, and I don’t want to stick out from them, for them to comment anymore on how square I look, how like a sorority girl. I grab a cheap necklace made up of four or five gold chains loosely braided together, imagine myself a Hells Angels biker, and head for the register. I buy an Orange Julius, which I drink, alone, wandering the corridors. It is strange to be under evenly lit halogen. It is strange to be inside. I wonder if people can smell me as I pass, as I linger beside soaps not tested on animals, then hundreds of Lego animals. I want each thing. But as I keep walking, I enter fewer and fewer stores, gawk at the prices in those that I do, am less sure that the items could fit in the life I’m currently living.

  I round a corner and find myself staring at a giant roller coaster. Though the Mall of America is the number one tourist destination in the Midwest, though on any given day the mall becomes Minnesota’s third largest city by population, though it is 1.15 miles around each level, when I find the roller coaster, I also find Tommy, Cassie, and Ben. I join them as we watch kids screaming past, and then Sunshine and Spif skip up, and we all stand there in a row, listening to the sound of wheels on the tracks, to the click of the pulleys hauling the carts uphill, the symphony of our lives, the screams of our dinner sound track, the smiling whiplashed faces and flying hair of our most familiar neighbors. Sunshine breaks our trance.

  “I’m going,” she says.

  “Me, too,” Tommy says.

  “Me, too,” we all agree, and march over to buy tickets. Everything smells of chlorine and packed dirt from the fake stream and planter boxes used to make the place feel like a real, wild, out-of-doors carnival somewhere.

  “Are you all in a band?” a young guy asks Spif as we wait in line.

  “Nah, man. We’re a freak show,” Spif says.

  We hand over our tickets and climb into the plastic bucket seats like we are weary travelers finally come home. We’re off. Rattle up a hill, whip down it, all of us riding together like some normal group of friends delighted by the uncommon pleasure of a roller coaster. We scream. Throw our hands up when we want to seem brave. Our direction, our speed, our pleasure—out of our hands.

  * * *

  We drive from the great gleaming mall across the highway overpass and into a giant parking garage outside the airport. Tommy parks the van, kills the engine, and turns back to us.

  “Sunshine, you’re with me. The rest of you, don’t move.”

  Like most times, I have no idea what’s going on. I know, vaguely, that we are getting a new performer soon, but I didn’t know it was now, today, if it is. I know as we head into the next meat-grinder, more performers means more bodies to fill in acts onstage, which means a slightly longer show, which means slightly longer breaks between acts, potentially, like four minutes instead of two, and so I’m delighted. Nearly two million people come through the Minnesota State Fair. On our last Walmart trip, Tommy instructed ea
ch of us to buy a plastic container with a screw-on top that we could use as a pee jar in our bunks for the times we wouldn’t be able to make it to the Porta-Potties between acts. I choose an extra-large plastic jug of trail mix.

  We wait in the van for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. Finally, about an hour later, Tommy and Sunshine emerge from the elevator area pushing a luggage cart, atop which sit several pieces of luggage and a man.

  “What’s up, everybody?” the new guy says as he opens the van door. His arms are tan, muscled, and he reaches both of them into the van, grasps onto a lever beneath the seat with one hand, a handle inside the van with another, and pulls himself inside. He is wearing a black cowboy hat and black T-shirt, and his body ends there.

  “Everyone, this is Short E Dangerously, the world’s shortest daredevil. Short E, this is everyone,” Tommy says. Short E uses his hand to throw a death metal devil horns into the air but does not turn around to look at any of us.

  I’d met Short E briefly at the Florida fair the evening I’d spent lurking around the tent and trailers, trying to get in with Chris Christ. He was smoking on the backstage steps and made the mistake of making eye contact with me. I barreled over. He watched me approach, squinting his eyes like an old cowboy though he was no older than his early thirties, and as soon as I could see his face clearly enough under the shadow of his hat, I blushed a little. He was very handsome.

  He obliged me in some of my questions about life on the road, and his acts, and when it was time for him to go onstage again, the Big Boss Chris came back out.

  “Watch out for him,” he said, nodding at Short E as he retreated through the stage curtains and onto the stage. “He’s a merciless flirt.”