The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  While I go out to perform, Short E drives a race car on his phone, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “I love the cheering here. All these people are cheering for me,” he says when I return. I raise my eyebrows at him. The cigarette ember matches the hue of the flames tattooed around his arm. “When I was born, my dad didn’t even think I would be able to ride the Ferris wheel, and here I am,” he says, gesturing out the open door to the whirling lights, the screaming teenagers grabbing one another as they shoot toward the sky.

  Born without the lower half of his spine, Short E’s atrophied legs were amputated when he was two and a half years old. In elementary school, he was strapped into a big bucket with Velcro straps over the shoulders and prosthetic legs attached to the base. He used crutches. Then he moved into a wheelchair.

  “But I’m stuck in a wheelchair with these goddamned fake legs and everyone else is outside having fun,” he says. “I got rid of them.” He’s been walking on his hands ever since.

  Propped in his DJ booth at the strip club one night, he met his girlfriend. “She was onstage and did this move where she kicked her leg behind her head. I looked over at the owner and said, ‘I think I’m in love.’” She moved in right away. Her two boys did, too. “They respect me,” he says, after telling a story about when they found his gun and shot a hole through the wall, about when they shoved the air conditioner out the window. Drank his bong water.

  Short E’s mom, a Lutheran minister, died eight years ago. “She tried to raise me to have a normal life,” he says. He pays his bills, rent. Vacuums his apartment. “The only thing I wish I had legs for was to drive a stick shift.”

  Short E’s act ends and Chris drops the curtain. Short E comes backstage.

  “That’s good stuff,” Chris says. “Real good stuff. Come with me into my trailer. I have an idea.”

  “See?” Sunshine says. “Chris had the curtain open for like three minutes watching Short E, and it gave him an idea for something that I’m sure will be crazy and very Chris-like. And it doesn’t matter about the audience that one time around.”

  “Because they still had a good time,” I say.

  “They did or they didn’t. But we tried.”

  * * *

  Do you know what feels good? Dollar bills in your underpants.

  * * *

  “Do you have a script for the blade box I could look at?” I ask Tommy. I am to be the new inside talker for the blade box. This means the person with the mic who brings the crowd closer to the act, tells the story of the rubber girl or Gypsy magic or whatever tale I come up with while the audience watches sixteen blades slide into a rectangular box a bit smaller than a phone booth. The performer is locked inside, contorting her body around the blades. The talker tries to get the audience to pay an extra dollar to go around back and see her inside the box. It’s called a ding, and it’s a big extra moneymaker for the show.

  “Say whatever you want,” Tommy says, and of course I know this is the answer he’ll give, the answer for everything, but I wish for something else. He must see some panic in my eyes. “All right. If you want to watch me do the first couple when we open so you can hear what I say, that’d be fine.”

  When I visited the sideshow for the first time, I remember the talker telling the story of a poor Romanian woman, Sunshine, with a young daughter at home. The Romanian, the talker said, wasn’t paid for her role in the sideshow but survived solely off tips. She was sharing her family secret, and shouldn’t we reward her for that? I remember falling for it hard, seeing her huge, sad eyes, and thinking about the monsters who wouldn’t pay her for her work in the show.

  In previous iterations of the act, the blade box was laid down on top of a table like a coffin, the scantily clad girl laying herself down into her own shallow grave. An assistant would stand beside the box, sliding the blades into precut holes on the top and pushing them through until they emerged on the other side. The audience could wonder at both sides of the blade, imagining the shape of a contorted body inside or the tricks that might be at play without being able to see the exact constellation of the blades.

  Inside the tent, where the audience’s skepticism and search for the nuance of deceit is always present, the visual assurance of both ends of the blade does a lot of work. When I’d first seen this act in Florida, I’d invented elaborate ideas about the hoax involved, the sword, for example, breaking off when it enters the box, holding to the box’s exterior by magnets, and another piece coming out the other side, plans that would have involved a significantly higher budget than we ever had.

  * * *

  I watch Tommy talk the blade box act twice, and when the third cycle of the show comes up, he asks if I am ready.

  “Maybe? Probably not,” I say.

  “Great, you’ll be fine,” he says, handing me the mic. He has the bally stage to talk, and other performers to manage, and money to deal with, and talking an extra act—a long one at that—isn’t something he can afford.

  “I’ll stand next to you this first one, as your assistant, just in case anything goes wrong.”

  We walk down to the separate side stage where the stand-up blade box reaches high into the air. Sunshine presents herself, and I start talking—“There are sixteen slits and slats into which we will be placing these blades,” I say—and she climbs in. Sort of remembering what Tommy had said, I throw in little details I’m not sure he’d said or I am inventing, and I stumble over words, repeating things I don’t need to repeat. The crowd has thirty or forty people in it. The blades are all in. And then I get to the moment.

  “So this is where our act usually ends. We get the blades out, take Ms. Sunshine out of the box, and bring our next performer onto the stage. But people keep coming up to us here and asking, What does she look like in there? Can I see her? And today, Ms. Sunshine has agreed to share with you her family secret. She’s agreed to let you see her inside this box, and if you’d like to see Ms. Sunshine today, there are just three rules.

  “The first rule is she asks that we make it happen quickly and in an organized fashion, because we don’t want to leave her in there any longer than is necessary. So you’re going to make one line starting here by me and going back straight in that direction to see Ms. Sunshine today.”

  The audience lines up quickly, still looking at me. Excited.

  “The second rule is we ask that you not touch Ms. Sunshine, for her safety. And third, because this is Ms. Sunshine’s family tradition, and it has been the way her family has made their living for the past five generations, Ms. Sunshine asks for a small donation today to see her inside this box. Now, she’d take as big a donation as you’d like, even one hundred dollars, but she does ask for a minimum donation of just one dollar per person to see her in the box today.”

  My sequined dress is soaked beneath the armpits. My voice is shaky. I am sure these nice fairgoers will see me for the sham that I am. Why on earth would someone hand me extra money?

  I look at Tommy, who is looking very seriously at me, nodding along.

  “So if you’d like to come on back and see Ms. Sunshine, I’ll collect your donation for her here, then you’ll go back around behind the box, look through those viewing windows, and exit on the other side.”

  The first person in line reaches into his pocket, pulls out a dollar, and hands it to me. The others behind him do the same. I have to pinch myself to keep from smiling. It is working. I am making it work.

  “Ms. Sunshine thanks you. Go on back and see her now,” I say, collecting the first dollar, and the second, collecting dollar after dollar until most of the people in the tent have gone through.

  Backstage, I sit beside Tommy as we count out the dollars in my hand. Twenty-eight.

  “Shit, Tess. Best turn today. You’re a natural.”

  I beam so bright I think my eyes might shoot off as stars into the sky.

  * * *

  In Minnesota, three weeks into talking this act, I want to be better. The best. I pr
actice timing out the story I tell about Sunshine as the blades go in, looking momentarily concerned at the box if I see the audience’s eyes wandering away from me so they think that something especially dangerous, especially wonderful might be happening this time, and this time only. I learn how important the first few people in line are, that if they decide to come on back, many others will follow. If they don’t, more in the back will think it’s a scam and not come back either. I must win them over. Group psychology. Make them believe not only in the magnificence of this particular feat, but also in Sunshine’s unique familial treasure. Make them feel sure they aren’t being swindled.

  Every single time it’s a brand-new puzzle to solve. It keeps me paying attention. Making real money for the show. And it’s the first act I’ve done here that I’m legitimately good at.

  A couple of days into the fair, I turn away from the crowd, pretending to sneeze, so they won’t see me stuffing the wads of dollars down my tights because my hands cannot hold any more money. The crowd is gigantic. They all want what I am selling. The bills bloat my sequined shorts, a brimming black rainbow around my crotch as the dollar bills create padding, the coins already warm from the hot air and the hot hands of the audience and now only slightly cooler than my body. Speak to me of power and political ambition and I’ll remember the press of paper and metal against my bare hips.

  I spin a story to a crowd.

  They buy it.

  “We can only keep Ms. Sunshine in the box for one more minute,” I say into the mic, trying to count by fives the line still waiting in front of me. I don’t know if people really buy that this is a family secret she’s deciding to share just this once, but I think the teensy sliver of possibility that that could be true is enough for them to fork out the dollar to come see.

  * * *

  At first I was afraid of lying, and then I wasn’t.

  Well, sort of.

  When I was very young I loved lying. It was so easy.

  In first-grade show-and-tell: “My daddy gave me this necklace,” I said, touching the necklace I was wearing, “because it was my birthday this weekend. And he threw me a party and we had a cake.” I am looking down at my beautiful plastic beaded necklace and up at the wide-eyed jealous faces of the children sitting cross-legged in the circle around me, who were not nearly special enough to have been gifted beautiful things. Sophie’s eyes across from me, perfect circles beneath her black eyelashes, are stuck on my jewels. We are going around the circle with special things we’ve brought in to show, or stories about our weekends that we want to tell. But I’d forgotten, and had nothing to show, nothing to tell. Or that’s what I thought until, when my turn came, I remembered the plastic necklace I was wearing.

  I looked back at Sophie, ready to further impress her with the glory of my weekend, but then there was a movement behind her. I looked up. Never look up. There she was. A classroom helper for a few hours that day. I’d forgotten. My mom. There she was with a look on her face, a certain twist of her mouth, a certain flare of her nostrils. More than disappointment, a confusion. That I was the kind of person I was. She was learning it right that moment. I couldn’t shut up. I felt my cheeks go red and had to pee. “All my cousins were at the party,” I said. “My one older cousin, too, and I’m his favorite. I’m his favorite and also my dad’s favorite. He gave me other presents,” I said, but I could see her moving over toward me. It was too late.

  I hadn’t seen my dad in months.

  * * *

  As the crowd hears and believes in Sunshine’s story, some people smile, look me in the eyes as they hand me their dollars, our fingers touching, like this handshake buys them a real secret. Others hand their money to me with great reluctance, don’t make eye contact, or, if they do, scowl like I am forcing them, cheating them. Which I am not, and also am, both. Sometimes one will pay and the rest gather round on the other side of the platform, waiting for the chosen member to walk through, to snap a picture and come back to show the rest. But we don’t light the backside and pictures are hard to make out. They are more of an appetizer than an answer. What the audience sees on the backside of the box is Sunshine, on tiptoe, her knees and hips and back and arms and neck bent in such a way that she fits around and between the blades. Her torso is curved in, her knees bent, her body one large S. Once you see her there, you can make out her body’s path on the other side of the box, between the handles of the blades.

  “Is it worth it?”other people from the audience will holler to someone coming out. If we are lucky, the kid nods her head in astonishment, an assertion of wonder. Other times, a woman shrugs her shoulders, taking huge wet bites of her foot-long sausage, gulping beer while she surveys our magic and, shaking her head no, heads for the exit.

  A young woman stands in line with a frayed shirt, three kids, one of whom is in a stroller with a broken wheel, and they have little dirty faces, or maybe my memory is adding the dirt beneath their nostrils, the brown collected in their snot so that their faces resemble the portraits of Depression-era Dust Bowl babies. They come forward with dollar bills in their hands and the mother stands back—she’s twenty-five at most maybe, looks closer to sixteen—craning her neck around because she wants to see what’s behind the trick as much as anyone. And aren’t we lucky to be filled with that wonder? She has pulled dollars from her pocket and straightened them out, and there are two bills left and three children, and she hands the dollars to two of them old enough to walk so they can come see this wonder whose story I’ve just spun, and the other little one, left behind, is squirming in the stroller, crying, and the mother is staring at the other kids in great anticipation.

  I wanted to whisper to just the kids to sneak around back and peek, to let the mother behind, too, and the little stroller kid, but it was rare I could swing it. Usually, I had to just take their dollars.

  Those were the hardest. Not because I thought glimpsing Sunshine uncomfortably posed around the blades wasn’t fun to see—it was—but because it filled me with this sudden moral dread. Is it okay to lie in service of entertainment? Okay to spin a story that causes someone to give you what seems like much-needed money?

  I had to find my own moral line. I found, quickly, that it was easy to stand up in front of an audience and tell them about Romanian secrets and family tradition, to tell a backstory that made people more excited to see her. In my moral world, it was another thing—shadier, more deceptive—to say she had a child at home and this was her only source of income. Why was the second story so much worse? They were all lies, of course, and probably the one with the child would have been more effective, would have collected her, and by turn us, and me—because as a ding talker, you took a cut of what you brought in, 10 percent for the blade box—more money. But something about that felt like it pushed us over into cheats. Pulled too hard on easy sympathies.

  I settled on a story that fit into my continually shifting moral guidelines.

  “Ms. Sunshine comes from a Romanian circus family. And this is an act that her family has been performing in this same traditional way for the last five generations. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and on and on up the family line. She’s been doing it since she was only four years old, when they brought the act from where they’d toured in Europe over to California. She’s now the last person who can perform this kind of contortion act today.”

  I knew that other performers—the owners, Ward and Chris, for example—didn’t agree that there was any difference between the kinds of stories we were telling out here. They didn’t tell me so, since I was bringing in good money, but Ward famously said that the thing to remember about the term show business, was that business was the longer word.

  * * *

  When I come backstage after the biggest turn, with money shoved down my shorts, dollars in my tights and jammed into my corset, filling my hands and the little change bag I carried, I stand in the middle of all my fellow performers. Standing there is unnecessary, but I want them
to look. I reach down into my shorts and, handful by handful, dump the money onto the broken wooden floor of the truck backstage. I bend over, pull my corset away from my chest and dump coins, reach down and pull out the dollar bills that are still stuck to my breasts and stomach. Beneath me, a pile of sweaty money grows across the floor. I make sure all the eyes are on me. I make sure they all see what I can do.

  Short E gives a few slow claps. “And there it is, folks,” he says. “GTFM. Get. The. Fucking. Money.”

  It’s the first moment since joining the show—maybe even since my mom got sick—that I feel like I nailed the thing I’d set out to do.

  * * *

  Chris Christ catches me as I am walking backstage the next night.

  “You’re pretty good at talking the blade box,” he says. “You have the kind of voice people listen to. It’s unusual. A little bit too rough,” he says, “and a little bit too high. Almost unpleasant.”

  “Thank you?”

  “You don’t sound like a showperson. That’s perfect for turning a ding. Do you notice when you turn the biggest crowds?”

  I think about this a moment. I’d just perfectly recounted Sunshine’s story. Spoke quickly and with a great rhythm, I thought, remembered all the major events of her life I’d invented, felt smooth and confident. I’d turned only three people.

  “Not that last time,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I had the story down pretty good.”

  “Think about it. People don’t trust a used-car salesman who is practiced and smooth, someone whose job is obviously to put a veil over their eyes and best them,” Chris says. “There are lots of styles talkers use, but think about this: less polish. It’ll give them the illusion that this isn’t something you do professionally, that you’re not out here twenty times a day giving the same speech, taking money from people over and over again.”