The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “Why would you have stopped it?”

  “They were hurting some guy pretty badly.”

  “The less you know about this world, the better,” he says. “There are systems in place here that have been working for many, many years. You can’t change that.”

  “What about all the Germans who turned a blind eye when the Nazis started terrorizing innocent people? Didn’t they have a responsibility to step in?”

  He laughs. “So the carnies are Nazis here? Come on, now. I just brought you a piece of pizza and a soda. Fresh pizza. Straight from the oven.”

  I look out our door to one of the kiddie rides down the midway, where a lanky carnie with a long brown ponytail is helping a little boy into the airplane ride. I think about Leo at the first fair, who’d delivered me iced tea when it was hot and who only wanted to talk about orchids. About Dale and the dream of his ranch. And then about the posture of the man’s body on the ground as he stretched his limbs over his most fragile parts like children are taught to do in earthquake drills in California schools. And I wonder how a person could not feel concern for someone else who is clearly so afraid that his neck will be broken. I do. I feel it. But I didn’t do anything about it.

  You did what you had to do.

  New worlds call for new yous.

  ELECTRICITY

  Day 130 of 150

  World of Wonders

  October 2013

  A day passes, two, three, more. The show carries on in its regular irregular swing, and I try not to think about the man on the ground, about my teeth marks on Cassie’s skin, but those are not easy weights to lift. I’m surprised by this darkness inside myself. My whole life I have tried to be good. And nice. To act right. I thought being out with the sideshow would present clearer moral grounds than the gray area I’d been inside for so long with my mom. I thought I could be here, do the job right, be good, and that’d be it.

  * * *

  The electric woman is not nice.

  “Can I be Electra?” I asked Sunshine during setup a few spots back.

  I’d spent a long time watching the electric chair from afar. I’d remained quiet when Sunshine cast the acts for each new fair, waiting, patiently, until she thought I might be ready. She didn’t ask. I stopped waiting.

  “Sure,” she said. “You’re the new Electra.”

  It was that easy.

  For the first two months, I had been a bally girl on the teaser stage, and then a month as an inside performer, mostly box jumper and mic talker, and then, suddenly, miraculously, I am the electric woman.

  Electra the Electric Woman is not a good girl. She’s not a girl at all. The electric woman plays dangerously and loves it.

  “It’s entirely safe,” Tommy said as he showed me the electric chair the day before I was to perform it. “You won’t feel a thing. We used to have the girl light a cigarette off her body, and you won’t even have to do that. Health nuts these days hate cigarettes.”

  I nodded confidently, always working on my fearlessness.

  “The only problem with the electric chair,” Tommy said, “is when it’s raining outside.”

  “What happens then?” I asked.

  “Usually nothing,” he said. “If it’s flooding, we’ll cut the electric chair act. If it’s just raining, there can be some small surprises.”

  “Shocks?”

  “Little ones. But they don’t feel like you think they would. They’re soft.”

  I am standing behind the curtain as Red finishes his blockhead act, thinking through Tommy’s warning, listening to the dim plops of rain hitting the vinyl tent. Red says, “This next act will also take place on this stage, where you see this fine and most unique piece of furniture.” His storytelling is so rehearsed after years on this stage, he almost sounds like a recording. Words blur together. “Every prisoner on every death row affectionately calls this thing Sparky.”

  I take the final steps up to the stage as I hear, “Let’s welcome Ms. Electra,” and part the curtain like this moment is my nineteenth rebirth of the day.

  Scattered applause.

  The vinyl curtain falls closed behind me, and now I stand beside Red, forty or so people looking back and forth between us. Over eight million bolts of lightning strike the earth each day. There’s so much wattage out there. Currents buzz beneath each leaf, inside all the open mouths. Red talks to the crowd and I stand with my hands on my hips, let them try to guess whether I feel any fear, what kind of person I am. The face I put on is confident, this half smile, this squinty-eyed woman who knows what kind of wattage she can withstand.

  “Do you know who invented the electric chair?” Red asks the audience. Silence. “Thomas Alva Edison. Do you know how many are still in use? Forty-seven.”

  This chair is not one of them. We want them to assume it is.

  I know this game. I know they know that I am about to be filled with something that can kill me. Why does this turn them on? I stand with my legs parted.

  “I wonder,” I’d asked Tommy when he first showed me the chair, “if there’s any chance the electricity might stay inside you?”

  “You won’t become electric,” he said.

  The woman who knows how much wattage she can withstand, and then takes more.

  What was better, to be safe or to be alight?

  * * *

  “Let’s flip the juice,” Red says. I step forward, swinging my hips, wink, take four sideways steps, hinge, and sit down on the electric chair, my bottom on top of my flattened palm. I adjust my angle so I lean back just a bit, casual. Unworried. My palm’s skin against the metal plate beneath me. A direct conduit for the electricity. New audience members duck into the tent and shake their wet umbrellas into the grass. Rub their eyes like cartoons. Red reaches behind the chair with a small drop of clear snot about to leak from the nostril that has just been filled with metal. The rain continues outside.

  He flips the switch. I’m electric.

  “Now watch Ms. Electra illuminate this bulb with the very tippy top of her little head,” Red says as he brushes the glass across my forehead. My face grows goose bumps as the bulb slides across the skin. It’s as if the electricity demands that each pore stand at attention. Not pain, exactly, but a sharp flick that translates internally instead of externally, a pinch that makes me feel very awake and sit up a little straighter.

  I sit down firmer against my hand. I want to be sure each finger and my full flat palm are connecting with the metal plate, soaking up as many electrons the Tesla coil produces as I can so I can conduct it without disruption. I only feel the electricity move through my body—light pinpricks, like when your foot is just waking up after having been asleep—when I don’t get enough. When it can’t easily pass all the way through. And when it rains.

  I’ve been performing this act for two weeks. One light summer storm brought sprinkles, and it made the electricity feel alive inside me. Lighting up wasn’t just something I knew was happening by watching the audience’s delighted faces. I felt it move inside me. I knew I was part of something larger, something stronger, something that spans the earth.

  Red walks across the stage, a child screams outside, and I put the light bulb I’d been hiding in my shorts into my mouth. Press my tongue against the ceramic insulator, around the base, my teeth clamping around the fuse. Would it be so bad to become all the way electric? I know this may not make sense, but the rules of physics and fantasy were performed away on those stages. Can you hear a story about yourself as an electric woman over and over and not believe the story a little, too?

  My tongue connects to the base of the bulb and my mouth fills with static and my teeth shiver in their skin clamps and a small pool of blood, no, water, grows from the side of the tent onto the stage. I hold the bulb in place and Red comes over to touch it with his finger and I light up. He completes the circuit. There’s a glowing miracle between my teeth. I can feel the tickle of something great passing through me. Cameras are out and clicking at us.
/>
  I feel dangerous. Amazing.

  Full of electricity, I am, for the first time, inside my own world of wonder. It’s an act I imagine performing in front of my mom, something to echo her surfing routine. Two strong, poised women channeling a force from the earth, two women choosing how to be awake in the world.

  * * *

  A beach at dusk, cold wind, reeds bending sideways. A girl, me—age eight or nine—sitting on a picnic blanket beside her mother. The mother is facing the ocean. Her face is turned up to the sky where the purples are moving in, eyes closed, making herself into a painting that she might re-create later. There is electricity brewing in the sky, potential energy collecting behind the purple clouds. This is sixteen or seventeen years before the mother’s brain will be flooded with blood and she will no longer be able to walk or talk or, for a while, demonstrate that she even knows the daughter anymore. Does she know the daughter anymore? Of course she must. The ocean has trails of thin white foam like fat through a steak and the sand lifts with small gusts of wind.

  “Do you feel that?” the mother asks, her eyes closed and facing the water. “Close your eyes. You can feel more.”

  I close my eyes. Wait to feel more. Wait. Peek over at her, and there is some sort of private smile across her mouth I’ve never seen before and it scares me a little. I close my eyes and try again, but I must be doing it wrong.

  She is right beside me, we are in the same wind and our skin is stung by the same sand and she is also elsewhere, feeling more. I wonder for the first time what it means if you can’t feel what another person is feeling.

  The seagulls walk in slow circles on the beach and move toward us like predators, and the mother thinks nothing of being wrapped in torn, old down coats that smell of sweat and campfire, thinks nothing of peeing mostly in view, waving and smiling as she walks away from where I sit. She winks at me and then walks off alone down the beach, turns to wave once, but then walks farther and farther until her size is halved and halved again, a retreating body meeting the last light on the ocean. What I’m saying is that she already knew how to travel away. I had already lost her. I never had her.

  The evening drops its yellow ball straight ahead. Dim stars behind. The cold wind and the cold salt smell. I imagine that the mother sees herself swimming to the next coast. How it would feel to be inside that Pacific water for days or weeks. How far she would go.

  When she comes back, she tells the story again of herself as a little girl, a swimmer, how nobody could ever get her out of the water, nobody, and how it’s just impossible for her to believe she has babies who aren’t water babies, aren’t interested in the submersion, not even a little. I mean, really.

  What I’m saying is, of all the things that happened later, there was this moment of unattainable beauty, of a person whom I did not possess, who did not possess me, walking slowly down the cold beach, touching things I couldn’t see on the sand. I only knew her a little at that moment. I wasn’t part of the multitude she was experiencing—her ocean, her sand, her crabs, her shells, her memories of a time before I was born, her fears, all that electricity humming its perfect, separate self.

  * * *

  My mom is plugged in and her eyes are closed.

  It has been three months since her stroke.

  I am leaving the hospital for the day and kiss her arm goodbye because I can’t kiss her face because there’s too much machinery. Because her brain is still bleeding despite four surgeries, despite a pump that sucks liquid out of her skull, carries it down her neck, and deposits it into her stomach. She is her own machine.

  I am not allowed to kiss her face and I am not actually supposed to be touching her skin at all right now. She has sepsis. She’s in a white-starched bed in a white-walled room sealed within another room, and everyone coming in or out must be covered head to toe in plastic protectant, eye guard, mask, and mine is down and I hear a rap on the window from a nurse in the quarantine station:

  PUT ON YOUR MASK.

  What kind of prayers? What last rites would you like for her? the hospital priest had asked Davy and then kept asking as the days and then weeks of emergency turned into months. What kind of life will she have now? the doctors asked, we asked, and Is it our job to decide if it goes on?

  There are tubes that go into her hand. The crook of her elbow. Her forearm. One that pumps right into her heart. I kiss her arm and my nose catches on one of them. I jerk my head up, startled, and it pulls the skin taut under the tape holding a needle in and there is a shrill cry of emergency on top of the wheezing of the accordion putting air into her mouth from a fat tube. The machines alarm. Flashing and buzzing. What I need to do is keep breathing, but how can I as the nurses rush in to check and reset the machines and see if I’ve killed her. Her eyes are still closed.

  The nurses in their germ-free spacesuits touch their fingers to buttons that reset her circuits. They tell me she is fine.

  I am waiting for her to be fine.

  To open her eyes. To say, Babygirl.

  There’s so much wattage that performs the wonder of keeping her alive. This electric woman.

  * * *

  I smile and wave for the audience, keep the other hand beneath me against the metal plate of the electric chair. They cannot hear the blood roiling in my temples, the nerves, they cannot feel my hammering heart. From the corner of my eye, I can see the water pool beneath the chair. I choose to remain seated. To flare my fingers, angle my wrists, press as firmly into the chair as I can so the bulb burns brightly. The possibility of getting hurt—which I’d thought a lot about earlier in the season—is secondary. What matters now are the bright stage lights on my skin. I will keep one hand beneath me, the bulb glowing from my mouth, the other hand up, up, up toward the sky, that kind of woman, directing attention toward what’s bright.

  BY SHIP INTO THE SEA

  Three years after the stroke

  Day 88 of The Trip

  November 2013

  I get an e-mail from Davy. They’ve recently boarded the ship that will bring them back to the States. Before that, though, in Florence, they were staying in an apartment with a window that looked out over a busy pedestrian street. Every morning, he says, in their pajamas, they have their coffee while they sit all scooted up against the window, setting the cup on the sill while they watch the world go by outside. There are a few photographs of my mom here. You can see only her back, her softest skin in the world beneath a nightie or a camisole, her silver hair wild and messy from sleep. She is in shadow because of the brightness of the window she’s looking out, a bright white building with turquoise shutters across the street, cars and motorbikes parked and in motion below, and people in light jackets walking every direction.

  How does the recycling work here? Davy wants to know. There are these bins and it looks like they empty underground, but how could that be? How do the trucks pick them up? He posts photographs of the Italian police, the Carabinieri, writing parking tickets to a line of scooters. And the bakery that opens each morning with fresh hot bread. And the street artist setting up his paintings in the morning beside the used-book man opening his tarp top, and a photo of the two of them having one of their discussions they seem to have each day. I’d spent two weeks in Italy just after high school, so I wanted to imagine myself watching the daily street life with them, but I couldn’t. They were on their own journey.

  Another e-mail from Davy follows just after, letting me know that their travel plans were messed up, delayed ships and work on the train tracks that they’d need to take back across the country. That they were panicked and didn’t know how all the timing for getting home would work out now, that the plans we all had to reconvene in California on Thanksgiving the day after we all ended our respective journeys might have to be tweaked.

  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the details in what he said, because I was too transfixed by the idea that they were returning at all. I had never asked, but they had actually made the plans to return, and were fol
lowing through, boarding ships that needed to be boarded. The idea was miraculous.

  TWINKLERS

  Day 136 of 150

  World of Wonders

  November 2013

  We’re headed deeper into the swamp.

  For the season’s last gig, we’re playing the Volusia County Fair in DeLand, Florida. Three days of set up, ten days of performing, a day of teardown, and the season will be over. What does that even mean?

  A bed in a room with a door. Clean sheets. Blankets. Toilets that flush. That fancy Trader Joe’s hand soap that I would lather my whole body in, rinse with hot water. And then sleep for weeks.

  My muscles are sinewy and strong. My skin a deep bronze. My hair very blond. All the clothes I’d purchased on the road, a very few, all at Walmart, are black. I am tough. Dirty. Grizzled. I have never been more exhausted. My mother is on the open sea. I am falling apart.

  We’d had a week stopover in Gibtown to appear on the reality TV show Freakshow. TV pays better than carnivals, so the bosses were game. Rash the Clown was delighted, and tried to be in as many shots as possible. Terrifying yet talented clowns are great for TV. Sunshine had a fire-eating nemesis to compete with, who turned out to be disappointingly nice. Spif was annoyed with how much more work we had to do than the TV cast. Tommy was happy for the money.

  One night, to pass the time before filming started, we went to the Showmen’s Club. The big flat building is a private club for members of the International Independent Showmen’s Association, more than 4,500 people. Because we were with Tommy and Red, we went in with no hassle even though we were not all members. Ward’s and Chris’s pictures hung on the wall. They’re royalty here. We posted up at the carousel bar because there were only a few other people in the whole club. Red sidled up beside me, asked what I was drinking, and bought me one.

  “This girl here is going to be a doctor,” he said to the bartender as he ordered our drinks. I had no idea he’d been paying attention to conversations I’d had with other folks about my plans for after the season—more grad school. Didn’t know he cared.