“I like when I see you reading,” he said, handing me the drink. “Good to have that kind of a mind. Ever read the mystics?”
We chatted for a while, about books first, then his plans to spend Christmas with his mom, who had even more kittens now, about the value of social media for reconnecting long-lost family. We toasted to my lack of sword-swallowing skills—I’d practiced here and there over the last few months with little progress, more seduced by the flashy whip acts. There were some people who took a few years to get it. Others just never did.
Eventually I sat beside Tommy at the bar. Tommy, who doesn’t drink, and me, who had a few. Tommy, the great road boss, the young sword swallower who figured out, at twenty-one, that this was the life for him and hasn’t left. Tommy, who works as a piano mover in New Jersey in the off-season, who performed as an amateur wrestler for a few years, who was infinitely patient with my screwups on the road, with the snake bringing me to tears, with the gasoline headaches, who called me Tessy right away as if I already belonged.
“I just want you to know,” I said to him. “You’re the greatest boss I’ve had. In any kind of job.”
“Oh, stop, Tessy,” he said.
“I mean it. You are kind and patient, but firm and tough when you need to be. And you’re doing this hard thing, keeping this show alive, struggling each year to make sure it happens. I admire you. You’re such a good person.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it is.”
“I keep the show alive because it’s fun. That’s why I do it. I like it.”
“Well, thank you for doing it. For liking it.”
I finished another drink, feeling good. Feeling hopeful, though Cassie and I hadn’t made eye contact at the bar and still weren’t talking much. I felt buzzed and happy to be a shitty sword swallower, a mediocre fire eater, for transforming into the electric woman, for being of medium strength, of sometimes sour moods, for all the good reasons I’d had to leave the show but had chosen instead to stay.
* * *
We haul Queen Kong from the back end for the very last time.
We’re in DeLand, Florida, at the season’s last fair, our twelfth. Unroll the tent walls once more. All these actions that have finally, finally, become so ingrained in my muscles that it takes almost no thought to put up the show anymore.
“Hey, girl,” a familiar voice calls as I head down the midway before opening on the second day of the fair. I grab her arm in response, squeeze the sinewy bicep as a greeting. It’s Tanya, operator of the Smash the Beer Bottle game.
“Wanna play?” she asks, her permed blond bangs standing at attention. “No charge.”
The rows of empty beer bottles shine green and brown with morning sun, the smell of old beer and the warm Indian summer dust in the air.
“Come on,” Tanya says, leaning in close. The scent of beer is replaced by cotton-candy body spray, and I wonder if the grandchildren she keeps telling me about think of this smell when they think of her, sweet and thick and edible. They wait up all night for her when she finishes the season, she tells me, the little faces sleeping on the trailer’s couch right against the front window that looks out onto the street so they can be ready for her to pull into the driveway well after midnight, their sweet-smelling granny with a face whose deep brown lines offer a map of where she’s been that they can’t quite read.
“Sure,” I say. It isn’t often I have an extra moment on the midway, but I do, and I like Tanya. I hold the giant softball in my hand. Lined up in front of me are dozens of empty glass beer bottles. Row after row at the far end of the game. The point is to smash them. Send the glass, shattered, flying. It reminds me of a relaxation chamber I’d heard about once, a place in Japan where you could pay to go into a room full of breakable things. You were handed a bat. It was a way to unwind.
She leans in close to my ear. I can smell the spritz. It’s the same one she has shared with me a few mornings when I’ve run into her in the portable bathrooms in carnietown. We can’t agree whether the bathrooms smell like old mildew or diarrhea. It’s both, somehow, and so strong that many of the carnies have taken to peeing in the woods instead. Tanya is dating one of the bosses, who is also her ex-husband, and has been on the road with some fair or another for almost thirty years.
“You’re my alarm clock, honey,” she said, coming into the bathroom one morning. I’d seen her head pop up from the bed of a pickup truck when I’d walked by, and she smiled at me vaguely and looked away quickly, off into the kudzu and jungle trees stretching as far as we can see on all sides of the fairground, with CAUTION, HUNTING GROUNDS signs nailed to the tree trunks. Carnietown is set up in the small jungle clearing. “When I see you trotting by, I know it’s time to get my ass up.”
“Here’s the trick,” Tanya says. She leans her temple right up against mine and points at one of the bottles at the end. “Think about your boyfriends. Think about one of them who’s done you wrong. There’s his face right there.”
I look at the empty old Budweiser. The bottle is just a bottle. Brown, dusty. The light from behind, sunshine and the red vinyl backdrop, gives the bottle an amber glow, just a little, just from the right angle. The bottle is also a face.
I step away from her, plant one foot in front of me, and take the ball into two hands. Crank one arm back and let the ball loose, imagining a face there, though not a boyfriend’s face. The ball sails through the air and lands on the ground, just short of the first row of bottles.
“Not to worry, my friend. Give it another go,” she says, handing me another softball.
“Imagine his eyes right there, where the label should go. Imagine his smug little asshole smile,” she says, patting me on the shoulder.
I squint at the bottle, take in the light, and transform it into eyes. Blur my vision so the bottom lip of the bottle becomes a tight-lipped grimace. Take a deep breath. Pick my front foot up as I lean back for force, then let the ball go once again toward the rows of bottles. Big white moon charging for the brown and green stars. Bullet.
The ball flies between two rows of bottles but doesn’t graze anything.
“Look, sweetie,” she says. “I’ll give you three more balls for five dollars. Because you’re with it.” With it is a term that carnies and showpeople used to mean “with the carnival.” It was a way of shutting up other carnies who tried to sell you things when you walked by.
“Thanks, Tanya. That was fun. I gotta go, but I’ll come back later to try again.”
The trouble was, the only face I could imagine on the bottle was my own.
* * *
When I come onstage for the electric chair act later that day, I see in the audience a carnie I’ve chatted with a few times. He is standing in the back row and has a huge wide grin on his face. I try not to stare. His blue uniform shirt is wrinkled, and he moves his fingers up to spread them wide across his mouth, a side smile behind the hand, openmouthed, and I know that just past those fingers is a tangle of crisscrossed teeth.
Who are you? he’d asked me a couple of days in a row as I’d walked by his joint.
I feel good about that pink mouth, those yellow teeth. The tenderness of people with a little contained mess. His handsomeness.
He claps like mad when the act is done.
* * *
That night, once the show closes, our crew chats out in front of the tent while we wait for the big wheel to shut off so we can fold up the banners and quit for the evening. Everyone cheats their bodies toward the wheel like a flock of seagulls facing the first light each morning. I am also cheating my body toward the balloon dart game where the handsome snaggletoothed carnie is folding it in on itself.
Across from our stage, the man who works the goldfish joint reaches to the ground and gathers four or five white Ping-Pong balls in each hand and tosses them into plastic baskets that line the wooden counter around his game. He does not feed the fish all season except to add some of the chemical they put into the tanks to keep th
e fish from needing to eat so they don’t have to buy food, he’d told me the day before, when I’d asked to feed the fish.
We wait. Snapping his fingers, Spif presses his butt into my crotch, bends over and pops his hips. His face is tilted slightly to the side so he can keep his eyes on the wheel. He jiggles his ass, shimmying it back and forth across my hips.
“You’re a beautiful dancer,” I tell him, hoping the carnie isn’t seeing this and getting the wrong impression.
“Mine’s thick. Like a Red Bull can,” he says, eyes on the wheel. “Give me a reach-around and feel it, just to see if you agree,” but before I can come up with a snarky response, he screams, “Wheel’s off!” the moment the orange and red and yellow flashing lights stop chasing one another, the moment the wheel becomes dark bones. Within seconds, the rest of the rides across the midway cut their lights and sounds and the darkness kills the lights from one end of the fairground to the other, swoosh, silence, swoosh, silence, the darkness chasing everything out.
We work.
When the final banner is tied, I look up, and standing in front of me is the carnie.
“Roelof,” he says, extending his hand to shake mine. Then he gives me a slip of paper with his phone number. “There’s a flea market outside the fairgrounds in the morning, before we open tomorrow. Do you want to go with me?” he asks. I do, I say.
* * *
Roelof and I are walking down the rows of Florida’s best used goods in the parking-lot flea market, and he slips his hand in mine right away. It feels extraordinarily nice. He asks about the show, tells me about his passion for distance running, what it feels like to run up mountains and watch the ocean for hours, tells me stories about teenage antics, makes jokes about cats. I ask about his game, where they’ve been this season. His family.
“My dad is dead, actually,” he says.
“I’m so sorry. How young were you when it happened?”
“It’s been nearly eight weeks now.”
All the words jam up inside my mouth. Eight weeks. The loss is so fresh. It would have happened while he was on the road. I start to say sorry and change the subject, but I remember how much I appreciated people wanting to know more about my mom when I told them she was sick. Not that sharing information shares the grief, just that it spreads the network of care.
“Did you get to see him before he died? Or go home for the funeral?”
“No, we can’t leave once we’ve signed these contracts for the season.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the system. I mean, I could have, but then they would have come after my mom for money, and she’s got enough on her plate right now.”
We are in front of a young woman in a tight pink sweatsuit who is looking eagerly back and forth between our faces. In front of her, every imaginable baby item lies spread on a giant blue tarp, clothes and used books and monitors and bright plastic toys and teething rings and car seats and swaddling blankets.
“Really good prices,” she says, pointing to a swing.
“What was he like?”
“Tough. Wonderful. An inspiration, but tough.”
“I wish I knew something better to say than sorry.”
“Me, too,” he says, smiles, and kisses me on my knuckles.
I feel a kinship to him. Another person figuring out how to get through this new world.
“Can I see you a little later?” he asks. “After the show? Can we take a walk or something?”
“Sure,” I say, trying to sound very cool. Nearly giddy.
* * *
Roelof and I meet just after banners are over and walk the dark midway rows, laughing and chatting. He tells me story after story and then asks about my life, my stories. It has been a long time since I’ve wanted to share my stories, since someone wanted to know them.
We end up near the main stage, at an open area filled with picnic tables. There are giant weeping willows above, all strung with small white glittering lights. The wind rustles the leaves and the night birds are calling. It’s strange, hearing the sounds of nature doing its regular work after so many months of human-made sounds. The Cuckoo House behind where we sit, for example, which blares German technopop sixteen hours a day and invites you inside with a mirror maze on the ground floor and vibrating, twisting metal plates up top that you have to jump between like lily pads on a pond. Roelof tells me that carnie women bring men up there sometimes to have sex on the vibration plates.
Behind the twinkling lights in the trees, the stars are twinkling, and Roelof has one of my hands in his hands, and he is inventing stories about each of my fingers. And then he kisses me. It is the middle of the night, in the middle of the fairgrounds, beneath low-hanging trees. He kisses me and I kiss him back and we sit like that for a long time.
“Shall we get a hotel room?” he asks softly, blushing a bit, kissing my knuckles.
“I hear there are bedbugs in all the nearby hotels,” I say, which is true, from a story about waking up covered in bites I’d heard from Tanya at the break-the-bottle game, but also an irrefutable excuse.
“Right,” he says. “Darn.”
“There’s a quick romance-killer.”
“Nothing like bedbugs to really foil a guy’s dreams.”
We stay beneath that tree for another hour, telling jokes, recounting dramas from the season, sharing stories about our families. I hadn’t thought much about romance in so long, hadn’t met anyone who sparked anything in me. But here it is. Maybe just for a moment, or a few days, a week at most. Here it is.
* * *
The next morning, a mother and her young daughter are sitting on a bench beside a food joint, eating a hot dog. They are sitting side by side, facing a plastic table, and the little girl’s feet, which don’t reach far beyond the edge of the bench, are bouncing slightly. The hot dog has ketchup on it and a very light yellow line of mustard, and the mother is holding it in one hand, bringing it to the little girl’s mouth and waiting for her small lips to part. The girl takes a bite and begins chewing, looking around her at the rides, which are in final preparation to open for the day. Maybe they know someone here, or the mother works here. Regular marks can’t get in early. Maybe they have a prizewinning steer. The mother takes a bite next, looks off another direction to assess these wild territories, and, after the little girl has swallowed, brings the hot dog back to her lips.
I’m watching this from two benches over, sipping some coffee, wanting a little space outside the truck. I can’t take my eyes off this pair, this young mother with dark hair and her small child, and the way they are sharing this food, how easy it seems, how smooth and regular, and I’m overwhelmed with the size of my heart, swelling and swelling in some slanted joy for witnessing this little miracle.
THE GREAT REVEAL
Day 145 of 150
World of Wonders
November 2013
I am in the middle of talking the blade box act.
There is a girl in the front row, seven or eight years old, a small skinny thing I’ve brought around to the back of the box we’ve just stuck sixteen blades through while Sunshine twists her body inside. This is part of the act—getting an audience member to confirm for the rest of the crowd that our contortionist, a Romanian born with yellow elasticity in her joints, I say, is indeed twisted around those blades. The girl stands staring at the contortionist with a big O’ed mouth, a really giant gape between her lips like she’s never seen anything so astonishing. It is pure gold, wonderful GTFM lubricant.
“Is Miss Sunshine REALLY inside that box?” I ask her and bring the mic to her lips as I always do to the volunteer, hope she’ll speak with a tone of pure awe and reverence, but the little girl doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the contortionist twisted between those blades. She just nods and nods, her head moving in overly dramatic sweeps between chest and sky. I thank her and ask her to come around front to rejoin her family, but she stays, eyes on the contortionist, mouth open w
ide enough to take the strangeness and amazement of the whole entire world inside. I thank her again and move the mic away from our mouths and ask if she’s okay and she keeps nodding and I start walking around to the front of the box, hoping she’ll follow, but she stays and stays, this little girl without a front tooth, her arms tucked inside a Green Bay Packers jersey, staring at what amazes her.
Finally, I reach out my arm and offer it to the little girl. It breaks the spell. We walk back in front of the audience and they clap and she drops my arm and her mom reaches toward her. “What’s the trick?” the mother wants to know. “Is she really doing it?” Her hands run up and down the girl’s arms, and the girl nods yes, yes, yes. What have you seen and what is the story you’ll tell about it?
And when I look back out to the audience, scanning the crowd to estimate what kind of turn I might have, thinking how I can best leverage her astonishment, I see them.
A flash of light on metal.
Not a sword.
Not a tent stake.
A flash of light on the metal frame of a wheelchair.
I see him first. Davy.
He is behind the chair, pushing it, and looking right at me. And then I see her, my mom, sitting in the chair. I see her eyes sliding across the objects of this world, the freaks in their cases, the stage, the lights, the tent, the audience watching me to see how I will try to amaze them next. Her head grazes left to right, up and down. Her eyes don’t seem to land on anything.
Nothing in the world has ever been as beautiful as her wild silver hair in the orange glow of the circus tent, like she is made of the moon and the sun both, and also that rare.
There are no words in my mouth. There are only worlds, breaking open.
I swallow, and try to find something to say. There are dozens of eyes on me, staring. I choke back the whole season of grief, the years of it. I look to the astonished little girl who is still staring at the blade box and use her wonder for strength.
I start talking. Put word after word to finish the act, look out at the audience and then back to my parents, checking to see if they are a mirage, if this is one of my daydreams, but there they both are each time. And my mom finds me with her eyes. She locks in on me. I can hear her softly singing in the back of the crowd, na na na na, na na naaaaa.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 35