The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “He’s not a lost puppy,” Devin said. “We’re taking him to the Downtown Pub. They’ll know what to do to help him.” I had no good arguments against this.

  The night was warm and swarms of blond girls filled the air with their floral perfumes, and sometimes I could howl with how much I wanted that easy life, but tonight we had captured a true American vagabond carnie. And maybe he’d be able to tell me about life on the road. About waking up beside a Ferris wheel. About a world where people who couldn’t fit anywhere, did. It was the most excited I’d felt in two months.

  The man slid into the booth beside Devin. I poured us beers as the man nodded off and then woke back up with a shock and looked me in the eyes. His were a clear light blue, bright and almost white, somewhere between a glacier and a blue Slurpee.

  “Let’s have fun, us three,” he said. Devin huffed and left for the bathroom.

  The man’s eyelids did not spasm or close. He was looking at me, right at me. “I really think we could be something, me and you,” he said. I swallowed hard.

  “What really happens at the carnival?” I asked.

  “Everything,” the man said, then paused. “You could live with me in my trailer,” he said. “I have a TV in there.”

  I laughed, laughing at myself for feeling drunk and serious, sipping my beer and looking around the bar. We were both quiet until Devin started walking back toward us. The man reached across the table and grabbed my hand in his.

  “Run away with me,” he said quietly, urgently, those blue, blue eyes wide and staring me down. “Run away with me to the carnival.” I couldn’t swallow. Tears started pouring down the sides of my cheeks.

  Devin hurried toward us and, from a few feet away, yelled, “Hey! What the fuck did he just say to you? What’s wrong?” I tried to wipe my eyes and paw toward him an “all’s okay,” but nothing was coming across to anybody. “What’d you just say, buddy?” he said, standing tall over the man.

  “No, no, it was nothing,” I said. “He said nothing bad.”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Devin said.

  “I gotta get back,” the man said.

  “What?” Devin asked, not looking away from me. “What was it?”

  “Let’s have a drink,” the man said, sipping his beer.

  “He just—” I said, trying to decide how much truth to tell, deciding to tell all of it. “He asked me to run away to the carnival. I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to say that.”

  “Jesus Christ, kid,” Devin said. “Jesus Christ.”

  THE MOON IS APPLE PIE

  Day 14 of 150

  World of Wonders

  July 2013

  It’s the Fourth of July, a Thursday, and our seventh day performing. Sunday will be our last day at this first fair, and we’ll tear down through the night and immediately move on to a fair in Ohio.

  But not yet. It’s 9:00 p.m., and the sky has just darkened. We have three more hours of performing ahead of us. Suddenly, a boom causes everyone to flinch as fireworks begin behind our tent, shot, it seems, from a big parking lot on the other side of carnietown. We can mostly see them from the stage, pausing our ballys because we can’t talk over the boom of the explosions, and people are holding each other around the waist, back to front, like they are getting their portraits taken and pointing and sipping beers in big plastic cups, the whites of their eyes like little moon mirrors for the colors in the sky.

  Tommy watches the fireworks, too, but looks out over the crowd every few seconds, a little fidgety. We haven’t made nearly as much money at this fair as we should have to keep everything afloat, and there are only a few more days until we close here and move on to the next fair. We have a big audience primed to go inside if only these damn distractions would stop. The show’s financial calculations were worked out before the season began, and include minimums for how much the show needs to make in each spot in order to go on to the next spot. This information isn’t discussed with the cast, but I can glean it from the stress each day as the midway’s thin crowds walk past our tent.

  “Inside, you’re going to see an Icelandic Giant—” Tommy begins, but a firework explodes and drowns out the rest of his sentence. “Free show, free show,” Tommy calls, and a few heads turn toward him for a moment but snap away when a series of booms take over the sky. Even I can’t look away.

  Tommy nudges my arm.

  “Light up your torches,” he whispers into my ear.

  “Now? Isn’t it, like, un-American to take attention away from fireworks?”

  “What’s more American than trying to make a buck?” he says.

  I light them up.

  I remember that in my fire-eating class our teacher had warned of gasoline burps, teeth cracks from heat, tongue blisters, and scolded me, sternly, not to get pregnant while sucking in gasoline fumes. None of this matters when I ignite the torches onstage. All I can see is the gas canister beside me, into which I dip the torches, shake off the excess liquid, and pick up the lighter. I am aware of the audience watching me ready the flame. I am not thinking about how many brain cells I lose each time I swallow some of the gas, which happens, just a little bit, each time. I light one torch, then touch my fingers to the other gas-soaked head and squeeze. I bring my hand to the lit torch and pick up the flame. It stretches, like a piece of chewed gum, between my thumb and pointer finger. I carry the flame to the unlit torch and light the head with my fingertips.

  Fire eating, long used in Hindu, Sadhu, and Fakir performances to signify spiritual attainment, became popular with sideshow and circus performances around 1880, a mainstay of touring acts. It’s not hard to see why. The eyes that are within fifty feet of our bally stage flicker over to me, then back to the fireworks, then back to me. What’s happening in the sky is spectacular, but the brightness of those lights is farther away, and one by one people start a slow zombie walk toward my fire, the same sort of draw I often see when the torches are lit, like there is never any choice but to seek the flame. We gather a small crowd as I run my fingers through the fire, wipe the torch across my arm, blow one out, and then light it again using my fingertips to carry the fire. The crowd grows, the fireworks still behind us, and I feel a little thrill to have stolen the attention. Tommy begins his bally, working it extra slow and long to give more time for a larger crowd to draw, the thunder of the fireworks lessening, the glint of his sword bright, reflecting the fire as he licks it and lets an audience member feel its heft, the burn of the fire in my mouth, the weight of our responsibility here to keep ourselves afloat just like real, good, hardworking Americans.

  We turn a huge crowd. The show will go on.

  * * *

  The next morning when I wake up, Tommy’s massive shadow is blocking all the light from the doorway as he stares at the bunk beside mine. On it, Snickers is stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. Tommy’s arms are crossed, a more serious posture than I’ve seen him make, a throwback perhaps to his days as a professional wrestler in New Jersey. I sneak over to Spif, who is connecting cables on the far side of the trailer.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Snickers got the boot,” he says.

  “Third strike?”

  “Guess so,” Spif says, attention still on the cords in front of him, as if this event didn’t merit even the smallest glance.

  “What’d he do?”

  “All I know’s he went down into carnietown last night and got involved in more trouble. Don’t want to know the details. Don’t care. Guy’s a prick.”

  Snickers begins singing to himself, laughing as he grabs something from the main trailer area, close to where we sit. I try to give him a pity smile, but he just keeps laughing, shaking his head.

  “What I care about is being shorthanded for teardown tomorrow night. And out a ticket guy. He fucked us over on that,” Spif says.

  “Don’t worry. You saw my guns during setup. I got you,” I say, elbowing him. He snorts.

  “You wanna know how you can rea
lly help me out? Give me a blow job,” he says.

  “In your dreams,” I say, and wander off to the bathroom, pleased that he thinks I can handle some coarse teasing.

  I feel bad for Snickers, for how heavily he wore this dream on his sleeve when he arrived, and how quickly he failed it. A man who had a hard life and finally thought he’d made it to his destiny. I’m sad for him but also nervous at how quickly a person can get thrown off the show—he’s been here ten days. The carnival takes all kinds; it is often a place for people to find work who can’t find work elsewhere—people from other countries, people with drug problems, people with criminal records, people with mental instabilities—but there are still rules, still a code to follow that can be broken, which will mean immediate removal. I don’t understand the codes yet. I’m not even sure I know them. When I ask Tommy about it later, he brushes me off. “Just keep showing up to work call on time,” he says. “And don’t believe that this will ever be easy.”

  * * *

  Sunshine and Spif spend half the year splitting the electricity bill and the other half traveling around the country as performers in the show. Both from Camarillo, California, they have been friends since they were very young. They lived close to one another, had classes together, spent time together after school. But things got hard.

  Story goes: Spif was homeless. As he’s telling me, he’s twisting the silver rings on his fingers, revising and looping to make sure the details come out right. We’re sitting backstage after day eight of performing, trying to wind down. “My friends were letting me crash on their couches for a while, but then they got sick of it. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I ran out of couches, and then ran into Sunshine.” He laughs at his joke. Sunshine has walked down to the bathrooms to take a shower, but her presence as the boss backstage is never far off. “When I told Sunshine I didn’t have a place to stay, she immediately told me to come over with all my stuff.”

  Later, I ask Sunshine about her and Spif’s story.

  “I needed help,” Sunshine says. After a long bout in the hospital, her mom was just about to return home at the same time the landlord required everything out of their house for renovations. “I was in a panic, and completely alone,” she says. But then there was Spif. He moved into her living room and they lent each other a hand. And he never left. That was three years ago.

  Spif talks about his early days in juvenile hall, his involvement with gangs. He’s twenty-three now and has been out of trouble for years. As he’s talking, he plays with a paper flower he bought earlier to give to Pipscy because she’s been feeling down. It’s hard to imagine him as a kid interested in trouble. Especially around Sunshine. They often lock arms and skip to wherever they’re headed.

  * * *

  This is Sunshine’s seventh season with the sideshow. As the stage manager, she’s in charge of behind-the-scenes operations—music cues, show order, break rotation—and also controls the loading and unloading of our semi. But the thing she’s known for, the thing the little girls outside the tent whisper about as they’re walking away, is her fire-eating act. She does tricks I’m far too scared to try—like the human candle, where she traps and then lights gas fumes in her mouth, blowing a flame out her O’ed mouth as casually as if she were blowing a bubble.

  She stands onstage in five-inch heels, her stick-skinny legs in sheer black tights below a black skirt and corset, her fingers removing two long torches from a canister of gas. The torches are ignited. She carries the flame with her fingertips, blows fire, swallows torch after torch and then lights the flame from the tip of her tongue. Moments later, she returns to the stage with Spif and stands on the knife board as he throws the bouquet of metal around her body.

  * * *

  There isn’t a day they aren’t together. But it hasn’t always been that way. This is Spif’s second season, so for years he’d stay at home half the year while Sunshine was touring the country. Then last year, when she was preparing to come out for her sixth season, Sunshine began thinking about asking Spif to come along. She’d never invited anyone out to work at the sideshow before.

  “You don’t bring just anyone,” Sunshine says. “You don’t actually bring anyone.” She’d watched as other performers brought friends or family out to work the season and then seen them sneak off in the night never to return just as many times. The hours are long; the work is hard. There aren’t many who can hack it, and vouching for a person who then leaves the show in a bind can be a big problem. In all her years, there was nobody in Sunshine’s life she thought could make it. Until Spif.

  Spif took the leap. He joined Sunshine for the season and stayed the entire time as the ticket man. A dedicated worker who proved himself quickly, he soon earned important crew jobs for setup and teardown. The bosses also saw his potential as a performer. For this, his second season, the bosses have taught him a few acts. To lie on a bed of nails. To throw knives around a live human target—Sunshine.

  * * *

  Later that night, a 3:00 a.m. storm sounds like a train breaking through a mountain of bricks. Spif leaps from his bunk, bounds down the hallway, and is outside, wrapping the electrical equipment in plastic in less than a minute, dropping the banners to protect them from high winds.

  “You gotta keep proving yourself here,” he says to me the next morning, when I asked him how he knew he was the one who should get up and fix what needed fixing. “It’s my job. My responsibility.”

  Between acts, Sunshine listens and asks questions as Spif describes the storm’s lightning, the proximity of thunder, then rolls her eyes when he moves on to describing a cute girl in the crowd. Mid-conversation, without speaking, they both stand and disappear through the curtain onto the stage. She will rely on him. He will rely on her. Loud, moody rock music plays onstage, but the sound of metal sinking into wood, with each thwack, is louder than the sounds coming from the intricate speaker system. So is the applause at the end.

  * * *

  Sunshine and Spif’s story was not unfamiliar. I’d been hearing similar themes in my mom and Davy’s story my whole life.

  Davy’s father, DS, played trumpet at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1930s. He was set up on a Coke date with a freshman sorority pledge in Kappa Kappa Gamma. She’ll be short, someone told him, slender and real pretty. Her name’s Mary Francis. He’s always carrying that trumpet, someone told her about DS. They met for a Coke. That’s the part I know. I like to imagine they shared the same straw, and he wanted to know about the mountains she grew up around, or about her older sister, the firecracker everyone talked about. It was her first date ever. She had just arrived at college. Mary Francis is my mom’s mother.

  They had a good time but decided to be just friends. He continued to play his trumpet around town, she danced with the Kappas. One night, at a party, she noticed another horn player in a different band who wouldn’t take his eyes off her while she was dancing with friends. At the set break, he lowered his instrument, approached, introduced himself as Everett and asked her for a date. Three years later, they married: my mom’s parents, Mary and Ev.

  DS had met his own sweetheart by then, Lenore, and the two couples, Ev and Mary, DS and Lenore, breezed around Oklahoma in fast cars and danced late into the night, until World War II was declared. Ev was shipped off to Germany. DS was asked to stay as the town’s dentist.

  This should be a made-for-TV movie.

  Ev was the commander of one of the ships that landed on the Normandy beach on D-day. World War II marched forward, every telegram and knock on Mary’s door a heart-stopper. Seven months after Ev headed out, she had a baby, Judith, my mom’s older sister. Ev lived in a hole on the beach in Anzo for six weeks, writing a letter each morning with the paper pressed up against the dirt wall beside him. And then, shock.

  Deep shock.

  Shock to have survived. The only person, of all the men he knew over there in his three-year stay, who returned without a scratch. Not a goddamned scratch, he still repeated sixty years
later.

  Ev returned to Oklahoma. Lenore and Mary became pregnant at the same time. In February, Davy was born; nine weeks later, to the minute, Teresa was born. My stepdad, my mom. Dave and Teresa spent three years being babies together. They rolled around in the grass, drooled on each other. And then Ev and Mary left with their girls for California.

  Seven years later, when Dave and Teresa were ten, Dave’s family was lured by their friends out west, rented a house right down the street. 1956. In the long, hot summer drive across half of the country, Lenore told story after story about their long-lost friends from Oklahoma with two beautiful daughters who loved to hula dance and ride bikes. The stories printed deep on that romantic ten-year-old boy’s heart, and he felt some sort of binding love even though he hadn’t seen this Teresa since he was a toddler. When they finally pulled up to Ev and Mary’s house, Dave jumped out of the car. Out the front door walked a tan little girl in a romper with bright green eyes and a swagger. She asked if he wanted to be in her gang. He tried to kiss her. She said she wasn’t that kind of girl. He touched her arm. She had the softest skin he’d ever felt.

  * * *

  It’s closing night. Day ten of performing. We’ve been instructed to have our bags packed and thrown on top of our bunks in order to make space for stage pieces that have to slide under the beds. Our drawers need to be closed, hanging items—like the sweaty fishnets I hang from a protruding nail in the wall to dry each night—put away, back end swept, minifridge emptied, work clothes out and ready to change into as fast as possible once the wheel goes off at 10:00 p.m. exactly. We completed the tasks the night before, because work call that morning was 9:00 a.m. And now, at 9:30 p.m., while most of the carnival still appears to be operating normally, I see twice as many carnies moving twice as quickly between rides, cords wound in the shadows, translucent trash bags full of unsold popcorn and soft pretzels laid beside food joints like little tombs.