The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  We’ve played only two fairs so far, but this life is becoming familiar so much more quickly than other kinds of lives I’ve had. It is so packed full all day, every day. I’ve escaped from handcuffs over a hundred times on that bally stage already, eaten fire nearly as many, I’ve unrolled and rerolled the banners every morning and night day after day, and now, just over a month into the tour, it is starting to feel as if I’ve always been here.

  * * *

  This isn’t the season’s first blown tire. On the drive from Florida up to Pennsylvania for the first fair, the tire on our semi blew, and a piece of the rubber spun around and cracked the truck’s battery. We pulled off at the next rest stop and started calling around for the cheapest, closest rig mechanic out in rural West Virginia. The pool of battery acid beneath the truck grew drip by drip.

  “Get comfortable,” Tommy said. “This’ll take a while.”

  We trudged into the rest stop and slouched against the walls. “Of course this would happen,” Sunshine said. She explained that the show never had enough money, and year by year it made less. Smaller crowds. Cheaper tickets. More people who believed it was politically incorrect to gawk, or gross, and then went home to reality TV shows nobody watched them watching. So each time the semitruck wore down its tires, Tommy, per instruction from the owners, took the worn front tires and rotated them to the back, where they were less important for traction, then bought newer but still used tires for the front. This is why the tire blew, I heard. It’s old, cracked, worn well beyond its life. Nobody said anything else, and we settled into a card game.

  “Are we playing Poobah’s rules?” Sunshine asked.

  “Of course,” Spif said, and started dealing.

  “Remember a few years back when Poobah got so pissed at Chris Christ?” Sunshine said, laughing as she organized her hand. “He hid behind one of the semi’s tires with a knife. He’d decided to stab him. So when Chris walked by, Poobah lurched out from behind the tire but somehow missed Chris and slashed the tire instead. That’s why we had the blowout,” she said. “The stabbed tire probably got rotated into the wrong spot.” Nobody looked up or asked if the story was true. Nobody sought clarification. The truth, I’ve learned, is less in the particulars of the story and more in the fact that there is a story at all. Somebody threw a joker.

  * * *

  With our second blowout, we wait inside a gas station for a few hours while it’s repaired, sipping the local root beer sold at the register for a dollar each or Special! $2 for 2, which tastes exactly like every root beer I’ve ever had, though the bottle has a handwritten label that promises Grandma’s secret recipe.

  We write postcards, walk the small aisle of trucker amenities, and touch the camo steering wheel covers. Staring at the hot dogs juicing on their spigots, I casually mention the creepy cops from a few nights earlier to Tommy and Spif. They stop gazing at the dogs. As I talk, they cross their arms over their chests and start shaking their heads.

  “Motherfucking cops,” Spif says.

  “Tess, you should never be out alone on the fairgrounds at night,” Tommy says.

  “Or even in the day,” Spif says.

  “Get pepper spray or a knife. I’m not kidding. All the girls carry them,” Tommy says. I know this is true, but don’t want to accept its necessity. I’ve lived plenty of other places people thought were dangerous—New York City for two years, West Africa for a year—and I never carried weapons. “And listen.” Tommy beckons the others over. “Here’s the new thing. Anytime you need to go out of the tent at night—to the bathroom, to smoke, whatever—you bring someone with you. Preferably me or Spiffer. I know you girls are tough, but it’s just not worth the risk. Wake me up anytime, seriously, I don’t care, just don’t go out alone. Okay?”

  We nod. I understand the concern—not just for the cops, of course, but all the incidents over the years. There’d been a brutal rape on one of these fairgrounds last year. But I feel two things—angry that it is necessary to protect women who just want to go pee at night, and relief that there are willing allies. We are all in it together.

  * * *

  The July sun is gaining relentless heat.

  The July sun is gaining such relentless heat that nobody wants to walk back out to the van to retrieve their backpacks for entertainment while we wait, so we sit around a sticky plastic table beside truck parts, watching a staticky, muted episode of Judge Judy on a small TV mounted in the corner.

  By the time we get to the Kane County Fair in St. Charles, Illinois, the news station releases a heat advisory for the whole forthcoming week. The newscasters suggest that all vulnerable populations in Kane County—the elderly and children, two of our primary audience types, in particular—stay indoors in air-conditioning. It is a health risk to be outside at all.

  Our show is set up in the center of a pool of black asphalt. By the third morning, everything is melting. I apply a few dabs of foundation, which turns into thin tan water and runs to my chin. My liquid eyeliner won’t make a straight line because there’s so much sweat pooling in my eye sockets. Cassie and I take turns getting ready in our bunk, the space in there only big enough to fit one body at a time, and too hot to stay for more than a minute. More layers of makeup do not make it stick. There is an actual wet stain on the ground from the sweat dripping off our bodies, and my hand slides when I try to steady it against my cheek to swipe on the mascara.

  We decide on a new plan.

  Makeup bags in hand, we slide out of our trailer and book it down the midway and into the presentation hall. In here, children’s paintings of their dogs and a church group’s prize quilt are displayed beside unusual vegetables lined up in a row. They’re all awaiting judgment. We stand in the holy air-conditioned public bathrooms and draw on our faces.

  Just an hour later, onstage, my makeup is completely smeared off, my costume is soaked all the way through, and my cheeks are bright pink. Tommy’s face is completely reflective, a mirror made of sweat, and I think that this might be the end for me, for all of us. My head feels full of air and then pummeling stones, and my vision seems to be getting a little fuzzy around the edges. It is 106 with 90 percent humidity. Nobody is out on the midway but us.

  “Tommy, tell me more signs that a person might be leaving.”

  “Why, you gonna leave me, Tess?”

  “I wish I had the strength to leave,” I say, joking, but that rings so true to me as I say it, I almost cry. Would I leave? Could I? I think about a trick my high school cross-country coach used to tell us. When you’re on a long run, if you think about how much longer you have to go, especially when you’re climbing a big hill, it feels insurmountable, too hard. You’ll want to stop. If, though, you make small goals ahead of you, that tree at the bend, the crest of this small hill you can see, then reaching it feels, though still hard, within your grasp. And by the time you get there, the hardest part might be over, and you’ve worked hard to get to that point anyway, so you might as well keep going.

  And then I think about my parents, and wonder whether, if I left now, I could get to them in time to see them once more. If they make it through the train journey, that would be something. And then the ship across the Atlantic. And then the ten-day waiting time in London. And then the ship to Italy. Then the travels between Rome, Florence, Venice, and back to Rome. Then the ship again. The train across the country.

  My cross-country coach’s trick didn’t work. Each step felt infinitely more insurmountable than the last.

  * * *

  “The signs are all around,” Tommy says. “It used to be that the sideshow was a community for all kinds of displaced or rejected people to find a home.”

  “Is it still?”

  “Sort of,” he says, spotting a mother and her three young children way down the midway and trying to get their attention. They turn into the air-conditioned presentation hall. “But not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “This isn’t a place where anyone can make it. Peopl
e aren’t used to the amount of hard work that goes into making it here. I mean, Snickers only lasted a week and a half. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. Many people just can’t handle how demanding it is. Physically. Mentally.”

  In front of us, the black asphalt looks like a river as sheets of heat rise up from the ground and make waves. What was once solid ground is now part of the liquid world, and the cosmos is melting, too, and the inside of my body feels like it contains nothing but boiling water, a fat meat sack of boiling water, and it occurs to me that I might die. Here. Today. And that would be fine.

  The few scattered people across the fairgrounds are taking momentary respite in faraway shade between air-conditioned buildings. A loudspeaker announces, “Welcome to Senior Citizens Day, sponsored by Miller’s Funeral Services.”

  “Be right back,” Tommy says, and darts offstage. I remain, the smaller of our two snakes, whom we have named Pandora, in my arms. I try to focus on something besides the heat.

  Boa constrictors range in size from three to fourteen feet, with hearty tan bodies that have distinctive dark brown and white saddles across their backs, increasing in proximity closer to their red-brown tails. The females are bigger—“heavy-bodied snakes,” Wikipedia tells me. I’ve been trying to read about snakes on my lunch break so that this beautiful creature becomes less an anonymous symbol of danger and more a complex, important creature of the larger ecosystem.

  Pandora senses heat with her lips, and moves her mouth up and down my body, flicking her tongue along the back of my neck. She is active today, writhing all the time, never settling around my neck or waist even though I try to convince her I am just a friendly tree. As she swings her head close I can see that her eyes are again starting to turn a milky blue, opal-colored almost. She is readying to shed.

  Since the tooth scrape incident, I’ve been reluctant to let her face near my body without my hand supporting her head and neck, just in case. But it is so hot today, and I’ve made a terrible mistake this morning in trying to wear my hair down. It is wet with sweat and clumped down my back, a nest of sorts, and Pandora keeps diving back there, probably for a respite of shade, and her body is clammy because I keep setting her back into her box into which we’ve hosed some cool water so that she can regulate her body temperature. She’s heavy and sticky and diving her face back behind my head even though my loosely open hand supports her neck and tries to guide it back to the front of my body, where both I and the sparse audience can keep our eyes on her.

  A few sweaty kids and their brave parents are down the midway at a lemonade stand. One of the kids spots the snake and points, and the whole group, reluctantly, slowly emerges into the sun and walks toward our stage. Once the boy who pointed is close enough, I parrot what Tommy usually says about the snake.

  “Do you think you can be hypnotized by a snake?” I ask the boy. He shakes his head no and walks a little closer. “Many people believed snakes have the power to hypnotize, so come close and look right into Pandora’s eyes,” I say, which is my cue to guide the strong, heavy snake’s head out toward the willing participant so he or she might gaze into the pools of her eyes, but when I start to pull her head, she won’t budge. I try again, gently still, smiling at the boy who is waiting to prove me wrong. The little boy has a bright red shirt a few sizes too big, and buzzed blond hair, and I can see his teeny rounded teeth inside his open, expectant, lick-lipped mouth as he looks from snake body to my face to see what the damn holdup is.

  Which is an excellent question. What the hell is happening?

  I pull at her neck, trying new angles, grabbing different sections of her thick body to extract her, and each time I do, she does not slide any farther out, but I can feel a hard pull on my hair. She’s stuck in there. Tangled deep, deep in my sweaty, curling-ironed hair.

  The little boy is still staring up at me with a slack jaw.

  “Can I see the snake?” he finally asks, as if that weren’t clear.

  “Of course you can,” I say, holding a great fake smile. “She’s just being a little shy, but I’m trying to coax her out for you.”

  I try pushing this time, thinking that perhaps the tangle is one-directional, and like a child with her finger caught in a Chinese finger trap, if the snake can only relax and move opposite her intuition, she can be free. She will not budge. Despite her thick, muscled body, with each pull or push I imagine the skin twisting just past its threshold and tearing open, guts and blood and the rat we fed her two days ago, hair mostly gone now and eyeballs out and body coated in some white and pink gooey slime, a whole package of horror bursting out of her body and sliding down my skin, down into my dress and tights and splashing onto the little boy’s face, the giant limp body still stuck to me for all eternity, the snake carcass my Sisyphean boulder.

  The little boy has now looked back to his parents for instructions, as the adult world isn’t operating according to promise. They’re looking at me with that same wide-jawed expectancy, but I can see in the mother’s face that she understands something of what is happening here, a recognition of my panic or the potential for violence and she says, “Honey, looks like maybe the snake is too shy today,” and walks toward the little boy, her arm toward him but her eye not leaving me, but the boy doesn’t budge, stays firmly planted two feet from me in the hot, hot sun, his pink cheeks and little teeth still gleaming in the afternoon’s brightness.

  It doesn’t matter how forcefully I try to pull her, the only pull I feel is on great patches of my scalp. As she’s gotten herself farther in, her body has pressed against the back of my head, forcing my chin down to my chest, straining my neck. The mom reaches the boy, her hand on his back, and I look at her, mouth sorry, look at the boy and say, “I’ll be right back,” and turn and exit the stage. Big, Big Ben is working the ticket booth and hasn’t taken his eyes off his phone’s screen, where he’s rereading the Harry Potter series.

  “Ben,” I hiss, but he doesn’t move. “Ben,” I say louder, and he grunts without turning around. “Ben, I need your help,” I say louder, still trying to keep my voice out of the register that the family pacing in front of the bally stage might hear, but loud enough to draw him out of Hogwarts.

  He turns around, annoyed. “What’s the problem?” he says.

  “The snake,” I say in my most serious but not hyperventilating panicked whisper, “is stuck. In my hair.”

  He takes a long second to look at me, longer than a quick moment of assessment, longer even than his usual longer processing time, or maybe it was just one second, but the snake was surely strangling in my ringlets so everything felt like forever. Finally, a half smile passes across his mouth.

  “The snake is stuck in your hair?” he asks, and the half smile turns into a big-lipped, full-toothed grin, the brink of hilarity, my inadequacies a comedy club. “Oh man,” he says, laughing, and turning back to Harry Potter.

  “No! Ben! Please, this is serious!” I say, and he turns back to face me, still smiling.

  “I really don’t want to help you,” he says.

  “No, please,” I plead.

  “Because it’s way too funny.”

  “I know.”

  “To have a snake in your hair.”

  “It is. But she might be hurt! Please,” I say.

  “To have the snake trapped in your hair, now that’s funny,” he says, laughing, slapping his knee.

  The family lingering up front loses patience with the sun and spies the shaded pig races down the midway and wanders off.

  “I really don’t want to help you,” he says, reaching up toward my hair. I spin around, still clutching the larger section of her body in my hands and letting Ben’s hands follow her neck up through my tangles, letting him part sections of my hair to see where she is.

  “Oh man,” Ben says. “She’s really stuck in there.”

  “Is she okay? Is she alive?”

  “No. She’s not okay. She’s stuck in your hair. I mean, she’s fine, but there’s a lot of hair woun
d around her body,” he says, and I’m thinking of a spindle and then a hot dog in a hairball and a host of other inappropriate images, because it’s really hard to picture a giant snake wrapped in human hair. “Hi, beauty,” he says to the snake.

  “Just get her out, Ben. Whatever you have to do,” I say.

  He glances around for something to help, but there’s nothing close, no scissors or knife as far as we can see, and so he begins trying to wriggle her out. Both of my hands are behind my head, a few hairs being pulled out as he loosens tiny portions of her at a time.

  “This is probably gonna hurt,” he says, eyeing me.

  “I don’t care,” I say. “Just please get her out.”

  He reaches both hands back again and I feel a series of small tugs and then one giant rip and sting and he grunts and my head is throbbing, but in his hands is the beautiful brown girl, eyes milky blue and unblinking, a sleeping bag of blond hairs circling her body. I reach back to touch my head, surprised that a large portion of skin isn’t gone, surprised I’m not half-bald. In the stinging area, the hair feels thinner, but it doesn’t matter.

  Ben is still laughing to himself as he holds the snake, gently peeling the hairs off her body as she slowly climbs across his arms.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I say, welling up with relief.

  “That was funny,” he says, and I set Pandora down in her box to cool off, run backstage for a hair tie, put my hair in an ugly half bun without care for showmanship, wipe off the rest of my makeup with a baby wipe, come back onstage, and, not knowing what else to do, open my arms again to the snake.