The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  There is not enough space for the new performers to have beds in the back of our truck. Sunshine unfolds cots in our main backstage area with sheets hung between some of them at night for privacy. New bunks.

  A flat wooden board is set on top of a lighting rack, a thin camping mat laid across it, and Brian’s room is formed. Other mats are rolled out across the stage, and people find places to sleep wherever they need. In truth, there is so little time spent sleeping, and we are so exhausted when that time comes, the accommodations almost don’t matter.

  It feels good to have this fresh blood among us after the same faces day in and out for nearly forty days. But I also feel wary. Maybe Tommy or Red will take to one of them; maybe they’ll prove their worth here quickly and make my presence unnecessary. I keep a little distance, watch them carefully.

  The first night, we all head to a carnie bar just off the fairgrounds. It’s packed with loud, chain-smoking men and women, most of whom are obviously people who spend all day outside, who work with their hands. The crew who have been out with World of Wonders for previous seasons greet the carnies, laughing about stories from past years, lamenting those who’ve been lost since then.

  “I love Francine,” Cassie says loud and often, hugging and kissing her. We’ve found a table on the back porch that most of us are sitting around. “I’m so glad Francine is here, she’s just so hilarious and fun.” The other new arrivals quietly sip their beers. I’d started being snappy with Cassie lately. She is so loud all the time. So quick to say something mean to someone on the crew, though she is always joking. So fast to say how much she loves people to get what she wants. There is such volatility, and I am getting too tired to be good at holding on for the ride.

  You’re a nice person, or you could be a nice person, I tell myself on the walk back from the bar. Mean people are usually hurting more than the rest of us, I try to remember. Be kind to Cassie, I try to remind myself. But a shadowy golem in my head asks whether niceness is really what is going to keep me afloat out here, or anywhere.

  Yes, it is, I think. Right?

  * * *

  The human teeth clink like gentle bells. In a small glass in the van’s cup holder, they are a shadowy white nearing gray and look fragile, almost hollow. They have failed to keep themselves inside their human mouth despite their rooting and pinching and grabbing.

  The teeth belong to our current working man. Every few hours, since he’d started with us two days before, he’d swear and spit and another hard object would fall out of his mouth and into his hand.

  Drew was hired from bum tryouts. After Cannon Fire Steve quit, we went without a working man for the next ten days to save a little bit of money, which meant that Big, Big Ben had to do twice his regular work—both acting as a ticket man and doing all the repair and labor jobs. Before we showed up in Wisconsin for the first meat-grinder, Tommy had posted an ad on Craigslist, and a handful of down-and-out-looking folks seeking temporary employment—under the table, no questions asked—showed up. The boss chatted with them, asked them to help for an hour or so with setup to see how they moved, checking if anyone looked tired or like they thought the labor was difficult, which it was. He’d given each of them ten or twenty bucks for that hour of work and then hired the one who looked like he had the most staying power. Drew looked promising. He had worked hard and kept quiet and barely broken a sweat.

  The first day, he claims bad allergies as he grinds his knuckles into his eyes again and again like he can force the irritant out of himself. Allergies are the reason for his narrowed eyes, he says, and also the reason why whenever we pause our labor, he falls asleep.

  He looks very tender asleep. Most of his neck and arms and hands are covered in tattoos, many of which look homemade, like he was a pad of paper on the lap of a child who kept doodling spiderwebs and skulls and unintelligible words. I have always loved people who fall asleep at unexpected times, or in surprising places. On a bus, midtest at a hospital. I like the idea that the brain can’t quite keep control over the body, that the body gives up its defenses. That they suddenly rejoin the world of the awake with wonder.

  The second day, Drew arrives forty-five minutes late, sweating, puffy-faced, a red rash across his cheeks, swaying, his eyelids barely open.

  “I’m sorry,” he says to Tommy. “It was my daughter. She couldn’t sleep last night. Sick.” He rocks gently back and forth, his hunched shoulders making little empty caves in his collarbones. Damn daughters.

  “What happened to your face?” the boss doesn’t ask Drew, but I wish he had. Instead, he whispers “strike one” as Drew passes, but his tone is almost apologetic. Drew goes right to work, hauling wood behind the show that needs repainting, hustling behind Big, Big Ben even as Big, Big Ben very openly rolls his eyes at the tardiness and excuses.

  “I don’t do drugs,” says Drew, slurring. “I used to have a problem, but not anymore.”

  His face is so red and swollen, it looks like he has been beat up pretty badly or caught a serious case of poison oak, all in the eight or nine hours since we’d quit work last night. As the first hour passes, the puffiness doesn’t go down at all, and it is hard to tell if he can see anything out of the slits between the meat puffs of his eyelids.

  * * *

  It is opening day at the Wisconsin State Fair, and I am taking one last shift on the bally stage with the snake, waiting for the crowds to flock. The late morning sun is growing hotter, and Drew is in the ticket booth nodding off. Ticket taking is the working man’s other duty, the only requirement for which is to stay awake and be able to count out change. I can help him with one of those.

  “How old’s your daughter?” I ask him.

  “Three,” he says. “She’s a princess.” I nod, make eyes at a passerby. “Or four,” he says, moving his lips suddenly into a tight circle. His tongue is moving against his cheek on the inside of his mouth. He lifts his hand to his lips and spits out a tooth. “She’s four.”

  “Where is she right now?” I ask, trying to eye the tooth. This is not my business, but these are the kinds of details I can’t help but barrel toward. The intricacies of other people’s lives. Their confessions.

  “My mom is looking after her,” he says.

  The tooth is dressed in a sheen of spit and lies nested in his half-closed fist.

  “I’m making money so I can help her out. Take care of my little girl myself.”

  His eyes begin to close but he jerks awake. “She’s a real cutie,” he says, sitting tall on the stool and continuing to talk like he’s been telling the same story in his sleep and just keeps on telling it. But it doesn’t take long—fifteen or twenty seconds—and his eyelids slide closed again. He works for a few flutters to pull them back up toward his brow, to continue his story, until the words slur and the fight against gravity becomes too much for his upper lids and they find the lower. A few more words come out, impossible to understand, and then a few seconds of total rest before he nods back awake, still talking. He manages to not fall off the stool.

  Lost tooth as wishing stone.

  * * *

  The evening before, after setup, a few of us loaded into the van and went to a sandwich shop. Drew headed right into the bathrooms. Cassie and I ordered and sat down at a booth, where I tried to scooch far back into the bench to make evident space beside me. We ate our sandwiches, and after coming out of the bathroom Drew ordered, keeping his voice low and soft, keeping his teeth in his mouth as far as I could tell. He sat at the booth behind us.

  “Do you want to join us?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “That’s okay,” he said, and the purple crescent moons beneath his eyes caught a glint of neon light from the window’s sign. He was quiet despite my continued harassment, carefully pulling a chip at a time out of the bag and eating it in small bites until, half a bag in, he said he was full. The sandwich remained untouched.

  Driving back, Drew slipped the teeth out from his pocket—where they might have felt sharp agai
nst his thigh, or where he might have been afraid they’d break even further, if something like that would even be a concern—and dropped them into the water cup he’d just finished drinking from. He was in the front seat, and held the cup in both hands for a minute or so, looking down the clear plastic tunnel like some prophecy lay inside. I hoped those mangled roots and ground white edges weren’t his future. He sighed, jammed the cup into the small storage pocket on the passenger door and left it there when he climbed out.

  “What’s Drew’s thing?” I asked Cassie later that night.

  “Methadone,” she said.

  “Meth?”

  “No. The drug they give you to get off meth. And heroin. He’s a junkie.”

  I looked across the tent to where Drew sat on the edge of the stage, waiting for the boss, staring off into the darkness with the two eternal sinkholes of his eyes.

  The next morning, I decided I’d ask him more about his daughter, because maybe talking about her would give him some sort of spirit he might have been having a hard time finding lately. Because all the men on the road with us had little daughters they’d left somewhere, and I wanted to believe, had to believe, that the idea of their daughters had the capacity to rouse some love or healing or determination in them, something. I wasn’t ignorant enough to think that it could cure Drew of a drug addiction, or that I could really help, but I still wanted to try. To focus on someone else’s suffering.

  I waited, thinking nothing of it when a few minutes after Drew was supposed to arrive passed and he didn’t show up. Then a half hour, an hour, two. Ben was back in the ticket booth. By the end of the day Drew had still not shown up, and that was that. He never came back.

  I thought about all the questions I’d asked, the stories I’d tried to pry out of him in the three days he was with us, and wondered if instead of bringing him closer to some nebulous state of peace, I’d actually done the opposite. Maybe he looked at me and saw who I really was: a person who had chosen to run. I was not working to care for my loved ones like he was. I had said goodbye and flown thousands of miles away. My head played the recursive loop of leaving: flying to California to see my mom for a few days, then flying back to Alabama for a few weeks, thinking of her constantly, calling Davy all the time—Davy, who was wildly stressed and depressed and barely hanging in there himself. I had left, and then left, and then left, and then left. And while I was away from her, I made it through the day by imagining that she was already gone.

  How might my mother have healed if she’d had my love constantly by her side to buoy her in the months and then years after her massive stroke? Would she have regained her ability to walk? To talk? What if there’d been a chance, however improbable, of her waking up one morning and writing take me to the beach, and all of us bundling her and supporting her on both sides as we crossed the sand and stood at the rim of the Pacific, putting our toes into the cold water and letting that sun warm our faces? It’s impossible to listen to all the echoes of what of might have happened without going deaf from the cacophony.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Sunshine is in the passenger seat and notices them, their brown and gray and white roots.

  “Gross,” she says, pulling the cup of teeth from the door. “This is disgusting.”

  Tommy grins and starts drumming on the steering wheel with excitement, holds his hand out for the cup. He dumps the teeth into the palm of his giant hand and turns them around in his fingers like golden coins. He is laughing, this high-pitched tee-hee-hee he lets out whenever something deeply delights him.

  “Anyone else?” he asks into the rearview mirror, holding the teeth in the air. Everyone shakes their heads. “Your loss,” he says, still giggling. “Thank god for junkies.” He pours the teeth back into the cup and plants it in the dashboard’s drink holder, where it remains for the rest of the season, adventuring with us across the country.

  THE TITANIC WAS CHILD’S PLAY

  Two years and ten months after the stroke

  10 days into my parents’ trip

  August 2013

  My parents’ train derails somewhere in Nebraska. Or just outside Chicago. Or in the Sierra Nevadas. It happens suddenly in the middle of the night, throwing the passengers out of their bunks and onto the floor, against the wall. The force throws my mother’s whole body up from the flat plane of the bed and into the air, freeing her limbs from gravity, from paralysis. Imagine it, the body loosed and airborne, the soft angle of a shoulder floating through space. Like a woman underwater. For the first moment, at least. Before the body’s smack.

  In my dream, the train crash isn’t beautiful. I want to remember it beautiful, to put lightning bugs out in the cornfields, to see the egg-tip of moon up in the sky and the blues of the night fingering over one another like Van Gogh’s starry night. But it isn’t. The dreams are brutal.

  The next dream has them in the small room they’ll be living in while they take the boat across the Atlantic. It is Davy this time, dead on the ground while my mom sits beside him in her wheelchair, the pee collecting beneath her, her cries collecting in the room, staring at him for minutes, hours, days, unable to know how to get help, what to do, unable to do anything. Just watching while possibilities for help fade away.

  These aren’t dreams I have at night. I am too tired by the time I lay my head down to think about anything much at all and my subconscious seems to feel the same. I fall right asleep, sleep through the night, wake in the morning to do it all again. Some mornings I wake and wish so deeply to be waking, instead, in a room by myself with a locking door and a few hours to do as I wish. But when I play that out—what I would do next: read? cook eggs?—the action inevitably turns to doing something to keep my mom safe, to helping Davy, and again, as it’s been for two years and ten months, I don’t know what to do. Here, I get up out of my bunk and know exactly what to do.

  I want to believe the waking daydreams bubble up out of my subconscious, as dreams do, but I think, mostly, they are conscious attempts at practicing for the worst. They happen as I sit backstage between acts, staring out the trailer’s back end into the late morning sun on the pig races next to us, the little pigs’ pink skin becoming the purse of the woman who happens to walk under a window in Italy and smell something foul, who happens to know the old woman who owns and rents out the little apartment where she smells the bad smell and whom she accompanies to check on the current renters, an American couple, one handicapped, who have been quiet as little mice and are now two rotting corpses.

  * * *

  “You know what’s really neat? Watching the color of the rocks change as you move across the country,” Davy says. We’re on the phone, finally, a few days into their journey. I’d called and texted a few times, and he hadn’t responded. Too busy, he said. The train had stopped over in Chicago and they’d switched trains and now they were in New York and things were FINE.

  “They go from gray to almost gold and then you get the red rocks, which have orange in them, and then granite in some places. It’s just really neat to see,” he said.

  “How’s Mom?”

  “Na na na na,” she says into the phone.

  “Great, she’s great,” he says.

  “And you?”

  “Great, too.”

  “Great.”

  “Well, the train car was a little small,” he says. “We got bumped around in there quite a bit, trying to get to the toilet.”

  “How bad?”

  “Not bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “Just some bruises. No big deal. We’re going to Times Square tomorrow. Mom wants to get a hot dog from one of those vendors on the street. And then we’re gonna sit out there and people watch. I’m sure she’ll want extra relish. My pickle girl.”

  “Na na na na,” she says.

  “Well, we better run, cutie,” he says.

  “Na na,” my mom says.

  “I love you, too,” I say. We hang up.

  * * *

  Fo
r the next part of their act, if you can believe your eyes, the two great American daredevils will board a ship and set off across the Atlantic. For nine days, they’ll be aboard the vessel with no phone service and expensive Internet. Don’t expect to hear from us, they say. They’ll be too busy fighting for the best view of the dolphins jumping alongside the ship.

  “Mom got a set of paints and a notebook and wanted to record street life in New York,” Davy says. “She wanted them for the ship, too. We’re going to find a little table next to a window that looks out over the water, and she’s going to paint and I’m going to whittle and we’re going to just sit there. We haven’t had time to do anything like that in a long, long time.”

  * * *

  “She was a very serious little girl,” my grandmother told me once, of my mother. “She turned into a funny woman, but when she was young, she was very serious. Two things happened at around the same time. First, she realized how much she loved to draw, and second, she started believing in Jesus. She’d sit at this little desk in her room for hours drawing excruciatingly detailed depictions of Jesus on the cross. Perfectly shaded thorns on his crown, spherical droplets of blood hanging by a thread from his palms and feet. Picture after picture she would draw, like she was trying to exorcise something out of herself. Like there would be some truth, or salvation, if she could just get the angles right.

  “The rest of us weren’t very religious. We’d go to church on Sundays, I mean, like all good people from Oklahoma were raised to do, but she was the one in the family that took it to a new level. Went to a camp for Christian kids, then became a counselor there as a teenager. She loved it, was gaga for Jesus. But one summer, when she came home, she said that was it. That she’d never go back again.”

  My mom had told me a story about this, once, with some sadness. After the first session ended, there were a few days before the new campers arrived when she and the other counselors had meetings and planning sessions. One of the primary topics was how to get the campers to have a moment of salvation or, for those not devout enough, who’d been sent there by worried parents, maybe, to feel some sort of light godly pressure to convert. That was what many of the daily activities were structured around, the pressure to show other campers you’d found God.