* * *
I slide off my mom’s brace, the sock beneath. She is sitting on the bed, knows now, with practice, to let the muscles on the left side of her body flare then squeeze and hold the bones of her whole body together, an ocean keeping a tree upright, afloat, way, way out. It is the last few days before I leave for the sideshow, before the lovers will sail off into the Atlantic.
I unzip her vest, remove her glasses. There is much work to be done to keep up with the rush of life on the vertical plane, the y-axis. All the therapies, all the doctors, working toward that y. My mom peers past my busy hands to my face. She wears a grimace, a furrow of concentration. She isn’t wearing a helmet today, not anymore, even though beneath her shaggy gray hair, her skull has a ledge. The absence of bone creates a canyon over a quarter of her head, where just below the skin’s surface her brain is firing and firing and always still bleeding.
* * *
Ms. Olga Hess, the Headless Woman, is a miracle of modern science. When the curtain is opened and they look at you, the audience will see a full woman’s body, arms and legs flailing, in a chair surrounded by plastic tubes that light up red and green and blue. Sparkly. They’ll see the chest and collarbone of a woman’s body and then, apparently piercing the flesh, a metal pole where a head should be. You’ve entered into the world of box jumpers, women who run backstage between illusions, sliding their bodies into one box and then another—spider woman, electric woman, four-legged woman. You’re all body. You are part of a long tradition of women who have lost parts of themselves. You will be whole only when nobody is looking at you.
* * *
My mom holds my shoulder with her one good arm as we lean down toward the bed. I shift her hips, lift the right leg onto the bed, hear the crinkle of her diaper—a word we never use in front of her—her short baby-breaths, and a dog barking outside. Usually, this is where I tuck her in, kiss her forehead, and leave. Lace up my running shoes, move as quickly as I can on foot down the shaded streets of my hometown, breathing hard, trying not to notice neighbors who want to talk about her prognosis. Or I close myself into the kitchen to do homework, grade papers, or hustle around the stove to prepare a meal, or walk slow circles in the bathroom and talk myself out of taking any of the painkillers singing their siren songs in their orange dresses.
* * *
If someone is holding the curtain open who should not be holding the curtain open, politely ask her to close the curtain. Change your tone as the day wears on and you become more tired, as the fair goes on. Use the loudest mean whisper you can muster. Say, Shut the curtain. Then, use only your arm when you see a peeker, a fast, wide swipe across the air in front of you toward their body, a warning, and then, as you are into hour fourteen of performing, month four of being on the road, say nothing at all. Kick hard and fast toward the body of the person staring in at you. Try to avoid contact, but don’t worry if you don’t succeed. As you slide into the chair sideways, your body tipping low and back, there’s a moment of vulnerability where you cannot yank the curtain shut or make contact because you’re lying too far back. To get flat is dangerous.
* * *
Instead of leaving, I lie down. I am tired. I hold open the covers and slide in beside her. Why this time? She turns to me, takes that one good hand and places it on my cheek. It is warm and dry and gentle. We have left the vertical plane where I hold her up and wipe her crack. We are horizontal people now, and somehow that shift has reorganized the nature of how and who we once were to each other. Her hand on my cheek, my hair, is the move a mother makes to her child. She slides her fingers along my neck, runs them, very softly, through my hair. It has been too many years since I have felt this much tenderness, and I don’t have a place for it anymore. That’s the awful price of coping.
* * *
The metal post, as big around as a flagpole, sticks down a foot from the wooden box you need to slide your head inside once you sit in the chair. Crane your neck around the pole. Do not hit your head or you’ll make a noise. Scooch back against the chair and straighten your spine and stretch your neck all the way up inside the wooden box, mirrored on the outside, tight and hot on the inside. Drape the blanket across your lap to look like what a sick person should look like, and arch your back. Sit straight up so the metal pole presses its angled tip against your breastbone, into the freckled hollow between and just above your breasts, press into it hard enough that this spot will, for the next three months, be a little bruised in service of the illusion. Hunch your shoulders forward to cover any space behind the box, and ready your arms to grasp out wild and blind once the curtain is pulled. Never reach your hands higher than your shoulders, never try to touch your own headless head, or your hands may shine back in the mirror to the audience, and then what miracle will they believe in? Instead, spread your fingers wide and keep them low, parallel to the dirt, reaching for the earth, shaking and alive, very alive, trapped in this headless body, escaping into the greatness of your own illusion.
* * *
We are two soft horizontal bodies breathing. Other mothers and other daughters in the world and in time lie side by side and pass on the secrets of the universe. My mother’s waved, soft gray hair falls across the missing chunks of her head. Does she think about what is gone, or what remains? I want to reach my hand out and trace the edges of her missing skull, but I am paralyzed. No, she is paralyzed. Half of her is struck still. With the other half, she is running her fingers through my hair. Tears are pouring out the corners of my eyes and my hands are moving up to catch them, because we’ve been warned by all the specialty doctors that we may not cry in front of her, may not show her our sorrow for fear of killing her hope.
* * *
Hope there is not a yellow jacket stuck inside the small wooden box your head must stay in for the duration of the act. Hope it is not 107 degrees, and hope you don’t faint with your face in the heat box, your body under extra blankets and costumes. Hope you’ll be able to regain your head after the curtain closes and you slide sideways out of the box, hope you won’t have to kick any strangers on the way out, hope your shoes are where you left them and haven’t fallen behind the stage, hope your makeup hasn’t melted completely off, hope you’re suffering enough to begin to understand the suffering of others.
When you move between the worlds of head and no head, know that you must move parallel to the earth. You must change your plane, reinvent your orientation until in front of you is sky and below you is the black earth, and that is your passageway—sister, mother, box jumper—you are your own door into a world of a different kind. You x-axis. You flattened miracle.
PREMIUM FOOTLONG CORN DOGS
Day 54 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
I’m sharing an uncooked, soggy corn dog with Pipscy, who is a vegetarian. She eats away a few inches of the corn batter, rotating the dog horizontally in front of her mouth like a spitted pig, then hands it over to me. I chomp the exposed dog. Hand it back to her. Like this, we make it through three corn dogs.
We ten performers are standing in a downpour. It is 4:15 a.m. Rain has been falling steadily since we began teardown at 10:00 p.m., first as sprinkles and then moving to the giant drops that explode on the pavement when they hit, the kind of rainstorm that lures children to play in it, their arms wide and wild like whirling dervishes. And for just as long, the rain has been pooling into the box of extra dogs a carnie threw out from his food joint, rising around them like a soup, as if they were foam noodles floating in a swimming pool.
“How can you eat that?” Francine, the vegan burlesque dancer, says to our grease-smeared cheeks.
We have been working straight through since 9:00 a.m. the day before, setting up and then performing all day and then beginning teardown. That’s how, we don’t say, instead taking bigger and faster bites.
We have survived our first meat-grinder. Or, we are close to surviving, once we finish teardown here in Wisconsin. Two swelteringly hot, long,
exhausting weeks with full tents and the regular performers plus newbies crammed into the semi and all we have to do is finish packing the show away and we will get to sleep. For a few hours. On our way to the next show.
But we are stuck. That’s why we’re taking the corn dog break. Our two-foot-long tent stakes, which closely resemble railroad spikes, will not budge from their burrow in the asphalt.
At this mega–state fair there are no grassy lots. This fair is four square city blocks of smoothed asphalt. We’d jackhammered holes into the ground and pounded the stakes the rest of the way in. There they stood for the two weeks we’ve been here, reassuringly unbudgeable, but now we have to get them out.
The stakes will not move. Not with the regular crowbar we used, not with the metal extender, not with sledgehammers or jackhammers, nothing.
If we are not set up in time for opening day at the next fair, we’ll incur a huge fine. If we incur a huge fine, the show will likely shut down—it’s a struggle to pay us week by week, and the bald, patched tires on our semi continue to explode on the highway. But more important than the money and the comfort, I’m certain everyone agrees, is the fact that if our show shuts down, there is no longer any American traveling sideshow left.
We can’t leave the stakes in the ground because we need them to hold the tent in place at the next fair. Also, this fairground board levies a huge fine for leaving any equipment in the asphalt.
And so it is 4:15 a.m. and twenty-eight stakes are still stuck in the asphalt. We are standing in the downpour, trying to figure out what to do, stuffing our faces with corn dogs. Tommy decides we’ll wait until 8:00 a.m., when we can hire a forklift.
We wake to a forklift, two long metal prongs sticking out the front, and all the men leaning in close with great tenderness to watch the driver try to jam an edge of the fork under the exposed small circle of metal, the stake’s top. It looks so inconsequential, that small bump nearly flush with the asphalt—doesn’t hint at the two feet below the surface its body reaches.
The rest of us are finishing the final teardown details, hauling the last poles, coiling electrical equipment. I am on ropes. There is a special crochet system we have for each of the ropes that turns the long two-rope pulleys into short, neat, foot-long grubs. It took me a few setups to understand the pattern, but now I can knot and twist and pull the inch-thick ropes with speed, and I understand how helpful it is to keep tools organized and ready to use once we begin setup again at our next spot, which will hopefully, hopefully, be later this afternoon.
One of the forklift’s prongs is against the edge of the stake’s head, pressing with the full force of its machinery, trying to make a little space under which it can sneak and pull, but this stake will not budge. The driver tries different techniques, the fork’s side edge, the armpit, and finally the very tip. This is when he finally manages to insert a small edge under the metal. He is pressing harder on the throttle, and there is some excited chattering from the crew around the stake.
“Stand back a few feet,” Tommy says. “It might pop into the air.”
The forklift driver presses the throttle farther, and the giant metal fork begins to bow. It’s beautiful, the small arc, like a long slice of rusty melon.
All eyes are on the stake and the bent forklift, all voices exclaiming how amazing it is, to put that much force on something and for it to hold utterly still, and then, all at once, the tent stake is gone.
The sound it made.
That’s what people talked about after.
The quiet whoosh.
At the moment before it finally breaks free, I turn my attention back to the ropes in my hand. I see nothing, but hear, from every person within earshot, a collective gasp. I look quickly to those near the forklift and see all their faces turned to the air. See all the necks cranked all the way back, faces looking high, high in the air, like some form of group worship.
Of course, this is where we use phrases like “Time stands still,” and “Each second stretches to eternity,” because time extends here in ways it is hard to articulate.
Time stands still. Each second stretches to eternity. All those necks looking to the sky. I would move my neck to the sky, too, but before I can even begin, all the heads are moving, lowering, turning. The chins are coming back toward their chests and the necks are swiveling, and before I have a chance to look up I realize that all the faces I can see, each of them, are looking at me.
I feel a shadow.
No. I see a shadow.
Is that real?
I notice a suggestion of shadow.
The shadow comes from the stake, which blocks the sun for just a moment as it comes down upon me.
The stake’s sharpened tip scrapes the end of my nose.
This is where it is falling. Forty feet up into the air hurling through space and then down on me.
It grazes my nose and then falls past my mouth and chin. It whirs past the fragile pumping of my heart, inches from the skin.
My elbows have been tight against my body, my hands pulling the ropes into taut braids, my left hand covering the right as I tighten the knot.
The metal stake finally lands, the full force of its fall, on my hand.
How safe is your body right now?
The force knocks the rope from my hands, shoving them down to the ground, and the tent spike falls with an ear-splitting clang onto the asphalt below.
There is screaming.
It isn’t me.
Where is the worst moment of this story? Just after, with the havoc of pain? Or is it the moment before, the days, weeks, years before, before the illness sets in when there is still the possibility of learning the ingredients in her famous Moroccan carrots, about why she’d had that spell of zealous Christianity, and why she’d lost it, about what word I said first as a baby, if it was her name. When there is still a chance to make amends, but I don’t take it.
I look down at the stake for a second, two, the sounds from the rest of the world gone except for some distant buzz. I pick my hands up from my side to look at them, because I feel some sensation there, though I cannot tell what that sensation is. I look, thinking it’s possible that my hands won’t be there. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure what has happened at all.
But there they are. Both hands. Ten fingers. No exposed bones. A big smear of dirt where the stake hit my left hand.
I crouch down to pick up the rope and resume braiding.
As I stand, sound comes back. There is some loud human voice somewhere, or a few of them. There is the blur of bodies moving toward me very quickly.
Nothing that isn’t a complete catastrophe really matters at all.
“Are you okay? Jesus Christ, are you okay?” say the voices I hear.
I look up.
Cassie is standing right in front of me, taking the rope out of my hands.
“Stop, dummy, put this down,” she says.
Tommy is right beside me then, too. “Tessy? Are you okay?” he says.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re fine?”
“I’m not even hurt,” I say, starting to shake.
He is staring at my face, studying it, shocked, it seems, that I am not covered in blood, that my brain isn’t sticking out of my skull.
“Where did it hit you?” he says.
I raise my hands from my side, and they float into the air between us like new balloons.
“Shit,” he says, gently grabbing my wrist. I can see it now, my left hand. There is no blood, no bone, but my knuckles are growing bigger and bigger, they are pink and going purple, a few fingers are doubling in size, and there is a lump like a marble sticking out from the bone. My right hand feels tingly, but the left was mostly shielding it.
“Move your fingers,” he says. “Can you move your fingers?”
I do, a little.
“Not broken,” I say.
I look at them, these hands, this non-catastrophe. I look at them, and more performers gather around and all
the world’s sounds are back to their regular weird selves and there is the morning sky with clouds and there is the life that has happened so far and whatever else is ahead and everything is the same as it was before and maybe always will be. I start to cry.
Not a lot. I’m not a goddamned baby. Just a little.
“You’re in shock,” Tommy says. “Jesus, Tessy. Poor Tessy. Here,” he says, pulling Cassie right into me, forcing her into a tight hug against my chest. “Take her to my trailer,” he says to her.
“I’ve got to keep working,” I say, reaching for the rope. My fingers won’t move much.
“Take a breather,” Tommy says.
“I’ve got to keep going or I won’t hold it together,” I snap back.
Sunshine appears beside us. “Tessa,” she says in her stage manager voice. “Come with me. Now.”
“There are frozen grapes in the freezer. Put them on her hand, sit her in the shade,” Tommy says.
Sunshine nods at him, takes the ropes I’d managed to pick up and drops them to the ground, and pushes my back until I start walking. She runs my hand under a cool spigot of water, rubs my back. Gives me frozen grapes.
Every day we put fire and swords and electricity into our bodies, throw knives at them, contort them, wrap them in snakes, and every day we wake up sure those things won’t harm us but also sure that there is so much else that will.
I start to feel a deep throbbing in my hand. I’m not sure if it’s a feeling I should care more about. Red catches my eye as I walk past. He holds it. Makes his mouth into a grimace and shakes his head, an acknowledgment of what has just occurred. Perhaps I’ve passed some test here, taking in pain and carrying on.
“Damn, Tessy,” Tommy says a little later. “In my nine seasons with this show, that right there, hands down, was the scariest thing that has ever happened.”
But isn’t this our collective deceit?
Can one moment, the happening of the event, be the worst moment of our lives? The truth is that the worst moment is always still waiting. The next fair. The next stake ripped from the earth. The next phone call from your stepdad where he’s crying and you’re telling him, Calm down calm down calm down just tell me, until he does, and then you are rocking and crying, too.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 21
