The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “Wear your sunglasses when you practice,” Sunshine says as we’re wrapping up. “That way you’re less likely to lose an eye.”

  * * *

  The next night, after the fair closes at eleven, we blare Tom Waits inside the closed tent. Rash the Clown plays Rain Dogs on repeat, an album that sounds like the sound track to a demented circus in another universe. Though there had been some hangouts after hours with smaller clusters of people earlier on in the season, the last month hadn’t provided much time for leisure. Here in Kansas, for the first time, the night hours become a circus of our own.

  Though the midway’s power is shut off each night, we have the stereo and one big cage light at the top of the tent’s center pole plugged into our generator. The edges of the tent are shadowed, the Feejee Mermaid and Queen Kong barely visible in their nightdresses. But the music is loud and keeps getting turned up louder and louder.

  Rash the Clown and Short E are throwing knives. They’re playing some kind of knife poker–meets–darts, where playing cards are stapled to an old board and the knife you throw must land on a certain one. It’s a little alarming how often they don’t hit the target, considering most of the time a female body is standing in the way of any room for error.

  Sunshine is teaching Lola a fire transfer from the tongue, and Spif is practicing a tarot card reading on himself. He cleansed his cards with the last full moon, he says, so now is a perfect time to reenergize the deck. Cassie has her practice sword out and is trying to get the metal down. Tommy has stretched a sheet of newspaper between two ladders, clipped them to the rungs, and I am cracking the whip to try to split the sheet in half. Mostly, I knock one side off the ladder rung, walk back to set it up, whip again, knock it, walk back. I’m determined to get better. Red is in his van, as usual, and Ben is in his bunk in the semi’s cab, but the rest of us are here rehearsing for the acts we won’t perform.

  Once Tommy turns in for the night, each of us pauses to sip from the flask on the stage or pass one of the circling joints, some voices increasing their volume with each pass, others getting a little quieter. The official policy here is no substances, and though I’m sure Tommy knows what goes on, he seems fine turning a blind eye as long as people can hold themselves together.

  There’s something both playful and serious in the focus on learning new acts after hours. They are fun to do in and of themselves, but there is always also the small, distant tease of what might just possibly happen should you get very, very good at it. A TV appearance, maybe. A movie gig. Money. A role in one of the few other shows like the one in which Short E sometimes performed, where you had one gig a night in a bar full of excited, drunk enthusiasts, an inconceivable kind of luxury.

  But anytime one of those possibilities was mentioned, people were quick to dismiss it. Too easy. Not hardcore. Shirking from tradition. There was something about lasting a season here that was a kind of rite of passage, though it was never clear to me what was on the other side. For me or for anyone else, really.

  “Once you’ve performed with the World of Wonders,” Rash the Clown had told me earlier in the day, “you can do anything. You are learning from the masters.”

  “Like, you can perform with any of those other shows?”

  “Like, you can do anything.”

  * * *

  I thought I could see the world, but it turned out I was only seeing the first layer. You cannot stop at the first layer. There are always worlds behind worlds, days inside days, the richness of any moment magnified by how open you are to what’s happening, each person not just who they are in some interaction with you, but a whole world opening infinitely out from your expectations, from their experiences. What was set up, what appeared onstage, what the audience saw, what happened behind the curtain, what happened beyond.

  * * *

  The setup:

  Inside Vickie Condor’s chair, it reeks of mothballs. The four-legged woman illusion requires a hollowed-out armchair, covered over by a seat and a back, upon which the outer Vickie sits. The inner Vickie must be small enough to squeeze her body within the very thin hollowed-out space inside the chair, must have bony enough thighs that they fit through the slit at the chair’s front, covered by Vickie’s skirt. The inner Vickie’s body is pressed against old wood and a few springs and whatever small, dry creatures hid themselves in the cracks while the chair was tucked away with other unnecessary props in the off-season.

  * * *

  Behind the curtain:

  The turkey appears out of nowhere. Spif is walking from the main backstage area to his bunk to grab something, and when he comes back, a giant turkey leg is sitting on the steps at the stage door. It is wrapped in tinfoil and the size of a small cat.

  “Somebody left a turkey leg out here,” Spif says over his shoulder toward us.

  Lola slowly raises her head from the book she is reading. “Oh,” she says. “That’s for me.” She reaches her hand out toward Spif, slowly unfurling it like a tongue readying to coil the meat.

  “You got somebody dropping off meat for you?” Spif asks as he hands her the wrapped leg.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “How’d you do that?” he asks.

  “Spif,” Sunshine says. “Guess.”

  “It’s not fair, all the shit you get ’cause of your titties.”

  “It’s not fair all the shit you get ’cause of your dick,” Lola says.

  She unwraps the tinfoil and the salty meat smell of roasted bird spreads through the whole container quickly.

  At that moment, Sunshine and I simultaneously rise from our chairs backstage and walk behind the curtain to the side stage. It’s time for us to become Vickie. We kick off our shoes, climb, carefully, onto the rickety side stage, one of us holding the curtain for the other. There’s an act taking place on the main stage, different acts in different orders at different fairs. This time, it’s Short E’s balancing act, with his loud voice and the crowd’s loud cheers and the continuous noise of the carnival whirling through space all around, so there’s no need for us to lower our voices as we prep.

  “Damn, that smelled good,” Sunshine says, “and I’m a vegetarian.” She hands me a pair of Vickie socks.

  “I don’t know how they make those turkey legs so amazing,” I say, putting on the socks, then the vest and skirt.

  “It’s especially nice after the smell of the bathrooms in this place. Did you go this morning?”

  “Yeah, horrible.”

  “I can’t even tell what that smell is,” she says, lifting the cushioned back of the chair up and seat cushion out.

  “Yeah, it’s not really sewage smell,” I say, taking the chair’s back from her hands to hold up while she slides her body inside the chair.

  “It almost smells like there’s standing water in there. Like, rotting pools of water with shit in it.” She’s inside the chair now.

  “It does smell like old, stagnant water,” I say, lowering the back and seat cushion on top of her body as she turns her head to the side and tucks her arms in close. She’s inside the chair now, in darkness, with the mothball smell. I sit down on top of her.

  * * *

  What the audience sees:

  “Hello!” I say to the crowd as the talker on the main stage pulls the curtain aside.

  “And how are you today, Ms. Vickie Condor?” the talker asks.

  “Oh swell, just wonderful. Except for one of my cats, Pickles. He had a bit of a sneeze fit this morning,” I say, or something else I make up on the spot, because one way I’ve learned to survive the strange monotony of performing the same acts over and over and over is to keep my brain active by saying new things each time.

  Sometimes people laugh a bit, humor me. Mostly they don’t. They stare at my four legs, craning their necks around the person in front of them to see if there is a trapdoor beneath the chair that a person hides inside, or if someone is crouching behind the chair, or what could possibly make this dumb trick work.

  We ban
ter a minute, and then the music starts. I tap Sunshine’s legs as if I’m counting time on my own legs, and at the agreed upon tap, we begin our dance routine. We alternate pairs of legs kicking together so the audience, the haters, the mugs, can see there are in fact four real human legs, four live limbs that can move independently of one another. This is when they really pay attention. I have a big smile and splay my fingers in jazz hands, but all the audience’s eyes are on our legs, trying to work out how the illusion is done.

  * * *

  Behind the curtain:

  “Actually, I think the smell is rotting pumpkin,” Sunshine says as I lift the false back of the chair up once our act is through and the curtain has been closed.

  “That’s it! Rotting pumpkin and stagnant water,” I say, lifting the seat off her and then offering her my hands. She grabs them.

  “I heard some carnies in there talking about pumpkin as I walked in, and I didn’t pay any attention, but now I know exactly what they meant.” She’s standing now, and we’re peeling Vickie’s socks off. A breeze blows inside the tent, starts to billow the velvet curtains around us. Sunshine reaches out her leg to pin the curtain to a pole with her foot, and I hold the curtain against the pole nearest me with one hand while the other finishes sliding my Vickie costume off.

  “It’s going to be hard for me to drink a pumpkin-flavored latte anytime soon,” I say, and she laughs, folding both our sock pairs back together, laying them on Vickie’s chair as I part the curtain in the back for her to pass through.

  “I think those are nasty anyway,” she says as we walk behind the stage curtain to our seats backstage, ready to head out for our next act in thirty seconds or four minutes. “Pumpkin-flavored stuff. What is that?”

  Lola and Spif are still discussing the turkey leg.

  I wonder if Lola recognizes the parts of the leg, if the tendons or bones mean more to her than they do to me. Story goes: she was premed as an undergrad, excelled in sciences. Wanted to help make people better. Her mom was so proud. And she’d started med school, learning about what the body could or could not withstand in textbooks and lectures, but something didn’t feel right. She went to a burlesque show in town one night and saw the women onstage teaching the audience about what their bodies could or could not withstand. That was the kind of help she wanted to do. She dropped out of school and started dancing.

  * * *

  Behind the curtain and onstage:

  Sometimes Sunshine’s conversation isn’t with me and it continues even once we’re onstage. We perform our choreography together as we prep for the act, but instead of directing the nonstop stream of chatter to me, she holds a phone to her ear. She talks often to her boyfriend and mom and cousin, and I can hear her conversation continue inside the chair as I perform above, the soft vibrations and low tone of her voice beneath me, discussing their electricity bill or her mom’s health or a hilarious thing her boyfriend’s son had just done at the park, and I love that these two worlds are happening simultaneously, knowing that inside the magic of the illusion, the same kind of conversation is happening as happens everywhere—the particulars of what her mom is going to eat for dinner, about how she bruised her foot. Knowing my body is a conduit between the two worlds.

  * * *

  Behind the curtain:

  The next day, there is a container of fries on the step. And the next, Lola will come back from her break with an ice-cream cone. She’s reaching past the world of our performers, making connections on the outside.

  “You’re fucking around with a foodie,” Spif says when the fries arrive. “That’s smart. They can get you things.”

  Lola doesn’t say anything. She dips a fry in ketchup, inspects it, and puts it into her mouth.

  Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return.

  “Who is it?” he asks.

  She shrugs her shoulders and licks the salt off her fingers before she adjusts her thigh-highs, then goes back to her food.

  I want to seem cool and uninterested in Lola’s love life, but there is so little to do backstage between acts. I’d seen her talking to somebody a few nights before, a tall, pale guy who seemed like he would never meet Lola’s cool quotient, but here was all this food. Physical evidence of love.

  Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return.

  “So, you’ve been hanging around that guy?” I ask her quietly when it is just the two of us in the hallway doing makeup the next morning.

  She smiles, just slightly, and shrugs.

  “Is it good?” I ask, stretching the corner of my eye way out to the side to ready it for liquid liner.

  “It’s good,” she says, and nothing more. That’s the end of that.

  Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return. Again and again, what we appear to be doing remains the same, but the world inside and behind is always changing.

  But it wasn’t the end for Lola and the turkey-leg man. They kept in touch once we left that spot, which I knew because she’d give me updates on where his show was headed, and what disaster befell a kid on one of their rides somewhere down the road. And it wasn’t the end, because when the season was over, Lola went to Florida instead of back to St. Louis. And it wasn’t the end, because some months later, her Facebook status changed to engaged, and she and the man who had delivered her gifts of food on the steps were married. A backstage miracle brought in front of the curtain.

  CHRISTMAS FISH

  Eighteen years before the stroke

  December 1992

  My mom decided we needed to eat like Jesus.

  Story goes: it was Christmas, and she was walking around again after a mysterious illness that had kept her in the hospital for half the summer. Her spleen had died. Nobody knew why. My brother and I were shuttled between relatives and neighbors. We went on family camping trips with other families, played in our cousins’ pool for weeks. We even shot a BB gun. We were allowed to shoot the gun because it looked like she might die. A reward for impending tragedy. But then, months later, she’d come home.

  A small pile of figs sat on the kitchen counter beside matzo crackers, a plastic bear of honey, and peanuts. There were dates, too.

  It wasn’t about religion, my mom and Davy said. It was about history. They wanted us to feel the spirit of Christmas by pretending we were at its moment of origin.

  “Jesus didn’t have a dining table,” my mom said as I readied to set the table. I was nine and had learned some incredible napkin-folding techniques in Girl Scouts.

  “Jesus probably didn’t have forks either. Or chairs,” she said, pouring some honey from the plastic bear into a little bowl. “Or napkins folded into lotus flowers. Put this on the coffee table,” she said, handing me two big glasses of milk. “We’re going to eat with our hands. We’re going to sit on the floor.”

  My brother, five, screamed a few high-decibel notes, which meant joy. He loved the floor.

  “We could use a little luck this year,” Davy said, lighting some waxy pebbles in two small bowls. “Wise men brought frankincense and myrrh to baby Jesus,” he said. “For ambiance.”

  We all sat down on the floor, the air quickly overpowered by the smell of pine resin wafting from the burning nuggets of sap.

  “Well, isn’t this nice?” my mom said, coughing. She smiled. Changed position on the floor. “I think historical Jesus would have wanted us to be comfortable,” she said, grabbing pillows from the couch for her and Davy to sit on.

  My dad’s side was Catholic, and I’d been to church with my grandmother quite a bit, where there was also something we did that involved eating Jesus. What I knew of the Bible so far mostly had to do with eating, like the fish people had on their cars to mean Jesus, and also the PB&J sandwiches my grandmother and I made by the hundreds for homeless people. I thought it was all pretty great.

  My mom reached out and took our hands, the four of us making a square around the table. “Thank you, historical Jesus, for le
tting us try your food,” she said.

  “And thank you for the health,” Davy said. It had only been a few months since she was back. “And a wish for the coming year,” my mom said. “For a trip to Italy.”

  Davy smiled at her, squeezing her hand tighter.

  “You’re going to Italy?” I asked.

  “Yep. One day. We’ve got to wish it into the universe,” she said, winking at Davy.

  “Dear Universe,” Davy said. “Thank you for the trip to Italy that we will take.”

  “Amen,” my mom said. She looked at my brother and me, cleared her throat.

  “Amen?” we said. She smiled.

  We wanted to be good, all of us. We wanted to eat like historical Jesus so the Universe would bless us with things, so that the mysterious forces would take over. No more sicknesses. Money. Italy.

  We chewed some dates, crunched crackers. We chugged a lot of milk. We dipped our fingers in honey and brought big gooey piles of it to our tongues, filling ourselves with amber.

  The bowls of frankincense and myrrh smoked and billowed, and finally my mom said it stank too much and we opened the doors and windows to let the cold air rush in.

  The fruit was gone, then the honey, the crackers, the milk.

  “We’re hungry,” my brother and I said.

  “Historical Jesus was just fine,” my mom said.

  “But we are starving,” we said.

  “Have more milk,” she said, gesturing toward the fridge. We were still sitting on the floor, full only of history, and so my brother let out more high-decibel shrieks as he started spinning on his knees on a stuffed animal, and his foot kicked me as he spun, so I kicked him back, and his screaming became higher pitched and I told him to shut up and we knew, even without knowing much about Jesus, that Jesus would not have approved, but so, too, would he not have approved of a summer of sickness and an almost-gone mom, and so we kicked and slapped and screamed and finally my mom said, “FINE.”

  We stopped, waiting for our prize.