The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(106)
“I don’t know, really. For fun?”
“Is it fun?”
“Sometimes.”
“Weren’t you, like, the student speaker at college graduation or something like that?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“And now you’re eating fire.”
“Now I’m eating fire.”
*
The night went on, and then the next day with the hair and makeup and wedding and dancing and toasts and it all was fine, lovely, I mean, but a little like something I was spying on from another room. Even though I’d scrubbed and scrubbed in the shower, I still thought I smelled different, I had cuts and calluses on my hands, my shoulders were the deep brown of outside labor, and I don’t mean to say I was somehow suddenly tough and nobody there was, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all my showpeople friends, working and working and working. I hated it. I thought about them and thought about them and chided myself for thinking about them, reminded myself not to text them pictures of flowers woven into hearts because I was here and having so much fun so how could I be thinking about them, and besides, the sideshow was tiring, so exhausting, and I’d turned into a beast out there, an aggressor, something so far outside of the kind of person I thought I was, and then I thought about them more. I wondered how the show was going. How big the audience was. If the person who had been pooping in the shared bathroom’s shower stall had stopped.
But I danced around, doing my best to fake it. That, I was very good at. Playing my part. Well, pretty good at. Though not the dancing part so much. I was limping my whole trip, my hip throbbing with each step from something I’d done to it in setup a week or two before. I’d tweaked it pretty badly on top of the ladder as I’d been hanging lights. So I was limp-dancing and keeping a smile on my face and reapplying deodorant every time I went to the bathroom just to be sure—by the end of the night I had a white crust under there—and feeling more sure each moment that I didn’t belong here.
I was to fly out the next night. I had a few hours to spend roaming the city with Devin, and when he rounded the corner to meet me at a café, I almost lost it. I wasn’t sure he’d be able to recognize me, if how I was changing internally could be seen externally as well.
“Jesus, kid,” he said once we started walking. He was concerned. My arm was hooked into the crook of his elbow to help with my limp, and my skin was still very tan and I was cussing like a sailor. I did not talk about the sideshow, because it seemed like any words I could say about it would be too small, too insignificant.
I bought candies for the performers I’d return to, sweets and cookies and chips and toys and little gifts that I felt I needed to give them in order to atone for leaving.
I didn’t look around and think about the fact that this city might not see my parents again. I did touch the jar of kimchi in the market, thinking a little wish-prayer for my mom.
“You don’t have to go back,” Devin said as I was getting ready to head to the airport. “You can stay on my couch for as long as you need, you can find a job here, you can let this hip heal, whatever.”
I thought about that, letting my body feel for a moment the sensations of living indoors, of walking through cities alone, my city, of erasing who I’d become out there. My loyal, lovely friend, trying to help.
“I know that’s a possibility,” I said.
“So? Do it.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I can’t let them down.”
“Tessa. The show will go on without you.”
“Yeah,” I said, and it was true. They’d be fine. The show would go on. They’d finish the season and be no worse off, except that for a little while they’d be a person short and would each have to pick up a little bit of the slack. Except that I’d leave the show without having learned every single act, without having an act that I know wows each person watching each time: the electric chair. And except for the fact that someone would take that permanent marker and write on the inside of the truck, TESSA: Couldn’t hack it.
The only way through it is through it. There is no trick.
“I gotta go,” I said, hugging Devin.
“All right,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t kill yourself out there.”
So I went back to the show.
*
Nobody will look me in the eye.
Tommy picks me up from the airport, sweet, sweet Tommy, and says he missed me, says the show wasn’t the same without me, and I want to cry in gratitude for his white lies. When we arrive at the lot where setup has begun at the Pensacola Interstate Fair in Florida, I climb out of the van, pull on my work gloves, and am ready for a stream of hellos, how was your trip, how we’ve missed yous. But there is work to be done. And we are the workers. Nobody even really notices me. So I weave myself back in the best I know how, feeling like an alien, like a deserter, limping between tent poles, trying to work doubly hard to win some affection.
It doesn’t feel good, exactly, to be back, but it doesn’t feel bad either. I feel tired, immediately, and dirty, and guilty for having left. My bunk is still here, having housed the temporary performer—someone I’d recruited from Alabama with promise of adventure for a few days—who kindly replaced me while I was gone, and it looks the same. The snakes still coil around each other for warmth in their box. The banner-line crew, setting up the lights and flags that attach to the very top of the tallest poles out front, are managing just fine on their own, it seems, though when I offer help, Spif silently climbs off the ladder and motions for me to climb to the top. That’s my job. That’s what I know how to do. I mount the ladder, ascend to the top so my feet are near the highest rung, and I lean from there to attach items to the poles, slide in the flags, plug in the flashers, I do exactly what I know a person should not do for ladder safety, I reach farther out than I usually do during setup, work a little bit faster, because somehow I know, with the feeling of a rock in my stomach, that I don’t want to be here, and I do want to be here, and I didn’t miss it at all, and I missed it like crazy. I know that this place is inevitably, inexorably, but oh so temporarily, my home.