The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(112)
“Oh, stop, Tessy,” he said.
“I mean it. You are kind and patient, but firm and tough when you need to be. And you’re doing this hard thing, keeping this show alive, struggling each year to make sure it happens. I admire you. You’re such a good person.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it is.”
“I keep the show alive because it’s fun. That’s why I do it. I like it.”
“Well, thank you for doing it. For liking it.”
I finished another drink, feeling good. Feeling hopeful, though Cassie and I hadn’t made eye contact at the bar and still weren’t talking much. I felt buzzed and happy to be a shitty sword swallower, a mediocre fire eater, for transforming into the electric woman, for being of medium strength, of sometimes sour moods, for all the good reasons I’d had to leave the show but had chosen instead to stay.
*
We haul Queen Kong from the back end for the very last time.
We’re in DeLand, Florida, at the season’s last fair, our twelfth. Unroll the tent walls once more. All these actions that have finally, finally, become so ingrained in my muscles that it takes almost no thought to put up the show anymore.
“Hey, girl,” a familiar voice calls as I head down the midway before opening on the second day of the fair. I grab her arm in response, squeeze the sinewy bicep as a greeting. It’s Tanya, operator of the Smash the Beer Bottle game.
“Wanna play?” she asks, her permed blond bangs standing at attention. “No charge.”
The rows of empty beer bottles shine green and brown with morning sun, the smell of old beer and the warm Indian summer dust in the air.
“Come on,” Tanya says, leaning in close. The scent of beer is replaced by cotton-candy body spray, and I wonder if the grandchildren she keeps telling me about think of this smell when they think of her, sweet and thick and edible. They wait up all night for her when she finishes the season, she tells me, the little faces sleeping on the trailer’s couch right against the front window that looks out onto the street so they can be ready for her to pull into the driveway well after midnight, their sweet-smelling granny with a face whose deep brown lines offer a map of where she’s been that they can’t quite read.
“Sure,” I say. It isn’t often I have an extra moment on the midway, but I do, and I like Tanya. I hold the giant softball in my hand. Lined up in front of me are dozens of empty glass beer bottles. Row after row at the far end of the game. The point is to smash them. Send the glass, shattered, flying. It reminds me of a relaxation chamber I’d heard about once, a place in Japan where you could pay to go into a room full of breakable things. You were handed a bat. It was a way to unwind.
She leans in close to my ear. I can smell the spritz. It’s the same one she has shared with me a few mornings when I’ve run into her in the portable bathrooms in carnietown. We can’t agree whether the bathrooms smell like old mildew or diarrhea. It’s both, somehow, and so strong that many of the carnies have taken to peeing in the woods instead. Tanya is dating one of the bosses, who is also her ex-husband, and has been on the road with some fair or another for almost thirty years.
“You’re my alarm clock, honey,” she said, coming into the bathroom one morning. I’d seen her head pop up from the bed of a pickup truck when I’d walked by, and she smiled at me vaguely and looked away quickly, off into the kudzu and jungle trees stretching as far as we can see on all sides of the fairground, with CAUTION, HUNTING GROUNDS signs nailed to the tree trunks. Carnietown is set up in the small jungle clearing. “When I see you trotting by, I know it’s time to get my ass up.”
“Here’s the trick,” Tanya says. She leans her temple right up against mine and points at one of the bottles at the end. “Think about your boyfriends. Think about one of them who’s done you wrong. There’s his face right there.”
I look at the empty old Budweiser. The bottle is just a bottle. Brown, dusty. The light from behind, sunshine and the red vinyl backdrop, gives the bottle an amber glow, just a little, just from the right angle. The bottle is also a face.
I step away from her, plant one foot in front of me, and take the ball into two hands. Crank one arm back and let the ball loose, imagining a face there, though not a boyfriend’s face. The ball sails through the air and lands on the ground, just short of the first row of bottles.
“Not to worry, my friend. Give it another go,” she says, handing me another softball.
“Imagine his eyes right there, where the label should go. Imagine his smug little asshole smile,” she says, patting me on the shoulder.
I squint at the bottle, take in the light, and transform it into eyes. Blur my vision so the bottom lip of the bottle becomes a tight-lipped grimace. Take a deep breath. Pick my front foot up as I lean back for force, then let the ball go once again toward the rows of bottles. Big white moon charging for the brown and green stars. Bullet.
The ball flies between two rows of bottles but doesn’t graze anything.
“Look, sweetie,” she says. “I’ll give you three more balls for five dollars. Because you’re with it.” With it is a term that carnies and showpeople used to mean “with the carnival.” It was a way of shutting up other carnies who tried to sell you things when you walked by.
“Thanks, Tanya. That was fun. I gotta go, but I’ll come back later to try again.”