The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(113)

The trouble was, the only face I could imagine on the bottle was my own.

*

When I come onstage for the electric chair act later that day, I see in the audience a carnie I’ve chatted with a few times. He is standing in the back row and has a huge wide grin on his face. I try not to stare. His blue uniform shirt is wrinkled, and he moves his fingers up to spread them wide across his mouth, a side smile behind the hand, openmouthed, and I know that just past those fingers is a tangle of crisscrossed teeth.

Who are you? he’d asked me a couple of days in a row as I’d walked by his joint.

I feel good about that pink mouth, those yellow teeth. The tenderness of people with a little contained mess. His handsomeness.

He claps like mad when the act is done.

*

That night, once the show closes, our crew chats out in front of the tent while we wait for the big wheel to shut off so we can fold up the banners and quit for the evening. Everyone cheats their bodies toward the wheel like a flock of seagulls facing the first light each morning. I am also cheating my body toward the balloon dart game where the handsome snaggletoothed carnie is folding it in on itself.

Across from our stage, the man who works the goldfish joint reaches to the ground and gathers four or five white Ping-Pong balls in each hand and tosses them into plastic baskets that line the wooden counter around his game. He does not feed the fish all season except to add some of the chemical they put into the tanks to keep the fish from needing to eat so they don’t have to buy food, he’d told me the day before, when I’d asked to feed the fish.

We wait. Snapping his fingers, Spif presses his butt into my crotch, bends over and pops his hips. His face is tilted slightly to the side so he can keep his eyes on the wheel. He jiggles his ass, shimmying it back and forth across my hips.

“You’re a beautiful dancer,” I tell him, hoping the carnie isn’t seeing this and getting the wrong impression.

“Mine’s thick. Like a Red Bull can,” he says, eyes on the wheel. “Give me a reach-around and feel it, just to see if you agree,” but before I can come up with a snarky response, he screams, “Wheel’s off!” the moment the orange and red and yellow flashing lights stop chasing one another, the moment the wheel becomes dark bones. Within seconds, the rest of the rides across the midway cut their lights and sounds and the darkness kills the lights from one end of the fairground to the other, swoosh, silence, swoosh, silence, the darkness chasing everything out.

We work.

When the final banner is tied, I look up, and standing in front of me is the carnie.

“Roelof,” he says, extending his hand to shake mine. Then he gives me a slip of paper with his phone number. “There’s a flea market outside the fairgrounds in the morning, before we open tomorrow. Do you want to go with me?” he asks. I do, I say.

*

Roelof and I are walking down the rows of Florida’s best used goods in the parking-lot flea market, and he slips his hand in mine right away. It feels extraordinarily nice. He asks about the show, tells me about his passion for distance running, what it feels like to run up mountains and watch the ocean for hours, tells me stories about teenage antics, makes jokes about cats. I ask about his game, where they’ve been this season. His family.

“My dad is dead, actually,” he says.

“I’m so sorry. How young were you when it happened?”

“It’s been nearly eight weeks now.”

All the words jam up inside my mouth. Eight weeks. The loss is so fresh. It would have happened while he was on the road. I start to say sorry and change the subject, but I remember how much I appreciated people wanting to know more about my mom when I told them she was sick. Not that sharing information shares the grief, just that it spreads the network of care.

“Did you get to see him before he died? Or go home for the funeral?”

“No, we can’t leave once we’ve signed these contracts for the season.”

“That’s insane.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the system. I mean, I could have, but then they would have come after my mom for money, and she’s got enough on her plate right now.”

We are in front of a young woman in a tight pink sweatsuit who is looking eagerly back and forth between our faces. In front of her, every imaginable baby item lies spread on a giant blue tarp, clothes and used books and monitors and bright plastic toys and teething rings and car seats and swaddling blankets.

“Really good prices,” she says, pointing to a swing.

“What was he like?”

“Tough. Wonderful. An inspiration, but tough.”

“I wish I knew something better to say than sorry.”

“Me, too,” he says, smiles, and kisses me on my knuckles.

I feel a kinship to him. Another person figuring out how to get through this new world.

“Can I see you a little later?” he asks. “After the show? Can we take a walk or something?”

“Sure,” I say, trying to sound very cool. Nearly giddy.

*

Roelof and I meet just after banners are over and walk the dark midway rows, laughing and chatting. He tells me story after story and then asks about my life, my stories. It has been a long time since I’ve wanted to share my stories, since someone wanted to know them.

We end up near the main stage, at an open area filled with picnic tables. There are giant weeping willows above, all strung with small white glittering lights. The wind rustles the leaves and the night birds are calling. It’s strange, hearing the sounds of nature doing its regular work after so many months of human-made sounds. The Cuckoo House behind where we sit, for example, which blares German technopop sixteen hours a day and invites you inside with a mirror maze on the ground floor and vibrating, twisting metal plates up top that you have to jump between like lily pads on a pond. Roelof tells me that carnie women bring men up there sometimes to have sex on the vibration plates.