The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(114)
Behind the twinkling lights in the trees, the stars are twinkling, and Roelof has one of my hands in his hands, and he is inventing stories about each of my fingers. And then he kisses me. It is the middle of the night, in the middle of the fairgrounds, beneath low-hanging trees. He kisses me and I kiss him back and we sit like that for a long time.
“Shall we get a hotel room?” he asks softly, blushing a bit, kissing my knuckles.
“I hear there are bedbugs in all the nearby hotels,” I say, which is true, from a story about waking up covered in bites I’d heard from Tanya at the break-the-bottle game, but also an irrefutable excuse.
“Right,” he says. “Darn.”
“There’s a quick romance-killer.”
“Nothing like bedbugs to really foil a guy’s dreams.”
We stay beneath that tree for another hour, telling jokes, recounting dramas from the season, sharing stories about our families. I hadn’t thought much about romance in so long, hadn’t met anyone who sparked anything in me. But here it is. Maybe just for a moment, or a few days, a week at most. Here it is.
*
The next morning, a mother and her young daughter are sitting on a bench beside a food joint, eating a hot dog. They are sitting side by side, facing a plastic table, and the little girl’s feet, which don’t reach far beyond the edge of the bench, are bouncing slightly. The hot dog has ketchup on it and a very light yellow line of mustard, and the mother is holding it in one hand, bringing it to the little girl’s mouth and waiting for her small lips to part. The girl takes a bite and begins chewing, looking around her at the rides, which are in final preparation to open for the day. Maybe they know someone here, or the mother works here. Regular marks can’t get in early. Maybe they have a prizewinning steer. The mother takes a bite next, looks off another direction to assess these wild territories, and, after the little girl has swallowed, brings the hot dog back to her lips.
I’m watching this from two benches over, sipping some coffee, wanting a little space outside the truck. I can’t take my eyes off this pair, this young mother with dark hair and her small child, and the way they are sharing this food, how easy it seems, how smooth and regular, and I’m overwhelmed with the size of my heart, swelling and swelling in some slanted joy for witnessing this little miracle.
THE GREAT REVEAL
Day 145 of 150
World of Wonders
November 2013
I am in the middle of talking the blade box act.
There is a girl in the front row, seven or eight years old, a small skinny thing I’ve brought around to the back of the box we’ve just stuck sixteen blades through while Sunshine twists her body inside. This is part of the act—getting an audience member to confirm for the rest of the crowd that our contortionist, a Romanian born with yellow elasticity in her joints, I say, is indeed twisted around those blades. The girl stands staring at the contortionist with a big O’ed mouth, a really giant gape between her lips like she’s never seen anything so astonishing. It is pure gold, wonderful GTFM lubricant.
“Is Miss Sunshine REALLY inside that box?” I ask her and bring the mic to her lips as I always do to the volunteer, hope she’ll speak with a tone of pure awe and reverence, but the little girl doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the contortionist twisted between those blades. She just nods and nods, her head moving in overly dramatic sweeps between chest and sky. I thank her and ask her to come around front to rejoin her family, but she stays, eyes on the contortionist, mouth open wide enough to take the strangeness and amazement of the whole entire world inside. I thank her again and move the mic away from our mouths and ask if she’s okay and she keeps nodding and I start walking around to the front of the box, hoping she’ll follow, but she stays and stays, this little girl without a front tooth, her arms tucked inside a Green Bay Packers jersey, staring at what amazes her.
Finally, I reach out my arm and offer it to the little girl. It breaks the spell. We walk back in front of the audience and they clap and she drops my arm and her mom reaches toward her. “What’s the trick?” the mother wants to know. “Is she really doing it?” Her hands run up and down the girl’s arms, and the girl nods yes, yes, yes. What have you seen and what is the story you’ll tell about it?
And when I look back out to the audience, scanning the crowd to estimate what kind of turn I might have, thinking how I can best leverage her astonishment, I see them.
A flash of light on metal.
Not a sword.
Not a tent stake.
A flash of light on the metal frame of a wheelchair.
I see him first. Davy.
He is behind the chair, pushing it, and looking right at me. And then I see her, my mom, sitting in the chair. I see her eyes sliding across the objects of this world, the freaks in their cases, the stage, the lights, the tent, the audience watching me to see how I will try to amaze them next. Her head grazes left to right, up and down. Her eyes don’t seem to land on anything.
Nothing in the world has ever been as beautiful as her wild silver hair in the orange glow of the circus tent, like she is made of the moon and the sun both, and also that rare.
There are no words in my mouth. There are only worlds, breaking open.
I swallow, and try to find something to say. There are dozens of eyes on me, staring. I choke back the whole season of grief, the years of it. I look to the astonished little girl who is still staring at the blade box and use her wonder for strength.