The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(14)

“I need you to lean all your body weight against this stack,” she says. “Plant your feet and really lean. The poles get jostled on the road, and sometimes they all just pour off the stack and bury people.”

The steel lip of the possum belly is cracked beneath me, ripped and rotting in jagged metal patterns that look like lacework.

Though she is thin and doesn’t appear muscular, Sunshine moves her body in this tight space with the strength and precision of a martial artist, climbing and cinching and grabbing and leaning, intricate movements that make clear this is an orchestrated dance. She pulls poles out one by one as if she were playing a terrible game of pickup sticks that might always end in entombment.

Sunshine slides a pole to one end of the truck. I take it in both hands. It’s heavy and dirty, fifteen feet long, and sharp where the metal is corroding and flaking off. I spread my hands wide for more balance and take a few steps. The weight is still unbalanced, and heavier than almost anything I’ve ever picked up. I drop one end to the ground and then the other. Nobody looks. I pick the pole back up, trying to remember lessons about using your legs, and one side of the pole comes up quickly, much quicker than I expected, and knocks into Spif as he’s walking by.

“Oh, sorry,” I say.

“Careful,” he snaps, jumping back and continuing his hustle toward the truck.

I tighten my grip on the pole, looking ahead of me and over my shoulder before I move it, then spread my hands wide, grit my teeth, and move with the steel. The space around me is not mine anymore but my crew’s. In the other crews around our lot, men climb the still-unrecognizable rides to begin wrenching and pinning and joining. Now that I’m here with all this, I feel like a bona fide carnie. Suddenly, my body counts for something. It is working; this is what work is. Look at all these functional limbs whose muscles respond on command.

I move like a tightrope walker. My hands are in the center of the pole and I concentrate on one step and then the next, a tiny correction, and then the next. There is nobody to call for help if I can’t carry it—it is my job to carry it.

*

Once we finish unloading the possum belly, Tommy opens the container’s back end.

We grip the corners of the Feejee Mermaid’s coffin. “Never ask what you should do next,” he tells me. “Just wait for instructions. But don’t wander off or look distracted. That includes the bathroom. Don’t go.” The Feejee Mermaid’s hair is peeling off her face and her plastic tail is chipped. “We’ll take breaks sometimes, and you can go then, if you ask first,” he says, wiping sweat from his forehead. The Pennsylvania sun is lowering but still strong, and we are moving quickly. Much of the skin I see around me is sunburned.

“Everything has a very specific order. So don’t take anything out that you aren’t told to. And don’t touch anything, or it might fall on you. Last season a giant board fell on Sunshine’s head and knocked her out cold,” he says. We unload a massive chair with metal plates and wiring.

“What’s this?” I ask Tommy.

“The Electric Chair. For Electra, the Electric Woman. She lights light bulbs with her tongue,” he says, his voice suddenly changing as if he’s onstage.

“Wow. Who gets to be Electra?” I ask.

“Only the bravest among us. Will that be you one day, Tess?” he asks, winking. My stomach flutters.

We drag part of our massive circus tent across the grass in its giant canvas bag. I can’t wait to see the bag untied, watch the red and blue vinyl unroll from its log and join the other flattened vinyl to somehow form the structure around the amazement we’ll offer onstage. Or, the amazement they will offer.

“Don’t worry if Sunshine yells at you. Or Red. Red’s arriving tomorrow, and he might yell at you. Actually, I’m sure he will. He’ll call you a dummy. It’s nothing personal. Okay, Tessy?” Tommy says.

“Okay,” I say.

“How you doing?” he asks, noticing my flushed cheeks.

“Sore,” I say, patting my arms. “I can already feel some of those circus muscles coming in.” He nods, smiles. We’ve been working for less than an hour. The bulk of setup, which takes sixteen hours on a good day, will come in the next few days, after we scrub the winter off the set and props.

“Well, take it easy,” he says, still smiling, maybe hiding a laugh. Greenhorn.

Physical labor is still, as it has always been, a marker of class delineation, and as a middle-class female my life has never required anything more physical than picking up the children I was nannying, delivering burgers to the tables outside. Nothing has ever been asked of my body, not really, not much. But here, straining to keep the pole from knocking into someone’s head, there’s little I can think about other than the geometry of my movement, the mechanics of my machinery.

“Can I be doing anything more to help?” I ask Tommy.

*

Can I be doing anything more to help? It’s a familiar question. One I had asked nurse after nurse, surgeon, neurologist, physical therapist and then occupational therapist, speech therapist. Nurse this or that would say something or other, new doctor, new thing, and then I’d do that thing, rotating the arm from the elbow in tight circles

clockwise

counterclockwise

north

south

rubbing Vaseline between the toes to encourage blood flow