The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(20)

The summer before she had her stroke, when I was back with her and Davy for two months to help them with packing and sorting, I decided I’d tell her that I was sorry, and that I loved her. I knew I needed to. I’d choked out the words love you just a handful of times in all my memory, but I wanted to tell her that I always had. I was scared, confused, wrong, I was going to say. Maybe it would let the ever-present guilt I carried for being so skeptical and unkind to her finally loosen. Maybe it would mend the hole in her heart she told me I created.

I thought about it when we sorted my old Barbies for a garage sale, drinking wine and dressing them in outfits and posing them on various fruits. We laughed hysterically. Of course I love her, I thought, but didn’t say so. I thought about it all the time that visit: when we watched the deer scatter during one morning walk and she squeezed my arm with delight, when she brought me strawberries—my favorite—for no reason, when she was so stressed from trying to figure out where they’d move next and what they could sell in the meantime. I was almost there. I could feel the words taut in my throat, getting so close that they pressed against the back of my teeth like an animal trying to escape. But somehow I couldn’t let them out.

I was going to grad school in Alabama, and I drove back in late August. My mom told me on the phone, on that long drive southeast, how much strain losing their house and their community of the last twenty-two years was putting on her and my stepdad. And how much it made her feel she hadn’t succeeded. Financially. Professionally. At anything, she said.

It would have been such a perfect moment to tell her that she was wrong, and her life was inspiring, and she was deeply loved.

“Oh god, relax. It’ll all work out,” I told her instead.

Six weeks later the blood poured into her brain.





SNICKERS T. CLOWN

Day 9 of 150

World of Wonders

June 2013

Red holds a hammer. He has the full moon of a nail’s head protruding from his nostril. He taps it in a little deeper. The flat head rests one inch out from the entryway to his cavity, the metal flaring the soft nostril tissue wide. With the hammer’s forked prongs, he hooks and slowly pulls out the nail. It glistens. Only the audience members right up front can see the sheen of snot coating the nail, but the rest are practiced in the art of imagination.

There is nobody out front to hear our bally. I’m half-crouched, peeking through the opening in the tent to watch Red perform.

“You want more?” he asks the audience.

“Yeah!” they yell.

“You’re sick,” he says, pounding the nail into his nostril one more time, bowing a little with the nail inside so they can see that he is filled up, that he is real, that they may now applaud.

*

When Red first arrives at the Big Butler fairgrounds—the day after our caravan pulls in from Gibsonton—all the other performers run to him with arms open.

We’ve just started unloading Queen Kong, our taxidermy gorilla in her upright glass coffin, but she needs fourteen hands beneath her heft as she’s lowered straight down from the truck, and there are only six of us: Tommy, Sunshine, Pipscy, Spif, Big, Big Ben—the show’s working man who we’d picked up in Gibsonton—and me. And then, as if on cue, Red’s van pulls up.

“Red!” Sunshine calls, running to him across our lot and throwing her arms around his neck. Everyone says hello, and then Red thumbs at the small man who has just climbed out of the passenger side of his van.

“This is Snickers,” he says.

“Snickers T. Clown,” Snickers says, tipping his fedora. He’s wearing a suit vest with no shirt underneath, and some very worn slacks. He doesn’t smile.

“Came recommended through a friend of a friend,” Red says. “He’ll be our working man and ticket guy.”

“And performer,” Snickers interjects.

“We just need a working man for now,” Tommy says.

“I’ve got a lot of acts. I’ve been performing for years,” Snickers says. There’s a long pause.

“We’ll see,” Tommy says, turning away. “Anyway, good to see you, Red. We’ve got your stage unloaded and an extension cord ready for your van.”

“Where did you guys come from?” I ask Snickers, who gives me an exaggerated smile that reveals two dimples so deep, they must be scars.

“I met up with Red in Philly. Spent a few days there. Got a kitten from his mom. Then we headed this way.”

“A kitten?” I ask, looking around.

“She’s in the van, with Red’s cat,” Snickers says. I look over to the van, but the windows are covered with tan curtains on the inside.

“They don’t get too hot in there?”

“There’s an air conditioner in the back window,” he says. “One of those big ones. My cat’s name is Wednesday, like from the Addams Family. I’ve been performing for years,” Snickers says, looking around the tent as he lights up a cigarette. “It’s in my blood. They’ll put me onstage as soon as they see what I can do.”

“What can you do?” I ask. The others have wandered off, back to their various jobs.

He grabs his left pointer finger with his right hand and pulls it all the way back so it touches the top of his hand. He does this for each of his fingers, pulling and pushing them back, then switches and contorts the fingers on the other hand.