The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(36)
*
Later that night, a 3:00 a.m. storm sounds like a train breaking through a mountain of bricks. Spif leaps from his bunk, bounds down the hallway, and is outside, wrapping the electrical equipment in plastic in less than a minute, dropping the banners to protect them from high winds.
“You gotta keep proving yourself here,” he says to me the next morning, when I asked him how he knew he was the one who should get up and fix what needed fixing. “It’s my job. My responsibility.”
Between acts, Sunshine listens and asks questions as Spif describes the storm’s lightning, the proximity of thunder, then rolls her eyes when he moves on to describing a cute girl in the crowd. Mid-conversation, without speaking, they both stand and disappear through the curtain onto the stage. She will rely on him. He will rely on her. Loud, moody rock music plays onstage, but the sound of metal sinking into wood, with each thwack, is louder than the sounds coming from the intricate speaker system. So is the applause at the end.
*
Sunshine and Spif’s story was not unfamiliar. I’d been hearing similar themes in my mom and Davy’s story my whole life.
Davy’s father, DS, played trumpet at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1930s. He was set up on a Coke date with a freshman sorority pledge in Kappa Kappa Gamma. She’ll be short, someone told him, slender and real pretty. Her name’s Mary Francis. He’s always carrying that trumpet, someone told her about DS. They met for a Coke. That’s the part I know. I like to imagine they shared the same straw, and he wanted to know about the mountains she grew up around, or about her older sister, the firecracker everyone talked about. It was her first date ever. She had just arrived at college. Mary Francis is my mom’s mother.
They had a good time but decided to be just friends. He continued to play his trumpet around town, she danced with the Kappas. One night, at a party, she noticed another horn player in a different band who wouldn’t take his eyes off her while she was dancing with friends. At the set break, he lowered his instrument, approached, introduced himself as Everett and asked her for a date. Three years later, they married: my mom’s parents, Mary and Ev.
DS had met his own sweetheart by then, Lenore, and the two couples, Ev and Mary, DS and Lenore, breezed around Oklahoma in fast cars and danced late into the night, until World War II was declared. Ev was shipped off to Germany. DS was asked to stay as the town’s dentist.
This should be a made-for-TV movie.
Ev was the commander of one of the ships that landed on the Normandy beach on D-day. World War II marched forward, every telegram and knock on Mary’s door a heart-stopper. Seven months after Ev headed out, she had a baby, Judith, my mom’s older sister. Ev lived in a hole on the beach in Anzo for six weeks, writing a letter each morning with the paper pressed up against the dirt wall beside him. And then, shock.
Deep shock.
Shock to have survived. The only person, of all the men he knew over there in his three-year stay, who returned without a scratch. Not a goddamned scratch, he still repeated sixty years later.
Ev returned to Oklahoma. Lenore and Mary became pregnant at the same time. In February, Davy was born; nine weeks later, to the minute, Teresa was born. My stepdad, my mom. Dave and Teresa spent three years being babies together. They rolled around in the grass, drooled on each other. And then Ev and Mary left with their girls for California.
Seven years later, when Dave and Teresa were ten, Dave’s family was lured by their friends out west, rented a house right down the street. 1956. In the long, hot summer drive across half of the country, Lenore told story after story about their long-lost friends from Oklahoma with two beautiful daughters who loved to hula dance and ride bikes. The stories printed deep on that romantic ten-year-old boy’s heart, and he felt some sort of binding love even though he hadn’t seen this Teresa since he was a toddler. When they finally pulled up to Ev and Mary’s house, Dave jumped out of the car. Out the front door walked a tan little girl in a romper with bright green eyes and a swagger. She asked if he wanted to be in her gang. He tried to kiss her. She said she wasn’t that kind of girl. He touched her arm. She had the softest skin he’d ever felt.
*
It’s closing night. Day ten of performing. We’ve been instructed to have our bags packed and thrown on top of our bunks in order to make space for stage pieces that have to slide under the beds. Our drawers need to be closed, hanging items—like the sweaty fishnets I hang from a protruding nail in the wall to dry each night—put away, back end swept, minifridge emptied, work clothes out and ready to change into as fast as possible once the wheel goes off at 10:00 p.m. exactly. We completed the tasks the night before, because work call that morning was 9:00 a.m. And now, at 9:30 p.m., while most of the carnival still appears to be operating normally, I see twice as many carnies moving twice as quickly between rides, cords wound in the shadows, translucent trash bags full of unsold popcorn and soft pretzels laid beside food joints like little tombs.
At 10:00 p.m. exactly, the big wheel goes off. All across the lot, screams of “Wheel’s off!” echo down the midway.
“You have ten minutes to go to the bathroom, get out of your costumes, pack them up, get into your work clothes, and meet back here,” Tommy tells us.
“Then what happens?” I ask.
I get a hard look from Sunshine. “You’ll find out. Go!”
And I do.
*