The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(39)
She folds in one worn sleeve and then the other. Smooths the creases. Smooths the collar, evens out the sides. Her other hand remains tucked unmoving in her lap but this hand is grabbing the bottom of the T-shirt and folding it up against the shirt’s shoulders, creating a rectangle perfect for stacking in drawers, this little miracle of normalcy on a couch in a wooden house on a cool spring evening. She cannot talk or walk, but this. Here it is, a chore. Ordinary life.
*
We talk a lot about packing. Though I leave for the sideshow two months before my parents leave for their trip, I spend a lot of time navigating the half-packed suitcases strewn across my parents’ house. Day by day Davy prepares carefully for The Trip—his term for the long, dangerous journey he is planning—but that doesn’t assuage my unease.
One afternoon, my mom is in the bedroom napping.
“I just want to see her face,” Davy says, “seeing the bridges in Florence.” He is arranging pill bottles in the outside pockets of one of the suitcases. To fit a four-month supply of anticonvulsants, antihypertensive agents, osmotic diuretics, antibiotics, pain management medications, fiber pills, and vitamins, there are giant Ziploc bags filled with the translucent orange tubes, and white tubes, brown plastic tubes, bottles in all shapes and sizes filled with tiny morsels of health. Another suitcase is entirely filled with adult diapers. The right size is hard to find, and instead of risking it, he is bringing the entire three-month supply. There’s a bag with orthotic braces. There’s a bag that is used exclusively to hold the second wheelchair, Bubbles. There’s just one bag with their clothes: seven outfits each, Davy has determined, stuffing into one of their toiletries bags a large bottle of Dr. Bronner’s in order to do laundry most nights. Redundant thumb drives with copies of their medical records, advance directives—of which my brother and I both have copies—tucked into various pockets. Audio-recording equipment for one of the bags so he can capture the sounds of the streets around them.
Eleven bags total.
Over 250 pounds.
Plus the sweet beauty who will be sitting in the chair.
“It will make all this worth it,” he says. “Seeing her face see the water in Venice.”
He is counting out the week’s pills into the seven-day strip of containers. “There’s a secret spot in Rome I found when I was nineteen. It’s off the main road in one of the squares. I wandered off there when I was alone, when I was just a teenager. I bought some dope off a guy in a back alley, and, almost by accident, ended up smoking in this hidden garden with broken sculptures. It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. That’s what I want most on this trip. I want to find that place that I used to think was magic. I want to show Teresa that magic.”
DAUGHTERS
Day 20 of 150
World of Wonders
July 2013
Our caravan—one semitruck pulling the show, the fifteen-person passenger van pulling Tommy and Sunshine’s trailer/the office, and Red’s van—pulls into a small fairground surrounded by houses that have metal bars over their windows. We’re in Maumee, Ohio. A few joints are here already, unfolding their giant wings, pinning and joining and stretching out for the imminent arrival of little feet, but much of the fairground is still empty and waiting. It’s much smaller than the last spot. We sit in the van while Tommy talks to the boss canvasman. We aren’t supposed to interrupt the boss when he is talking to other bosses, or get out of the van when we aren’t told to, or walk near other joints during setup, because it is a dangerous affair that requires hard hats, which the people setting them up only sometimes wear. Those metal pieces—which I want to think of as spring petals unfolding from their metal stamens—actually swing and clang and break and people get hurt, badly hurt, during setup. The general rule is to stay out of the way.
The afternoon light is waning into a pale gold, and unlike the paved, smooth Butler fairgrounds we left just that morning, 230 miles back, here dirt roads carved into grass act as the midway lying between huge floppy trees with bright green leaves, willows maybe, and little yellow dandelions. As we wait, flecks of firefly light burst around us. On these new fairgrounds, I will be better at eating fire. Less afraid of snakes. I’ll lure more people into the tent. I’ll get better at what I need to do, focus more acutely, so my brain has less space to catastrophize elsewhere.
We’ve been on the road together two and a half weeks. Because our first fair was so long, we’ve put up the show only once, though beginning setup this time feels a little easier, a little less intimidating, even though we are all tired.
A dirt bike pulls up to our lot bearing a huge guy who wipes his face with his forearm, spits, and lumbers over to the van on thighs the diameter of a steering wheel. The boss had posted a Craigslist ad for a new ticket guy, since he’d had to fire Snickers. The new guy is stopping by for an interview, which is basically a way for Tommy to see if he’ll be:
a. strong enough to potentially move heavy things, and
b. tough enough to actually stick around and do it.
The guy approaching us is even bigger than Big, Big Ben, our working man, and the prospect of adding a big guy to our team is alluring, another bull to take some weight and get that tent up fast.
Tommy sweeps the new guy out back to talk, and walks him around and through the tent like the boss at a construction site, gesturing with his hands and pointing out items they pass, items that require work. He’s sussing the new guy out, watching the way his body moves. I wonder if the working man job is one that has to be done by a man. The women on our crew, after all, do a lot of hard labor.