The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(44)
“Pips, you…,” I start to say, but don’t know how to finish the sentence. I start laughing again, and she glances down to her waistline.
“My tattoos!” she yells, starting to laugh as well, and up closer I can see them, peeling and smudged temporary tattoos of swords and skulls, rubbing away to black flakes.
“I can’t get real tattoos because of my acting career, so I put on these temporary ones sometimes,” she says.
Cassie, butt in the air, calls over, “It looks like an STD is growing from your snatch up your body.”
Pipscy, in perfect cartoon form, widens her eyes, O’s her mouth, and then leans over to inspect her disease. She starts laughing, and Cassie and I start again, too, Cassie still bent over and rubbing rash cream for babies into her butt cheeks and upper thighs, and the ridiculousness of all this, it all feels perfectly strange, and the easy laughter feeds and builds and becomes louder and harder, laughter that takes over all three of us and works its way toward hysterical, the work and sweat and tears of the last weeks all rushing out of us in a torrent. It is good. In eight hours, we will wake up and hoist the banners and set the props and get into costume and perform each of our acts and then perform them each again and again and again and again and again, until the fair closes its gates at ten or eleven or midnight, with no breaks, no days off, for 130 more days. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, right now, we’re just three people laughing hard in a muddy bathroom.
Eventually, Pipscy and Cassie walk back to the tent. I stay behind, brushing my teeth, washing my face, rinsing out underwear and my cereal bowl in the sink, trying to learn better laundry and dish-washing techniques as I go. A few people come in and out of the bathroom in the ten or so minutes I’m there, but I must not be paying close enough attention because a woman startles me as she bursts from one of the stalls. She’s wearing her game joint shirt. I know that a lot of folks use the privacy of bathroom stalls to smoke, snort, and shoot things, and in my few weeks on the road I have already seen a few pairs of feet peeking out the bottom of the stalls, toes facing the back wall, the body leaning hard against the stall’s door. I assume some variation of such activity has just taken place, so I keep my eyes on what I am doing in the sink, tempted as I am to look.
The woman pauses just outside the bathroom stall. She is still as a statue, so I venture a glance. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail so tight it tugs at her skin and makes it hard to identify emotions on her face. I follow her attention to something in her hand, ready to see a pipe or syringe. Carnie stuff.
It’s a pregnancy test. She keeps her eyes on the small white plastic device for another three or four seconds. She doesn’t move. I don’t breathe. Then all at once, like the video of this moment is finally allowed to play, she steps from the stall and walks quickly over to the large garbage can in the corner of the room. She throws the test inside and walks out the door into the night’s bright lights.
Either answer on that stick might have been wanted, anticipated. Either might have been devastating. This is a hard place to think about taking care of anyone else, or losing the opportunity to do so. I slow down as I walk past the garbage can on my way out. Maybe I could find her game, befriend her. Offer her—what? I press both palms against the door, push my way out of the bathroom, and send a vague wish up into the starry sky for all daughters.
*
The next morning, Thursday, the Maumee fair opens with a whimper. A few young mothers with strollers wander the midway, and a couple of old folks smile at us and keep shuffling along.
“Where’s the section with all the rides?” I ask Tommy.
He spreads his arms wide to the section we’re in. There’s a Gravitron, a janky Zipper, a boat ride, and that’s it. A small, small country fair. Physically, we’re the largest thing on the midway by a long shot, and the most outrageous, too. On the other side of the pond in front of us, a safe distance from our depravities, are a number of barns full of horses, cows, sheep, ducks—the usual assortment of 4-H kids and their mothers’ apple-pie-baking competitions. The barns stretch across much of the fairground.
This fair has a cause. I’m not sure if all the fairs have a cause, but this one announces it on the loudspeakers with increasing frequency. “Attention fairgoers,” a nasaly voice calls through the speakers. “Please come to Horse Barn Three at two p.m. for a presentation on pollination awareness.” There are informational sessions. Evening meetings. Another meeting is called the night before we open to discuss what to do with lost fair children. The loudspeaker also announces when we can pick up ice each hour. It announces when Buffo the Clown’s show is about to begin. Someone behind the microphone must have been denied high school announcements, because there is a continual stream coming from the speakers, and between that and the band playing just across from us, covering the 1950s’ greatest hits, it’s hard to get in a full sentence of our bally on the mic before something cuts us off. We will start to build a tip, a few interested folks stopping to look at the snake, and we’ll reel them in a little closer, but then Buffo the Clown will cruise by on his Segway and the pygmy goat parade will be announced, and the folks who had stopped beside our tent develop wandering eyes and move on.
We have to pause the inside show six or seven times throughout the day, because despite our best efforts we can’t get anybody to come into the tent. Tommy drops the entry price from three dollars to two dollars. Consults with Red backstage. As the day ends, Tommy’s eyes reach farther and farther down the midway as he searches for an audience to invite over for a bally. If there were a way to throw his voice across the pond to those 4-H barns, for example. If only they could see what wonders we have inside, what fun. Few people come. His upper lip keeps sweating long after the sun has gone down.