The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(5)

“No name yet.”

“Hello, snake,” I say. She does not blink.

Tommy steps toward me, and without meaning to I step backward. He steps toward me again. I involuntarily step back, trying to throw a casual laugh on top of my ducking and dodging like this little tango is just a joke. After a few steps, though, I’ve come to the wall. My back is cold against the metal-and-wood paneling that runs inside the truck. I feel the film of dust slide against my palms. I try to come up with excuses that might explain why I’m trying to escape the snake, but my mind is nearly blank. I start to sweat.

“Will she bite?” I ask, desperate to stall.

“Boas don’t bite,” he says. “They squeeze their prey to death.”

“Oh, right.”

“But she won’t do that to you. She knows you’re too big to eat,” he says. “Just make sure she doesn’t get around your throat, of course,” he says. I touch my neck, imagining her body tightening around me.

I had some idea that because I’d been through so many harder things, once this moment of reckoning arrived—once it was me and the snake, not the imagined fear, not the generic childhood phobia—I’d see she was just another beautiful creature on the earth trying to get by, and I’d find peace.

I find no peace.

*

Sideshows are where people come to see public displays of their private fears: of deformity, of a disruption in the perceived gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion. And that is a sideshow’s intention—to frame whoever or whatever is on display as being outside the realm of what’s “normal.” For the snake act, it should appear that I have such chemistry with the creature that we are almost one. That’s what’s interesting to see—the snake/human duo who have overcome the predator/prey divide.

*

I look at the snake. She is moving her head side to side, trying, I’m sure, to find someone to kill. I’m sweating. A few of the other performers come through the stage curtains and into the truck, rushing right to the snakes with open arms and kissy noises and pet names. They’ve all worked with snakes before.

“Who’s a snake? Oh, you’re just a snake, that’s right, girl,” Cassie says as she reaches out both hands and takes the snake. She notices me trying to plaster myself to the wall and breathing hard. “The snakes think you’re just a big tree,” she says encouragingly. I nod my head, glance out the door to the darkening escape route where a polka band rehearses “America the Beautiful.”

“I haven’t actually, uh, spent much time around snakes before,” I say, ready to be chastised, ready, at twenty-nine, to be treated like a fibbing child, but the admission doesn’t seem to faze anyone. Tommy shrugs and Cassie steps toward me.

“Here’s the little angel,” she says, moving quickly as she drapes the snake around my shoulders.

The snake is cold and so heavy she forces my neck to bend so I’m looking down at the floor, and I taste blood as I bite the inside of my cheek, knowing, like a sword in my heart, that I cannot do this.

*

I ended up with a snake around my neck because of a conversation with a giant.

February 2013.

Four months before this snake moment.

Two and a half years after my mom had her stroke.

A town in Florida where sideshow performers retire.

I snuck around back behind the circus tent to an old, off-white trailer, peeling, rusted, with all its curtains drawn. I knocked. Something inside bumped the trailer’s wall and the whole thing shook. It was still again.

I could feel my heartbeat under my tongue, pulsing that soft skin like the belly of a panicked frog. Trespasser. That’s what the man would say, if he ever opened the door.

I knocked again. Something jostled in the trailer, followed by some clanging. The door opened the width of a human head.

“Yes?” the man asked. He was huge, his neck bending and back stooping to fit his face into the door’s opening. In the dim trailer light I could just make out that he was wearing droopy underwear and a yellowed T-shirt.

“Hi,” I said, unsure of what to say next, realizing I hadn’t planned anything beyond this moment. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the sideshow. About your life?”

He stared at me.

“I’m a big fan,” I said, and smiled, and didn’t step away from the door despite his silence.

“I don’t do daylight,” he finally said. His voice was low, and gruff, and gravelly, like a man who’d been shouting into a microphone for a lifetime. Which is exactly what he was.

“I can come back when it’s dark,” I said. “I’m a student.” I was trying to throw any pieces of my identity toward him that I thought might make him sympathetic. Willing to talk.

He sighed. “All right, then. Come back when it’s dark.”

*

I walked around to the front of the tent, paid three dollars, and went inside.

Steel blades flew from a man’s fingertips and landed inches from a woman turned sideways, her spine arched. Thwack. Knife after knife sliced the wooden board. Stood straight out. A constellation of metal like a saint’s glow. Like she was made of prayers. Thwack. She did not flinch. Stared at her assailant. I had spent a lot of the past few years feeling tired, half-asleep, in the lulls between emergencies. But in this tent, watching the blades make a new shape around the woman’s body, I felt very, very awake.