The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(54)
Our show is set up in the center of a pool of black asphalt. By the third morning, everything is melting. I apply a few dabs of foundation, which turns into thin tan water and runs to my chin. My liquid eyeliner won’t make a straight line because there’s so much sweat pooling in my eye sockets. Cassie and I take turns getting ready in our bunk, the space in there only big enough to fit one body at a time, and too hot to stay for more than a minute. More layers of makeup do not make it stick. There is an actual wet stain on the ground from the sweat dripping off our bodies, and my hand slides when I try to steady it against my cheek to swipe on the mascara.
We decide on a new plan.
Makeup bags in hand, we slide out of our trailer and book it down the midway and into the presentation hall. In here, children’s paintings of their dogs and a church group’s prize quilt are displayed beside unusual vegetables lined up in a row. They’re all awaiting judgment. We stand in the holy air-conditioned public bathrooms and draw on our faces.
Just an hour later, onstage, my makeup is completely smeared off, my costume is soaked all the way through, and my cheeks are bright pink. Tommy’s face is completely reflective, a mirror made of sweat, and I think that this might be the end for me, for all of us. My head feels full of air and then pummeling stones, and my vision seems to be getting a little fuzzy around the edges. It is 106 with 90 percent humidity. Nobody is out on the midway but us.
“Tommy, tell me more signs that a person might be leaving.”
“Why, you gonna leave me, Tess?”
“I wish I had the strength to leave,” I say, joking, but that rings so true to me as I say it, I almost cry. Would I leave? Could I? I think about a trick my high school cross-country coach used to tell us. When you’re on a long run, if you think about how much longer you have to go, especially when you’re climbing a big hill, it feels insurmountable, too hard. You’ll want to stop. If, though, you make small goals ahead of you, that tree at the bend, the crest of this small hill you can see, then reaching it feels, though still hard, within your grasp. And by the time you get there, the hardest part might be over, and you’ve worked hard to get to that point anyway, so you might as well keep going.
And then I think about my parents, and wonder whether, if I left now, I could get to them in time to see them once more. If they make it through the train journey, that would be something. And then the ship across the Atlantic. And then the ten-day waiting time in London. And then the ship to Italy. Then the travels between Rome, Florence, Venice, and back to Rome. Then the ship again. The train across the country.
My cross-country coach’s trick didn’t work. Each step felt infinitely more insurmountable than the last.
*
“The signs are all around,” Tommy says. “It used to be that the sideshow was a community for all kinds of displaced or rejected people to find a home.”
“Is it still?”
“Sort of,” he says, spotting a mother and her three young children way down the midway and trying to get their attention. They turn into the air-conditioned presentation hall. “But not really.”
“Why not?”
“This isn’t a place where anyone can make it. People aren’t used to the amount of hard work that goes into making it here. I mean, Snickers only lasted a week and a half. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. Many people just can’t handle how demanding it is. Physically. Mentally.”
In front of us, the black asphalt looks like a river as sheets of heat rise up from the ground and make waves. What was once solid ground is now part of the liquid world, and the cosmos is melting, too, and the inside of my body feels like it contains nothing but boiling water, a fat meat sack of boiling water, and it occurs to me that I might die. Here. Today. And that would be fine.
The few scattered people across the fairgrounds are taking momentary respite in faraway shade between air-conditioned buildings. A loudspeaker announces, “Welcome to Senior Citizens Day, sponsored by Miller’s Funeral Services.”
“Be right back,” Tommy says, and darts offstage. I remain, the smaller of our two snakes, whom we have named Pandora, in my arms. I try to focus on something besides the heat.
Boa constrictors range in size from three to fourteen feet, with hearty tan bodies that have distinctive dark brown and white saddles across their backs, increasing in proximity closer to their red-brown tails. The females are bigger—“heavy-bodied snakes,” Wikipedia tells me. I’ve been trying to read about snakes on my lunch break so that this beautiful creature becomes less an anonymous symbol of danger and more a complex, important creature of the larger ecosystem.
Pandora senses heat with her lips, and moves her mouth up and down my body, flicking her tongue along the back of my neck. She is active today, writhing all the time, never settling around my neck or waist even though I try to convince her I am just a friendly tree. As she swings her head close I can see that her eyes are again starting to turn a milky blue, opal-colored almost. She is readying to shed.
Since the tooth scrape incident, I’ve been reluctant to let her face near my body without my hand supporting her head and neck, just in case. But it is so hot today, and I’ve made a terrible mistake this morning in trying to wear my hair down. It is wet with sweat and clumped down my back, a nest of sorts, and Pandora keeps diving back there, probably for a respite of shade, and her body is clammy because I keep setting her back into her box into which we’ve hosed some cool water so that she can regulate her body temperature. She’s heavy and sticky and diving her face back behind my head even though my loosely open hand supports her neck and tries to guide it back to the front of my body, where both I and the sparse audience can keep our eyes on her.