The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(55)
A few sweaty kids and their brave parents are down the midway at a lemonade stand. One of the kids spots the snake and points, and the whole group, reluctantly, slowly emerges into the sun and walks toward our stage. Once the boy who pointed is close enough, I parrot what Tommy usually says about the snake.
“Do you think you can be hypnotized by a snake?” I ask the boy. He shakes his head no and walks a little closer. “Many people believed snakes have the power to hypnotize, so come close and look right into Pandora’s eyes,” I say, which is my cue to guide the strong, heavy snake’s head out toward the willing participant so he or she might gaze into the pools of her eyes, but when I start to pull her head, she won’t budge. I try again, gently still, smiling at the boy who is waiting to prove me wrong. The little boy has a bright red shirt a few sizes too big, and buzzed blond hair, and I can see his teeny rounded teeth inside his open, expectant, lick-lipped mouth as he looks from snake body to my face to see what the damn holdup is.
Which is an excellent question. What the hell is happening?
I pull at her neck, trying new angles, grabbing different sections of her thick body to extract her, and each time I do, she does not slide any farther out, but I can feel a hard pull on my hair. She’s stuck in there. Tangled deep, deep in my sweaty, curling-ironed hair.
The little boy is still staring up at me with a slack jaw.
“Can I see the snake?” he finally asks, as if that weren’t clear.
“Of course you can,” I say, holding a great fake smile. “She’s just being a little shy, but I’m trying to coax her out for you.”
I try pushing this time, thinking that perhaps the tangle is one-directional, and like a child with her finger caught in a Chinese finger trap, if the snake can only relax and move opposite her intuition, she can be free. She will not budge. Despite her thick, muscled body, with each pull or push I imagine the skin twisting just past its threshold and tearing open, guts and blood and the rat we fed her two days ago, hair mostly gone now and eyeballs out and body coated in some white and pink gooey slime, a whole package of horror bursting out of her body and sliding down my skin, down into my dress and tights and splashing onto the little boy’s face, the giant limp body still stuck to me for all eternity, the snake carcass my Sisyphean boulder.
The little boy has now looked back to his parents for instructions, as the adult world isn’t operating according to promise. They’re looking at me with that same wide-jawed expectancy, but I can see in the mother’s face that she understands something of what is happening here, a recognition of my panic or the potential for violence and she says, “Honey, looks like maybe the snake is too shy today,” and walks toward the little boy, her arm toward him but her eye not leaving me, but the boy doesn’t budge, stays firmly planted two feet from me in the hot, hot sun, his pink cheeks and little teeth still gleaming in the afternoon’s brightness.
It doesn’t matter how forcefully I try to pull her, the only pull I feel is on great patches of my scalp. As she’s gotten herself farther in, her body has pressed against the back of my head, forcing my chin down to my chest, straining my neck. The mom reaches the boy, her hand on his back, and I look at her, mouth sorry, look at the boy and say, “I’ll be right back,” and turn and exit the stage. Big, Big Ben is working the ticket booth and hasn’t taken his eyes off his phone’s screen, where he’s rereading the Harry Potter series.
“Ben,” I hiss, but he doesn’t move. “Ben,” I say louder, and he grunts without turning around. “Ben, I need your help,” I say louder, still trying to keep my voice out of the register that the family pacing in front of the bally stage might hear, but loud enough to draw him out of Hogwarts.
He turns around, annoyed. “What’s the problem?” he says.
“The snake,” I say in my most serious but not hyperventilating panicked whisper, “is stuck. In my hair.”
He takes a long second to look at me, longer than a quick moment of assessment, longer even than his usual longer processing time, or maybe it was just one second, but the snake was surely strangling in my ringlets so everything felt like forever. Finally, a half smile passes across his mouth.
“The snake is stuck in your hair?” he asks, and the half smile turns into a big-lipped, full-toothed grin, the brink of hilarity, my inadequacies a comedy club. “Oh man,” he says, laughing, and turning back to Harry Potter.
“No! Ben! Please, this is serious!” I say, and he turns back to face me, still smiling.
“I really don’t want to help you,” he says.
“No, please,” I plead.
“Because it’s way too funny.”
“I know.”
“To have a snake in your hair.”
“It is. But she might be hurt! Please,” I say.
“To have the snake trapped in your hair, now that’s funny,” he says, laughing, slapping his knee.
The family lingering up front loses patience with the sun and spies the shaded pig races down the midway and wanders off.
“I really don’t want to help you,” he says, reaching up toward my hair. I spin around, still clutching the larger section of her body in my hands and letting Ben’s hands follow her neck up through my tangles, letting him part sections of my hair to see where she is.
“Oh man,” Ben says. “She’s really stuck in there.”