The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(58)

“You could learn all the acts, not just the bally acts. It would give you a chance to try out every position here. What do you think?” she says, coming out of the toilet stall.

“I think yes,” I say. “But what happened to Pipscy?”

“Pipscy is homesick, she misses her boyfriend, blah blah blah. We’re gonna be hiring new performers for the season’s big fairs anyway, and it’s easiest to hire bally girls, since they don’t really have to be able to do anything already, and you know the show now, how things work.”

It was still a surprise, given how uneasy I was to begin here with almost no skills, that no skills are needed to be a bally girl. The idea of joining a show as a performer with nothing to perform is strange. And yet, it makes more sense the further along we are. How after just one day of performing, I had those acts down pat and, in the scheme of things, one mediocre day of figuring it out didn’t matter.

Pipscy has done a very decent thing, Sunshine explains, and told the bosses of her departure in advance, a week and a half or so. The ads have just gone up on Craigslist for temporary performers to join a traveling circus sideshow. What would it be like to come across that by accident? I don’t know if I would have believed it was real.

“I’m in,” I say, ready for the next chapter.

There’s that one inside act I’ve had my eye on since the beginning. It sits on Red’s stage, separate from the main stage, and amazes me every time I glance inside and see Pipscy performing it. The electric chair. Red flips a switch and the electric woman, seated on the chair, is filled with electricity. She lights bulbs off her fingertips and tongue. I don’t yet know how it works.

I’m in a sitting-in-the-electric-chair daydream onstage later that day when Cassie asks a woman emerging from the tent whether she likes our show. Cassie often asks customers what their favorite part of the show is as they walk out—as long as they don’t walk out shaking their heads or looking upset. It gives her the opportunity to repeat into the mic what they say, adding enthusiasm, offering a teaser.

“It was boring,” the woman says.

Boring?

I flip through my first experience watching the show, trying to imagine if any of it was boring. A little corny, yes, not always totally believable, but never boring.

“We were hoping for blood and guts,” the woman says, slowly walking away. She looks incensed, with a pinched expression that Sunshine calls a fart face, as if she were smelling something wretched. Sometimes you’d see those faces out in the audience, supremely unimpressed by whatever you were doing. But to be so vocal about the show being boring baffles me. Is it unclear that these are real human beings inside the show made up of actual blood, actual guts, some of which they are showing to the audience for two dollars?

“We didn’t see anything cool, no extreme gore at all.”

Cassie turns toward the other people gathering near the stage. “And there you are, folks,” she says into her mic. “Proof of the harmful effects of television’s desensitization. Come inside the show right now and interact with real human beings with real human blood and guts and see them perform real human feats of wonder.”

The woman walks off.

“What a dummy,” I say.

*

Cassie assures me that the giant state fairs we’re headed into will have fewer idiots to think our show is boring than there have been in some of these smaller fairs, but then she corrects herself and says there’ll just be too many other people for them to stick out much.

“It’ll finally be time for this,” Sunshine says, sticking her pointer finger out at me. There are four letters tattooed along the side of her finger closest to her thumb: GTFM.

“What’s that mean?”

“When people outside the show ask what it means, back at home and stuff, I tell them it means Get That For Me. You know, as stage manager, I’m always pointing at things and bossing people around.”

“But it doesn’t?”

“GTFM is carnie code. It’s about the bottom line. About doing whatever you have to do to get by out here and make it worthwhile. GTFM: Get the fucking money.”

*

A few months after my interview at that fancy private high school, I’d received a letter letting me know I was on the waiting list. The scholarships were limited and the application pool unprecedentedly large, so I’d just need to wait.

My mom opened the school’s most recent newsletter. “Look, their play opens Friday. Why don’t we go to it?” she said.

“Don’t you think it’s weird if I show up since they’re still deciding if they want me?” I said.

“I’m calling now to buy the tickets.”

When the play was over and the lights rose above the audience, she stood me up and pointed across the crowd. “There,” she said, “is your target.”

A man was just standing up, chatting with and smiling at those around him.

“The headmaster,” she said. “Go.”

“What am I supposed to say to him?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Introduce yourself. Say you’re on the waiting list. Say that you see yourself here. That this is your place.”

I looked around the theater with its plush emerald seats, big wooden stage, and lights. It wasn’t my place, not yet, but I could just glimpse the roughest edge of a fantasy where it was. Getting there took more courage than I had.