The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(67)
*
We are two soft horizontal bodies breathing. Other mothers and other daughters in the world and in time lie side by side and pass on the secrets of the universe. My mother’s waved, soft gray hair falls across the missing chunks of her head. Does she think about what is gone, or what remains? I want to reach my hand out and trace the edges of her missing skull, but I am paralyzed. No, she is paralyzed. Half of her is struck still. With the other half, she is running her fingers through my hair. Tears are pouring out the corners of my eyes and my hands are moving up to catch them, because we’ve been warned by all the specialty doctors that we may not cry in front of her, may not show her our sorrow for fear of killing her hope.
*
Hope there is not a yellow jacket stuck inside the small wooden box your head must stay in for the duration of the act. Hope it is not 107 degrees, and hope you don’t faint with your face in the heat box, your body under extra blankets and costumes. Hope you’ll be able to regain your head after the curtain closes and you slide sideways out of the box, hope you won’t have to kick any strangers on the way out, hope your shoes are where you left them and haven’t fallen behind the stage, hope your makeup hasn’t melted completely off, hope you’re suffering enough to begin to understand the suffering of others.
When you move between the worlds of head and no head, know that you must move parallel to the earth. You must change your plane, reinvent your orientation until in front of you is sky and below you is the black earth, and that is your passageway—sister, mother, box jumper—you are your own door into a world of a different kind. You x-axis. You flattened miracle.
PREMIUM FOOTLONG CORN DOGS
Day 54 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
I’m sharing an uncooked, soggy corn dog with Pipscy, who is a vegetarian. She eats away a few inches of the corn batter, rotating the dog horizontally in front of her mouth like a spitted pig, then hands it over to me. I chomp the exposed dog. Hand it back to her. Like this, we make it through three corn dogs.
We ten performers are standing in a downpour. It is 4:15 a.m. Rain has been falling steadily since we began teardown at 10:00 p.m., first as sprinkles and then moving to the giant drops that explode on the pavement when they hit, the kind of rainstorm that lures children to play in it, their arms wide and wild like whirling dervishes. And for just as long, the rain has been pooling into the box of extra dogs a carnie threw out from his food joint, rising around them like a soup, as if they were foam noodles floating in a swimming pool.
“How can you eat that?” Francine, the vegan burlesque dancer, says to our grease-smeared cheeks.
We have been working straight through since 9:00 a.m. the day before, setting up and then performing all day and then beginning teardown. That’s how, we don’t say, instead taking bigger and faster bites.
We have survived our first meat-grinder. Or, we are close to surviving, once we finish teardown here in Wisconsin. Two swelteringly hot, long, exhausting weeks with full tents and the regular performers plus newbies crammed into the semi and all we have to do is finish packing the show away and we will get to sleep. For a few hours. On our way to the next show.
But we are stuck. That’s why we’re taking the corn dog break. Our two-foot-long tent stakes, which closely resemble railroad spikes, will not budge from their burrow in the asphalt.
At this mega–state fair there are no grassy lots. This fair is four square city blocks of smoothed asphalt. We’d jackhammered holes into the ground and pounded the stakes the rest of the way in. There they stood for the two weeks we’ve been here, reassuringly unbudgeable, but now we have to get them out.
The stakes will not move. Not with the regular crowbar we used, not with the metal extender, not with sledgehammers or jackhammers, nothing.
If we are not set up in time for opening day at the next fair, we’ll incur a huge fine. If we incur a huge fine, the show will likely shut down—it’s a struggle to pay us week by week, and the bald, patched tires on our semi continue to explode on the highway. But more important than the money and the comfort, I’m certain everyone agrees, is the fact that if our show shuts down, there is no longer any American traveling sideshow left.
We can’t leave the stakes in the ground because we need them to hold the tent in place at the next fair. Also, this fairground board levies a huge fine for leaving any equipment in the asphalt.
And so it is 4:15 a.m. and twenty-eight stakes are still stuck in the asphalt. We are standing in the downpour, trying to figure out what to do, stuffing our faces with corn dogs. Tommy decides we’ll wait until 8:00 a.m., when we can hire a forklift.
We wake to a forklift, two long metal prongs sticking out the front, and all the men leaning in close with great tenderness to watch the driver try to jam an edge of the fork under the exposed small circle of metal, the stake’s top. It looks so inconsequential, that small bump nearly flush with the asphalt—doesn’t hint at the two feet below the surface its body reaches.
The rest of us are finishing the final teardown details, hauling the last poles, coiling electrical equipment. I am on ropes. There is a special crochet system we have for each of the ropes that turns the long two-rope pulleys into short, neat, foot-long grubs. It took me a few setups to understand the pattern, but now I can knot and twist and pull the inch-thick ropes with speed, and I understand how helpful it is to keep tools organized and ready to use once we begin setup again at our next spot, which will hopefully, hopefully, be later this afternoon.