The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(78)

I hadn’t seen my dad in months.

*

As the crowd hears and believes in Sunshine’s story, some people smile, look me in the eyes as they hand me their dollars, our fingers touching, like this handshake buys them a real secret. Others hand their money to me with great reluctance, don’t make eye contact, or, if they do, scowl like I am forcing them, cheating them. Which I am not, and also am, both. Sometimes one will pay and the rest gather round on the other side of the platform, waiting for the chosen member to walk through, to snap a picture and come back to show the rest. But we don’t light the backside and pictures are hard to make out. They are more of an appetizer than an answer. What the audience sees on the backside of the box is Sunshine, on tiptoe, her knees and hips and back and arms and neck bent in such a way that she fits around and between the blades. Her torso is curved in, her knees bent, her body one large S. Once you see her there, you can make out her body’s path on the other side of the box, between the handles of the blades.

“Is it worth it?”other people from the audience will holler to someone coming out. If we are lucky, the kid nods her head in astonishment, an assertion of wonder. Other times, a woman shrugs her shoulders, taking huge wet bites of her foot-long sausage, gulping beer while she surveys our magic and, shaking her head no, heads for the exit.

A young woman stands in line with a frayed shirt, three kids, one of whom is in a stroller with a broken wheel, and they have little dirty faces, or maybe my memory is adding the dirt beneath their nostrils, the brown collected in their snot so that their faces resemble the portraits of Depression-era Dust Bowl babies. They come forward with dollar bills in their hands and the mother stands back—she’s twenty-five at most maybe, looks closer to sixteen—craning her neck around because she wants to see what’s behind the trick as much as anyone. And aren’t we lucky to be filled with that wonder? She has pulled dollars from her pocket and straightened them out, and there are two bills left and three children, and she hands the dollars to two of them old enough to walk so they can come see this wonder whose story I’ve just spun, and the other little one, left behind, is squirming in the stroller, crying, and the mother is staring at the other kids in great anticipation.

I wanted to whisper to just the kids to sneak around back and peek, to let the mother behind, too, and the little stroller kid, but it was rare I could swing it. Usually, I had to just take their dollars.

Those were the hardest. Not because I thought glimpsing Sunshine uncomfortably posed around the blades wasn’t fun to see—it was—but because it filled me with this sudden moral dread. Is it okay to lie in service of entertainment? Okay to spin a story that causes someone to give you what seems like much-needed money?

I had to find my own moral line. I found, quickly, that it was easy to stand up in front of an audience and tell them about Romanian secrets and family tradition, to tell a backstory that made people more excited to see her. In my moral world, it was another thing—shadier, more deceptive—to say she had a child at home and this was her only source of income. Why was the second story so much worse? They were all lies, of course, and probably the one with the child would have been more effective, would have collected her, and by turn us, and me—because as a ding talker, you took a cut of what you brought in, 10 percent for the blade box—more money. But something about that felt like it pushed us over into cheats. Pulled too hard on easy sympathies.

I settled on a story that fit into my continually shifting moral guidelines.

“Ms. Sunshine comes from a Romanian circus family. And this is an act that her family has been performing in this same traditional way for the last five generations. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and on and on up the family line. She’s been doing it since she was only four years old, when they brought the act from where they’d toured in Europe over to California. She’s now the last person who can perform this kind of contortion act today.”

I knew that other performers—the owners, Ward and Chris, for example—didn’t agree that there was any difference between the kinds of stories we were telling out here. They didn’t tell me so, since I was bringing in good money, but Ward famously said that the thing to remember about the term show business, was that business was the longer word.

*

When I come backstage after the biggest turn, with money shoved down my shorts, dollars in my tights and jammed into my corset, filling my hands and the little change bag I carried, I stand in the middle of all my fellow performers. Standing there is unnecessary, but I want them to look. I reach down into my shorts and, handful by handful, dump the money onto the broken wooden floor of the truck backstage. I bend over, pull my corset away from my chest and dump coins, reach down and pull out the dollar bills that are still stuck to my breasts and stomach. Beneath me, a pile of sweaty money grows across the floor. I make sure all the eyes are on me. I make sure they all see what I can do.

Short E gives a few slow claps. “And there it is, folks,” he says. “GTFM. Get. The. Fucking. Money.”

It’s the first moment since joining the show—maybe even since my mom got sick—that I feel like I nailed the thing I’d set out to do.

*

Chris Christ catches me as I am walking backstage the next night.

“You’re pretty good at talking the blade box,” he says. “You have the kind of voice people listen to. It’s unusual. A little bit too rough,” he says, “and a little bit too high. Almost unpleasant.”