The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(94)

“That’s it! Rotting pumpkin and stagnant water,” I say, lifting the seat off her and then offering her my hands. She grabs them.

“I heard some carnies in there talking about pumpkin as I walked in, and I didn’t pay any attention, but now I know exactly what they meant.” She’s standing now, and we’re peeling Vickie’s socks off. A breeze blows inside the tent, starts to billow the velvet curtains around us. Sunshine reaches out her leg to pin the curtain to a pole with her foot, and I hold the curtain against the pole nearest me with one hand while the other finishes sliding my Vickie costume off.

“It’s going to be hard for me to drink a pumpkin-flavored latte anytime soon,” I say, and she laughs, folding both our sock pairs back together, laying them on Vickie’s chair as I part the curtain in the back for her to pass through.

“I think those are nasty anyway,” she says as we walk behind the stage curtain to our seats backstage, ready to head out for our next act in thirty seconds or four minutes. “Pumpkin-flavored stuff. What is that?”

Lola and Spif are still discussing the turkey leg.

I wonder if Lola recognizes the parts of the leg, if the tendons or bones mean more to her than they do to me. Story goes: she was premed as an undergrad, excelled in sciences. Wanted to help make people better. Her mom was so proud. And she’d started med school, learning about what the body could or could not withstand in textbooks and lectures, but something didn’t feel right. She went to a burlesque show in town one night and saw the women onstage teaching the audience about what their bodies could or could not withstand. That was the kind of help she wanted to do. She dropped out of school and started dancing.

*

Behind the curtain and onstage:

Sometimes Sunshine’s conversation isn’t with me and it continues even once we’re onstage. We perform our choreography together as we prep for the act, but instead of directing the nonstop stream of chatter to me, she holds a phone to her ear. She talks often to her boyfriend and mom and cousin, and I can hear her conversation continue inside the chair as I perform above, the soft vibrations and low tone of her voice beneath me, discussing their electricity bill or her mom’s health or a hilarious thing her boyfriend’s son had just done at the park, and I love that these two worlds are happening simultaneously, knowing that inside the magic of the illusion, the same kind of conversation is happening as happens everywhere—the particulars of what her mom is going to eat for dinner, about how she bruised her foot. Knowing my body is a conduit between the two worlds.

*

Behind the curtain:

The next day, there is a container of fries on the step. And the next, Lola will come back from her break with an ice-cream cone. She’s reaching past the world of our performers, making connections on the outside.

“You’re fucking around with a foodie,” Spif says when the fries arrive. “That’s smart. They can get you things.”

Lola doesn’t say anything. She dips a fry in ketchup, inspects it, and puts it into her mouth.

Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return.

“Who is it?” he asks.

She shrugs her shoulders and licks the salt off her fingers before she adjusts her thigh-highs, then goes back to her food.

I want to seem cool and uninterested in Lola’s love life, but there is so little to do backstage between acts. I’d seen her talking to somebody a few nights before, a tall, pale guy who seemed like he would never meet Lola’s cool quotient, but here was all this food. Physical evidence of love.

Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return.

“So, you’ve been hanging around that guy?” I ask her quietly when it is just the two of us in the hallway doing makeup the next morning.

She smiles, just slightly, and shrugs.

“Is it good?” I ask, stretching the corner of my eye way out to the side to ready it for liquid liner.

“It’s good,” she says, and nothing more. That’s the end of that.

Sunshine and I walk to the side stage, perform Vickie, and return. Again and again, what we appear to be doing remains the same, but the world inside and behind is always changing.

But it wasn’t the end for Lola and the turkey-leg man. They kept in touch once we left that spot, which I knew because she’d give me updates on where his show was headed, and what disaster befell a kid on one of their rides somewhere down the road. And it wasn’t the end, because when the season was over, Lola went to Florida instead of back to St. Louis. And it wasn’t the end, because some months later, her Facebook status changed to engaged, and she and the man who had delivered her gifts of food on the steps were married. A backstage miracle brought in front of the curtain.





CHRISTMAS FISH

Eighteen years before the stroke

December 1992

My mom decided we needed to eat like Jesus.

Story goes: it was Christmas, and she was walking around again after a mysterious illness that had kept her in the hospital for half the summer. Her spleen had died. Nobody knew why. My brother and I were shuttled between relatives and neighbors. We went on family camping trips with other families, played in our cousins’ pool for weeks. We even shot a BB gun. We were allowed to shoot the gun because it looked like she might die. A reward for impending tragedy. But then, months later, she’d come home.