The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
Page 16
“I keep trying, but she’s always just in the corner of the room as my memory sweeps through the house. I can see her for a moment, but most of the time she’s gone.”
“You don’t just lose a person like that,” he says. “Twenty-five years of memories don’t just get deleted.”
“I think maybe you do.”
We are both quiet a few moments.
“She was authoritative,” he says. “Commanding.”
“She was commanding,” I parrot, catching, for just a moment, some memory of a stern arch in her eyebrow.
“She laughed a lot,” he says.
“That sounds right.”
“Remember the bricks? She was going to make special bricks.”
“No.”
“She had just seen bricks somewhere with animals or patterns printed into them, and she decided she was going to make some. She was sure she could do it. How to make the mold, pour the mix. She was just going to do it.”
“God.”
“Right? Remember?”
I try to conjure up an image of her chiseling molds, measuring concrete and stone. I can’t see the bricks Devin is talking about, but I can see her hands doing a thing like that. Bony, raised green veins, chewed away around the nails. Her hands were often splotched with the stains of dye she’d use for painting. She was a textile designer, had her own business for years in our garage and then in a little studio she rented a few towns over. Hand-painted fabric for high-end customers to turn into drapes or upholstery. The business always just broke even. Custom-designed orders for spas and rich people’s homes.
“The music comes on when you enter the room, automatically,” she explained at dinner ten or so years before her stroke, after visiting one of her clients at home. “The woman had an obvious facelift. She looked surprised the whole time I was there. It’s so silly, a facelift,” she said, “and so expensive.” She pulled the skin taut across her throat and chin with a hand. Our dinners cooled as we watched her. She did the same to her cheeks. “But there are places you can go where it’s not so much,” she said. “Mexico. You fly down there and have the procedure and a whole vacation, all for cheaper than doing it here.”
“Mom. Why would you even talk about doing something like that?” I asked, not kindly.
“You don’t get it,” she snapped at me suddenly. “You don’t know what it feels like to get old. Just wait. Wait until you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.”
My brother and Davy, as usual, stayed out of it. They knew about stray bullets.
“In the morning there would be fresh fruit, and then beers in the afternoon, and all the while…,” she trailed off, pulling the skin taut against her hairline. “Take it easy, missy,” she said, looking at me. I hadn’t taken my eyes off her. “I’m not actually going to do it. I’m really just thinking about the ceviche.” She licked her fingers as if they were covered in lime. “Anyway, you’ve got your brain to rely on. So you’ll never be bothered with this stuff,” she said, smiling at me before she stood up from the table and left. She stayed in the bathroom a long time. We ate our dinner.
“Did she ever make those bricks?” Devin asks.
“I don’t remember,” I say.
“They had dogs or pheasants or something on them. I wonder if she made them.”
“I bet she did,” I say.
“I bet so, too.”
THE DEPARTURE
Two years and eight months after the stroke
June 2013
On April 7, 2013, she is back in the hospital after a series of seizures. She has high blood pressure. She is indicating headaches. Her body won’t stop its shaking. She is in the hospital, then out.
Their trip is three months away.
I leave for the sideshow.
Two months.
One.
Bags packed.
A friend drives them to the train station, helps them board.
* * *
The last time I saw them, a few days before I left for the sideshow and two months before they left for their trip, my pile of new costumes was on my parents’ kitchen table.
The table was in the new house my mom and stepdad rented. Well. First there was the single room Davy rented—I figured out how to cook rice without a stove, in the toaster oven! Davy gloated—then the tiny apartment under tall bay trees, and now this little yellow house. Inside the house it is dark and out the window is a creek and an expanse of grass. Deer graze and neighbors’ dogs poop and run and outside it’s always the yellow or gold or brown of wild California grass.
We were all preparing to leave. Them to Italy via a boat across the Atlantic for three months. Probably they won’t come back—I can’t imagine my stepdad returning without my mom, if it came to that. He said as much in the hospital. He wouldn’t go on without her. And now his life’s central task is caring for her. What would there be for him to come back to?
I’m leaving for the sideshow for five months. Maybe I will come back. We are all already performing.
How will she be able to tell him if she’s sick? neighbors asked, family asked. Will he know if she is tired? Will she know what to do if he gets hurt over there? Could she go get help?
Don’t know. Maybe. No. No.
The rest of the kitchen table is covered with bottles of pills and piles of diapers and small plastic salt and pepper shakers and maps of Italy. Their own costumes in neat piles. Checklists. Mine: Eyeliner and tampons crossed out. Theirs: Packs of AAA batteries and hats crossed out.
My pile of costumes has sequined shorts and glittery headbands. I imagine Davy covered in glitter and my mother in a sequined pantsuit, and there’s a laugh track in my head as he explains the kind of weight he’ll carry across Italy.
Also in my pile of costumes are two pairs of industrial-strength fishnets. My mom scooches toward the table in her wheelchair and picks up the black ones. She stretches the foot between her pointer and middle finger on her left hand. Lace. Shadows. Honeycomb. She stares at the fabric, running her finger over it. Where do these take her? There’s that scene in Good Will Hunting where Minnie Driver says she’d give her fortune back for just one more day with her dad, and I used to think, Bullshit. No way that’s true. Now I have a desperate, wild need to know what the feel of these fishnets means to her, what they remind her of, and now that’s not something I can know. My hands are twitchy by my side. Prepared for the moment when we’ll rehash the scene where she brings the thing she’s just picked up to her mouth and sticks it inside, and my never-gentle-enough voice reminds her the thing in her hand is fabric, not a glass of water, is lotion, not a slice of apple, is tweezers, is a stone, and my hand will quickly but firmly move to her hand and guide the object away from her parted lips, and I will feel sorry for having done so.
But maybe she knows all that. Maybe she’s looking at the footed fishnets and remembering herself at sixteen on a stage in San Francisco, drawing spontaneous illustrations for the judges of the Miss Junior California pageant. The stage would have been lit brightly, would have been hot, and the air all around would have smelled like vanilla and sweat and Tahitian Sunsets and the other smells of girls ripening into women. All those high heels. They’re competing for the title. My mother, the young woman, the artist, has bright green eyes with flecks of orange, and the judges call her up for the talent portion of the event. She hasn’t told her family, anyone, she’s tried out, or won the smaller competitions to get there. She just saunters out, pen in hand, and, eyes closed, doodles all over the giant paper pad facing the audience. A mess of lines and jags and dots are on the page. She opens her eyes, winks at the judges, and sets a timer for three minutes. Frantically, what were two disparate flecks on the page become the eyebrows of a whale. Two lines meet beneath her wrist and grow into coral, algae, sunken ships. A universe grows between her fingers, a seascape, a story, and the pen and the paper and the judges are not inside it but they are close and hungry for it, and isn’t that most alluring of all, being right next to someth
ing special?
The dogs outside the window have picked up the scent of a doe. They circle the ground, their snouts down. Nature carrying on.
She sets the fishnets back onto the costume pile and starts to pick up the tutu, stops. Holds still. Imagine there’s a spotlight on her.
An epiphany approaches.
We hold still.
We’re looking at her looking past the table.
The judges can’t take their eyes off her.
She pushes the tulle aside, finally, and the show continues.
Or it doesn’t.
I don’t know, because the planet of her head is unreachable. Maybe the show has just begun. Maybe she’s in a musical.
She hums.
My mom’s travel clothes are folded into suitcases. Thin material, easy to rinse and wash in a sink, clothes made for American tourists traveling to hot countries. This after the sequins onstage and the high heels and the wink to the judges with the pen in her hand … Is this in her character still? Is she still her same character?
I’m telling her the story of where I found each of the costume pieces as she paws through them, because they are the places she taught me when I was young.
The thrift shop down the street from the Ethiopian place on Haight, the San Rafael ballet store, the costume shop in the Mission, and she nods sometimes, and I keep talking, saying whatever I’m saying because there’s safety in noise.
Davy places a bowl filled with yogurt and cereal in front of my mom. Her wheelchair is scooted right up against the lip of the table, a spoon by the bowl’s side. A metal stick with a concave dome. A silver object, shiny, beautiful even. It is familiar. It is a part of the world of ordinary objects, although what is ordinary anymore?
Silver oval, silver line, sheen.
She grasps the spoon’s handle and picks it up. Holds it six inches from the tabletop. The spoon as meteor, as mirror, as muddled lifeline to another world. Brings the spoon up to her face, hesitates, then rubs it softly along her cheekbone.
“No, honey,” Davy says. “Spoon.”
She pulls it away from her cheek, sets it back down on the table.
Spoon.
What good is a word without its meaning? Is there a meaning? Is the meaning there, deep, like a song she recognizes with the lyrics on the tip of her tongue?
Spoon.
She picks up the spoon. Sets it down.
She reaches into the bowl with her thumb and pointer finger, pinches a flake of cereal, and brings it up to her mouth. Chews. Her fingers return to the bowl, three fingertips in this time, a scoop of purple yogurt on her pointer and middle fingertips, a journey up to the mouth.
Silver lollipop. Moon.
She takes the spoon in her hand, sets it back down.
Fingers in yogurt, licking each off, sucking the little pools of sweet from beneath her long nails after each scoop, this yogurt now honored and loved and savored like the last smear of birthday cake frosting.
She picks up the spoon, dips it into the yogurt, takes a scoop. Brings it to her mouth. Opens her mouth. Puts the spoon inside. Closes her lips around the metal moon, the silver half egg. Pulls the spoon from her mouth and chews the food still inside. All these familiar actions. All the steps in an ordinary life. She eats on her own, drinks by herself, in her own time. Relearning how to be in the altered world.
* * *
There’s a photograph from the train station my brother sends me the morning after my parents leave. My brother, standing on one side of my mom’s wheelchair, is in his dressy work clothes and smiles his huge bright smile, the one that makes people adore him immediately. His obvious happiness and casual hand on my mom’s shoulder is an uncomfortable contrast to my grandmother, my mom’s mom. She stands on the other side of the wheelchair. She wears a bright yellow coat and white gloves and holds a disposable camera the exact color of her jacket and has the smallest, saddest smile. Her eyes don’t meet the camera, but slide instead to some distant corner on the floor, or maybe they weren’t focused on anything at all. She is ninety-eight years old.
Their train will take them from Emeryville, California, to New York City, where they will spend a few days recovering before boarding the ship to Europe.
Here they go. Say goodbye.
“I am sure I’ll never see them again,” my grandmother tells me on the phone. “There is my beautiful daughter, and I’m sure I’ve just said goodbye.”
Do you see a hankie waving from the window?
Are their hands outstretched toward those they are leaving behind?
No. Their eyes are focused straight ahead. We can only make out the shadows of the backs of their heads.
* * *
I slip out the backstage door when everyone is off taking showers or calling people at home. I want to feel the anonymity of walking through a big city, anonymity I thought I could have as I walked the fairgrounds, until I realized I was in sparkles and a bustier. In this darkness, maybe I have a chance. I don’t want anyone to see my face while I swallow the fact that my parents are gone. They’ve been on a train taking them across the country for about twelve hours, not entirely too late to convince them to change plans and go home. But I don’t call them.
Lights remain on in a few of the joints being scrubbed down, but most of the fairground is covered in shadow. Where is the moon? There were nights the moon shone on all the sleepy people of the darkened world but curled up her light over the fairground like a woman stepping over a puddle, keeping what should be dark, dark.
I walk past a bounce house and a table covered by tubes of incense. Through the glow of a single streetlamp on the next midway I can make out the top of a small barn. I love all the animals here. Their small noises all night, their dirt smell.
There is a group of young sheep in a pen outside the barn. I can hear some activity on the other side, farmers or 4-H kids hosing out a pen maybe. For a minute, before they are corralled back inside, I can stand beside the sheep, alone, peaceful, and if I crouch low to where one is eating, I can just hear its sweet jaw grinding that hay. But then I hear the low whir of a motor.
I turn around, and barely visible is a golf cart with two men inside. The golf cart is a common fairground device for getting through small aisles quickly, usually reserved for bosses, so I expect this is just two bosses doing late-night checks on their joints.
“Come here,” a voice says, and I can make out an arm beckoning me over. It occurs to me that if there is someone here who owns the sheep, maybe I am doing something bad to them, disturbing their peace in a moment when prizewinning sheep need peace.
I am not remembering that when you are approached by a mountain lion, the first thing to do is stop moving, face the cat, and make yourself as big as possible. You make the lion believe you are not such an easy target.
I walk over to the golf cart. As I get closer, I can make out something reflective on their chests.
“Nice night,” one of them says, staring at me.
“It is,” I say.
“What are you doing out here?” the other asks.
Metal badges. They are cops.
“I work at the sideshow. I was just going for a walk,” I say.
“All alone?” the driver says. He is young, midtwenties maybe, with a smooth, fat face and crooked teeth.
“My show is right there,” I say, pointing down the midway. “There are lots of people inside.”
“So what do you do for the show?” the driver asks as the passenger’s walkie-talkie buzzes and he picks it up to listen. I want to hear what reports might be coming through, but I also have the sense that I need to pay careful attention to the driver, who is paying careful attention to me. I regret that I am still wearing my shorts and cowboy boots, even though I’d put a long-sleeve button-up over the top of my costume. “I’m a bally girl,” I say. “I eat fire, charm snakes, escape from chains, that sort of thing.”
“Well, well!” the driver exclaims, smiling. “What sort of chains?”
“They aren’t real,” I add. “The handcuffs.”
“Are you sure, now?” he says.
“They’re called Siberian handcuffs. They’re—”
“Because I’ve got some right here,” he says, patting his handcuffs on the side of his belt, “and I’d really love to see you in these.”
I laugh in my best good-natured way, trying to channel a polite Ohio girl, someone who would remind the cop of his sister or wife, someone he wouldn’t want to either arrest or make sex jokes to, whichever is happening here.
“Well, I’m quite sure that’s beyond my skill set,” I say, smiling and intoning my voice in a way that I hope implies I am exiting the conversation, but he interrupts my goodbye.
“No, really, try these out,” he says, a little louder. “Wait, we’ll make it even better. I’ll lock you up, and then throw you in the trunk of our car out in the parking lot,” he says. “That way, you’ll have to escape twice.” He laughs hard and loud. “Come over here,” he says, and his voice changes, drops a register. “Really. Tell me your secret. I’m not kidding, little girl. Come on over here and I’ll lock you right up.”
His partner is still fiddling with his radio, not paying attention to us. This, suddenly, in the few weeks I’ve been with the sideshow, is the most scared I’ve been of another person.
“It’s getting late. I’ve got to get back,” I say. “How would you like your daughter to be alone on the dark fairgrounds with a cop joking about locking her up and leaving her inside the trunk of a car?” I don’t say. Without waiting to hear their response, I turn to go.
“Anytime you change your mind, escape artist,” the cop says, “I’ll be waiting for you.” The golf cart doesn’t drive away. I can feel it behind me, the metal, the eyes following me as I walk quickly away, the stone in my throat growing smaller and smaller the farther I get.
* * *
A tire blows outside South Bend, Indiana. After Ohio we headed for a couple more small county fairs in Illinois as holdover stops before we reach the meat-grinders of the season: the big state fairs. Playing them grinds you up into little pieces, the hours are that long—8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., often, because the audiences are huge all day every day, because the fairs are two weeks or longer. We won’t get to them for a few more weeks, but I know they’re out there because the seasoned crew talks about them as both a cure for these dopey little fairs and a curse on your sanity.