The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(110)

I feel dangerous. Amazing.

Full of electricity, I am, for the first time, inside my own world of wonder. It’s an act I imagine performing in front of my mom, something to echo her surfing routine. Two strong, poised women channeling a force from the earth, two women choosing how to be awake in the world.

*

A beach at dusk, cold wind, reeds bending sideways. A girl, me—age eight or nine—sitting on a picnic blanket beside her mother. The mother is facing the ocean. Her face is turned up to the sky where the purples are moving in, eyes closed, making herself into a painting that she might re-create later. There is electricity brewing in the sky, potential energy collecting behind the purple clouds. This is sixteen or seventeen years before the mother’s brain will be flooded with blood and she will no longer be able to walk or talk or, for a while, demonstrate that she even knows the daughter anymore. Does she know the daughter anymore? Of course she must. The ocean has trails of thin white foam like fat through a steak and the sand lifts with small gusts of wind.

“Do you feel that?” the mother asks, her eyes closed and facing the water. “Close your eyes. You can feel more.”

I close my eyes. Wait to feel more. Wait. Peek over at her, and there is some sort of private smile across her mouth I’ve never seen before and it scares me a little. I close my eyes and try again, but I must be doing it wrong.

She is right beside me, we are in the same wind and our skin is stung by the same sand and she is also elsewhere, feeling more. I wonder for the first time what it means if you can’t feel what another person is feeling.

The seagulls walk in slow circles on the beach and move toward us like predators, and the mother thinks nothing of being wrapped in torn, old down coats that smell of sweat and campfire, thinks nothing of peeing mostly in view, waving and smiling as she walks away from where I sit. She winks at me and then walks off alone down the beach, turns to wave once, but then walks farther and farther until her size is halved and halved again, a retreating body meeting the last light on the ocean. What I’m saying is that she already knew how to travel away. I had already lost her. I never had her.

The evening drops its yellow ball straight ahead. Dim stars behind. The cold wind and the cold salt smell. I imagine that the mother sees herself swimming to the next coast. How it would feel to be inside that Pacific water for days or weeks. How far she would go.

When she comes back, she tells the story again of herself as a little girl, a swimmer, how nobody could ever get her out of the water, nobody, and how it’s just impossible for her to believe she has babies who aren’t water babies, aren’t interested in the submersion, not even a little. I mean, really.

What I’m saying is, of all the things that happened later, there was this moment of unattainable beauty, of a person whom I did not possess, who did not possess me, walking slowly down the cold beach, touching things I couldn’t see on the sand. I only knew her a little at that moment. I wasn’t part of the multitude she was experiencing—her ocean, her sand, her crabs, her shells, her memories of a time before I was born, her fears, all that electricity humming its perfect, separate self.

*

My mom is plugged in and her eyes are closed.

It has been three months since her stroke.

I am leaving the hospital for the day and kiss her arm goodbye because I can’t kiss her face because there’s too much machinery. Because her brain is still bleeding despite four surgeries, despite a pump that sucks liquid out of her skull, carries it down her neck, and deposits it into her stomach. She is her own machine.

I am not allowed to kiss her face and I am not actually supposed to be touching her skin at all right now. She has sepsis. She’s in a white-starched bed in a white-walled room sealed within another room, and everyone coming in or out must be covered head to toe in plastic protectant, eye guard, mask, and mine is down and I hear a rap on the window from a nurse in the quarantine station:

PUT ON YOUR MASK.

What kind of prayers? What last rites would you like for her? the hospital priest had asked Davy and then kept asking as the days and then weeks of emergency turned into months. What kind of life will she have now? the doctors asked, we asked, and Is it our job to decide if it goes on?

There are tubes that go into her hand. The crook of her elbow. Her forearm. One that pumps right into her heart. I kiss her arm and my nose catches on one of them. I jerk my head up, startled, and it pulls the skin taut under the tape holding a needle in and there is a shrill cry of emergency on top of the wheezing of the accordion putting air into her mouth from a fat tube. The machines alarm. Flashing and buzzing. What I need to do is keep breathing, but how can I as the nurses rush in to check and reset the machines and see if I’ve killed her. Her eyes are still closed.

The nurses in their germ-free spacesuits touch their fingers to buttons that reset her circuits. They tell me she is fine.

I am waiting for her to be fine.

To open her eyes. To say, Babygirl.

There’s so much wattage that performs the wonder of keeping her alive. This electric woman.

*

I smile and wave for the audience, keep the other hand beneath me against the metal plate of the electric chair. They cannot hear the blood roiling in my temples, the nerves, they cannot feel my hammering heart. From the corner of my eye, I can see the water pool beneath the chair. I choose to remain seated. To flare my fingers, angle my wrists, press as firmly into the chair as I can so the bulb burns brightly. The possibility of getting hurt—which I’d thought a lot about earlier in the season—is secondary. What matters now are the bright stage lights on my skin. I will keep one hand beneath me, the bulb glowing from my mouth, the other hand up, up, up toward the sky, that kind of woman, directing attention toward what’s bright.