The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(115)
I start talking. Put word after word to finish the act, look out at the audience and then back to my parents, checking to see if they are a mirage, if this is one of my daydreams, but there they both are each time. And my mom finds me with her eyes. She locks in on me. I can hear her softly singing in the back of the crowd, na na na na, na na naaaaa.
I turn as much of the audience as I can and my parents line up, too, getting closer and closer with each dollar I take until, finally, they are right in front of me, alive, completely alive, the strangest thing of all. The most beautiful, tender, impossible thing of all.
I dive down to my mom, throwing both arms around her shoulders, pressing my cheek up against her cheek. The softest skin of any person in the world. I feel the ledge of her skull, and inside, know that her brain contains universes. Travels between them, even.
Davy has tears in the corners of his eyes, more gray in his hair, but he is smiling. I stand to hug him, a huge, deep, grateful hug. I hadn’t given him a lot of those, even though he’d been around almost my entire life. Even though he has stuck around, and stuck around, and stuck around.
He looks exhausted but also brilliantly, brilliantly alive.
Not knowing what to say, and needing to begin the next act, I direct them behind the blade box so they can see Sunshine contorted inside. Davy pushes my mom across the uneven grass, the big wheels on Bubbles bumping over the knots and clumps, and we go on with the show.
*
I sneak into the tent to stand beside them in the audience once I have a few minutes between acts, pull them into the far corner.
How could a person believe that a thing like this was happening?
A miracle, right inside this very tent.
Turns out, their ship had arrived in Orlando, Florida, which was just a few hours from the fair, and the train they were supposed to immediately board had been delayed a few days for repairs. They’d rented a car and driven over and would stay a night before they went back to board the train and head across the country to California. To home.
“After all, what is adventure but inconvenience, properly regarded?” Davy quotes. It’s his favorite new phrase, one that now accompanies every e-mail he sends. My mom agrees with a hum.
They stay for two rounds of the show, see me as the headless woman, see me talk the bed of nails act, and see me, best of all, as the electric woman.
I sit on the metal plate, connect myself to the grid. The bulb is in my mouth. Davy is snapping photos on his phone, and behind that, I can see his wide smile. My mom is watching, too. Carefully. Tracking me exactly, even when Red is talking and gesturing beside me. She is watching a moment of this adventure in the glowing mouth-light, and I am watching an afterglow of her adventure emanating off every part of her body, a body I did not think would ever recover, did not think was recovered when they left for the trip, and am seeing here, finally, finally seeing here, and knowing that really, recovery is beside the point.
Her body right now is alive, full of light.
An hour later, they tell me they are pretty worn-out, ready to get a little sleep. I can’t even imagine what has happened to their understanding of fatigue, their sense of what is possible, to their relationship in the months they’ve been away, or, really, what it means to them to be back on this continent.
My mom hums, holding her palm against my cheek. I don’t know if this has happened during their trip, or if I’m just noticing it for the first time, but her eyes are back to green. A shade of pear, and bright, with flecks of orange, the same as they were before she had the stroke. It seems impossible, but there they are.
She presses the side of her face into mine. The sound of her song gets softer and softer until it is just a quiet sort of whisper for a child. The kind you make to reassure her that everything’s all right.
OUT OF THE MIST
Day 146 of 150
World of Wonders
November 2013
It is lightly raining and very gray. Up and down the midway rows, carnies in their bright blue polyester shirts are hanging new tigers and martians from their games and stacking milk bottles and sweeping broken glass and blowing up flaccid balloons to tack on the board.
My mom and Davy come to the fair early the next morning, before it officially opens. There is only a little bit of time before they have to get back into their rental car and drive to Orlando, to rest a bit before getting on the train that will complete their journey to where they began, though I wonder if it will look or feel like the same place.
I see them approaching from the end of one of the rows, two people appearing from the mist. They might have looked like this on a street in Florence, discussing what they’d see that day or which café to visit for espresso.
Something dumb strikes me. They are in this mist, getting closer to me, but I see them more clearly than I have in a long, long time.
Story goes: once there was a girl who kept her parents in a fog in her mind. There, it was easier to keep the sick safe and distant. And then one day, the girl saw that actually, while she thought they were napping in the fog, they’d been riding goddamned dragons in there.
It is a ridiculous and obvious metaphor, but I feel it happen, these two clear whole people walking out of something, and I can see them as people who are not first and foremost my parents, who are adventurers. I try to imagine meeting them somewhere on their journey, in the audience of the opera, maybe. How much I’d like them. How incredible I’d think their trip was. How ballsy.