The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(17)

“Oh, I was wondering where that was,” she said, speaking swiftly. “I’m glad you found it, at least,” she said, moving quickly and taking it from me. “And not your brother. My son found mine when he helped me move last. That was embarrassing.” In a quick flurry of movement she had the thing wrapped up in another slip and tucked into a sock and buried deep in the box we were packing.

I looked out the bedroom window at the golden hills and remembered a lesson my mom had taught me about keeping yourself safe. If you see a mountain lion, move slowly. Pick up the closest branch and place it vertically on top of your head. Keep one hand on your crown to balance the branch and stretch the other, if you can, out to your side, as wide as it can go, the fingers as splayed as starfish. You are creating a monster. You are becoming a bigger beast than the mountain lion, a beast the mountain lion will fear and acquiesce to as you back away slowly, slowly, horns still on head, wings spread wide, slowly, slowly, eye to eye.





THE DRAGON

One month after the stroke

November 2010

It was Thanksgiving. I made lists.

We were crammed into a neighbor’s kitchen. They were away for the weekend. My mom was still in the intensive-care unit, infections having crawled into her brain and her blood. She couldn’t eat or drink anything because her brain had forgotten how to chew and swallow. We spent most of our time at the hospital. Every day was the last day, the big goodbye, but then there was a new last day. Again and again.

So, Thanksgiving. Some aunts and uncles had driven up, and we all stood shoulder to shoulder in the neighbor’s kitchen being good ol’ regular Americans. Cranberries, fresh and canned. I wrote down recipe temperatures and cooking times. I wrote celery, butter, russet potatoes, flour. There was some communal delusion that Thanksgiving would heal us a little. We were big into holidays. The whole extended family loved elaborate meals, decorations, drinking. My mom especially. But we’d forgotten she was the one always in the middle, making all of it come together.

In preparation for Christmas ten years earlier, my mom came home with a thin cardboard box covered in Chinese characters. Without saying a word, she pulled out a red-and-orange flattened shape from inside. “Hold this very gently,” she whispered to my brother on the couch. He was eleven, I was fifteen. She placed one end of the paper in his hands. She took the other and walked slowly backward, letting it unfold between them. One red-orange plane of paper turned into two, then three, then more, strings attaching each section as she walked backward across the living room. When it seemed like all the sections had unfolded, she backed away even farther and the paper kept growing. It kept getting bigger than we imagined it could.

“I’ve decided on a theme for Christmas this year,” she said. The paper kept unspooling, on and on like scarves pulled from a magician’s throat. “The theme is: Chinese.” She was standing against the far wall, twenty feet away. Stretching across the room was a paper dragon. It had gone from the world of two dimensions into three. It was our year to host Christmas for our extended family.

“The theme is Chinese?” we asked. “What does that even mean?”

“You’ll see,” she said, with a grin like a plotting cartoon character’s.

“For Christmas?” we asked, still incredulous.

She sighed. “I’m tired of turkeys and hams, aren’t you?” We nodded, but we were not tired of turkeys or hams. In my fifteen years on earth, we’d never had turkeys or hams. We didn’t eat traditional holiday foods because they were always boring, according to my mom. We knew about them only as the tropes of other people’s worlds from the occasional mainstream movie we were allowed to watch.

She set the dragon down and pulled from other boxes little firecrackers and paper lanterns and big plastic soup spoons.

“Do you kids know what’s no fun?” she asked. We shook our heads. “Everything ordinary.”

Over the next few weeks, she and Davy were up on ladders every evening. Room by room, they transformed our small house into one of those shops you see in Chinatown so crammed full of goods it was hard to make out one object from the next. There were bright lanterns painted with pictures of bamboo and butterflies and flowers that hung from our lights, and paper umbrellas dangling upside down, and the counter was stacked with fake jade cats and red satin. She filled the fridge with wonton wrappers, tiny mushrooms, and big bundles of greens.

On Christmas, when the eight family members came, they were in equal parts delighted and wary—this fun wild sister, this creative one, this girl always a few steps away from what they understood. The dragon hung by translucent fishing line from hooks in the ceiling above the dinner table, a floating centerpiece. “This year,” my mother said as we sat down, beginning a Christmas toast, “we will all be transported somewhere far, far away.” Her tone was deeply solemn. There was always somewhere else to be. Some great dream adventure waiting, this time in misty mountains dotted with jade lions.

She was always a little bit elsewhere. Maybe that helped her when one of the doctors stood with his face six inches from hers as if she were deaf and dumb, asking her to stick out her tongue. Maybe she didn’t respond to his command because it was stupid, ordinary, and she was distracted by more interesting concerns; maybe she was inside some deep fold of her brain designing a new landscape for her dragons.