The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(31)
“I grow orchids,” Leo says. “That’s really what I love.” He takes out his phone and fumbles his thick fingers across the small buttons, breathing heavily and cursing quietly when the buttons aren’t taking him where he wants to go. I look down at the pony, steadily munching hay, taking no notice of my presence at all. “Here,” Leo says, coming up right beside me. On his screen is a photograph of a tiny violet orchid. “And here,” he says, showing me a snow-white large-petaled flower next. “They love it on my boat. It’s parked in Florida. You can come stay with me anytime,” he says. “You’re always welcome. Remind me of your name again?”
“Tess. Thank you,” I tell him. “They’re beautiful.” I’m amazed by his level of kindness toward a stranger. I imagine, in another context, that this kind of offer might come across as creepy, but he seems wholly focused on his flowers, and I have no reason to distrust him.
“How many seasons have you been out?” he asks.
“This is my first,” I say.
“Oh, you seem like a real pro,” he says, and I think about my Band-Aid finger and sore muscles and snake tears and nearly laugh out loud. “Well, the truth is that you’ll never be the same after doing this,” Leo says. “This kind of life changes you.”
“You’re not the first person who’s said that,” I say.
“Folks who spend life on the road are just different.”
“Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way?” I ask.
“That all depends,” he says, smiling. “Gotta wait to find out.” He pulls up more pictures of his orchids.
*
It seems so obvious—that whatever life you’re living will change you. But it’s not something I was aware of as a kid, not something kids are aware of in general—that their world is particular. I didn’t know my version of America was different from anyone else’s.
My America was full of women with armpit hair. A lot of musical events happened at my K–8 school, which doubled as a community center and day care with a rainbow painted above the door. There were drum circles and concerts on the scratchy grass, and my family would trek down to these events like everybody else. The women would stand up and sway their bodies along with the music, slowly at first, speeding up as they raised their arms to the sky for a fuller expression of the music entering them, and that’s when their soft, sweet armpit hair would emerge, and their skirts would twirl around them like trumpet flowers, and wafts of pot and sage would rise—it took me years to understand those scents as separate from one another. Sometimes men rose up, too, and swayed with half-closed eyelids like gentle ogres, and it was all sort of nice. It was what I understood America to be.
My mother shaved her pits. She shaved her legs. Sometimes. Once a week, she taught me. Well, from the ankle to the knee. Never shave above the knee, she told me, because there aren’t really hairs up there anyway, but the ones that are there will grow back black and thick like thorny vines.
She stood up when the loud music moved her like the other moved women, but she didn’t raise her arms to the sky. She snapped, or moved side to side, foot to foot. She swayed her hips, smiled, took sips of wine.
Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I couldn’t believe the number of times she asked me to dance with her in one afternoon. Come on and dance, she called to me. Stop being so shy, she said sweetly, and smiled, both her hands out to me, snapping with the rhythm and then beckoning me over, and I wished above all else to be invisible. Or dead.
I surveyed the scene around me. The town, mostly these women, carried out ongoing campaigns for the blue-bellied salamanders and campaigns to preserve the open ridges and campaigns for the spawning salmon and campaigns to create meditation retreats for the children. We were the children, and we ate miner’s lettuce from the side of the road, and there was love—local, free-range, organic love. I wouldn’t have said, as I looked at the pom-poms of their pit hair beaded with drops of sweat like beautiful cobwebs, that I didn’t envy them. That kind of looseness, that total I-don’t-give-a-damn-ness. I think my mom felt the same. I could see her there, bouncing side to side, talking to a friend but eyeing the wild mothers, wondering if letting go completely was a trick she would ever be able to perform.
It would be easiest to say she was this and she was that—a free-spirited smiling hippie in this free-spirited smiling hippie town—but she wasn’t. She was, partially. She was complicated. Like everyone. A part of her wanted to be loose in the world, an ecstatic celebrator, and another part of her desperately wanted to be accepted by the wealthy pearl-wearing women who hired her to paint fabric for their draperies.
My mom and Davy had moved to this drum-circle town because he’d found a job close by, and they were part-time hippies and she was full-bellied pregnant with my brother. I asked my mom, years later, how she could have left my dad and married someone else so quickly. I didn’t ask it kindly.
Sometimes, you just have to make the best choice for you, even if it’s not the pretty one.
As soon as he’d heard that my mom was splitting up with her husband, Davy had left his job as chief audio engineer at NPR without another job, packed all his things into his car, and driven across the country from D.C. to San Francisco. For her. For the possibility of her.
Fate’s the word Davy used. Finding each other again, getting married, him finding a job. A year after my brother was born, we went to a portrait studio in the mall. There were bears and plastic roses and wagons and piles of empty Christmas packages along the walls to use as props. We chose the wagon, set my small brother inside. I kneeled next to the wagon like an obedient little pioneer with my hands clasped tight in my good girl’s lap. I already knew, at five and a half, that I was the add-on. That I was not a core member of this nice, new, fated family. I stayed quiet a lot, afraid to remind anyone else of what they must know, too.