The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(43)

Dr. Couney funded his research by charging admission to see the tiny babies in their translucent worlds. Over his long career displaying the babies—from 1896 to 1940—they were also shown at World’s Fairs, amusement parks, and anywhere else he could find an audience. The money enabled Dr. Couney to keep the babies alive without cost to their parents. It’s unclear whether he studied with some of the other pioneering doctors of the time whom he claimed to have studied with, and even more dubious whether he was actually a medical doctor at all. Regardless, he kept thousands of babies alive—6,500 of the 8,000 who came into his care. They would have otherwise died. Dr. Couney passed away in 1950, not long after his incubators were finally accepted by hospitals for regular medical practice.

After six months in the incubator, Lucille went home with her parents. She lived for ninety-six more years.

*

Sometimes, a daughter has to step to the side.

I called my dad when my mom first had her stroke. She was his only marriage—brief, and wondrous, and terrible. They’ve been divorced since I was two.

She had a massive stroke, I told him.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he said.

“We don’t know what will happen,” I said, my voice trembling. “It doesn’t look good.”

There was silence on the other line, the sound of muffled choked breathing. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I was always so sure that we’d end up together as old people in rocking chairs.”

“Dad—”

“We’d be chain-smoking on a porch somewhere in a cabin in the middle of the woods.”

I was shocked. All I knew of what they thought of one another was from their twenty-four divorced years of fighting, threats, legal action, and assertions of the other’s cruelty.

“I never stopped knowing that would be my future,” he said.

“You hated each other.”

“Yes,” he said. “And we loved each other. Just two rocking chairs, and the sounds of birds. That was the plan.”

I was stunned. Silenced. I was standing in a parking lot. I had walked out there thinking this generic, anonymous space would be a perfect location for my grateful tears when I had a conversation in which my dad finally started showing up like a dad. I had thought maybe I could talk to someone who used to know my mom so well about how scary this time was, how much already felt lost.

“Two rocking chairs on a porch sound pretty nice,” I finally said. My voice was not trembling. It had happened so fast—this reminder that he was the person he was. That he would not just start acting like a different person, like some version of a dad I wanted him to be. He had his own pain, his own wishes.

“She couldn’t wait to start smoking again, once she was old and it didn’t matter anymore,” he said.

I hadn’t realized between all the times that he told me how much he hated her, how terrible she had been to him and to me, that he also loved her. That most of all, he loved her.

I felt suddenly extraneous in the conversation, in my father’s idyllic future with his ex-wife.

This was a new layer of pain I hadn’t anticipated. I had this deep sadness over my mom—losing her, in whatever form that losing was going to take. But then there was a next level, where the people I turned to for help and love, Davy, my dad, were so immersed in their own pain that they had no space for anybody else. There wasn’t anyone left to be the grown-up and help me through but me.

I thought about what my dad was like when I was young, about what story he would have told if someone had asked about his little daughter. What he would have known. There was one story I could remember he’d told about how when I was three to six months old, every day at 4:00 p.m. I’d get fussy and cry and nothing could stop it. Until one day he set me on his forearm, my head in his giant palm, my butt tucked into the crease of his elbow, walked around our apartment, and sang.

Old Dan Tucker was a good old man, he sang, my pinched, hysterical face screaming up at his, he washed his face in a frying pan, combed his hair with a wagon wheel, and he had a toothache in his heel. He sang this over and over, the same little song, and eventually my wailing lessened, and I watched him, and listened.

Maybe this was his shark tale. Maybe when someone mentioned a baby who wouldn’t stop crying, he’d tell his story about fitting his daughter’s tiny head into his palm and walking back and forth across the living room until she was soothed by a nonsense song sung from a father’s mouth.





MUD

Day 20 of 150

World of Wonders

July 2013

The bathrooms closest to our tent are also nearest the livestock barn, so by our second day in Maumee, Ohio, the showers are filled with giant clumps of mud and grass, and the lights have acrobatic bugs circling them and dive-bombing human intruders. The 4-H kids clean up here after their time in the pigpens, and then we clean up here to try to look like starlets. As I come out of the shower, avoiding as many of the mud pits as I can, bent over beside a sink with her pants down around her ankles is Cassie, rubbing white cream for heat rash onto her butt cheeks.

“Oh hey, babe,” she says, looking at me upside down from between her legs. “Need any rash cream?”

I chuckle and glance over at Pipscy, who is bent over the sink behind Cassie, dousing her hair in red hair dye. So far, she’s changed her hair color twice since we’ve been on the road. Pipscy is wearing a crop top and low-slung cotton pants, and, it appears, has a long string of crusty black pubic hair lining the top of her waistband.