The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(50)

“God.”

“Right? Remember?”

I try to conjure up an image of her chiseling molds, measuring concrete and stone. I can’t see the bricks Devin is talking about, but I can see her hands doing a thing like that. Bony, raised green veins, chewed away around the nails. Her hands were often splotched with the stains of dye she’d use for painting. She was a textile designer, had her own business for years in our garage and then in a little studio she rented a few towns over. Hand-painted fabric for high-end customers to turn into drapes or upholstery. The business always just broke even. Custom-designed orders for spas and rich people’s homes.

“The music comes on when you enter the room, automatically,” she explained at dinner ten or so years before her stroke, after visiting one of her clients at home. “The woman had an obvious facelift. She looked surprised the whole time I was there. It’s so silly, a facelift,” she said, “and so expensive.” She pulled the skin taut across her throat and chin with a hand. Our dinners cooled as we watched her. She did the same to her cheeks. “But there are places you can go where it’s not so much,” she said. “Mexico. You fly down there and have the procedure and a whole vacation, all for cheaper than doing it here.”

“Mom. Why would you even talk about doing something like that?” I asked, not kindly.

“You don’t get it,” she snapped at me suddenly. “You don’t know what it feels like to get old. Just wait. Wait until you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.”

My brother and Davy, as usual, stayed out of it. They knew about stray bullets.

“In the morning there would be fresh fruit, and then beers in the afternoon, and all the while…,” she trailed off, pulling the skin taut against her hairline. “Take it easy, missy,” she said, looking at me. I hadn’t taken my eyes off her. “I’m not actually going to do it. I’m really just thinking about the ceviche.” She licked her fingers as if they were covered in lime. “Anyway, you’ve got your brain to rely on. So you’ll never be bothered with this stuff,” she said, smiling at me before she stood up from the table and left. She stayed in the bathroom a long time. We ate our dinner.

“Did she ever make those bricks?” Devin asks.

“I don’t remember,” I say.

“They had dogs or pheasants or something on them. I wonder if she made them.”

“I bet she did,” I say.

“I bet so, too.”





THE DEPARTURE

Two years and eight months after the stroke

June 2013

On April 7, 2013, she is back in the hospital after a series of seizures. She has high blood pressure. She is indicating headaches. Her body won’t stop its shaking. She is in the hospital, then out.

Their trip is three months away.

I leave for the sideshow.

Two months.

One.

Bags packed.

A friend drives them to the train station, helps them board.

*

The last time I saw them, a few days before I left for the sideshow and two months before they left for their trip, my pile of new costumes was on my parents’ kitchen table.

The table was in the new house my mom and stepdad rented. Well. First there was the single room Davy rented—I figured out how to cook rice without a stove, in the toaster oven! Davy gloated—then the tiny apartment under tall bay trees, and now this little yellow house. Inside the house it is dark and out the window is a creek and an expanse of grass. Deer graze and neighbors’ dogs poop and run and outside it’s always the yellow or gold or brown of wild California grass.

We were all preparing to leave. Them to Italy via a boat across the Atlantic for three months. Probably they won’t come back—I can’t imagine my stepdad returning without my mom, if it came to that. He said as much in the hospital. He wouldn’t go on without her. And now his life’s central task is caring for her. What would there be for him to come back to?

I’m leaving for the sideshow for five months. Maybe I will come back. We are all already performing.

How will she be able to tell him if she’s sick? neighbors asked, family asked. Will he know if she is tired? Will she know what to do if he gets hurt over there? Could she go get help?

Don’t know. Maybe. No. No.

The rest of the kitchen table is covered with bottles of pills and piles of diapers and small plastic salt and pepper shakers and maps of Italy. Their own costumes in neat piles. Checklists. Mine: Eyeliner and tampons crossed out. Theirs: Packs of AAA batteries and hats crossed out.

My pile of costumes has sequined shorts and glittery headbands. I imagine Davy covered in glitter and my mother in a sequined pantsuit, and there’s a laugh track in my head as he explains the kind of weight he’ll carry across Italy.

Also in my pile of costumes are two pairs of industrial-strength fishnets. My mom scooches toward the table in her wheelchair and picks up the black ones. She stretches the foot between her pointer and middle finger on her left hand. Lace. Shadows. Honeycomb. She stares at the fabric, running her finger over it. Where do these take her? There’s that scene in Good Will Hunting where Minnie Driver says she’d give her fortune back for just one more day with her dad, and I used to think, Bullshit. No way that’s true. Now I have a desperate, wild need to know what the feel of these fishnets means to her, what they remind her of, and now that’s not something I can know. My hands are twitchy by my side. Prepared for the moment when we’ll rehash the scene where she brings the thing she’s just picked up to her mouth and sticks it inside, and my never-gentle-enough voice reminds her the thing in her hand is fabric, not a glass of water, is lotion, not a slice of apple, is tweezers, is a stone, and my hand will quickly but firmly move to her hand and guide the object away from her parted lips, and I will feel sorry for having done so.