The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(51)

But maybe she knows all that. Maybe she’s looking at the footed fishnets and remembering herself at sixteen on a stage in San Francisco, drawing spontaneous illustrations for the judges of the Miss Junior California pageant. The stage would have been lit brightly, would have been hot, and the air all around would have smelled like vanilla and sweat and Tahitian Sunsets and the other smells of girls ripening into women. All those high heels. They’re competing for the title. My mother, the young woman, the artist, has bright green eyes with flecks of orange, and the judges call her up for the talent portion of the event. She hasn’t told her family, anyone, she’s tried out, or won the smaller competitions to get there. She just saunters out, pen in hand, and, eyes closed, doodles all over the giant paper pad facing the audience. A mess of lines and jags and dots are on the page. She opens her eyes, winks at the judges, and sets a timer for three minutes. Frantically, what were two disparate flecks on the page become the eyebrows of a whale. Two lines meet beneath her wrist and grow into coral, algae, sunken ships. A universe grows between her fingers, a seascape, a story, and the pen and the paper and the judges are not inside it but they are close and hungry for it, and isn’t that most alluring of all, being right next to something special?

The dogs outside the window have picked up the scent of a doe. They circle the ground, their snouts down. Nature carrying on.

She sets the fishnets back onto the costume pile and starts to pick up the tutu, stops. Holds still. Imagine there’s a spotlight on her.

An epiphany approaches.

We hold still.

We’re looking at her looking past the table.

The judges can’t take their eyes off her.

She pushes the tulle aside, finally, and the show continues.

Or it doesn’t.

I don’t know, because the planet of her head is unreachable. Maybe the show has just begun. Maybe she’s in a musical.

She hums.

My mom’s travel clothes are folded into suitcases. Thin material, easy to rinse and wash in a sink, clothes made for American tourists traveling to hot countries. This after the sequins onstage and the high heels and the wink to the judges with the pen in her hand … Is this in her character still? Is she still her same character?

I’m telling her the story of where I found each of the costume pieces as she paws through them, because they are the places she taught me when I was young.

The thrift shop down the street from the Ethiopian place on Haight, the San Rafael ballet store, the costume shop in the Mission, and she nods sometimes, and I keep talking, saying whatever I’m saying because there’s safety in noise.

Davy places a bowl filled with yogurt and cereal in front of my mom. Her wheelchair is scooted right up against the lip of the table, a spoon by the bowl’s side. A metal stick with a concave dome. A silver object, shiny, beautiful even. It is familiar. It is a part of the world of ordinary objects, although what is ordinary anymore?

Silver oval, silver line, sheen.

She grasps the spoon’s handle and picks it up. Holds it six inches from the tabletop. The spoon as meteor, as mirror, as muddled lifeline to another world. Brings the spoon up to her face, hesitates, then rubs it softly along her cheekbone.

“No, honey,” Davy says. “Spoon.”

She pulls it away from her cheek, sets it back down on the table.

Spoon.

What good is a word without its meaning? Is there a meaning? Is the meaning there, deep, like a song she recognizes with the lyrics on the tip of her tongue?

Spoon.

She picks up the spoon. Sets it down.

She reaches into the bowl with her thumb and pointer finger, pinches a flake of cereal, and brings it up to her mouth. Chews. Her fingers return to the bowl, three fingertips in this time, a scoop of purple yogurt on her pointer and middle fingertips, a journey up to the mouth.

Silver lollipop. Moon.

She takes the spoon in her hand, sets it back down.

Fingers in yogurt, licking each off, sucking the little pools of sweet from beneath her long nails after each scoop, this yogurt now honored and loved and savored like the last smear of birthday cake frosting.

She picks up the spoon, dips it into the yogurt, takes a scoop. Brings it to her mouth. Opens her mouth. Puts the spoon inside. Closes her lips around the metal moon, the silver half egg. Pulls the spoon from her mouth and chews the food still inside. All these familiar actions. All the steps in an ordinary life. She eats on her own, drinks by herself, in her own time. Relearning how to be in the altered world.

*

There’s a photograph from the train station my brother sends me the morning after my parents leave. My brother, standing on one side of my mom’s wheelchair, is in his dressy work clothes and smiles his huge bright smile, the one that makes people adore him immediately. His obvious happiness and casual hand on my mom’s shoulder is an uncomfortable contrast to my grandmother, my mom’s mom. She stands on the other side of the wheelchair. She wears a bright yellow coat and white gloves and holds a disposable camera the exact color of her jacket and has the smallest, saddest smile. Her eyes don’t meet the camera, but slide instead to some distant corner on the floor, or maybe they weren’t focused on anything at all. She is ninety-eight years old.

Their train will take them from Emeryville, California, to New York City, where they will spend a few days recovering before boarding the ship to Europe.

Here they go. Say goodbye.