The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(62)

These aren’t dreams I have at night. I am too tired by the time I lay my head down to think about anything much at all and my subconscious seems to feel the same. I fall right asleep, sleep through the night, wake in the morning to do it all again. Some mornings I wake and wish so deeply to be waking, instead, in a room by myself with a locking door and a few hours to do as I wish. But when I play that out—what I would do next: read? cook eggs?—the action inevitably turns to doing something to keep my mom safe, to helping Davy, and again, as it’s been for two years and ten months, I don’t know what to do. Here, I get up out of my bunk and know exactly what to do.

I want to believe the waking daydreams bubble up out of my subconscious, as dreams do, but I think, mostly, they are conscious attempts at practicing for the worst. They happen as I sit backstage between acts, staring out the trailer’s back end into the late morning sun on the pig races next to us, the little pigs’ pink skin becoming the purse of the woman who happens to walk under a window in Italy and smell something foul, who happens to know the old woman who owns and rents out the little apartment where she smells the bad smell and whom she accompanies to check on the current renters, an American couple, one handicapped, who have been quiet as little mice and are now two rotting corpses.

*

“You know what’s really neat? Watching the color of the rocks change as you move across the country,” Davy says. We’re on the phone, finally, a few days into their journey. I’d called and texted a few times, and he hadn’t responded. Too busy, he said. The train had stopped over in Chicago and they’d switched trains and now they were in New York and things were FINE.

“They go from gray to almost gold and then you get the red rocks, which have orange in them, and then granite in some places. It’s just really neat to see,” he said.

“How’s Mom?”

“Na na na na,” she says into the phone.

“Great, she’s great,” he says.

“And you?”

“Great, too.”

“Great.”

“Well, the train car was a little small,” he says. “We got bumped around in there quite a bit, trying to get to the toilet.”

“How bad?”

“Not bad.”

“How bad?”

“Just some bruises. No big deal. We’re going to Times Square tomorrow. Mom wants to get a hot dog from one of those vendors on the street. And then we’re gonna sit out there and people watch. I’m sure she’ll want extra relish. My pickle girl.”

“Na na na na,” she says.

“Well, we better run, cutie,” he says.

“Na na,” my mom says.

“I love you, too,” I say. We hang up.

*

For the next part of their act, if you can believe your eyes, the two great American daredevils will board a ship and set off across the Atlantic. For nine days, they’ll be aboard the vessel with no phone service and expensive Internet. Don’t expect to hear from us, they say. They’ll be too busy fighting for the best view of the dolphins jumping alongside the ship.

“Mom got a set of paints and a notebook and wanted to record street life in New York,” Davy says. “She wanted them for the ship, too. We’re going to find a little table next to a window that looks out over the water, and she’s going to paint and I’m going to whittle and we’re going to just sit there. We haven’t had time to do anything like that in a long, long time.”

*

“She was a very serious little girl,” my grandmother told me once, of my mother. “She turned into a funny woman, but when she was young, she was very serious. Two things happened at around the same time. First, she realized how much she loved to draw, and second, she started believing in Jesus. She’d sit at this little desk in her room for hours drawing excruciatingly detailed depictions of Jesus on the cross. Perfectly shaded thorns on his crown, spherical droplets of blood hanging by a thread from his palms and feet. Picture after picture she would draw, like she was trying to exorcise something out of herself. Like there would be some truth, or salvation, if she could just get the angles right.

“The rest of us weren’t very religious. We’d go to church on Sundays, I mean, like all good people from Oklahoma were raised to do, but she was the one in the family that took it to a new level. Went to a camp for Christian kids, then became a counselor there as a teenager. She loved it, was gaga for Jesus. But one summer, when she came home, she said that was it. That she’d never go back again.”

My mom had told me a story about this, once, with some sadness. After the first session ended, there were a few days before the new campers arrived when she and the other counselors had meetings and planning sessions. One of the primary topics was how to get the campers to have a moment of salvation or, for those not devout enough, who’d been sent there by worried parents, maybe, to feel some sort of light godly pressure to convert. That was what many of the daily activities were structured around, the pressure to show other campers you’d found God.

This was crushing. All those years of believing that finding God came from somewhere beautiful, somewhere inside, now seemed a sham.

When she believed in something, she wanted to believe in it all the way. For its beauty. For the way it felt true inside. But she never wanted to be duped. Never wanted to seem like she wasn’t smart.