The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(63)
She stopped drawing Jesus and became a hippie instead.
Some of those ideas, some of what Jesus taught, some of what the free-flowing skirt people taught, were the same. And these were the things she carried with her. Kindness. Sacrifice.
Driving in the car to a soccer tournament when I was thirteen or fourteen, she’d made two pieces of toast each for us with mayonnaise and sliced garden tomatoes, big thick red slabs. I ate my two, scarfed them down the way a teenager would, and she’d just finished her first slice.
“Here,” she said, “eat my other one. I’m not hungry anymore.” We had hours and hours ahead of us on the foggy soccer fields. I knew it wasn’t true that she wasn’t hungry, knew it wasn’t a nice thing for me to do, but I gobbled down that other piece of toast, too, licked the mayonnaise from my fingers, and, later, tried not to look at her much from the other side of the field where I sat on the sidelines across to where she sat on the sidelines, chatting with one of the other moms probably wearing pearls, knowing not to wave at me, but watching me. We watched each other a lot. She wanted something from me. She was desperate with how much she wanted it. I thought it was success, to have a daughter who did all the things she hadn’t done—go to college, have a career, achieve financial stability, be a person other people called smart. Find a job with health insurance. Dental insurance. Move forward in the world with a paycheck. She believed in art but wanted desperately for me never to be an artist. It took me a long, long time to figure out that although all that was important to her, it wasn’t the main point.
“There’s one thing missing from my life,” she told me when I was twenty-one. “One thing that has been the biggest heartbreak of my life. The biggest hole. It’s you. It’s that you don’t love me.”
I didn’t say anything back.
I knew this was the wrong thing to do. This was a moment where she was reaching across our chasm and all I had to do was say what was true, which is that there was always love, even if it sometimes felt like a broken train, like a suitcase of weapons, like a sick dog. Even if I didn’t always believe my love was true.
I like to think that if I’d known that in five years we’d never be able to have a spoken conversation again, I would have grabbed her hands and, tears cresting, told her that of course I loved her then and always had, that I was so sorry I’d been cold and distant but that I’d felt hurt by her for so many years and it seemed like distance from her made the hurt feel better. And maybe now could be a time we could start again and get to know one another.
But I didn’t know the future. I only knew I had a little power. I stayed silent. It was one step kinder than what I’d said to her in the past.
MONSTERS
Day 49 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
One afternoon, I see the boss laughing and chatting with a short guy who is gesturing around our stage with great familiarity. His head darts back and forth, scanning the tent like he’s selling hot watches from his trench coat. I lose track of him while I perform, but when I return from my act he’s waiting for me backstage.
“Hey, can I talk to you?” he asks me. Eyes the other girls. “Privately?”
We walk out back as I hear the guillotine music begin, which means I have about four minutes until I need to slide into the headless woman’s chair. A few carnies are walking in a cluster along the dirt road we’re parked beside, an entryway to the back alleys of carnietown, and I can see my toothpaste spit from that morning drying in the dust.
“I’d love for you to get eaten by a monster,” he says, grinning. I’m silent. Interested, obviously, but wary. “I make these movies,” he says. Tommy had told me that a guy named Raymond would show up at the fair, and that he was eccentric and hyper and made some adult movies, and that he was a friend of the show’s. “There’s a monster named Vore I’ve built and you’d be tied up and eaten by him. If you agree, after the fair closes one of these nights, I’ll pick you up and bring you to my studio, and we’ll film you getting pretend-eaten by a huge papier-maché monster, I’ll give you a hundred bucks, and bring you back. Sunshine has already agreed. She’ll be the dominatrix. I’m going to ask Pipscy, too. You two will be sidekicks. No nudity, no violence, nothing you don’t want to do. Just getting eaten. Oh, by the way, I’m Raymond. How’s that sound?”
Three nights later, Raymond meets us as the show is closing at midnight and leads the three of us, each carrying a bag with costume options and a makeup case, down the darkening midway. I would never do this alone, but I trust these women, and they seem to feel just fine about going with Raymond. The lingering carnies wipe down the counters in food trucks or hang new prize stock in their game stands. I expect a big truck or old Chevy convertible out in the parking lot. I am surprised when Raymond unlocks the door of a midnineties Honda, the back seat sprinkled with Cheerios and a baby-doll bib beneath a car seat.
“Wanna see pictures of my niece?” he says, and begins scrolling through a series of photos on his phone: the baby behind a plate of spaghetti, the baby tottering across a wide, open field.
“Raymond? We should get going if we want to get back before we open tomorrow morning.” Sunshine nudges him.
“Oh, right,” he says, “that’s good. You should keep me on track. Whenever I start to lose track like that, just say, ‘Raymond! Stay focused!’ And I’ll try to get focused. I’m just”—he stops to giggle for a moment—“so easily distractable.”