The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(66)
I still don’t have much in the way of actual skills to perform, not really, not like everyone else out here, but I know how to talk into a mic. I can look right into an audience member’s eyes and, with a smile, lie.
When I am not talking into the mic, though, I present my body in various forms. These, for example, are the instructions for losing your head:
Put on your hospital gown. Step quietly onto the rickety side stage and prepare to slide sideways into the chair. Try not to ruffle the curtains surrounding it. If you do ruffle the curtains, or even if you don’t, a child or teenager or adult might pull the curtain away from the stage anyway, peering inside at you. She will catch you with your attached head right there, midslide into the illusion.
*
I slide off my mom’s brace, the sock beneath. She is sitting on the bed, knows now, with practice, to let the muscles on the left side of her body flare then squeeze and hold the bones of her whole body together, an ocean keeping a tree upright, afloat, way, way out. It is the last few days before I leave for the sideshow, before the lovers will sail off into the Atlantic.
I unzip her vest, remove her glasses. There is much work to be done to keep up with the rush of life on the vertical plane, the y-axis. All the therapies, all the doctors, working toward that y. My mom peers past my busy hands to my face. She wears a grimace, a furrow of concentration. She isn’t wearing a helmet today, not anymore, even though beneath her shaggy gray hair, her skull has a ledge. The absence of bone creates a canyon over a quarter of her head, where just below the skin’s surface her brain is firing and firing and always still bleeding.
*
Ms. Olga Hess, the Headless Woman, is a miracle of modern science. When the curtain is opened and they look at you, the audience will see a full woman’s body, arms and legs flailing, in a chair surrounded by plastic tubes that light up red and green and blue. Sparkly. They’ll see the chest and collarbone of a woman’s body and then, apparently piercing the flesh, a metal pole where a head should be. You’ve entered into the world of box jumpers, women who run backstage between illusions, sliding their bodies into one box and then another—spider woman, electric woman, four-legged woman. You’re all body. You are part of a long tradition of women who have lost parts of themselves. You will be whole only when nobody is looking at you.
*
My mom holds my shoulder with her one good arm as we lean down toward the bed. I shift her hips, lift the right leg onto the bed, hear the crinkle of her diaper—a word we never use in front of her—her short baby-breaths, and a dog barking outside. Usually, this is where I tuck her in, kiss her forehead, and leave. Lace up my running shoes, move as quickly as I can on foot down the shaded streets of my hometown, breathing hard, trying not to notice neighbors who want to talk about her prognosis. Or I close myself into the kitchen to do homework, grade papers, or hustle around the stove to prepare a meal, or walk slow circles in the bathroom and talk myself out of taking any of the painkillers singing their siren songs in their orange dresses.
*
If someone is holding the curtain open who should not be holding the curtain open, politely ask her to close the curtain. Change your tone as the day wears on and you become more tired, as the fair goes on. Use the loudest mean whisper you can muster. Say, Shut the curtain. Then, use only your arm when you see a peeker, a fast, wide swipe across the air in front of you toward their body, a warning, and then, as you are into hour fourteen of performing, month four of being on the road, say nothing at all. Kick hard and fast toward the body of the person staring in at you. Try to avoid contact, but don’t worry if you don’t succeed. As you slide into the chair sideways, your body tipping low and back, there’s a moment of vulnerability where you cannot yank the curtain shut or make contact because you’re lying too far back. To get flat is dangerous.
*
Instead of leaving, I lie down. I am tired. I hold open the covers and slide in beside her. Why this time? She turns to me, takes that one good hand and places it on my cheek. It is warm and dry and gentle. We have left the vertical plane where I hold her up and wipe her crack. We are horizontal people now, and somehow that shift has reorganized the nature of how and who we once were to each other. Her hand on my cheek, my hair, is the move a mother makes to her child. She slides her fingers along my neck, runs them, very softly, through my hair. It has been too many years since I have felt this much tenderness, and I don’t have a place for it anymore. That’s the awful price of coping.
*
The metal post, as big around as a flagpole, sticks down a foot from the wooden box you need to slide your head inside once you sit in the chair. Crane your neck around the pole. Do not hit your head or you’ll make a noise. Scooch back against the chair and straighten your spine and stretch your neck all the way up inside the wooden box, mirrored on the outside, tight and hot on the inside. Drape the blanket across your lap to look like what a sick person should look like, and arch your back. Sit straight up so the metal pole presses its angled tip against your breastbone, into the freckled hollow between and just above your breasts, press into it hard enough that this spot will, for the next three months, be a little bruised in service of the illusion. Hunch your shoulders forward to cover any space behind the box, and ready your arms to grasp out wild and blind once the curtain is pulled. Never reach your hands higher than your shoulders, never try to touch your own headless head, or your hands may shine back in the mirror to the audience, and then what miracle will they believe in? Instead, spread your fingers wide and keep them low, parallel to the dirt, reaching for the earth, shaking and alive, very alive, trapped in this headless body, escaping into the greatness of your own illusion.