The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(89)
The young couple singing in the recording, he says, are these nice Italians who speak a little English and sit in the same spot every day, so my mom and Davy have added this into their routine. They roll up in the afternoon to listen to music, record, drop a little money in their case.
“How you doing, cutie?” Davy says in the recording, in a kind of soft voice that is not meant for outside listeners. Maybe they’re sitting in the shade, beneath a tree, and maybe it is very hot and they’ve already had a long day. Maybe she’s just up from a nap and still in the wet-eyed stare that usually follows. From what I can hear in the recording, she doesn’t make any sound, and for a moment this worries me, listening as I am spatially and temporally removed from a moment that already took place, changed, and is something entirely else now. How was she? Why didn’t she make a sound?
I love those sounds she makes. The hums. The little songs she sings into the phone, into my ear when I lean in close to hug her.
The human brain is bilateral in structure. While the left hemisphere has zones connected with language, analytical processing, time sequencing, and so on, the right hemisphere has regions governing musical ability, humor, visuospatial skills, and so forth. The left hemisphere of her brain was severely damaged in the strokes, but the right side, the music, lives on.
And what of the recording’s silence in response to Davy’s question? In her chair, she smiles, sometimes nods, yawns. She cocks her head to attention, or flicks it to the side when something is funny, or when she is making a joke. She slowly closes one eye and raises the other eyebrow when she jokes, too. She touches people she is near on the arm. A friend. A stranger. She cleans any hair or lint or stray artifact from their clothes.
This does not occur to me until the moment I get off the phone with them—they have to go, because they’re due to stop by their afternoon musicians and hear a few songs and wouldn’t want them to worry if they didn’t show up—that all these years, Davy has been understanding the world through its sounds. Things make sense to him not through narrative, not through the stories people tell one another in direct conversation, but rather through what the sound of someone swaying beside a microphone as it records a folksinger might mean. What story that might tell. For the nearly three years that he has been telling me that he knows what my mom is saying, what she means, that even though she can no longer use any words he can translate her thoughts, I thought he was delusional, or, worse, lying. But maybe he’s not. Maybe, just maybe, she is understood. And he is understood. And they’re just somewhere else, outside language.
BEHIND THE NIGHT’S DRESS
Day 77 of 150
World of Wonders
September 2013
There had been fried flecks of potato suspended in their hair. Salt spread across their faces like the starry night sky. And I’d sat there, unmoving, brimming with inaction, and let their fight happen.
Right?
Or was it none of my goddamned business?
I thought about all the other times I’d taken this approach, sitting on the sidelines, lamenting the crisis but too afraid to actually do anything about it. The wilting ghost in the corner of the hospital room whose only action is to fade into white walls.
It was time to step a little closer. Get dirtier. I needed to learn a goddamned thing. Why the hell else was I there? Why would I stay?
*
Neither Cassie nor Short E speaks to the other for the rest of the night or the next day as we finish the drive or this morning as we begin setup. No one is actually talking much to anyone else until we hear this:
“What’s up, fucks?” It’s an unfamiliar voice, high and screechy, loud, calling from across our lot. We’ve just begun setup in Hutchinson, Kansas, where we’re getting two new performers. I don’t quite understand how staffing works, but there must be some careful trade-offs the bosses work out behind the scenes, weighing, for example, seasoned performers and the kinds of acts they can do and when they can arrive, et cetera.
One of the newbies arrived the night before, a greenhorn bally girl named Lola Ambrosia. She is a burlesque dancer, wants to become a fire eater, and will stay with us for the rest of the season.
“It’s really rare, unfortunately rare,” Tommy says before he picks Lola up, “to have a nonwhite bally girl. A lot of the performers doing this kind of work look kind of the same—white, tattoos, piercings, kind of a fuck-you mentality.”
“Well, for so many years, nonwhite folks were exploited in freak shows, right? All those ridiculous displays with Mexicans being dressed as cannibals from Polynesia, stuff like that,” I say.
“Yeah, some were, and that was terrible. But many of them—most, even—made great livings. They got to see the country or the world, made a lot of money.”
“Some of them were taken advantage of.”
“Sure. But you tell me any business anywhere where that’s not true,” he says.
I try to find an answer but come up blank.
“It’s weird,” I say. “The freak show was supposedly about people who were different from you. About people who didn’t fit in. But in reality, it was kind of a place where everyone fit in.”
“Still is,” Tommy says. “We have quite a mix here. And each season it’s a new mix. Anyway, Lola’s one of the only black bally girls I’ve come across in a long time. And she’s good. And smoking hot.”