The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(9)

“No, I can’t,” I say.

*

On my seventh day with the World of Wonders crew, all my fellow performers’ eyes are on me, the new snake charmer, to see what I do with this beastie around my neck. I will be bold. I touch the snake’s body with my hand. My eyes crest with tears. My chest heaves. I can hardly breathe. I’m trying to tell myself not to be scared, that there is no reason to think the snake might hurt me, that people look far greater terror in the face every day, people who are even at this minute standing very close to me. I dig in deep, try to channel that bravery. Exhale slowly.

“Okay, nope, enough,” I say, scooting my shoulders out from under the snake. Four sets of arms reach toward me to catch the snake I’m recoiling beneath. They grab the thick body and peel her muscled length from my neck. They move fast. It appears, given the placement of their hands, that they think there is a very good chance I will drop or throw the snake.

“Off, off, off,” I say, the tears breaking and dribbling down my cheek. My heart won’t slow the pace of its clenching, the thump of its terror.

“Snake lesson number one,” Tommy says, creating a quick distance between me and the reptile. “That was a good start,” he says, taking in stride my inability to hold the snake, not letting on to any disappointment. “You’ll practice again, and it’ll feel better, and then you’ll be ready to perform with them.” He’s putting the snake back in the trunk.

“You okay?” he asks. I nod. I am so grateful that Tommy is not the stereotypical boss from the old circus movies who’d throw you from the train in the middle of the night. He doesn’t seem surprised by my fear of the snake, by how little I’d known during setup, by my anxious gulp each time I remind him I don’t know how to perform the escape artist act I’ll be doing tomorrow, or the magic trick.

It seems that showing up here for the bally girl position without any skills is par for the course. My lying was ignored. Or expected. And maybe so is embellishing your own story.

It is 8:00 p.m. the night before we open. By the next morning, I have to be ready to hold the snakes for twelve hours a day and to do it again the next day. And the day after that.





HUMAN HISTORY

One week after the stroke

October 2010

I would paint her nails midnight. That was my next task. Nail polish. I could focus on nail polish.

Maybe midnight was too dramatic. Maybe coral. Powder blue. A nurse had said—in response to our twenty-fifth question that afternoon about when she might wake up and what a certain toe twitch might mean and what we could be doing to help—“Why don’t you paint her nails?”

“Oh yes, she’ll be so happy to see some color right when she wakes up,” my aunt said. And so we had brought a Ziploc baggie of polishes. Some lotion to soften the cuticles. My mom’s nails were chewed to hell. It looked strange, actually, that evidence of living and working and stress on a hand that was now unmoving.

It had been a week since she’d had as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive, as the doctors said. She was put into an induced coma to try to let her brain heal itself a little bit. When she woke up, they’d be able to assess the damage. But don’t hold your breath, they said. It doesn’t look good.

There were moments when she looked peaceful. Between the ventilator’s wheeze and the heart monitor’s beep, there was this slice of a second where she was still and her eyes were closed. That’s usually when people imagine their loved one is just asleep and will wake right up and be fine. When I started to let my mind wander that way, I cut it off. Blood like an oil spill in her brain. I imagined that instead.

I could touch four walls from where I stood. The door was locked to my right. It even had a deadbolt. The whole great world falling apart down the hall and this small place with a lock and space for just one person. Not like the hospital room itself, filled by nurses in astronaut suits and noisy machines and panic. It was hard to remember I had my own body when I was in the room with my mom and her body. I held the bathroom sink and made myself look straight into the mirror, seeing my swollen nose. My pink patchy skin and mascara smears.

“Human fucking history,” I said out loud. “This is the normal cycle of human history,” I said, trying to sound like the reasonable person others believed me to be. Mellow, levelheaded. I was trying to conjure that idea of myself, but my chest and guts were filled with a throbbing, acute pain, hot pain, searing. I started pinching the skin between thumb and pointer finger with my nails. People lose their parents and carry on. Human history. We must have some innate biological coping mechanism that enables the numbing of grief. This wound must be mendable over time, because it has to be—because people go on, because a death happens and eventually it’s Wednesday, and then Thursday, and somebody has to buy coffee filters.

I brought my face closer to the mirror. I was doing a thing I’d seen people do when they needed to get serious with themselves.

“This is not special,” I made myself say, looking into my eyes. My face blurred. Idiot crying baby.

*

When I was thirteen, my mom drove me to interview at a fancy private high school. She’d hated high school, had not done well, hadn’t gone to college more than a semester here or there. She was unwilling to let my education resemble hers in any way.