“I need you to lean all your body weight against this stack,” she says. “Plant your feet and really lean. The poles get jostled on the road, and sometimes they all just pour off the stack and bury people.”
The steel lip of the possum belly is cracked beneath me, ripped and rotting in jagged metal patterns that look like lacework.
Though she is thin and doesn’t appear muscular, Sunshine moves her body in this tight space with the strength and precision of a martial artist, climbing and cinching and grabbing and leaning, intricate movements that make clear this is an orchestrated dance. She pulls poles out one by one as if she were playing a terrible game of pickup sticks that might always end in entombment.
Sunshine slides a pole to one end of the truck. I take it in both hands. It’s heavy and dirty, fifteen feet long, and sharp where the metal is corroding and flaking off. I spread my hands wide for more balance and take a few steps. The weight is still unbalanced, and heavier than almost anything I’ve ever picked up. I drop one end to the ground and then the other. Nobody looks. I pick the pole back up, trying to remember lessons about using your legs, and one side of the pole comes up quickly, much quicker than I expected, and knocks into Spif as he’s walking by.
“Oh, sorry,” I say.
“Careful,” he snaps, jumping back and continuing his hustle toward the truck.
I tighten my grip on the pole, looking ahead of me and over my shoulder before I move it, then spread my hands wide, grit my teeth, and move with the steel. The space around me is not mine anymore but my crew’s. In the other crews around our lot, men climb the still-unrecognizable rides to begin wrenching and pinning and joining. Now that I’m here with all this, I feel like a bona fide carnie. Suddenly, my body counts for something. It is working; this is what work is. Look at all these functional limbs whose muscles respond on command.
I move like a tightrope walker. My hands are in the center of the pole and I concentrate on one step and then the next, a tiny correction, and then the next. There is nobody to call for help if I can’t carry it—it is my job to carry it.
* * *
Once we finish unloading the possum belly, Tommy opens the container’s back end.
We grip the corners of the Feejee Mermaid’s coffin. “Never ask what you should do next,” he tells me. “Just wait for instructions. But don’t wander off or look distracted. That includes the bathroom. Don’t go.” The Feejee Mermaid’s hair is peeling off her face and her plastic tail is chipped. “We’ll take breaks sometimes, and you can go then, if you ask first,” he says, wiping sweat from his forehead. The Pennsylvania sun is lowering but still strong, and we are moving quickly. Much of the skin I see around me is sunburned.
“Everything has a very specific order. So don’t take anything out that you aren’t told to. And don’t touch anything, or it might fall on you. Last season a giant board fell on Sunshine’s head and knocked her out cold,” he says. We unload a massive chair with metal plates and wiring.
“What’s this?” I ask Tommy.
“The Electric Chair. For Electra, the Electric Woman. She lights light bulbs with her tongue,” he says, his voice suddenly changing as if he’s onstage.
“Wow. Who gets to be Electra?” I ask.
“Only the bravest among us. Will that be you one day, Tess?” he asks, winking. My stomach flutters.
We drag part of our massive circus tent across the grass in its giant canvas bag. I can’t wait to see the bag untied, watch the red and blue vinyl unroll from its log and join the other flattened vinyl to somehow form the structure around the amazement we’ll offer onstage. Or, the amazement they will offer.
“Don’t worry if Sunshine yells at you. Or Red. Red’s arriving tomorrow, and he might yell at you. Actually, I’m sure he will. He’ll call you a dummy. It’s nothing personal. Okay, Tessy?” Tommy says.
“Okay,” I say.
“How you doing?” he asks, noticing my flushed cheeks.
“Sore,” I say, patting my arms. “I can already feel some of those circus muscles coming in.” He nods, smiles. We’ve been working for less than an hour. The bulk of setup, which takes sixteen hours on a good day, will come in the next few days, after we scrub the winter off the set and props.
“Well, take it easy,” he says, still smiling, maybe hiding a laugh. Greenhorn.
Physical labor is still, as it has always been, a marker of class delineation, and as a middle-class female my life has never required anything more physical than picking up the children I was nannying, delivering burgers to the tables outside. Nothing has ever been asked of my body, not really, not much. But here, straining to keep the pole from knocking into someone’s head, there’s little I can think about other than the geometry of my movement, the mechanics of my machinery.
“Can I be doing anything more to help?” I ask Tommy.
* * *
Can I be doing anything more to help? It’s a familiar question. One I had asked nurse after nurse, surgeon, neurologist, physical therapist and then occupational therapist, speech therapist. Nurse this or that would say something or other, new doctor, new thing, and then I’d do that thing,
rotating the arm from the elbow in tight circles
clockwise
counterclockwise
north
south
rubbing Vaseline between the toes to encourage blood flow
the base of the feet
calves, when they aren’t in the squeezers
spreading and folding the fingers
and I remembered to do all these things one, two, maybe four days, and then the new nurse has
the new set of mouth-opening stretches, her jaw between my thumb and fingers
the lemon-flavored sponge to rub along the gums
inside the lips when I can pry them open
to wet the teeth
see if the synapses connected to taste still work
new knee bends
new holding her hand in my own hand
rotating: thumbs up
thumbs down
thumbs up
thumbs down
thumbs up
thumbs down
singing
humming
staying silent
telling old stories
making up new stories
reading books out loud
except I skipped parts that were sexual or scary or violent or dangerous or that involved medicine or death, or that were particularly sad or extra happy, so I read mostly descriptions of desert plants, the diet of a trumpeter swan, the cycle of power generation at a nearby windmill.
What else can I be doing to help?
She smelled like plastic and disinfectant, and beneath all that she smelled like a human mother, my own human mother.
What, exactly, had been lost? There she was, still, in front of me, alive. The only human being who would ever walk up behind me, rest her cheek on my shoulder—her surprisingly tall daughter—and hug my waist from behind, saying softly as she laughed: I birthed you.
* * *
“There’s nothing else you can do right now, Tess,” Tommy says.
A clean-shaven man in a visor and polo shirt strides over to us with a clipboard in hand. He calls to Tommy. “That’s a boss,” whispers Sunshine. “Just look at him. You’ll know who they are because they’ll have showered, they’ll have most of their teeth, or they’ll be riding around in a golf cart with one leg off the side so they can jump down to solve a crisis while the cart’s still running.”
“And kick lazy carnies as they pass,” Spif adds.
“Listen up,” Tommy says as he walks back over to us. “Boss just told me there’s a new policy. We’re getting drug tested at this fair.” All eyes that had been vaguely distracted by something else are now glued to Tommy’s face. “This carnival company is doing a major push to be family friendly and move away from their reputation, so everyone’s gotta pass a drug test to get their ID before we open.”
“Oh fuck,” Spif says.
“You have to pass or you can’t be in the show. Boss’s orders. We’re heading to Walmart tomorrow night so that everyone can buy whatever they need to make sure they pass. All of you,” he says, slower, quieter now, “have to pass. We have no extra people. The show won’t run if you don’t.”
Spif and Sunshine grasp one another by the arm as Tommy walks away. “You have four days,” Tommy calls over his shoulder.
It is time to make the individual bodies perform feats once thought impossible.
“Vitamin B3 makes you sweat,” Spif says.
“Cranberry juice clears you out,” Sunshine adds.
“B vitamins,” Pipscy says.
Everyone starts moving very quickly.
* * *
After five days in the induced coma, the doctors gave her some sort of wake up! drug. They wanted to test her level of brain function, to measure what she could respond to, how she could move.
We hovered around her bed.
I thought ICUs would be full of people moving very quickly, but much of the time, there was stillness. Quiet. Like the woman I sat with in the waiting room when I couldn’t handle being in my mom’s room or when they were doing something to her they thought we might not want to see. The woman was waiting to see if her boyfriend would wake up from a motorcycle accident. He’d been in a coma two weeks. We waited near each other. She sat cross-legged in the upholstered chair, smiled a lot. Put on lip gloss. Together, we picked up magazines, set them down.
The magic drug went in through my mom’s IV. We waited in a semicircle around her bed. Davy, my brother, Sam, my aunt, and my uncle. She would open her eyes, see us there, and smile that smile we all knew so well, the smile of the boss of our lives, the queen, and we’d know that this minor disaster was just another hurdle we’d applaud her for overcoming.
We waited. She would yawn and stretch, say, “What happened?” or “Where am I?” and we’d smile sad, grateful smiles, wipe little warm tears from the corners of our eyes and say, “Never you mind, because everything’s going to be just fine.”
Two hours, four, twenty-four.
And then, genius, miracle, angels-on-high-or-something, whoever, thank you, her left hand gave a squeeze. Just a little. Just a small squeeze, a hello someone’s here.
It was the first sign that she wasn’t vegetative.
She would open her eyes.
She would open her eyes, and then she did.
We crowded around the end of the bed. “Hi! Hi! Hello! Hi, beautiful!” we said. But the bright, bright green of her eyes wasn’t there. Instead, there was a slug-gray cover over her iris. Like a cartoon of illness or evil or warning. But this was no cartoon. This was a real fucking sick person whose eyes had changed color and all I could think was Who is this new person inside her?, and then hated myself for thinking it. Of course it was her.
It wasn’t her.
It was.
The gray eyes weren’t looking at us, weren’t looking at anyone or anything in particular, it seemed. They stared off blankly.
* * *
That’s all I could think about that night, those eyes, whose eyes?, as Davy, Sam, and I drove back from the hospital to the house. This house that she had spent twenty-two years living inside and fixing up with her bright, bright green eyes, the house that was now filled entirely by boxes. They’d bought it all those years ago for so little, spent year after year digging away chunks of the hillside on which it was precariously perched to make a garden, putting in new windows, saving a year or two at a time for a new appliance. But the rest of the Bay Area housing market boomed and it was too hard to keep up.
The house was filled with boxes of dye and hand-painted fabric from the business my mom had finally had to close a few years before. She’d sold off her painting tables, fabric steamer, washer. Had let go of the small studio/office, already a much smaller space than the previous studio/office, downsizing and downgrading until all that was left were a few mouse-chewed boxes in the dirt basement. Davy hadn’t been able to find work after his layoff a few years before. There was no more money to be borrowed, shuffled. Everything was getting sorted and boxed. The house was gone. Sold. There was an empty storage unit waiting for all these boxes and a plan to come up with a good plan.
The move-out date was two weeks after her stroke.
* * *
Our neighbors went to work in the kitchen. They stuffed garbage bags full of open baking soda, warped Tupperware lids, packages of stuffing, chicken marinating in the fridge, ceramic spoon-holders my brother and I had molded as Mother’s Day gifts when we were small.
I came into the kitchen where women with large curly hair and turquoise earrings were sorting. The neighbor women volunteered to help, but my mom was the one with the packing plan and so now nobody really knew what to do with anything. Everyone had their own plan. One opened a jar of berbere, Ethiopian spices my parents ground by hand with the mortar and pestle they kept under the tea boxes, beside the jars of flour and sugar. The neighbor smelled the spice. “What on earth is this?” she asked the room.
“Berbere,” I wanted to say. I wanted to say that since my parents could barely afford to pay the electric bill month after month, my mother traveled the world through the kitchen. But I was still trying to synthesize memory into a sentence when the woman with the berbere shrugged and tossed it into the garbage bag. Other people’s hands squeezed boxes of decorative toothpicks and released them into the bag. Other hands disposed of kimchi.
There was nothing I could do in there, wordless as I was. What arguments were there for keeping a jar with four cloves? Some. I just couldn’t find them. I walked quickly down the hallway, heat rising and piling on my face. A few other neighbors were hovering in the doorframe, discussing the best way to tackle the bedroom. Her underwear. Dirty T-shirts. Satin slips. The slips were rolled into tight logs like cakes and lined up next to one another in a drawer, pale pinks and ivory and black, tucked beside a few belts and a Ziploc bag of pantyhose. I didn’t want these neighbors to touch the last things that she had touched. The very idea made my lip snarl. I needed the items all to myself.
The details are what drive you mad with grief. Socks that didn’t match but that she counted as a pair anyway.
“I’m sure she’ll want turtlenecks soon,” one of the women in the doorframe said as she reached for a hanging turtleneck.
“I’ll do the bedroom,” I said, smiling and pushing between them.
“We’ll help,” the women said, not budging.
“No thanks,” I said. “Thank you, though,” I remembered to say, smiled, and then shut the door right up against their faces. I hated them there. I knew this was rude. Picking up dirty cups and feeling superior—were they feeling superior? were they overwhelmed by pity?—because these weren’t the dirty cups of their own beautiful California homes, which they weren’t losing. We needed them. There is no question: they saved the day. Because of their help the house was being packed. Our family would move everything into a storage unit in time and no police would be called to escort us off the land with shotguns, nobody would be bleeding except for our dumb swollen hearts and my mother’s head, still spilling, at the hospital.
It wouldn’t stop, the bleeding. They tried different drugs, tubes, suctions. It just wanted to give and give and give.
I pulled flattened cardboard into boxes. Taped. Made new containers for the bedroom stuff to live in. Bracelets. Bras. Potpourri sachets. One of my mother’s two sisters came in as I started on the sock drawer. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be crying, if I shouldn’t cry. Somebody in the family needed to be the general here to get things done. It was clear this would be me. I’m the heavy lifter. My brother was back at college. Davy was off somewhere, his heart falling apart in huge sloughs. We needed someone around to sign paperwork.
I started filling a box with handfuls of socks. My aunt was doing the underwear drawer beside it. It was okay that she was here. Good, even.
A few handfuls in, I touched something hard instead of soft. I pulled it out. In my hand was a huge, multibuttoned vibrator. On its side, it said The Rabbit. I blushed quickly and held it by two fingers like it was a dirty diaper. It was heavy, and used by a live body with desire and a whole life far, far apart from me, the life children often forget about their parents having, the life I usually wanted to forget about my parents having. But now it meant something else. It already indicated a former self. My aunt, perceptive and kind, saw the momentary horror on my face, the complicated sadness of what was in my hands, my embarrassment.
“Oh, I was wondering where that was,” she said, speaking swiftly. “I’m glad you found it, at least,” she said, moving quickly and taking it from me. “And not your brother. My son found mine when he helped me move last. That was embarrassing.” In a quick flurry of movement she had the thing wrapped up in another slip and tucked into a sock and buried deep in the box we were packing.
I looked out the bedroom window at the golden hills and remembered a lesson my mom had taught me about keeping yourself safe. If you see a mountain lion, move slowly. Pick up the closest branch and place it vertically on top of your head. Keep one hand on your crown to balance the branch and stretch the other, if you can, out to your side, as wide as it can go, the fingers as splayed as starfish. You are creating a monster. You are becoming a bigger beast than the mountain lion, a beast the mountain lion will fear and acquiesce to as you back away slowly, slowly, horns still on head, wings spread wide, slowly, slowly, eye to eye.
THE DRAGON
One month after the stroke
November 2010
It was Thanksgiving. I made lists.
We were crammed into a neighbor’s kitchen. They were away for the weekend. My mom was still in the intensive-care unit, infections having crawled into her brain and her blood. She couldn’t eat or drink anything because her brain had forgotten how to chew and swallow. We spent most of our time at the hospital. Every day was the last day, the big goodbye, but then there was a new last day. Again and again.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 5