The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  So, Thanksgiving. Some aunts and uncles had driven up, and we all stood shoulder to shoulder in the neighbor’s kitchen being good ol’ regular Americans. Cranberries, fresh and canned. I wrote down recipe temperatures and cooking times. I wrote celery, butter, russet potatoes, flour. There was some communal delusion that Thanksgiving would heal us a little. We were big into holidays. The whole extended family loved elaborate meals, decorations, drinking. My mom especially. But we’d forgotten she was the one always in the middle, making all of it come together.

  In preparation for Christmas ten years earlier, my mom came home with a thin cardboard box covered in Chinese characters. Without saying a word, she pulled out a red-and-orange flattened shape from inside. “Hold this very gently,” she whispered to my brother on the couch. He was eleven, I was fifteen. She placed one end of the paper in his hands. She took the other and walked slowly backward, letting it unfold between them. One red-orange plane of paper turned into two, then three, then more, strings attaching each section as she walked backward across the living room. When it seemed like all the sections had unfolded, she backed away even farther and the paper kept growing. It kept getting bigger than we imagined it could.

  “I’ve decided on a theme for Christmas this year,” she said. The paper kept unspooling, on and on like scarves pulled from a magician’s throat. “The theme is: Chinese.” She was standing against the far wall, twenty feet away. Stretching across the room was a paper dragon. It had gone from the world of two dimensions into three. It was our year to host Christmas for our extended family.

  “The theme is Chinese?” we asked. “What does that even mean?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, with a grin like a plotting cartoon character’s.

  “For Christmas?” we asked, still incredulous.

  She sighed. “I’m tired of turkeys and hams, aren’t you?” We nodded, but we were not tired of turkeys or hams. In my fifteen years on earth, we’d never had turkeys or hams. We didn’t eat traditional holiday foods because they were always boring, according to my mom. We knew about them only as the tropes of other people’s worlds from the occasional mainstream movie we were allowed to watch.

  She set the dragon down and pulled from other boxes little firecrackers and paper lanterns and big plastic soup spoons.

  “Do you kids know what’s no fun?” she asked. We shook our heads. “Everything ordinary.”

  Over the next few weeks, she and Davy were up on ladders every evening. Room by room, they transformed our small house into one of those shops you see in Chinatown so crammed full of goods it was hard to make out one object from the next. There were bright lanterns painted with pictures of bamboo and butterflies and flowers that hung from our lights, and paper umbrellas dangling upside down, and the counter was stacked with fake jade cats and red satin. She filled the fridge with wonton wrappers, tiny mushrooms, and big bundles of greens.

  On Christmas, when the eight family members came, they were in equal parts delighted and wary—this fun wild sister, this creative one, this girl always a few steps away from what they understood. The dragon hung by translucent fishing line from hooks in the ceiling above the dinner table, a floating centerpiece. “This year,” my mother said as we sat down, beginning a Christmas toast, “we will all be transported somewhere far, far away.” Her tone was deeply solemn. There was always somewhere else to be. Some great dream adventure waiting, this time in misty mountains dotted with jade lions.

  She was always a little bit elsewhere. Maybe that helped her when one of the doctors stood with his face six inches from hers as if she were deaf and dumb, asking her to stick out her tongue. Maybe she didn’t respond to his command because it was stupid, ordinary, and she was distracted by more interesting concerns; maybe she was inside some deep fold of her brain designing a new landscape for her dragons.

  * * *

  We made a turkey. Stove Top stuffing. Pillsbury rolls. It was the first time we had that kind of real American combo. We ate like she was away for the weekend and we were sneaking in as much ordinary life as we could before she returned, maybe teased us, maybe pretended to be grossed out. Every few minutes my brother and I said, too many times, too loud, how good the rolls were. I mean, really, exceptionally good. Unbelievable.

  * * *

  Devin had come to visit me two months before the stroke, late summer, when the biggest challenge we faced was removing twenty years of life from the house. He had not met my family, and I wanted to show him this place before it was gone.

  We stood on the deck that looked out over the valley and hills, the dusk giving the high points one final golden glow. Cows dotted the dead grass, redwood trees stretched in wild stripes.

  “I could live here,” he’d said. “I’d like a place like this.”

  “Not me,” I said. “This place is haunted.”

  I could hear Davy inside working on an old tiny motor, the clatter of tools, an intensive project he was single-mindedly focused on despite the sea of other, larger, pressing projects closing in. I could hear my mother on the phone, negotiating dates with the Realtor. A little more time, she said, just another week or two. Then: How’s your garden?

  “But you could have a garden,” Devin said. “I could work at Google and make all the money and eat free sushi for lunch every day.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And you could write steamy romance novels and make millions,” he said.

  “It’s a good point.”

  “It is a good point.”

  He told me later that night, after my parents had gone to bed and we were alone, that when I’d gone inside, my mom, empty wineglass in hand, had walked over to him, hooked his arm, and firmly marched him farther down the deck, away from the house.

  “Do you know how special she is?” she’d said, turning to look him straight in the face. Her hair was short and silver. People stopped in the grocery store to comment on the greenness of her eyes.

  “Yeah, I—”

  “Really, exceptionally special.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know?”

  “She just loves you so much,” he told me when we were brushing our teeth.

  * * *

  “Loosen up, babygirl,” my mom said, pushing a shot of tequila at me across the table. “Loosen up, and toughen up.” She smiled.

  I took the shot and raised it into the air. “What are we cheersing?”

  “Adventure,” she said, and swallowed the thing down. Small glittery skulls hung from the ceiling like a warning.

  “So tell me about why you keep dating people who aren’t your equals?”

  “Mom.”

  “Want me to tell you what I think? You’re scared. You want to be in charge.”

  “Let’s not talk about this,” I said.

  “You feel like you need to be the boss,” she said.

  “That’s not it,” I said, even though it obviously was.

  “Well, what is it then?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Sir,” she said, meeting the eyes of our waiter. “Two more tequilas, please.”

  “You can’t just get me drunk and make me talk.”

  She smiled again. “Wanna bet?”

  It was March 2007, three and a half years before her stroke. I was twenty-two. We were at a small Mexican restaurant in a strip mall somewhere near the Oregon-California border. The mariachi music was low and the lights were bright, and my mom and I sat across from one another in a small booth against a yellow wall, tequila debris between us. Also, history between us. Some lingering linguistic trail that pointed back to the moment in the kitchen when, at fifteen, in the midst of a fight about a friend’s house I was no longer allowed to visit, I told her: “I don’t love you.”

  They weren’t just fighting words, though. Since I was thirteen, I’d known it. I believed it through my early twenties. I didn’t love her.

  When she looked at me, shocked, the corners of her mouth tur
ned up just slightly as if she were about to laugh, because usually whenever I said something dramatic, she laughed. That’s how I knew what to say next. The surprise on her face. “I don’t love you now, and I never have. I never will.”

  She didn’t laugh. She looked at me, stoic. We both realized that something in what I’d said was true.

  Finally, she turned back to the carrots she was chopping and gave a halfhearted chuckle. “I sure can’t wait till you’re not a teenager anymore,” she said, trying to cover the wound. But I knew what those words had done, and how they were now and forever a part of her world.

  Never have. Never will.

  * * *

  “I just want you to find someone who will make you happy,” she said, holding up the next shot of tequila.

  “I can make myself happy,” I said.

  “The world is lonely and you are lonely in it,” she said. “Get a partner. A good one. It’s better that way.” Her tequila was still in the air like a vessel of preserved amber that might hold some key to unlocking the future. I raised mine, too.

  “That’s why I ended up with David,” she said. “He’s a guy who loves me no matter what. He works hard and loves the family.” She paused to suck lime. “He stepped in when it was just me and you, when you were two, and I didn’t know what to do next. He built you a little kitchen. Do you remember? A little wooden kitchen. That’s when you started calling him Davy. Not David, or Dave, like everyone else, but Davy. He built you that kitchen before he’d even met you.”

  We drank. It singed our throats.

  * * *

  We were drinking tequila because I was driving from Seattle, where my dad lived, to San Francisco, where my mom and stepdad lived, and she’d decided to join me for the road trip.

  When I was two, my mom left. We were living in Seattle, my mom, my dad, and me. And then she left for California. I don’t know for how long.

  I don’t know for how long because how long depends on who is telling the story.

  In my mom’s story, she was gone just a few days, a few weeks at most, to scope out a new apartment for us to live in. She was leaving my dad, see.

  In my dad’s story, she took off and there he was, a big burly bachelor man with a two-year-old baby girl, and did he know how to braid hair? No. And would that become a problem when that girl child became insistent, furious, that she have her hair braided the way her mama braided it? Did she throw screaming tantrums so that the bachelor man had to plead with some coworkers later that day to show him how to braid hair and he spent the afternoon practicing on women in his office, getting tips from the flock of expert braiders? Well, yes.

  In my mom’s story, shortly after she arrived in California, she received a letter from my dad. It said, Bye, I’m taking the baby and we’re moving to Canada. He is Canadian, so he can scoot right over and back pretty easily, knows a lot of folks over the border. Not just Canadian, but French-Canadian, and not just that, but Catholic, so he’s related to most people. Anyway, there he went. “It’s not that he really wanted a kid all to himself,” my mom said the first time she told me this story. “It’s just that he knew what would hurt me the most.” She sighed. She’d decided that my college graduation gift was this truth and told me a few weeks before I finished school. She hadn’t told me before, she said, because she wanted to protect the person I believed my dad to be. “Your face could have been on a milk carton. He could have been in prison.”

  In my dad’s story, she left to go have an affair with someone she’d known for a long time, someone she might have been having an affair with forever. She was done with my dad. With me. A few weeks before she left, before he knew anything about the leaving or the divorce or any of that, she’d thrown my dad a surprise party. As they were driving there—he didn’t know anything about it—she said she was going to leave him, that she wanted a divorce, wanted out, that she’d be taking off soon. Then they arrived at the party. “Surprise!” everyone shouted as he walked in the door.

  I believed his version for a long time. Probably because I didn’t see him much. It was easier to be on his side. Each time we talked on the phone, I pleaded for more pieces of the story, wanted to know the ways she’d wronged us. The stories spooled on. Trying to get me legally removed from him. Taking and taking child support, but never using it on me. Not letting me visit when I was scheduled to visit. Leaving me behind, and then deciding to take me back months later, because she’d been guilted into it. Each piece of information was like a wound I couldn’t stop filling with salt, an itch already scratched open that I did not want to stop digging into.

  And I developed this real allergy to her love. By the time I was ten or eleven, when she touched me, it felt like there was a hot searing poker scalding my skin. I felt like my organs were failing a little bit when she’d hug me, like it was a big fake act she was putting on and somehow my body knew the truth and withered in response to her proximity. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t think her love was real, because she’d chosen to walk away from my dad and left him all alone, so sad, and angry. Because she’d been able to walk away from me.

  If she didn’t need me, I didn’t need her.

  At eight, eleven, fourteen, eighteen, and all the years in between, the more I heard and then embellished in my head, the more deeply I became attached to the story. The more I invested in it being my own story, the clearer it was that the only way to get through life was to be on my own. Me against the world made up of my mom.

  When I was a teenager, I spent some time trying to verify truths. Cross-referencing stories, finding outside sources.

  What I discovered is that there are even more versions of what happened, who did what, and who was to blame.

  So I stopped.

  In my own story, I decided that there might be truth somewhere in the middle, and that the two stories could both exist as half fictions, as versions of what each of them felt, of how hurt they were by the other.

  What matters most isn’t actually related to any of their truths. They were trying their best, my mom, my dad, and my stepdad. I love them for that.

  What matters most is my cruelty.

  I don’t love you, I’d told her. I never have, and I never will.

  * * *

  It took me so many years, until I was in my early twenties, to figure out that what she wanted from me was love. That she wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe she’d made mistakes, but she’d spent years afterward trying to pour that love on me, trying to make me sure I knew that she loved me—always had, always would. It seems so obvious from a distance. But I figured it out so late.

  How do we arrive at our realizations? There wasn’t any sparkling, trumpet-sounding, aha moment of recognition for me, no tidy turning point. Just a gradual understanding, as I became an adult, met more people, saw some of the world, that the person my mom was did not align with the person I had believed her to be.

  The summer before she had her stroke, when I was back with her and Davy for two months to help them with packing and sorting, I decided I’d tell her that I was sorry, and that I loved her. I knew I needed to. I’d choked out the words love you just a handful of times in all my memory, but I wanted to tell her that I always had. I was scared, confused, wrong, I was going to say. Maybe it would let the ever-present guilt I carried for being so skeptical and unkind to her finally loosen. Maybe it would mend the hole in her heart she told me I created.

  I thought about it when we sorted my old Barbies for a garage sale, drinking wine and dressing them in outfits and posing them on various fruits. We laughed hysterically. Of course I love her, I thought, but didn’t say so. I thought about it all the time that visit: when we watched the deer scatter during one morning walk and she squeezed my arm with delight, when she brought me strawberries—my favorite—for no reason, when she was so stressed from trying to figure out where they’d move next and what they could sell in the meantime. I was almost there. I could feel the words taut in my throat, getting so close that they p
ressed against the back of my teeth like an animal trying to escape. But somehow I couldn’t let them out.

  I was going to grad school in Alabama, and I drove back in late August. My mom told me on the phone, on that long drive southeast, how much strain losing their house and their community of the last twenty-two years was putting on her and my stepdad. And how much it made her feel she hadn’t succeeded. Financially. Professionally. At anything, she said.

  It would have been such a perfect moment to tell her that she was wrong, and her life was inspiring, and she was deeply loved.

  “Oh god, relax. It’ll all work out,” I told her instead.

  Six weeks later the blood poured into her brain.

  SNICKERS T. CLOWN

  Day 9 of 150

  World of Wonders

  June 2013

  Red holds a hammer. He has the full moon of a nail’s head protruding from his nostril. He taps it in a little deeper. The flat head rests one inch out from the entryway to his cavity, the metal flaring the soft nostril tissue wide. With the hammer’s forked prongs, he hooks and slowly pulls out the nail. It glistens. Only the audience members right up front can see the sheen of snot coating the nail, but the rest are practiced in the art of imagination.

  There is nobody out front to hear our bally. I’m half-crouched, peeking through the opening in the tent to watch Red perform.

  “You want more?” he asks the audience.

  “Yeah!” they yell.

  “You’re sick,” he says, pounding the nail into his nostril one more time, bowing a little with the nail inside so they can see that he is filled up, that he is real, that they may now applaud.

  * * *

  When Red first arrives at the Big Butler fairgrounds—the day after our caravan pulls in from Gibsonton—all the other performers run to him with arms open.

  We’ve just started unloading Queen Kong, our taxidermy gorilla in her upright glass coffin, but she needs fourteen hands beneath her heft as she’s lowered straight down from the truck, and there are only six of us: Tommy, Sunshine, Pipscy, Spif, Big, Big Ben—the show’s working man who we’d picked up in Gibsonton—and me. And then, as if on cue, Red’s van pulls up.