The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  Somebody else’s catastrophe is unfolding right now, right this very moment, right beside us.

  We barrel on. Say quiet things to ourselves like oh shit and that sucks.

  At the next exit, Sunshine veers off the highway and I think it’s maybe to call for help or to go back and help, but we don’t. Instead, we pull into the parking lot of the Kansas Star Casino, a massive reflective tomb surrounded by a mostly empty asphalt parking lot and, beyond that, fields of corn as far as you can see in any direction.

  My heart is beating fast, both from the caterwauling van and the emergency we passed, and the feeling is familiar, the panic, the danger. The taut faces that signaled distress.

  “Fix this fucking trailer problem,” Sunshine tells Tommy, who has swung the semitruck around in the parking lot and, sighing, gets into the van’s driver seat.

  “Everyone out,” he says, and we pile out onto the empty parking lot, the sun a low gold ball above the cornfields. We hear sirens in the distance. I imagine the people on the side of the road hearing the sirens, too, believing that there might be time for what has gone wrong to be made right again.

  Spif walks toward the casino to pee and walks back several minutes later. They wouldn’t let him inside.

  “What are you going to do?” Ben asks Tommy, eyeing the trailer, but Sunshine leans over to him.

  “Shut up,” she says.

  “What Sunshine said,” Tommy says. “She’s in charge.”

  Tommy leaves all of us and drives the van and trailer out of the parking lot and down a road whose horizon disappears between golden fields of corn.

  We get comfortable on the asphalt, leaning against one another. We sit in the sun, wondering aloud how close to the next fair we’re going to get that night, whether we’ll have to sleep in the unplugged bunkhouse in an empty lot on a back road or in a Walmart parking lot, whether we’ll pull in somewhere at an hour when anyone who has someone to call can still call them. We roll small stones between our fingers. We are chatting or silent. Some are on phones. Someone passes out gum. People lie down. Someone yawns and we talk about yawning. Pebble tossing. Shoulder massages. Clouds move across the sky in the shapes of fat horses, and then are gone.

  In between emergencies, there’s the regular, boring muck.

  * * *

  An hour later, the van and trailer pull back into the parking lot. Tommy rolls down the window and shakes his head at us. Smiles. He holds up one hand with a screwdriver clenched in his fist.

  “The trailer won’t fishtail anymore,” he says.

  “How can you know?” Sunshine asks, jumping up. Her huge blue eyes squint against his confidence, always testing him.

  “The tank,” Tommy says under his breath.

  “Oh god,” Sunshine says. “Sewage? I thought you stopped using the toilet after we couldn’t get it open to dump anymore.”

  “Well, I stopped shitting in it.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “It was full. That’s why you were fishtailing. The sewage tank was really heavy on just one side of the trailer.”

  “Thomas,” she says, slowly.

  “It was the meat-grinder,” Tommy says. We all understand what that means. The busyness of Minnesota didn’t allow for Porta-Potty breaks, and there were too many carnies and kids wandering back behind the midway’s bright lights to allow for peeing against the trailer’s tires, a move I pulled on other darkened fairground nights in smaller lots.

  “So you got the latch open with that screwdriver and dumped the tank?”

  “I still couldn’t get the latch open,” Tommy says.

  “This is disgusting,” Sunshine says. “What are we supposed to do?”

  Tommy smiles a long, flat grin. He holds the screwdriver up again. “I stabbed a hole through the side of the trailer into the tank. I dumped all the year-old piss into a sunflower field a few miles down the road.”

  Back on the highway, maybe near the yellow sheets of sunflowers, the family has probably left the side of the road. Whatever emergency has happened is likely still happening and will probably continue causing a wake for a long time. The ripples will travel and travel and eventually, hopefully, it will be the strangest thing, when suddenly that child will find herself looking at the clouds, no longer measuring time by proximity to disaster.

  * * *

  One and a half years after my mom’s stroke, her brain was suddenly bleeding again. Too much. We didn’t know why, or how, but the drain had stopped pumping and so we had a problem.

  I shouldn’t say that her brain was bleeding again, because it is actually always bleeding. It is never not bleeding. It hasn’t stopped since that first stroke. Not really. The liquid space around her brain is constantly gaining volume. When she first came into the hospital, the emergency-room doctors cut away the skull on half of her head, and it cannot fit back on there. It won’t take. They kept trying to reattach it and the body wouldn’t have it.

  To reduce the fluid, they surgically implanted a drain that sucks the liquid, blood and fluid, and carries it down the inside of her neck and dumps it somewhere in her stomach, where her body digests it like it processes everything else.

  But the drain stopped working, and everyone was moving very quickly.

  She was in a rehabilitation hospital that did not have the capacity to deal with this. I was standing in the back corner of the room with my limbs and stomach and butt and throat sucked in as close as I could get them, trying not to be noticed. It was the family members, usually, who wailed, who asked questions, who tried to touch when touching could not occur—they were the ones who were asked to leave. I stayed quiet.

  The EMTs were young men, three of them with close-cropped hair, boys still, who left high school five or fewer years before and probably played beer pong on Thursdays. I wanted to play beer pong on Thursdays. I wanted to go to their beach parties. To do something that didn’t mean anything.

  They slid her onto the gurney and wheeled her into the hallway. There was oxygen over her nose and her eyes were closed, then open and looking at people on some other plane of existence, and then they closed again.

  We waited outside the room while arrangements were made at the hospital. Would she die this time? The question never changed. We called the aunts and uncles with news of the new emergency. Davy wailed in his car.

  She was released from the hospital ten months after her stroke. Then she had an infection and had to go back. A month in the hospital. Then out. Three days in. Out. Three weeks in. And out, and back, and out. And in. Et cetera. Would she die?

  I was beside the gurney, and her eyes were opening and closing—did she know what was going on? Was she in pain? Could she see the tiled ceiling and soft pastel bouquets lining the walls in this world?

  There was one EMT standing at the head of the gurney, waiting for instructions. His hair was dirty blond and parted loosely in the middle like a teen heartthrob from the nineties. I stood by her shoulder, on the side, holding her unresponsive hand, which was cold and dry and had longer fingernails than I’d ever seen on her.

  “She your grandma?” the EMT asked.

  “Mom,” I shot back quickly. “My mom.” I was terrified that she’d heard that. The question would not have been well received in the past. But I also felt, shamefully, embarrassed for her, on some vain and irrelevant level, given the crisis at hand.

  She did look old. The previous year and a half had put her body through so much that her skin sagged away from her bones. She was very skinny and frail, her hair gone further from gray toward white.

  “She just … It has been hard lately,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I bet. Sorry for your loss.”

  I couldn’t believe he said that: my loss.

  My loss.

  It was a loss. Is. But nobody had said that word, would say it, or could—because she wasn’t technically lost. Here was her body, right here, alive, and to say loss would imply that she wasn’t working as hard as she was to remain
here in this world. Which was hard. So. Fucking. Hard.

  As long as she was alive, the conversation with medical staff and family had to remain firmly about recovery and progress, about indicators of forward-moving time without the recognition of the past—of who she had been to me, to my brother, to her husband.

  “Has she made any progress?” the EMT asked. I thought about the first weeks when she was in a coma, of the following weeks when we first felt one hand squeeze, when she began, from time to time, to make eye contact with us, to breathe, to get to the point where she could sit propped up for ten whole minutes. To move the one leg, the one arm. To go through painful physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy. To get to the point where she could eat and drink on her own, where she could look us in the eye sometimes and laugh, touch our hair like it was nothing, where she was strong enough to be released from the hospital.

  “No,” I said. I wanted more sympathy from him. I was desperate to hear someone talk more about the loss.

  She punched me in the nose. No, I only wanted her to punch me. I wanted her eyelids to peel back, for her to look at me with condemnation and accusations, with disdain, but she didn’t move. I flooded with guilt.

  The other EMTs gave a signal and we loaded into the ambulance.

  * * *

  Someone removed my eyeballs from their sockets and soaked them in hot sauce. They blew insulation in through one ear and it filled all the space in my head, forcing my brain out the other side. And my bones were replaced by the steel poles we used to build the tent, which were so heavy and hard to move that my whole body started scraping the ground every time I tried to walk anywhere.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept more than five or six hours. We’d been on the road two and a half months, though it felt like years. We were never more than a few feet from one another, even sleeping, with our bunks stacked vertically, and the thin boards that separated the beds horizontally thin enough to hear someone cracking their toes in their bed inches from your face. It was getting ugly. I was. Everyone was taking little stabs at one another to try to deflect some of the knives outward. Eyes were red. Little veins across the balls.

  “I’ve never wondered how folks here get so into uppers,” Spif says. “I don’t do that shit, but I almost wish I did.”

  So did I. There was weed around, and booze sometimes, but our crew, as far as I knew, stayed away from any harder drugs. But I wanted some. Something to cool the brain, to wake the body. I was too scared to ask around for it, but I looked longingly at the folks grinding their jaws and walking quickly between machinery fixes. There hadn’t been a drug test since that first fair, and the lack of regulation was obvious.

  I’d been exhausted before—after long nights studying or worrying about my mom. I’d felt moments of this tiredness in fits and starts, but never as this total takeover, like some other being was creeping out from its shadowed cave and speaking for me, thinking for me.

  * * *

  It is late, and we’re on the jump to Kansas from Minnesota. We left the sunflower fields hours before. Motel for the night, cheapest thing we could find, because there was no suitable place for us to park and sleep in the bunkhouse and then go on to setup tomorrow. The few hours in the motel, though it is dirty and stained and noisy, is pure luxury. Warm showers. Bed. Even with four of us to a room, which we’d been sure the clerk couldn’t see, the space feels infinite. Though I want to slide into that bed the moment we check in and never emerge, it is 11:00 p.m. and most of the crew hasn’t eaten, and Tommy and Sunshine, the only other two who can drive the van, are quickly out of sight.

  “I’m gonna teach you fire breathing in Hutch,” Short E tells me. “You know how to do everything else now, and even though fire breathing isn’t in the show, because the flame is too big for the tent, I’m gonna teach you.”

  Unlike fire eating, where you extinguish a flame in your mouth or perform tricks with a torch, fire breathing involves spitting a mouthful of gasoline onto a torch in order to create a gigantic flame ball.

  Short E, Cassie, and I are at a fast-food chain. There are burgers and fries in front of us, and drinks, and many weeks left in the season.

  “Be careful with fire breathing,” Cassie says. “We don’t wanna hurt anyone’s little faces.”

  “It’s not dangerous if you’re careful,” Short E says.

  “It’s always dangerous. You’re spitting gas out of your mouth and creating a fireball,” Cassie says.

  “If you do it right, it’s not dangerous. Trust me.”

  “Are you kidding me? The wind can change in a second, which is totally out of your control, and the fireball will shoot back and eat your face. That, in my definition, is dangerous.”

  “Whatever,” Short E says.

  “I just wish Elton were here to teach Tess. That’s as un-dangerous as you can possibly make it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m not saying you’re a bad teacher, I’m just saying that Elton is the best teacher,” Cassie says. “Don’t be upset.”

  “It doesn’t matter, guys,” I say, trying to put a little neutrality into this conversation that is clearly heating up too quickly. “We’ll see when we get there.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” Short E says. “I’ve been fire breathing for a long time.”

  “Not as long as Elton.”

  “These fries are so good,” I say.

  “Stay out of this, Tess,” Short E says.

  “I’m just worried ’cause—” Cassie starts, but Short E shushes her.

  “Just stop,” he says.

  “Don’t shush me,” she says, in a very low tone.

  “Shhhh,” he says.

  “Do. Not. Shush me.”

  “Sssshhhhhhhhh,” he says.

  Cassie’s hand flies from her lap across the table and knocks Short E’s basket of fries and burger onto his lap. The fries rain down all over him.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Short E picks up the basket, which still has some fries in it, and hurls it across the table into Cassie’s face. It lands right on her forehead, salt and little hard chunks of fries coating her hair, and she is instantly fighting tears and clenching her jaw and balling up fries from the table and throwing them at his face.

  Both are moving quickly, and I’m sitting still like a dumb doll, waiting for them to break into hysterics over the ridiculousness of this, but the only breaking is the fries under the shaking, furious fists as they are thrown back and forth. Smashed potato is ground into the table. Clumps are stuck to both their shirts. Arms. Mine, too.

  There are only a few other customers in the restaurant. Everything else is quiet, but Cassie’s voice booms.

  “All I asked was for you to stop shushing me,” she is yelling. And he is yelling, “You’re such a bitch, you’re a giant bitch,” and their voices are escalating, each of them finding other things on the table to throw at one another’s faces, salt and pepper shakers, napkins, each growing redder and full of tears.

  “You’re the fucking worst and everyone hates you,” Short E yells.

  “You’re a talentless fuck,” Cassie screams. “You’re not a daredevil at all, you’re just a little piece of shit. The only reason you’re here is because you have no legs.”

  All eyes in the restaurant are on our table now, assessing Short E. Cassie gets up and storms outside. I haven’t moved. I sit with Short E for a moment as he slows down his tirade. As our heartbeats slow. The employees resume movement behind the counter. We start cleaning up the fries. Get up, dump our trays, and walk outside. I drive us all back, in a long silence, to the motel.

  SOUNDS PAST THE NOISES

  Two years and eleven months after the stroke

  48 days into The Trip

  September 2013

  In the audio recording, it’s easy to make out a guitar and keyboard. There’s occasional percussion, too, and two voices, one ma
le and one female, singing in accented English. The first song is a cover of “Stand by Me,” then some originals, some instrumentals, and I eventually pause the recording. It’s twenty-five minutes long.

  “This is one of the great things about Mom’s chair,” Davy says when I finally get them on the phone. I’ve asked how the trip was going, and by way of response, he has e-mailed me the file. “I can hide a lot of things on it that people don’t notice. Like a small mic, which I can attach to one of the handles and get real close to the street musicians to record them.”

  “Why do you want to record them?” I ask, as if I don’t know this answer.

  “So that we can listen to their music whenever we want. So that when people ask what The Trip was like, I can let them hear it.”

  Davy was an audio engineer for years, first on tour with musicians and music festivals, then at National Public Radio, and then at THX for Skywalker Sound, George Lucas’s sound company. He loves recording sounds. He loves hearing something, capturing it, manipulating it to make it sound like its best, truest self, and then letting other people hear it. There is no better way to replicate an experience, he thinks.

  “So the great thing about street musicians is that you can hear all the other stuff going on around them at the same time, too. The cars honking, the people clapping, the kids chattering, the carts rolling by. There’s this whole world that makes sense when you hear it with the music, and you can hear in the music that whole world, too. The rhythms and moods.”

  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.