I came across Other Voices - a bi-annual literary magazine published by the University of Illinois at Chicago - at the local bookstore because I was attracted to the Ben Merco’s somber cover drawing. Since then, OV has not been available in any bookstore in the area, nor in the Barnes and Noble in Chicago when I checked. I am currently too poor to subscribe regularly. However, I did appear to buy a winning issue because almost every story is enjoyable to read.
Appalachian Snapshot is one of my favorites. Writing in a second-person narrative is difficult because it often sounds pompous or fails to create a sense of intimacy with the reader. Ayers does a nice job here, using the intimacy to imitate a deep meditation of a bittersweet past.
While typing this out - I don’t have a scanner at my disposal, so please alert me to any typographic errors you may find - I realized that my perspective of this story had changed. What I liked about Appalachian Snapshot as a teenager was the general feeling of nostalgia I took away. At that time, I associated nostalgia with longing, wistfulness and a small degree of angst. While typing the story out, I changed my thinking; while the narrator/I suffered loss, who we were then is not the same person we are now. Consequently, how can we really feel the same type of feelings as someone while being separated by time and, actually, another life?
* * *
Appalachian Snapshot
by Alice Ayers
Published in Other Voices, Fall/Winter 1999
There are two snapshots tucked into your diary. The first is of your husband in the bedroom you now share, taken moments after he and the Native American midwife pulled your second-born from you. He stands, grinning broadly in a blood-spattered white T-shirt, holding your son who is wrapped in a stained cloth and, with only the top of his raw pink head showing, looks like a bundle of meat in the arms of a butcher. You are present in this photograph too, your naked leg fuzzily visible in the background, and next to your thigh is the corner of the black Rorschach your blood made on the bed.
The other snapshot is of your boyfriend, taken on the last day of his life.
You drove the Rambler because, after all, it was your car. You paid for it, bought it from an old woman who said, “I can’t drive anymore, I can’t even turn the key,” and behind her screen door help up hand that had become twisted with arthritis. You also drove because your boyfriend like to smoke on the interstate—something about the intersection of highway and horizon put him in the “zone” as he called it. Once, when he offered to take the wheel, you explained you no longer felt safe with a smoker behind the wheel. “Hey, I’m old,” you said, only half-facetiously. “I’ve outgrown my immortality.”
He laughed. “That being the case…” he said, and lit up. You smiled at him. He was years younger than you, and, you had always though, beautiful. His lips were full, his hair dark brown. His arms were long and graceful and corded, almost accidentally, with muscle. Veins popped in his forearms, his deltoids fit into your palms like hard apples.
After a while he carefully ground out and stowed his roach in the little tin box in which his grandmother once kept pills. He swiveled and fished up one of the old Reader’s Digest magazines out of the mess on the back seat. Then with his feet on the dash, the magazine in one hand and your thick braid in the other, he began to read.
As Tennessee countryside slipped by, you listened to him read. You drove and her read Drama in Real Life, punctuating his sentences with gentle tugs on your braid. The Tennessee countryside swept by, and you hear “One Handhold from Death!,” the story of Jim Tobin, a pilot who was hurled by a freak accident from the cargo door of his twin-engine Beechcraft. As it turned out, Tobin had incredibly quick hands and managed to seize a nylon cable attached to his plane, nine thousand feet over rural New Jersey. Fortunately for Tobin, his co-pilot, Bob Pierce, noticed his predicament and brought the plane to the ground so gently that Robin escaped with injuries that could only be described as minor: lacerated skin, torn rib cartilage, fingers that had been broken by the force of his grip on the cable.
Your boyfriend clapped the Reader’s Digest shut and announced, “The end.” He put his head in your lap and his feet out the window. You heard him tearing a page out of the magazine, saw his hands working busily. “It pays to enrich your word power, oh yes it does,” he murmured, and you knew he was pleasantly stoned. After a moment, his hand came up level with your chin, presenting you an origami swan.
By late afternoon, you had traveled over the North Carolina border and into the Pisgah National Forest. Your boyfriend read the gazetteer, which along with auto-mechanics, needlepoint and bowling, was one of the odd things he did so well. He directed you to a trailhead where you parked the car. You took your canteens and daypacks from the backseat and started up a steep incline into the trees.
After about an hour on a winding path, you came to an opening in the trees and a meadow leading to a rock bald that jutted over the valley floor. Your boyfriend walked right to the lip of the bald and sat with his legs dangling over the edge. You hesitated. In those days, you were not so good with heights, with ledges, with sudden drop-offs. You were always seized by what-if fears. What I if I lost control and pitched myself over? What if I gave my boyfriend a running shove? Now you could pogo-stick to the rim of the Grand Canyon confident in your ability to veer away before the moment of no return, but then, then you looked at the edge and just couldn’t go any further than the middle of the rock. You thought about Tobin holding on to that cable, New Jersey miles beneath his feet—did he really fall or was he seized by some dark and rapturous impulse?
You sat down in the middle of the rock, your legs crossed. For awhile you occupied yourself with maintenance tasks: drinking water, eating granola, wiping the perspiration from your eyeglasses. Your boyfriend sat in front of you. Beyond him was the panorama of the valley floor, the bright buttercup, the wild strawberry and the fluorescent green of a deciduous forest in summer.
These days, as you spin your wheel, this is the image so often in your mind. You spin your wheel and the clay climbs to form vessel walls and you see yourself on the rock bald. You see yourself stand to stretch your calves, see your braid tumble from your back and sweep the ground. Back the, your hair was so long that when you loosed your braid, it curved below your ribs. You remember your boyfriend teasing you, calling your hair your pet, your spaniel, your lhaso apso, watching you put it up, take it down, brush it in the bathroom mirror, you remember how you toyed with your hair, twirling it on your finger, rubbing the smooth strands against your sensitive upper lip.
You spin your wheel and also see your boyfriend on the rock, now standing, now leaning against a sturdy mountain laurel. He wears a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, jean shorts cut almost to his crotch, his father’s cast-off hunting boots. His brown hair curls on his collar, picks up red highlights in the sun. he looks down into the valley below. And under the toes of his boots, a short incline starts; it descends sharply before giving way to a fall of three hundred feet or more.
You met your boyfriend in a Ketchum, Idaho restaurant in the summer of seventy-five. You were twenty-five, he was eighteen. You chopped vegetables, wore sandals and flowing skirts of Indian print, your fingers smelling always of garlic. He waited tables, wore hip-huggers, jerked his head constantly to the right to toss his bangs away from his face.
In between customers, he sprinted to the kitchen. You julienned the carrots and watched him from the corners of your eyes. He talked manically, demonstrated his telemarking technique for the head chef. He did push-ups in the walk-way, chinned himself on the molding of the kitchen door. When he came over to watch you work your knife, you told hi you were an artist. He informed you that he was an excellent artist’s model.
Though your principal medium was clay, you decided to give charcoal a try.
In your apartment, his spine stood out like a tiny staircase. He sat with knees drawn up and head bent. Hours later he unfolded at your touch. No, he wasn’t a virgin. Of course not, he told you.
He left his mother’s house to live with you.
Your rooms were in an old house that had been divided into apartments. A bead curtain hung between the bathroom and the living room; on the floor, you threw pillow to sit on while you ate leftovers from the restaurant. He bought some clothes, a guitar he never played and two black-light posters. He also brought a home-movie projector and, inexplicably, a sewing machine his mother no longer used.
At night, sometimes, he set the projector up in the living room, watched black and white films of himself as a child. You sat at the kitchen table, drawing, the over-bright images flickering in the corner of your eye. A child’s face, a spikey crew-cut. Saddle oxfords running over a neatly trimmed lawn. Your hand moved surely over the paper. Your boyfriend sat quietly on the floor. The projector hummed, threw a wedge of light.
In the fall, you left the restaurant together and rode a series of buses southwest, to Tucson, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. You are your meals out of convenience stores, slept in motels with stains on the carpet and did dramatic reading from the Gideon Bible. Your boyfriend stood on the bed and parted the Red Sea, a sheet flung over his naked shoulder and a Traveler’s Rent towel draped on his head.
On the bus to El Paso, you decided to fall in love with him. He slept with his head against the window and you pictured yourself as a diver about to swan from a cliff, to fall breast-first into glassy blue waters. No longer would you be two people sharing time, bodies, and resources. You would be lovers. Now when you opened the Gideon Bible, it would be to read from the Psalms. As soon as he awoke, you would tell him of your decision. You touched his hand, marveling suddenly at the fine hairs on his forearm. Beyond his head, the landscape suddenly grew more arid.
You returned to Idaho in the early winter. You enrolled into the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. Your boyfriend got on as a ski instructor. At school, you spun your wheel. The clay bloomed like a flower and you knew your hands were solving the problems they were meant to solve.
In the Pisgah National Forest, your boyfriend stood in the edge of a rock bald, a mountain laurel on his right and just under the toes of his boots a drop of three-hundred feet or more. You had gone to pee in the woods on the other side of the trail. You rose from your squat and felt light-headed. Your boyfriend was so close to the edge it made your stomach cold. You imagined him swanning off the cliff and soaring across the air like Tobin from “One Handhold from Death!”
“And where did you get all these old Reader’s Digests?” one of your instructors has asked when pages from “Humor in Uniform” and “Life in these United States” began to appear in your collage work.
“They came with the car I bought,” you said.
And it was true. You had owned the Ramble for a week before you thought to check for a spare tire. When you opened to trunk you found the Reader’s Digests, a collection complete from May 1953 to December 1976, packed neatly in grocery bags. Your boyfriend was delighted. He said, “This is exactly what should come with a Rambler Americana. You should get Rolling Stone with a Mustang, People with a sporty Mazda.” You always meant to return the magazines to the woman from whom you’d bought the car. Surely she didn’t mean to give away this lovingly packed, chronologically organized collection with her car. But you never did. The magazines soon broke out of their bags and slid from one side of the trunk to the other. They provided ballast when the road was icy, and reading material on long trips.
The Rambler deteriorated gently over the years. It was, after all, a ’66. The seats and dash cracked and, after a break-in, the driver’s side door opened only from the inside. Then the gas gauge broke and your boyfriend kept track of the level with a stick he stuck in the tank. To keep the hood from springing open on the highway, he tied it with twine he cut whenever he wanted to check on the oil or look at the engine, which continued to tick like a stubborn good heart.
Most of the Reader’s Digests remained in the trunk or in the backseat, though you lost a few to attrition. You remember one magazine disappearing sideways into a hole in the backseat floor board like an animal slipping into a burrow. Since it was on one of the rare occasions your boyfriend was driving, you turned to watch the magazine cartwheel on the blacktop until the highway bore it away. You had to wonder what month and what year you lost—July ’59, April ’68, September ’73? You remember with regret that when you found the magazines, the issues from the fifties were just as crisp as the ones from the seventies.
The trusty Rambler made it down to Mexico in August of ’79 when you went to stay at a particular hotel you had heard about from friends. The hotel was on a each and you spent a whole month carving the wet sand. You sculpted castles, animals, and reclining nudes with heavy, cratered buttocks. Afterwards you took off your T-shirt and swam in just your bikini bottoms. Your boyfriend sat on the empty beach, watching, you imagined, your arms rise and fall and break the bright water like the surface of a mirror. When you walked from the water, you saw him reclined next to one of your reclining sand nudes. His head was flung back to the sky, his chest burning brown in the sun, his hair going red on the ends and the peace symbol he wore on a string flashing between his nipples.
The hotel your friends has told you about was once a gathering spot for a thirties Hollywood crowd and had since declined into a semi-ruin. The white stucco exterior was crumbling and the boardwalk to the beach overtaken by high beach grasses. The family you rented from lived in a clapboard house behind the hotel and stabled their livestock in its east wing, when you left your room in the early light, you threaded your way past the back of indifferent beasts intent on pecking or grazing their morning meal from the grass. When you returned in the heat of the day, you could see their quiet shadows in the lobby. Goats knelt on the worn carpet, chickens roosted in the foyer. Once, walking back from the beach, you saw a pig’s face staring placidly from a second story window.
Most of the rooms on the west wing were habitable, though in varying states of dereliction. You took a room on the first floor and slept on twin bed pushed together. After a while, you annexed the adjacent room, which was unoccupied. In that room, you remember, the door was two-thirds unhinged and leaning into the hall. A box spring lay on the floor and its mildewed mattress against the wall. You sketched your boyfriend I this room. That drawing, now lost, had shown broken bottles, crushed cigarettes on the floor, and slumped against one wall, your boyfriend with a relaxed and vacant face, hands crumpled like paper in his lap.
On the rock bald in Pisgah, your boyfriend was too close to the edge. He held his camera a 35 millimeter single reflex you had given him on his twenty-sixth birthday. He pointed it down toward the valley floor and his arms lifted from the torn sleeves of his flannel shirt almost like wings. You rose lightheaded from your squat, imagining Tobin soaring the air, and stumbled back to the rock.
“Hey,” you called, “I think we should go now. We’re going to lose the light.”
He didn’t speak, but turned slowly to face you. You remember a noise like a car backfiring at a distance, and your boyfriend’s hair lifting up on one side. For just a moment, you seemed to see a red leaf trembling in the dark strands. Then he stiffened and held the hand with the camera out formally as if he were a butler offering a tray of drinks. Thinking he wanted you to take his picture against the backdrop of the valley floor, you stepped forward to take the camera. But as you moved, he moved as well. His shoulders sagged, his knees bent, he gave a soft toss and the camera rolled from his hand. As you bent to catch it, you saw him folding in on himself so gracefully that, for a moment, you thought he would reverse his downward motion and lift in to the sky.
You cupped your hands under the camera, and watched him back swiftly down the incline. The camera grazed your fingertips, then struck the rock. A sheet of white unfolded from the flash.
He favored black and white Tri-Pan X and could roll bulk film in the dark faster than anyone you knew. All those years of covert joint-rolling in cars, bars and movie theaters, in restroom stalls and under restaurant tables, had made his fingers speedy and sure. He also loved the camera’s flash. Sometimes at night, he wandered the apartment, triggering the flash over and over. It made him feel as though he’d suddenly had a brilliant idea. He said, “A lightbulb going on in the head, see?” He began to use the flash for daylight photographs, taking his camera to the ski lodge and shooting flash shots in full sun with the snow glaring off the slopes. He presented the film to you and you developed it in the dark room at the Art School.
“Any good?” he asked over your shoulder as you watched the images emerge in the developing bath.
“Oh yes,” you said.
And they were. The prints were brilliant white, the figure on them as faint and ghostly as images dreamed or remembered from decades ago.
“Can I have these?” you asked. He nodded and said, “Consider them yours.”
These photographs became part of your oeuvre. You remember them, mounted on pastel-colored mats and housed by thin black frames, hung for a retrospective of your work at the Art School, and below the photographs, your clay vessels exhibited on wooden stands. Over the years, you gave away or sold most of the photographs, but two remain with you, now on display in your living room. In one of them, three lift poles travel up a slope, each one smaller and fainter than the other. To you it is a crucifixion scene in space, with the tiny skiers threading among the poles like black stars in a white sky. In the other, two children swim in a pool, the shadows of their white faces afloat in light, their bodies distorted by unseen water. Now when you look at these photographs, you realize something you now attribute to your genders or the differences in your ages; while you had an interest in the archiving of images, your boyfriend only had interest in their making.
There are two snapshots in your diary. The color image is of your husband with your second-born and the black Rorschach your blood made on the white sheets of your bed. The blackness of blood, after all, is what disguised your boyfriend’s injury.
When you tell the story now, you understand how Tobin must have felt, telling a story that no one could really believe. You must have had incredibly gifted hands, Tobin must have had incredibly gifted hands to be able to seize a cable in the middle of a headlong tumble from an open cargo. You must have had incredibly gifted hands, for your boyfriend did not fall of the rock. You flung yourself forward and seized the front of his flannel shirt and the two of you went down hard on the rock bald. He hung from your arm for nearly three days and you never saw the blood for the darkness of his hair. And because your glasses lay broken on the rock off to your left. In the hospital, you learned he’d been struck in the side of the head by a bullet from and unknown gun. Poachers, the state trooper told you, were not unheard of in the National Forest.
Your boyfriend hung from your right arm and you hung from your left arm which was wrapped around the trunk of a mountain laurel. You remember almost nothing of the time you spent together on the rock, you would like to remember more but you only have a handful of images. Night coming for the second time and the sky voluptuous in darkness. The stars pouring down shafts of light on your boyfriend’s face which burns like a pale hearth. His eyes opening and closing as he faces you from the other side of the rock like a person who has gone into deep still water and holds onto a raft while floating languorously.
The hikers who found you pulled you away from the drop-off by your legs. Your boyfriend’s body, still attached to your fist, bumped over the rock like a heavy net coming out the water. The hikers cut the flannel shirt from your hand with a knife and walked you, semi-conscious and buckling like a marionette down the trail. Your boyfriend remained on the ridge wrapped in a sleeping bag and tucked into the bushes.
Your parents came to North Carolina to collect you and your father donated the Rambler and the Reader’s Digests to a women’s shelter. You flew with them to their home in Colorado with your ribs taped, your face stitched, holding your arms like two broken wings.
As time went on, your father helped you learn to drive again using the heels and palms of your damaged hands. He offered to buy you a car in return, he said, for having dumped your Rambler so hurriedly in North Carolina. You let him chose a second-hand Chevrolet. An automatic with power steering, you could only do so much with your hands. But you missed the way the rambler shifted, three on a tree.
Eventually you left your parent’s home and drove alone to Sun Valley and discovered along the way you still liked driving. From Sun Valley, you drove to Jackson and from Jackson to Billings and you found yourself believing you had seen your boyfriend once of twice going the other way on Highway 25, in a mini-van or Mustang.
In the grief workshop in Seattle, you sat on the floor in the center of a circle of women and showed them your hands. They rubbed your shoulders, passed you crumpled tissues and stoked your crooked fingers. You told them how you had cried when the doctor had said your hands were dead. You told them how you had cried when you realized the Rambler was gone forever. And you told them the story of Tobin who had hung on so fiercely in the sky that once returned to the ground, he could no longer remember how to open his hand.
Your doctor told you this hand is dead, these hands are dead, the hands that held your lover have died and will not move. Your strong right hand which once threw the clay on your wheel can only curl and reach like a fish that is landed and no longer understands how to breathe. The doctor told you your hands would not heal and you believed him. You thought that as you proceeded down the years, your eyes fixed on the horizon behind, you would look back and see this moment as the horizon behind, the moment your life broke forever into before and after.
The doctor told you your hands would not heal but the hands have healed and the face you expected to see for the rest of your life long ago finished its drop over the edge. You see that face now in the pages of your photo albums and can’t imagine it wearing the passage ten more years. Your hands have healed, and your boyfriend’s death has disappeared into the mosaic of your memories until it is no more clear or remarkable I your mind than the moment you found the Reader’s Digests in the back of the Rambler.
Your hands now work the clay on your wheel. They knead your husband’s shoulders. Your husband’s arm in his flannel shirt goes to and fro; he plays the violin while you throw the vessels that bear your name into the avant-garde art world. Your hands cup the faces of your children, Jasmine the girl and Max the boy, born after your fortieth birthday, after you had unspoiled the ‘80s out West in Helena, Spokane, Seattle and Eugene, after you had cut your hair, traded your John Lennon glasses for contacts, left the commune in the Klamath mountains and met the logger who grieved for old growth forests, the logger who would leave Oregon and follow you to that desert heaven, Tucson.
You remember your boyfriend only when a distinct period piece pops out of the cultural fabric, a peace symbol on a jean jacket, Billy Jack on cable, the acrid smoke of marijuana, so infrequent these days, brings his face, or sometimes the smell of gasoline and you see him returning from the men’s room, over his head the red balloon reads Esso instead of Exxon. It’s all part of a crumbling past; Mary Tyler Moor and Son of Sam bring the same sweet sting of nostalgia, and you could believe it never really happened, that it just slipped from the late show into your dreams, if it wasn’t for the other snapshot, taken the moment the camera bounced on the rock between your tumbling bodies. It is over-exposed, a flashbulb blown in daylight, but in the white light you can see the image of dark-haired boy in a sleeveless shirt. At the bottom of the frame, your fingers reach up, but the boy is leaning back, already weightless. He flings his arms wide and rises into the wind like a kite riding the sky on the best day of your life.
Contributor’s Notes:
Alice Ayers lives in Seattle. She received an MFA in writing from the University of Washington.
“The story started with the idea that given enough distance you can develop nostalgia for the terrible as well as the sweet. About twelve years ago, I lived in New York City. My roommate’s brother came to stay with us and got so sick his hand literally died. His doctor said his body was working so hard to fight an infection it had to abandon less critical functions like circulation to extremities. Over the year, I watched gangrene eat the flesh of his fingers until he finally had to have them amputated at the second knuckle. I’ve never lost the image—it blends rather pungently with my gentler memories of the city.”
Popularity: 5% [?]