Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This story makes me think about the different people we become over time—and how we create artifacts of past selves in photographs and papers (something I have familiarity with lately). Neil Serven’s story gives full complexity of character to the woman who is the speaker’s mother through the speaker’s contemplation of such artifacts.
Listen to Serven read the story:
Red Eye
If every photograph is an accidental death, as I think Sontag or Barthes might have said, then my mother died many times over. We’re still finding them—in boxes with our old report cards, tucked in romance novels with shopping lists penciled on the flyleaf. Never in one place, as though each was discarded when the mood struck.
They shot her with a Leica, an Instamatic, a Polaroid. Laughing in the backs of cars. Basking poolside. Smiling through a Coke bottle.
Sassy-faced with a cigarette held aloft beneath the marquee of the Strand Theater. TAXI DRIVER LIPSTICK ALL PRESIDENTS MEN MOTHER JUGS & SPEED.
Backstage at a club somewhere, her hair clipped smart. Her blouse the reddest thing in the room, so red it skewed the color of everything else.
On a threadbare sofa in someone’s apartment, again the cigarette, red-licorice mouth open in the middle of a thought about Anne Sexton (I am projecting this part). A game of Parcheesi in progress. Everyone looking at her.
We hadn’t known she had these friends. We don’t know their names. We didn’t know she played Parcheesi.
* * *
It might have been Walter Benjamin who said that thing about death, now that I’m thinking of it.
Anyway, I never knew the woman in these pictures. A short while later my sister arrived, then me, in a large apartment our mother shared with our aunt and cousin, our louse father in and out as it suited him, punching up drunk in a rattletrap Datsun that couldn’t fit us, opening the fridge without even a hello. New shoes like he had just closed a deal.
She got him to fuck off at some point. Then she met the man she married and had two more.
There may have been attempts to juggle it all: Simone de Beauvoir, disco records, Valium, Old Milwaukee in cans, parties until we cried. Until we wore her down. Until her friends up and left one by one, bored or slighted or with families of their own, opportunities in California, they’re sending Philip out there. You’ll have to come visit.
* * *
There are shoeboxes somewhere stuffed with envelopes from Fotomat. That’s where we’ll find the woman we knew. Check the attic.
There’s the one where she’s up to her wrists in ground beef after making sure she took off her rings first.
With the four of us kids aboard the Lake Champlain ferry in front of my stepfather’s Caprice wagon, Andy in her tan arms but by then getting too big to be held.
Where’s the woman struggling to make sense of her checkbook, iced coffee leaving a ring on the table, watching Days of Our Lives?
Having her change ready for the 422 bus to Market Plaza, where we’d buy Keds on sale and she said she’d take us to Friendly’s for ice cream if we behaved?
We never behaved. We always ended up at Friendly’s. We know now that the ice cream was for her.
Neil Serven’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square, Rain Taxi, Post Road, The Pinch, Monkeybicycle, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere, and he is an alumnus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He and his wife, Hillary, own and operate Federal Street Books in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
