the magic of hands

The girl’s bedroom was pink.  She did not ask for it to be pink, nor did she like the color.  It was her room, though.  She did not have to share it with her brothers, and for this reason alone she liked the new house, which wasn’t a house at all, but a singlewide trailer placed on a tiny lot between the two-lane main street and the mountainside.

Carved into the mountainside behind her home was a trail, the Appalachian Trail, and a long span of rock stairs started at the edge of her backyard and  climbed up and up into the wilderness.  First thing she’d done when they moved in was to run up those stairs and count them.  Her mother  saw her and cut her eyes at her.  “Them stairs are dangerous,” she scolded,  “I see you playing on ‘em again  your daddy’ll tan your hide.”   There were forty-seven stairs, a prime number, and she’d never set foot on them again.

So she’d watch.  People were always walking along Main Street, crossing the road just after her house, and then climbing up the steep rock stairs.    If she was playing in the yard, she would wave to them, but then her momma reminded her they were strangers, and to keep to herself.   She wanted to watch when a hiker came by, but was afraid they might wave to her.  Then she would be torn between waving back and getting into trouble.  So she just averted her eyes if someone came around, pretending she didn’t see them.

From her bedroom it was different.  She could watch folks climbing up the trail with an unrelenting gaze.  And if she squatted down and looked up she could watch them climb up to the very top stair before they disappeared altogether.  The other two bedrooms faced the street, and the curtains were always drawn in the living room.  Only she had this view of the backyard with the trail that stretched all the way to Maine.

At school there was a map of the Appalachian Trail, and she liked to look at it, and imagine what it must be like, to walk all that way.  There was a star on their little town, and she could see the exact spot where the trail crossed the road before it went up and up and up, through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and on.  I’m right there she would think, her finger pressing on the map.  She did not know what Maine was like, or Virginia even.   The farthest she’d ever been was across the state line into Tennessee to visit her aunt, which she hated to do because her cousins were all boys, and mean ones at that.  She would sit in the safety of the living room and watch TV blankly, the air harsh with cigarette smoke.

It was late January.  A sparse snow lay on the ground.  Her brothers were watching TV with Dad, her momma was making supper.  She’d been reading on and off all day, “Little House in the Big Woods.”  She thought that might be a fine life, with no electricity and farm animals, and she’d mentioned it that morning to her mother,  who’d replied that electricity made life possible, “something you’ll figure out soon enough if the power goes out.”

She looked out the window to see snow flurries starting to fall.  There might not be school tomorrow, she thought.  That’s when she saw a couple making their way carefully down the stairs.  The woman was dressed in a bright purple coat, with lime green gloves and a knit cap with a tassel that matched her coat.  The man wore a black leather coat, a black fleece cap , and jeans.  They were smiling.  The woman  looked down at the house, her eyes scanning the windows, then seeing the pale face of a girl looking up.  The moment their eyes met, the woman slipped on the slick stairs and fell, down, down the steps, then tumbled off the stretch of stairs headfirst onto the sloping black Earth.  The girl put her hand over her mouth.  She watched as the man ran down the stairs, and reached out to the woman.  For a moment the woman lay still, and a fear gripped the girl’s stomach.  She had caused the woman to fall, she was sure of it.   Her cheeks burned with shame.  But then the woman lifted her head, and  stretched out her hand, and the man pulled her to her feet and helped her sit down on the stairs.  They sat there quietly for a few moments, the man standing a few steps down from the woman, asking her if she was OK.  Then they started to laugh, and she could hear their voices come into her room.  The woman turned and looked into her window.  She smiled and gave the girl a thumbs up sign before standing up and continuing carefully down the stairs.  When they reached the bottom, the man put his arm around the woman’s waist, and they walked on, across the road, and down the sidewalk, disappearing around the bend.

The girl sat in her pink room and wondered at the stairs she was not allowed to climb.  Her mother was right, they were dangerous.  But they had laughed.  She thought about Maine and log cabins and snow.  She hoped that there would be school tomorrow.  She wanted to look at that map again, to claim again her spot in it, and dream of where she might go.

There were Lego pieces everywhere.  Tiny bits of plastic color spread across the carpet, on the bathroom counter, on the stairs.  It had become such a habit for her to gather these pieces and toss them in the bucket that she was mindless in the task.

Except for today.  It was an unwavering gray.  Snow was falling.  It was late February, so there was no charm to the weather, no charm to her home, cluttered as it was with the restlessness of Winter, no charm in the cold of her fingers.  There was no place in the house that Legoes were not, and she began to feel as if she were gathering little pieces of herself, spread about carelessly, this red wing-shaped thing her passion, this gray block her obligations, these little round buttons her breasts.  She began to gather them with a fierce intensity, as if this were the only way she could reclaim herself from the familial chaos that had ruled her life for years, scouring corners and shelves and out of the way places.  She scrounged for them like coins, then threw them all into the Lego bucket.

She sat down, stirred the cauldron of legoes.  She hated legoes.   A sigh hedged out of her throat, and in that breaking away there followed a galloping of horses, wild in their sorrow, their grief, their confinement.  The wildness of her sorrow disturbed her.  She must maintain order and calm.  There was no place for this rumbling emotion.   She stood up, grabbed her coat, pulled on her boots, and walked out of the house.

Outside the air licked her face clean, the sifting hush of the snow lulled her thoughts.  She began to walk, down the drive, down the road.  The wind picked up, blowing snow in her face.  She passed the old farmhouse, dark and empty, and the fields around it which mirrored its desolation.  She passed the tall stand of pines that swayed in the wind, and the wide patch of briers that guarded elderberries in September.  She walked until she came to the spot where the road and the river touched before turning away from eachother,  the road going up the hill to the right, the river turning down and left.  Here there was a shore  of cold  stones that in the summer drew kids and adults alike.  Now, it was like everything around her, desolate and bleak.

There was one lego in her pocket.  It seemed to be the windshield of some space ship.  She set it down on a wide rock, blowing the snow away as if to protect the piece from the chill.  Then she picked up another large rock, one that fit nicely between her hands, a solid weight that she brought down resolutely on top of the little lego piece. It broke easily enough, but she continued smashing until the piece was more ground into something unrecognizable.

This is the violence of women, she thought, destroying the things that represent ourselves. She was tearless, cold, relieved.  She stood up, shoved her hands in her pockets.   The river wore on, over the course stones.  The wind relaxed and looped around her.  She pushed the smashing rock with her foot, and it rolled towards the river’s edge, so she finished the job my picking it up and heaving it in.  She turned away and headed back, wondering when it would end.