“He was wrong. I could take the ark.
I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.
The way they almost glittered.
It was the animals—the animals I could not take—”
Yesterday there was a black and yellow snake hiding under the cushion of one of our upholstered chairs. I was on the back sunporch, wearing a bathing suit, preparing to spend a few hours sunbathing and reading, when I saw something move. I thought at first that it was the curtain pull but when I looked I saw the flick of a tail, a half body of a snake slither under the cushion. I screamed.
I was alone at home, an uncommon occurrence in a house shared by four people, an even more uncommon occurrence during quarantine. Right now, when I have the chance to be alone, I feel desperately grateful, like a person who will only acknowledge they’ve been thirsty for days when they finally make it to water.
When I saw the snake, I called B immediately for no reason other than I didn’t want to be alone with it. I can’t take them, the animals. Our house feels so porous to the wild world. We are constantly trying to take back the domestic space from some animal. This is not so bad when it is the normal ones that people with homes deal with: ants, mice, flies. It becomes bewildering when the plumber fixing the pipes says he thinks the clog might have been some unidentified mammal, when there are squirrels living in the drains, attic, drywall, when a snake appears in a chair.
B told me recently that he can’t stand snake gore. I asked him, is this because a snake is so phallic, so reminiscent of a man’s most sensitive organ? I asked him this because I cannot go more than five minutes without thinking about sex. He laughed. No, he said, I don’t think it’s that, exactly, though maybe in part. It’s got something to do with the fact that snakes are all one. If you hurt one part of the snake you hurt the whole thing. It made me stop and think for a moment about humans, how we’ve evolved to have so many things we can lose. Two of everything. A fail safe. As if we knew we would all be so reckless that we should have a double of everything. Later, when we described the snake to my roommates, B put both hands to the side of his neck, said that the snake had a big fan, said it might have been a cobra. Or, maybe, a rattlesnake. My roommates’ eyes widened before they realized he was joking. It had been, at most, a garden snake, and had left through the open back door once we left it alone.
The only time I’ve seen a rattlesnake was in Wyoming. We were climbing dusty steps as part of a trail and it made its way across the steps ahead of us, its yellow brown body sinking easily into the background. This would have been during the week my family spent out there for my Aunt Wendy and uncle Jeff’s wedding, the event that would make her my aunt. My parents bought me cowboy boots with multi-colored fabric sides. There was a barn dance one night and I wore a dress that had a jean top and a patchwork skirt bottom. My dad spun me around the wooden floor for as long as I wanted to dance. My brother and I rode horses named Macaroni and Cheese around a pasture one afternoon. We took a covered wagon ride where some people pretended to be Native Americans on horses and some people pretended to be settlers. Looking back the Native Americans were presented as far too wild and scary, the settlers far too kind. At the time (I was eight), the whole experience felt like stepping into a movie. My aunt and uncle got married on a sunny day. I wore a pink dress my grandmother had sewn me with a seed pearl border and little rosettes down the front. I got altitude sickness and threw up all of my catered wedding dinner onto my shoes, took off my socks, put my patent leather mary-janes back on and danced the whole night.
My aunt Wendy was a professional wildlife photographer. She took photos of animals, but never snakes, always bigger things: lions and dolphins and foxes. I have a thumb drive of photos she took, some photos taken of her in front of a big zoom lens in a field. At the time of the wedding, the rattlesnake seemed shocking and strange. In Ohio I was used to raccoons and deer, coyotes, even, but never something like this. It was so thrilling, a brush with poison.
At my uncle’s house in Jackson Hole, sometimes moose come up to the windows in the wintertime. Everything in that town is so close to real open spaces, fields of tussock grass, uninhabited mountains and dessert patches where geysers erupt. We visited for Christmas once when Wendy was still alive and she told us about the moose nosing at the glass, about red foxes that lived under her friend’s house, like sweet wild dogs. I remember her leaking breast milk onto her shirt because she was still feeding my cousin Mason. I remember her putting him in a stroller and taking him for a run in the mornings. I remember how strong and fit and out of this world she felt to me.
I have tried and tried and tried to write about my aunt but still, always, fail to do her justice. I remember her wearing big ceramic earrings shaped like turtles that pulled her earlobes down like putty. She gave me a beautiful ring on my thirteenth birthday. When she came to our house on Hadrian Circle, she spent half of the time petting the dog next door because she couldn’t understand why such a beautiful, rust colored creature should be tied up. She told me she loved going to an all-girls school because she could wear her pajamas to class and it didn’t matter what she looked like. She seems to have been the thing that really made my uncle light up because she was so light.
I was thirteen when she died. Unexpectedly in the night. A relatively unknown heart disease. A pacemaker had been discussed but it didn’t seem like it was quite necessary. My mom and I left Los Angeles, where we were on a vacation Wendy had arranged for us, and went directly to Nashville for the funeral. Wendy’s mother was in the bathtub drinking wine for days. I remember eating grits for the first time and feeling so sick that I didn’t eat them successfully again for a decade. I saw my dad cry.
All of these memories feel stored with nothing to do with them. My uncle is a stoic; talking to him about Wendy seems difficult. I’ve tried it once and it was a little stilted, awkward, felt like we were talking about something as unrelated to us as a person in a history book. So they sit there. I think of us the day we saw the rattlesnake on the trail. I remember waiting to see that it had continued far enough away that it was safe again to cross the steps. How that day we seemed so lucky to have just missed the deadly thing. I wish that kind of luck could have held, forever, over the whole state of Wyoming, and over everything my aunt ever did.
B told me that rattlesnakes can still bite you even when you’ve bit their head off. Their fighting instincts die as much as an hour after they’ve been separated from the life they’re fighting for. Phantom pain, an instinctual response. It is not shocking to me that people experience phantom limbs when one of their two versions has been lost. It’s not shocking that a rattlesnake head bites with its final spasms of life. It is not shocking that sometimes I forget for a moment that Wendy is dead. What would be shocking would be if we didn’t.
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