Jane took the groceries from Myla and jaunted straight back to the kitchen, leaving Myla standing at the door. She had the presence of mind to pull the screen door shut behind her, the tiny voice in the back of her mind reminding, “Keep the cat out.” Then Jane came back in the room and clasped her hands. “Myla. Myla.” It was a surprise, Myla realized, for Jane to be the first person to use her name after all the years of being called Kate. It was right to have Myla uttered here.
Jane ushered Myla to a spot on the couch, piling newspapers and magazines on the floor to clear a space. Myla smiled and looked around the unchanged room. “I hope this is okay.”
“What?”
“Coming here. Like this.”
“Are you kidding?” Jane looked incredulous. “This is a miracle to us. I’ve called Steve. He’s on his way. He and I . . .” Jane looked at her again with those mother eyes. “He and I think about you every day. We aren’t religious people, you know, but we do the closest thing we can to praying.” Then she smiled self-consciously. “Oh, but it doesn’t need to be as dramatic as all that. I’m sure your life is just excellent.” She looked down at her hands, which kept fluttering in her lap, and Myla wanted to tell Jane it was fine for the older woman to touch her, fine for her to use her mother’s hands as she longed to use them. But instead there was a whistling from the kitchen. Jane stood up. “I put some water on to boil. I’ll make us tea.”
So Myla followed Jane into the kitchen, and Jane poured piping-hot water into two handmade mugs. “Here’s my latest attempt at something artistic.” Jane smiled somewhat apologetically as she handed one to Myla. “The problem is, I’m not really that good. But they hold water, and that’s got to count for something.”
Myla knew Jane’s movements so well that it was as if she’d been in this kitchen every day for the last decade. Jane would give two tugs on her tea bag, then walk to the utensil drawer to the right of the sink, extract a spoon, tease the tea bag onto the spoon, wind the string until it squeezed out all the juice, then unwind the string as she walked to the garbage and deposited the tea bag. Then there was the honey procedure: half a spoonful of honey, centrifuged expertly so that there’d be a taste of sweetness throughout. Myla looked hopelessly down at her cup of tea, now turning a deep brown from neglect. She wouldn’t even try to put in honey: she’d end up with a glob of stickiness at the bottom that would make her feel hopeless. She wished she were young enough to ask Jane for assistance. But now Jane was moving toward her, seeing a fully formed adult, and trying, truly trying, to treat her like one. Myla could tell it was difficult and was amazed by Jane’s restraint. So Myla volunteered information: about being a professor of medieval English and about her research on Mary’s blue robes, which—she realized with a flash of surprise as she was explaining it to Jane’s open face—she hadn’t thought about since she’d been in Portland.
And then Jane told Myla about their lives. “Steve’s no longer at the university.” Myla nodded. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Jane say something like, “It was too difficult for him to be there after everything that happened,” but instead Jane smiled and said, “He’ll recount his renunciation of the laws of mathematics to anyone who’s willing to listen. Consider yourself warned. Having left behind the glamorous life of a math professor, he’s fallen in love with recycling. He takes the discards from one company and figures out what another company can do with them. Unused pieces of plastic, that kind of thing. He really loves it. And I’m still teaching eighth grade. The year’s almost at an end, and the kids have been pretty tough, but I still do it. It’s what I do.” Myla knew she was working toward something, but wasn’t going to say it without knowing that Myla wanted to know.
“And Emma?”
Jane’s face broke into a smile even as her eyes welled with tears. “Em’s doing well. She’s celebrating two years of sobriety. She’s living in San Francisco with her wonderful boyfriend—they graduated from Berkeley last year.”
“Oh God,” said Myla, shocked by this new reality. “Two years of sobriety? Is she—”
“It’s all right,” said Jane, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Emma’s doing really well now. She’s just fine.” Jane obviously didn’t want to talk about this part of Emma’s past. But she added, “She’ll be so happy to know you’re here. She’d love to see you.” Jane had decided to let Emma speak for herself.
Myla flashed with knowing that there was no reason to assume only her life had been shattered by Pru’s death. In the intervening years, Myla had occasionally revisited her treatment of Jane and Steve with great regret, but even in those moments of remorse, Emma had remained a perpetually sunny ten-year-old in Myla’s mind. Of course, now she saw her desire to believe that Emma would be just fine had been selfish and unrealistic. Myla tried to push away the wave of grief that surged up when she thought of what Emma had obviously endured since she’d seen her last.
Jane finally took Myla’s hand and squeezed it, bringing Myla back to her present self. Jane looked Myla in the eye. She said, “We miss you, Myla. We think about you every day. We do.” And Myla knew she was telling the truth.
IT’S VERY HOT ONE DAY, SO I’m sitting in my underpants in Ruth’s backyard. I want to go home to get our wading pool so we can fill it up with water and I can lie in it, but Ruth says that will take too much time. She already has the camera outside, and she says she doesn’t want to carry all the equipment in and lock up the house and drive us home. But I tell her it’s so hot that I don’t want to take pictures. Myla rolls her eyes because she’s afraid that means Ruth won’t take pictures of her either. But Ruth says, “Okay.” And then, all of a sudden, she looks excited. She goes into the garage and comes back with a sprinkler and takes it all the way down to the bottom of the yard, away from the camera, and screws it into the hose. And when she turns it on, cold water sprays out all over me, like rain. And then I run in it again and again, until I’m cool all over.
After a while, I’m bored, and I come over to where Ruth is taking pictures of Myla sitting on a towel. Ruth is saying to Myla, “And then Agostino Tassi, a good friend of Artemisia’s father, Orazio, rapes Artemisia—”
“Shh,” says Myla. “Don’t say that.”
“What?” asks Ruth.
“Don’t say that word.”
I know they’re talking about me, but I pretend I’m not even listening. Then Myla says to me, like she knows everything, “Ruth was just telling me about this painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. She lived in the seventeenth century. Her father was a painter too, and then one of his friends hurt her. Right, Ruth?”
Ruth says, “Sorry about that, kiddo. You two are so grown up that I forget sometimes.”
“That’s okay,” says Myla, like she owns the situation. “You should just be careful. Even though you don’t have any kids of your own, you still have to be responsible.”
I’m sick of them acting all bossy to each other, so I say, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”
Ruth asks, “What, Pru?”
I tell them again. “That’s what I want to be. A painter. I’m going to be a painter.”
Myla giggles. “Well, everyone wants to be something when they’re six. Kids want to be astronauts and archaeologists and doctors all the time, but you know, Pru-y, it’s hard to actually be those things.”
Then Ruth looks serious at Myla and I can tell she’s the grown-up again. She says, “Pru, you’ll be an incredible painter. What kind of paintings do you think you’ll do?”
This is something I haven’t thought about, but now that Ruth’s listening, I don’t want Myla to take it all away. So without knowing what I mean, I say, “I want to work in large formats.”
“That sounds great,” Ruth says, smiling. “Maybe we’ll do a show together someday, with my photographs of you, and your paintings.”
“What will we call the show?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“It has to have a good name, so people will b
e interested in coming to see it.”
“Well,” she says, “I don’t know. What do you guys think?”
I think about it for a minute. My idea comes to me like a shape, without words. So I have to put words on it and I don’t know how. “We could name it after what we call this.”
Myla giggles again. “I have no idea what that means,” she says.
But Ruth says, “Can you explain it to us?”
“Like this,” I say. “What do you call this? What do you call us when you’re doing this? Like I know we have names, but that’s not what I mean. What do you call us?”
Ruth nods. “Well, most photographers would call you subjects or models—”
“Call us models!” says Myla, but I shake my head.
“That doesn’t describe it,” I say.
“Remember that first day I took a photograph of you guys? In my studio? Remember how I told you you could name my camera? And you never did. Well, how about you name this instead? How about you name what you are.”
So I stop and I think. And then the shape inside me finds its words. And before I know it, the words are outside me. “Camera girls,” I say. “We’re your camera girls.”
Ruth says, “Lovely.”
Myla says, “Boring. Let’s go run in the sprinkler.”
But Ruth says, “Wait. Side by side, just like that.” And we know what’s coming. So we hold still and relax our faces, and I’m happy because I have my idea, and Myla’s happy because she has her picture. Ruth slides the film into the back of the camera, and we take one photograph. One photograph to remember that I’ll be a painter—to remember we have a name. A name for what we are.
STEVE BOUNDED IN THE DOOR, and Myla felt the shock of realizing he looked old in a way that David never would have. David would have remained tall and lean. He was the kind of man who would have been able to wear the same pair of pants into his old age. But Steve, though not elderly yet, had changed. He had a belly now that pressed hard against her when she hugged him. And he had turned gray, whereas David’s hair, thick and brown, would have stayed that way for a long, long time. Steve hugged her again, and kissed the top of her head. She could feel Jane watching them. “Jane and I hope you’ll be staying,” he said. His first words to her in years.
“Oh, thanks, I’ve actually got a hotel room—”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re staying with us. I can’t believe you didn’t come by before this. How long’ve you been here?”
“Only a day,” she apologized.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about last night, but you’re damn well staying here now.” Myla nodded, bent to him. Now that she was here, it seemed the only option.
Steve ushered them into the kitchen, and Myla remembered this about them, that the kitchen was where this family did their familying. Their kitchen was bigger than their living room, tucked into the back of their bungalow. They settled down in chairs around the table while Jane started moving around. Myla knew Jane was beginning dinner. It was exciting to witness such motivation over something so routine. She watched as Jane opened the fridge and emerged with vegetables and chicken breasts. She checked with Myla that she wasn’t a vegetarian, and Steve smiled with relief when she shook her head.
“Well, thank God for that,” he said. “You kids always loved my special sauce. How about I grill this weekend?” The question hung like darkness in the air as Myla watched Jane’s back flinch at “you kids.” Myla wanted to stand up and put her hand on Jane’s shoulder, to tell her not to worry, that she could hear these things, but Myla didn’t move.
“That would be great,” said Myla, smiling.
Steve leaned back in his chair. “You’re looking good.”
Myla looked down at herself, cased out her grown-up body. Her arms seemed too long, so she folded them against her. “Yes. I’ve been fine.”
“See, that’s the problem, Myles. You haven’t been good. You’ve been fine.”
She opened her mouth to justify the habitualness of the phrase, but Steve put up his hand. She’d forgotten how hard it was to argue against him. “Where’ve you been?” he asked. Myla could see that Jane was focusing her whole attention on the chopping of the knife against the wooden board. Jane wasn’t going to interfere, and each chop seemed to resound with her determination.
“I’m sorry.” Myla looked down at her folded, too-long arms.
“Don’t apologize, Myla. Just tell me what happened.”
She waited for a way to explain it. She’d rehearsed this conversation for over a dozen years, and it had always started with her proudly standing up for her decisions, glancing Steve’s questions off her shiny shell of self-confidence. In her imagination, the conversation hadn’t gone like this. “I changed my name.”
Steve nodded. “Well, we figured that much out.” He turned to Jane. “Didn’t we?”
Jane was turning on the stove. “We looked for you. When we heard you’d left college, Steve was certain you’d transferred somewhere else.”
“I knew you wouldn’t give up on your smarts,” he said.
Myla nodded. “Well, you were right. I’ve been telling Jane, I teach medieval English. I’m trying to write a book. I guess that isn’t much of a shock.”
Steve laughed. “Well, we weren’t hungry for a shock. We just wanted you to come home.” He reached across the table and freed one of her hands. “Now that you’re home, you can explain it all to us.”
Now Jane came forward, and Myla could see that she was speaking to Steve, directing him, even though she was looking at Myla. “You must be wiped. I’m whipping dinner up, and then you can relax.” She knew Jane was giving Steve her assessment of the situation: Myla would be here for a while, so Steve should stop pestering her.
Steve took the hint. “You’ve always known you have a home here, Myles.” He stood and pecked Jane on the cheek. “I’m going to go freshen up,” he said.
Once they sat down and ate, Steve didn’t ask any more big questions. The windows in the dining room were open, so in drifted the late-spring sounds of kids biking home from the park, of people barbecuing on their back porches. Jane related all of Myla’s news to Steve. He listened politely to Jane’s rendition, then asked Myla some questions about her research. She obliged. The candles became the only light, flickering against the walls. Then it was nighttime, and Steve told stories about his Dumpster-diving adventures for the recycling firm, Jane talked about her students and their literature projects, and Myla saw the evening from outside. From outside, this gathering would not look unusual. Someone would see a family, and after all, this was family, and not just anyone’s. This was her family. They wanted to be this for her. The solidarity was foreign, yes, but it gave her back her name. Jane and Steve said “Myla.” They said “Myles.” She liked this. She liked it all the way to bed.
RUTH CALLS US ONE SATURDAY and says, “Guess what, guys, I’ve got a show!” There’s a gallery downtown interested in her photographs. She says they’re interested in everything: the first portraits of horses and jockeys she took when she was living in Kentucky, and the ones she’s taken since she’s lived in Oregon, and now the photographs of Myla and me. “My camera girls,” she says to me when I’m on the phone.
Myla takes the phone from my ear and asks, “Does everyone at the gallery wear black and talk like the Beats?” Then she laughs at whatever Ruth says back. I don’t hear it. But then Myla puts the phone to David’s ear and says to him, “Ruth wants us in the show, David.”
David’s face is all listening. He keeps the phone by his ear and smiles down at me. He says, “Wow, Ruthie. I’ll talk to them, see what they say. Great. And Ruth? Congratulations! You’ve hit the big time! Okay, bye now.” Then he looks at us. “Well, it looks as if your mugs might end up in Ruth’s show. How about that?”
Myla sticks out her tongue. “Don’t call them mugs.” Her nose wrinkles up. “Call them countenances, call them visages.” Then she giggles.
“So what do you t
hink, Pru? Do you think it would be okay to have your picture hanging in a gallery?”
“Like a van Gogh portrait, Pru-y, think of it!” Myla says, and twirls toward the fridge like a prima ballerina.
David says, “Ruth said you guys can look at the ones she’s thinking of proposing to the gallery, and I guess the gallery’ll make the final decision. But she also said”—and here he reaches out his arms and pulls me onto his lap—“that you don’t have to have your picture on any wall if you don’t want it there. And Prudence, she means that. I know her. If you don’t want your face on the wall, it doesn’t have to be there.”
I know I want it hanging there, and that scares me a little. What is it in me that wants people to see my face? But then I realize—it’s the part of me that’s been working with Ruth for what feels like forever, the three of us, a team of artists. So it’s not exactly that I want my picture on the wall, and it’s not exactly that I don’t want it there. It’s that I don’t want to know that having a picture on the wall is what makes it real. I want the moment to be real. I don’t want the picture to fall into anyone else’s life but my own. But I know I’ll say yes. Myla twirls around the sun-bright kitchen and winds me into the yes I know I’ll give.
chapter eight
when Myla woke up, Steve was sitting at the foot of her bed. “Good morning,” he whispered. She wondered why he was whispering if she was already awake; she heard the soft hushing sound of the shower.
“Good morning,” she managed as she pulled herself up into sitting.
“I’m on my way to work,” he said by way of explanation. “But I wanted to make sure you’d be okay.” He glanced over his shoulder, and Myla realized he’d be in trouble with Jane if she saw him in here bugging her.
The Effects of Light Page 9