Emma was behind her. “I think it’s good for you. Just to see it’s still standing.”
Myla nodded. Emma’s gesture asked if Myla wanted to knock on the door, and Myla shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve seen what I need. We lived here, is all. And now we don’t. I’m fine.”
Emma kicked at a stone. She said, “I thought if you saw the house, you’d get it.”
“Get what?”
“That you can’t ever leave anything behind. No matter how hard you try.” Emma turned her face to Myla’s. “It was a horrible thing, the way you walked out on Mom and Dad. Forget me, I was just a kid. But they lost people too, you know? It wasn’t just you. And then you left them.”
Myla nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know. I know you are. But how about instead of apologizing, you promise me, right here, that you will never ever disappear again. You don’t have to be friends with my family—”
“Of course I want to be friends with you guys—”
“Wait,” said Emma, putting up her hands, betraying a maturity Myla hadn’t given her credit for. “Let me finish. This isn’t about hanging out with friends. This is me telling you: you’re not allowed to walk out on my family again. You’re not allowed to do that to anyone. But especially not my parents.”
“Of course, I promise. Of course.” Myla pulled Emma in to hug her. “I was messed up. You’re right, I was only thinking about myself. But I’m not going to do that again. I promise.”
“Good,” said Emma, resisting Myla’s pull. “I’m only telling you once. You nearly destroyed my parents. And I couldn’t help them. They needed you.” Myla’s world became blurry from her tears. And then Emma hugged Myla back, softly at first, and then holding hard to her. Myla could feel Emma begin to cry and soothed her gently, rocking her back and forth.
“I want to know how you are, Emma. I want to know what happened with you.”
“Good,” said Emma. “Someday. Someday I’ll tell you. But for now you promise you’ll never disappear again. You tell us if you’re going.”
“I’ll never disappear again,” said Myla, and it was a promise, for the first time, she truly felt she could keep.
WE’RE AT AN OLD SHED ON the edge of someone’s property by the coast. There are apple trees. It’s afternoon, and the wind will turn soon and whip us where we stand, but for now I’m fine, protected by the shed. Ruth’s hair is red in the light and whips behind her like a scarf. And the camera is here, set and ready. I’m curving my body, my arms steady and solid. I can see what I look like—this is how good I’ve gotten at knowing what will click Ruth’s mind into wanting to get me down on paper.
She never wants to talk about her work unless we’re looking at it. It’s like the pictures aren’t real for her until she sees them on paper. It’s the opposite for me. When I see them on paper, they get less real. It’s like the moment has faded by the time it gets to where you can hold it in your hand.
But this is one shoot we talk about before we do it. I can quote Ruth about subject and ground. Subject: well, I’m the subject. Ground: “There are three kinds of possible photographic ground: those that harm and distract, those that are just there, and those that pre-sent the subject like a jewel in a setting.” The orchard is the first type, but could become the third, if Ruth can pull it off. She tells me this. She says the only reason she’s trying is because I’m willing to get bored trying. The orchard is tricky because of all the “bright, distant ground elements in the sky and the busy-ness of orchard trees set apart.” This is how Ruth talks to me. Black and white is already contrasty and busy. I know that. Ruth wants to know if I’m up to the challenge.
So this time I give her a challenge too. This time I stop her right before she starts making the pictures that I know she’ll love. I want something else from her, something bigger. I just say, “Can we try something different?”
That brings her out of her quiet head. She says, “Sure, okay. What do you mean?”
“Like. I don’t know.” I walk forward. I realize for a second how silly I look, naked in an orchard with a shed behind me and this big eye focused in my direction. “Try to take a picture that isn’t pretty.”
She laughs. “But how can I possibly do that, when your beauty is beyond measure?”
“Ha ha. You know what I mean. Just try it for a second. Take a picture of me that feels ugly. Or plain. Take a picture of the part of me you aren’t interested in.”
Ruth looks worried. “Honey, what do you mean? What part of you could I possibly not be interested in?”
“C’mon, Ruth. You’ve taken pictures of me since I was three years old. So that’s what? Nine years? And you always take pictures of me where I look beautiful or happy or easy to get along with. But there’s got to be something about me that you choose not to take pictures of. So try to take a picture of that.”
Later, she shows me the proof sheets from that day. I can see we never achieved my goal. But I can also see something else: that my idea worked. There are moments in some pictures that aren’t just beautiful. And those are the ones that are interesting, at least to me. They show us working together, they show my ideas helping her pictures.
There’s one picture I make her print even though she doesn’t want to. She says it just doesn’t make any sense. But she prints it as a favor to me. My body looks the way it always looks in her pictures, like a statue. But my eyes are different. They are wild at the corners, though only if you glance at the picture from one angle really, really fast. If you didn’t know me, you’d think maybe I was just sneezing or something.
I like that picture because I look afraid.
THAT NIGHT MYLA LAY IN bed, Samuel curled deep in sleep beside her, and watched the light from the streetlamp patterning the wall. She was happy, alive. She’d been waiting for this moment for years. A sensation of peace and excitement all at once. When she was a little girl, she’d often fallen asleep this way, watching over Pru’s dreaming body and thinking about the big stories and ideas David had left behind him in the room, after he’d kissed them both good night and closed the door.
Reading his words was so much like hearing his voice that at times it took her breath away. And today was the day he’d started to tell the story of photography. She’d had to restrain herself from flipping ahead to this section—The Momentous Birth of Photography and the Advent of Technological Time—while she’d been reading the earlier parts of the book. But today’s reading had been wonderful. She’d felt the old familiar joy of following her father’s train of thought. It was a physical sensation, full of rising and lifting, resting and lying low. And what he’d said made such sense that it made her want to laugh.
Photographs had been central to her life for so long that she’d never before even tried to imagine what the world must have looked like, and seemed like, before their invention. All day long she’d noticed pictures everywhere she looked. And now, as she watched the light playing on the wall, she could imagine the longing that had made inventors want to capture that light and write with it on paper. It must have been so discouraging for the first photographic inventors to realize they could capture a picture but had no way to fix it on the page. Then came Niépce and Daguerre, who figured out how to coat a copper plate with chemicals to secure the picture exactly. But the real miracle, the world- altering miracle, was William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the paper negative. Then pictures could be reproduced again and again, multiplying the same vision.
The reason all this mattered so much was simple: photographs weren’t just pictures, they were moments. For what the invention of photography in the 1820s and 30s provided was visual proof that there was such a thing as the historical moment. For centuries, artists had been painting such moments, but none of the resulting pictures had been made in a moment’s time. Photography captured the moment in a moment. And technology made it possible.
Myla lay in bed and thought about Ruth’s camera, how foreign and str
ange and machinelike it had always seemed to her. Wood, metal, cloth, glass. It was both extremely fragile and very tough. It worked. And then there was the chemistry of the darkroom. Myla had never been interested, but Pru had agitated to be allowed downstairs to help Ruth print pictures. Both Ruth and David had vetoed that idea. Too toxic, they’d told her. Way too toxic for a little girl.
Myla could hardly lie still; David’s thoughts filled her with energy. She slipped out from under the covers, slid her feet into a pair of Jane’s down slippers, and pulled a wool afghan around her shoulders. Quietly she made her way downstairs in the dark and let herself out the front door. The spring air was fresh, not too cold, damp. A fuzzy halo shimmered around the streetlight. She sat down in a wicker chair and tucked her feet under her. Above her in the house, Samuel, Steve, and Jane all slept. Myla understood that this was a moment, a distinct moment. And if she had a camera, the right lenses, the correct film, she could photograph it. All of them asleep in their beds, this wicker chair, the cold light. Every single moment could, theoretically, be depicted; every picture would allow that moment to endure.
What her father had claimed was that through the act of making the moment visible, photography not only affirmed the existence of such moments but also provided a way for the human mind to think about reality, about the experience of living in time. If linear time was evident everywhere, then photography allowed human beings to think of their lives as actual moments strung like beads along the time line of their lives. Every moment, whether photographed or not, was always visible in theory. And with multiple prints of a single moment traveling through time and space, the moments of an individual’s life gained a force never before experienced anywhere at any time.
Myla felt the sweep of her father’s mind carrying her along and was surprised to look up and see Jane standing in the doorway, her arms wrapped around her. “You okay, Myla?”
“I’m fine. No, better than fine.” Myla smiled. She felt the coldness in the air and stood up, shivering. “I think I’m happy, Jane. Right here. Right now. In this moment.”
The older woman stepped forward and set the screen door back in place as quietly as she could. She enveloped Myla in her arms. “That’s what we want, sweetheart. But we don’t want you to freeze to death.”
Together they entered the house, and Jane said, “For what it’s worth, if you ever want to talk . . .” She left off. “About anything. You know. Samuel. What you’re going through now. The past.” Jane sounded awkward. “I don’t want to interfere in anything now, but I wish I’d been more present for you in the past.” She paused. “I just feel awful about that, Myla. You needed me, you know. And I wasn’t there.”
Myla was shocked. “Jane! You of all people. You couldn’t have been more there.” She hugged the older woman. “Please don’t worry. I know I told you that all the adults let me down. And maybe I believed that then. But now, well, now I’m a grown-up. I know better.” Jane hugged her, then pulled away as Myla went on. “But I’m ready for a mom now, so I guess you’ll be stuck with lots of conversations.”
The two women made their way back upstairs, and soon Myla found herself stretched out beside Samuel. She’d lost none of her contentment, but Jane’s words had awakened a memory, a moment, and she realized that only in her present happiness could she afford to feel this moment and let it expand into the scene it was, the scene it had been.
She remembered waking up and hearing the two adults arguing below. Usually Helaine had gone straight home after dinner, but Myla remembered that on this night she and Pru had been angry about something and had retreated upstairs. They’d put on makeup for hours, then ended up curled against each other on the bed, until she’d woken up. Pru stayed asleep as Myla had slowly eased her arm out from under her sister’s hot head. The house was quiet but not asleep. No David in the next room. Too many lights on, that was the first sign.
Myla had crept down the stairs, missing creaky number five and sitting on seven to see if she could hear anything. She knew she could go downstairs if she wanted to, but it felt right to hide somehow. She listened, knowing that their voices would come. And they did, still from the kitchen. She thought they would have moved out of there a long time ago.
“The point I’m trying to make here, if you’d just give me a chance to make it, is that this stuff is potent.” Helaine’s voice, shrill.
“And you don’t think I know that? You think I haven’t deliberated long and hard about the consequences? These are my daughters—”
“Well, I may not know what it’s like to be a parent, but I know what it is to love Myla and Prudence. They’re terribly important to me.”
“If they were terribly important to you, then you’d understand.”
“You asked my advice, David, and I’m trying to give it to you. Now just calm down and listen.”
It was quiet for a long time, and Myla could see in her mind’s eye the way that David’s face was trying to cool itself, the way his hands would be pulling at the knees of his pants. She’d never heard him angry like this before. At last he said, “Go on.”
“You’ve been having problems with Myla.”
“Not problems. She’s a teenager. It’s normal. She’s pulling away.”
Helaine’s voice again. “And she’s not in Ruth’s pictures anymore.”
“Yes,” said David. “Myla’s decision.”
Helaine sighed. “I just think . . . I think it’s more than that. I think this is more about Ruth’s work than you or Ruth or even Myla would be willing to admit. Whether or not one agrees with the pictures being considered pornography or what have you, your daughters are going to be lying on their therapists’ couches talking about those pictures for the rest of their lives. Don’t you get that?”
“No. I don’t. I don’t choose that for them.”
“But you don’t get to choose, don’t you see?”
“Fine, Helaine. You’re right. I don’t get to choose their futures. All I can do is offer them possibilities, open up their childhoods so they know they have freedom of self and expression. That gives them the tools to choose what they want for themselves. That people look at those photographs and think they depict something they simply don’t—well, that has nothing to do with my girls. That’s a cultural problem. And the only way to fight against that problem is to encourage art that stretches the boundaries of what is conventional, of what is mainstream.”
“Your girls aren’t experiments. Your girls aren’t here to expand the imagination of millions. They’re just girls.”
“I know that, Helaine. I know my girls. No one pressures them. Myla’s chosen not to be in the photographs anymore. When she made that decision, everyone supported it. Besides, Ruth consults us on each photograph she prints, making sure we want it out there in the world. There’s a whole slew of photographs she took of Myla that she chose not to print because she felt they were too charged. Not because Myla was doing anything overtly sexual in them, but because Myla’s grown up. She has a woman’s body now. And her stubbornness, her self-knowledge, can be easily perceived as sultry. Ruth made that call. That’s her job as a responsible artist. That’s my job as a responsible father.”
Myla hadn’t known that. She heard one of them scraping a glass across the table and then clapping it back down again. Then Helaine said, “David, I know you’ve had the best of intentions since day one. And I honestly believe that if Sarah were still alive, the girls would have been in pictures just the same. But—and I know I’m wading into treacherous waters here, but I’ve got to say my piece—if Sarah were alive, those pictures would be different for the girls. Ruth and those images wouldn’t be all they imagine about what it is to be a woman in this world. Don’t you see? As a man, you’ve made things too simple for them, you’ve required them to believe they live in a world where women can do or be or think anything, where bodies aren’t used as weapons, where a smart woman isn’t threatening. I think Sarah would have given them a dose of reality that you
haven’t been able to, a reality that Ruth’s artistic vision just won’t include.”
Helaine’s voice sounded clear, not angry, as she went on. “Those girls love you. They love Ruth. I know they don’t love me because I’m not fun. But also because I won’t play along and pretend that what you’ve all chosen isn’t dangerous—” It sounded as if Helaine were going to say something else, but she didn’t.
“And?”
“And nothing, David. I can help you if you’ll let me, but I can’t sit by and watch you expect so much of them. They’re children. They can’t be theories and research and proofs. They’re your daughters, and they would be anything for you. So let them see the pictures in all their complexities, talk openly with them about the things people are saying about them, as brutal as those things might sound to you. They’ve both asked you about them. Pru even wanted that interview. Just showing them articles isn’t enough. They need to hear from you—”
David’s chair pushed across the floor as he stood up. “They won’t ever hear anything like that from me. And before they hear it from you, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Now, David, really, be reasonable.”
His voice was painfully quiet. “Please go.”
When Helaine’s steps clipped across the floor, Myla sprang up the stairs. She slipped back into her room and closed the door as David and Helaine walked into the front hall. She listened and listened, but she never heard a slam or even a click from the front door.
Curling up again behind Pru, Myla had been drawn to the swirl of her sister’s hair on her pillow. Hair the color of their mother’s hair. Something she hadn’t realized before. It struck Myla as odd that she hadn’t noticed the resemblance in the past, and she felt far away from herself. How did any of them know who they were with Sarah so fully gone from them? She’d been gone almost thirteen years. Too long to understand. Too long even to imagine what life might have been with her there.
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