Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  Two kids sat on the terrazzo stairs leading to the front door. They seemed unfazed as Jenny stepped between them.

  One of the kids said, “You can just walk in, lady. He don’t care. Here.” He jumped up, pushed opened one of the two identical tall, narrow doors with carved wooden angels and inset with high, stained-glass windows.

  The boy left her on the threshold to go back to his friend on the stoop.

  “Hello?” said Jenny.

  No reply.

  “Um, anybody?”

  She walked into the shadowy, high-ceilinged entry, almost as long as it was tall. Unwilling to close the door behind her, yet nervous to leave it open, she glanced down the hall and up the stairs to the left. She could see a living room, part of a dining room, and into a very large kitchen, all with the same fourteen-foot ceilings.

  Very little light came into the house because of the close-set houses on either side, and what light there was came from the still-open front door and, Jenny could see, the other opened door next to a wall of windows at the back of the kitchen.

  Closing the front door, she walked a straight line past the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen, then out the back door and onto a wooden landing. Below the landing she saw a young man in the garden. He was hacking some sort of resistant vine with a hoe.

  “Excuse me,” she called over the chop-chop of the hoe as it hit stem and ground. He stopped without looking up, as if he were listening, then resumed.

  “Hello?”

  This time he looked up. “I thought I heard someone,” he said, seemingly unsurprised at seeing a stranger newly emerged from his house. His dark, straight hair fell to the base of his tanned neck, damp with perspiration; suntans were unusual for San Franciscans, leading her to surmise that he spent quite a bit of time in his garden. He was of medium height and slender, with a pleasing face and smile, a nice-looking man. There was an ease about him, almost as if her appearance on his wooden deck was usual and ordinary. He wasn’t, in some respects, unlike Abner.

  “Ed sent me? From Schonneker’s Camera Emporium?”

  He held his hand to the side of his eyes, blocking the lingering sun. “Oh, Ed. Look, I’m a little”—his hand fell from his face as he indicated the stubborn foliage—“uh, could you come back another time?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  He waved as he returned to his labors; a handsome Siamese cat with her dark chocolate and cocoa-colored markings accented by sections of bright, white fur marched over to him, then sat down nearby like a one-cat audience. Jenny saw him stop, turn toward the cat, and smile.

  • • •

  She drove to Green Apple Books on Clement Street. It was the sort of inviting store that probably made half its income by tapping into the natural curiosity of the reader, banking on spontaneous purchases; the more one browsed, the more one wanted to read (and to buy). She bought one novel, one short story collection, one biography, and four books on photographers.

  She crossed the street to buy cheap dim sum that she ate while leaning against a building and watching the commuters jumping off the Muni, heading home or ducking into a market or take-out place.

  She got into her car and drove back to Sam Tsukiyama’s. This time he answered her knock, dinner napkin still in hand as he said, “You again.”

  “You said to come back another time.”

  He laughed. “I guess this is another time.”

  “I have children, so my time isn’t strictly my own.”

  “Then you better come inside.”

  • • •

  Sam showed Jenny how to tilt the lens using the camera bed; to check for pinholes that allowed light in the bellows. “You’ll have to replace them if this happens,” he said. He talked about the No. 9 and told her that it was one of the Seneca models that produced “postcard prints.” He demonstrated the revolving back for horizontal and vertical photographs. “And this,” he said, opening a hinged flap, also in the rear of the camera, “is where you see the image.” She tried to see what he was talking about, but the image was barely visible on the ground-glass screen.

  “You’ll need to wear a black cloth over your head if you want decent resolution. Here.” He handed her a sweatshirt that was tossed on a nearby dining room chair.

  As she scanned the dining room, she saw the Siamese cat now sitting on the table with the same audience demeanor she’d noticed when it was in the garden; she saw pens (including a fountain pen), a notebook, a short stack of books, partially complete New York Times crossword, and, finally, Sam. The screen was large enough to offset the disorientation she felt at the images being upside down and reversed.

  “You have a tripod, right?”

  “Somewhere,” she said.

  “You may want to use it, though the camera is light enough to hold it steady. Just check the spirit level,” said Sam. “Once upon a time you could buy prepared dry plates, but now—I mean if you really want to pursue this—you’ll have to do it yourself. It takes practice and patience.”

  He explained the process of preparing the plates (gelatin, silver nitrate, potassium bromide, and a tool to spread the emulsion). He said that they could stay sensitive for months, unused. He said there was a chemical shortcut of ready-made emulsion, but it was up to her. He said she could dispense with the plates and go to paper. Or film. “And by the way, what are you using now?”

  “My father’s old Rolleiflex.”

  “I had a very good friend who used a Rollei.” He seemed to leave her for a moment before saying, “Okay, then, you’ve got to get the stillness down, because you’ll need it with glass plates. So, be still. Mind the dark slide.”

  “You’ll have to come out to my house,” said Jenny to Sam on the phone, canceling their session; this time it was Agnes who needed her. Again. Since that first meeting, Jenny had gone two more times to Sam Tsukiyama’s for instruction in dry-plate photography. She needed help with glass-plate preparation and printing. Using the Seneca proved fairly easy once she understood it. “I can’t always come to you, as I explained, and I have a studio and darkroom and all the chemicals anyone could need.” She hesitated, as if trying hard to remember something, then brightened. “Please,” she said.

  “I can do it in the late spring and summer. You have children, I have students.”

  “I’ll make a room for you in the Little House,” she said. “It’s near a fountain and the zodiac clock.”

  “Zodiac clock?”

  “You’ll see when you get here.”

  “I didn’t say that I would come and stay for the spring and summer.”

  “You could bring your cat?” she offered. “We have a jungle garden.”

  Sam started laughing. “I don’t think Kali’s been pining away for a jungle all her life.”

  “As if you’d know the innermost workings of the mind of a house cat.”

  “Didn’t Montaigne say something about not knowing if he was playing with his cat or if his cat was playing with him?” he said.

  “Then I’ll invite your cat and you can come with her.”

  The first photograph was of Bunny, Jenny’s second child, who was all of five years old, mosquito bites up and down her bare arms, like metal studs on the sleeves of a leather jacket. In her underwear, she looked slightly miserable at the grouping of bites.

  “I know they itch, sweetie, but I just need you to stay still for a few minutes,” said Jenny, adjusting the camera on its tripod. Checking the upside-down, reversed image in the ground glass at the back, alternating between checking while under the black head cloth and coming back out to reassure her daughter. “Almost, almost,” she said.

  Sam sat nearby smoking a cigarette. He was reading The Great Gatsby for the tenth time; he read it every other summer and only in summer. Kali stretched out asleep on the patio of the Little House, a one-bedroom, stucco, Spanish-style place that Sam had to admit he rather loved. (“You weren’t kidding about the zodiac clock,” he said to Jenny as he stood near t
he working clock of flowers and star signs, which dwarfed him with its size.) Wonderful, too, was spending a summer outside the city, with its fitful days of sun and fog and cool nights that rarely felt like summer. Summerplace was short-sleeve evenings, restless sleep from the heat, and access to any one of the pools, even if the floating lilies were a little creepy. There was the collision of fragrances from the flowers and plants; a breeze carried something sweet, followed by something with more bite that smelled like one might imagine dust to smell, then back to perfume.

  He took his meals in the main house with the Huxley-Luxes.

  It was his living there for so many months that got people talking. And it was the resulting photographs that made people believe they were justified in what they said. Judgment, innuendo, accusation.

  It wasn’t unusual for the Luxes to have a stream of guests out to their property; the Little House wasn’t the sole outbuilding. There was a shingled place, two stories and built in 1901. It had an open first floor with a decent-size kitchen and a second floor with the rooms on one side of a hallway—the wall on the other side collapsed like shutters to turn the second floor into a porch. The lack of insulation, making it fairly frigid in the winter, showed that it was only ever meant to be a summerhouse.

  The main house, where the Luxes lived, was the one where Jenny grew up, all glass and post and beam and disappearing walls. When all the sliding doors and windows were opened, the place became a kind of tropical covered patio, with worn concrete floors.

  • • •

  The nudity or partial nudity of Babe, Bunny, and Agnes, witnessed by various townspeople who made their way to Summerplace for work or deliveries, seldom went unremarked. It was often the precursor to criticizing Jenny Lux. “It’s sheer laziness not to clothe your kids,” they said. “And it’s plain wrong.” “This isn’t France,” said people who had never been to France but had heard stories about topless beaches and sexual permissiveness. Never mind that the adults were always clothed.

  The guests who came and went were one thing. Abner teaching at the college (his long commute adding to his absence) was another thing. But the last thing, the hushed thing, was Sam Tsukiyama living out there at that pagan paradise, where children ran naked and undomesticated. Who knew what went on there?

  When Jenny had first shown interest in the Seneca, she’d found two glass plates already in the holder. She thought nothing when she removed them, leaving them on the counter in her darkroom. Sam asked about them, was told they came with the camera, and he, too, ignored them until the day they developed some of Jenny’s shots—Babe in sundress and pearls, leveling her clear-eyed gaze at the camera, a candy cigarette in her hand. She held it as if she were a socialite who had been smoking since prep school.

  Sam accidentally picked up the old plates, placing the unexposed plate in the developer and then, realizing his mistake, immersing the other one. The image that came up showed a toddler, a little boy, nude and squatting in the dry dust of what looked like a California landscape, among the native plants of someone’s garden. The boy had a spider or an insect between his fingers in that way of very young children who haven’t quite learned how to calibrate the physical pressure when holding a living thing. His expression was rapt. A decomposed shoe lay nearby, along with a discarded dinner fork.

  Jenny couldn’t decide if the picture was pleasing or disturbing (the crushed bug, the rotting shoe, the dinner fork, the naked child in the semiarid environment). Despite the fact that there were no real markers of an era, not even the length of the boy’s hair, the picture looked decades old. She said without thinking, “His mother was the photographer.”

  And everything that she had been searching for was found.

  The picture left nothing out: The composition, and the capture of the right moment, no simple task with the Seneca, said that the photographer knew what she was doing (and, perhaps, had gotten the child to comply). The age of the picture, and the nudity of the child in the unkempt garden said that she was at home and used to being at home. But the picture was not a snapshot of her child exactly—it was a picture of childhood, and it was this distinction that revealed the reach for art in the photograph.

  No one except another woman with children of her own could read that conflict between motherhood and the constant push to create. Was this picture of the boy in dirt the picture she wanted to take, or the picture she ended up taking? There was the art-mother problem in that children and art asked for the same things: your undivided attention. Art required solitude, a disengaged mind, free to sort through the inconsequential and the profound, sifting through the mess in the mind until it found what it sought.

  But kids interrupted this process at every turn, whether it was because they needed you or because you needed them.

  Jenny adored her children so deeply that she could hardly stand it, because the world was as rough as it was wondrous, and being a parent threw that knowledge out of balance much of the time.

  She was the least mystical person she knew. Life was right now, and when it was over, well, it was over. But when she saw the picture of this woman’s child, it was like being handed a key.

  “How do you know the father didn’t take the picture?” asked Sam.

  “It’s too intimate. It’s too ordinary. This is a picture of the everyday; there are limitations.”

  Sam clipped the print to the slender line that spanned the darkroom.

  Jenny’s pictures of her girls were of bruises and scraps, of roller skates and pets, candy cigarettes, pearls, and gloves, games played, swimming and hair wet and tangled from the pool. They were of napping on the fake beach, on an old mattress, in the grass. Playing dress-up, playing with lipstick, blush, and nail polish. Rhinestone barrettes, and felt-pen pictures drawn on tanned skin like little tattoos. Acting in the garden’s terraced amphitheater. The girls were streaked with chocolate or circus-colored melted Popsicle sugar, standing around in bathing suit bottoms or cross-backed sundresses. There was blood, and tears, childhood mishaps, and ice cream. Dogs and birds and Sam Tsukiyama’s bemused cat pictured stretched beside Agnes, both fast asleep on the green canvas of a garden chaise longue; tiny twigs and grasses along with dirt gathered in the tufts and folds of the pad.

  Every so often, clothed adults were pictured in the periphery of the children’s lives, talking among themselves, eating or drinking, paying no attention to the unfolding of childhood.

  “I’ve never cared about things,” said Jenny. It was one of the aspects of her that Abner most loved; she genuinely wasn’t interested in clothes or jewelry or furniture. She cared about the ephemeral: images, her dogs, love. Summerplace. All the things you can enjoy but never really possess.

  The summer of 1986, Sam and Jenny appeared inseparable; everyone saw them everywhere. When they came to town to pick up ordered chemicals from the post office; purchased glass plates from Acme Glass and Windows; went marketing, or filled Jenny’s Scout with gas, it was even more damning that these activities were domestic. Errands were a married activity.

  So when they were seen eating lunch on the patio of a café, or stopping for ice cream, their laughter, their intense conversations, the way they were unaware of the world moving about them made everyone feel sorry for Abner. There he was, teaching summer school, in the weird freeze of an air-conditioned classroom, or meeting with students and other faculty, when he’d rather be outside (they believed) while his wife and her “friend” were acting so “familiar.”

  Those poor kids—already too free by half—who knew what they saw out there in that “garden.”

  If only Jenny would explain herself. Not that anyone would believe her, which was the paradox of explaining herself; the weekenders and workers were convinced she must have something to hide. Her hands were always stained with chemicals; she didn’t even bother fixing herself up for her poor husband.

  “We should just rig a tiny camera onto her collar,” whispered Jenny to Sam as they tried to track Kali on one of her d
aily rounds.

  They were following the cat to settle a bet about her daytime activities. Sam said she preferred the patio next to the Huxley house, and Jenny said that she snuck off to the cycad garden.

  Instead, Kali turned and walked toward them, greeting them with her tail in the air, as if she wanted to join in on whatever they were stalking.

  Here was the part that confused the question of What Goes On Out There for the people of Stellamare: Abner and Sam could sometimes be seen together, at the nursery, or engaged in hours-long conversation following a leisurely lunch on the deck of a local restaurant. Instead of defusing speculation regarding the relationship of Jenny Lux and Sam Tsukiyama, seeing Sam with Abner made it more volatile.

  The girls were playing cards. Seven-year-old Babe was wearing a rhinestone brooch in her messy hair and a green plaid sundress. Bunny wore pearls around her neck and wrists and was in an old vest of Abner’s, no shirt, and a pair of underwear. Little three-year-old Agnes had just cut her own bangs, gouging out an uneven swath from the otherwise thick, brown hair that she’d inherited from her mother. She’d even nicked her left eyebrow in the process.

  Jenny set up her camera, peering through the viewfinder and waiting for the right moment, then calling out “Freeze!” The girls were natural models, knowing not to alter a thing, yet making their inaction appear unforced. They had mastered the art of behaving as if no one was watching them.

  Sam was nearby, alternately talking to Abner and another guest while loading glass plates for Jenny and handling the exposed slides.

  “How did you learn to work with glass plates?” asked the guest, a colleague of Abner’s at the college who taught composition and frankly hated doing it.

  “I was a photography student, and I heard that Cymbeline Kelley was looking for an assistant.”