by Lise Haines
When I saw her face change in that light, in that lousy blue light, I realized I had to be careful with what I said.
“You might as well hear all of it, but don’t tell Lola, not yet. I’m taking a leave of absence from school.” She ran the flat of her hand over a stretch of sheet, like this might iron something out. “I have to build up our reserves.”
“Don’t do this,” I said. Then I mentioned her brother. Surely Uncle Hal could loan her enough so she could stay in the program.
“Maybe if it were just Hal by himself, I don’t know,” she said.
This was the way we talked about his second wife, without using her name. “They own three homes,” I said. “They go to Europe every spring, Aspen every winter, and they own how many Mercedes?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Looking at the clock now, she began to rub my arms, as if I were cold. “God. And you with work tomorrow. Everything okay there?”
“Yes. And I’m getting an interview at the comic book store.”
“Just don’t overdo, you promise?”
“I’m fine.”
“I love what you did with this print,” she said, nodding toward one of Anna Lily’s photos I had forgotten to put away.
She had this saying when the worst events hit: At least I’ll get a sculpture out of it. And maybe that’s when she was at her most beautiful—when she poured everything she had into her art. She had the capacity to let almost everything else flee from her when she worked, like a flock of birds rushing out of a canyon. I hoped she would say that to me now, but she was probably too tired.
“It’s a friend’s work. I was just thinking about her dodging technique.”
“She’s crazy good like you.”
I shifted against my pillow, and before I had a chance to, she brought the covers up along my shoulder line and kissed me goodnight, which she hadn’t done in years. I said without hesitation that I loved her, and she said the same thing to me.
Mom had an alarm clock that began with a low-pitched tone and gradually emitted a piercing noise intended to take out the hearing of all within range. Despite it reaching the highest octave she wasn’t pushing the button down.
“Why isn’t Mom getting up?” Lola asked, coming into my room.
“She had trouble sleeping last night.”
“I had trouble sleeping last night. I better stay home.”
“School as usual today. Mom will be up soon.”
After I punched Mom’s snooze button I checked the kitchen cabinets. We were out of Lola’s favorite cereal. She didn’t like these disruptions to her routine.
“I’m going to wear the same exact clothes I wore yesterday to school,” Lola said with that brand of defiance I had come to love in her. It drove me nuts when it surfaced, of course, but I couldn’t imagine how she would make it in this world without it. That’s what I wished for Mom—that she had more of that fierceness.
When Lola was dropping bits of egg down her throat with her head tilted back, which had something to do with her affection for seals, I went into the bathroom. I quickly buried her undies from yesterday in the bottom of the hamper and told her I couldn’t find them, so she’d have to wear fresh ones. As soon as she was dressed, Mom came around the corner of her folding screen and said, “I can’t believe I slept that long. What’s this?” she said, looking at Lola’s outfit. “Is this from yesterday? Did I sleep … backward?”
This got a quizzical look and finally a good laugh out of Lola.
And there it was—my mother’s brave face—an image I also needed to capture on film.
Mom was going to meet her new boss that morning to get detailed instructions and keys to the first three homes on her list of trashouts. She was evasive when I asked where the first batch was located, saying that she would have her phone, as if automatic dial would keep her from being attacked or that no one would ever steal her phone. I thought she might cave under the pressure. Geary had said that sometimes the ones who consistently manage are the ones who crack the hardest. He was talking about Diane Arbus and her strange and remarkable images. She had two daughters and kept everything going until she couldn’t.
I got into Geary’s early. He was still upstairs with his wife, Lettie, having a long breakfast. His studio in that old brick firehouse had a roll-up door that had gone off its track years ago, lodging it permanently shut. There was a smaller door along the side. He had worked on that place little by little with the help of friends, hoping the fire inspectors wouldn’t bring it down. It had few windows at street level, and the ones that were there were painted over with black paint on the inside. The main bank of windows was higher up and provided plenty of natural light.
Geary was a genius when it came to black-and-white photography. He had worked with Gordon Parks and done prints for Avedon, but he never bragged about stuff like that. Geary didn’t have many notable shows to his name. Always too busy supporting his family, and then the extra hurdles of being black in a mostly white game. But a lot of photographers knew his work, and several fashion photographers used him for print work. He did a lot of C-prints. They knew him as a master printer, and they sought him out in that old building in Evanston. Work came from as far away as New York and Los Angeles.
If you were a former student of his—back when he was at the high school—and you had stayed with photography and shown any kind of passion for it, he would help with your portfolio and never send a bill. If you lost one of your parents, he would stand at the graveside with you. His kids were grown, the two who had survived.
I had interned at his studio until he hired me. When he learned I couldn’t go to college for a while, he said over time I would learn what I needed working with him. Sometimes, especially when he sensed I was going through a particularly rough patch, he put on a jazz LP from his giant collection and gave me technical assignments to work out. To the sound of Nina Simone or Miles Davis everything became light source and aperture. We worked on a platinum palladium print together for one client.
After I printed another shot of Lily’s I went through half a box of photo paper trying to print one particular image from my childhood. I had found some unmarked negatives that might have been Mom’s but might have been someone else’s, maybe a friend’s or a relative’s. In the print I was eight years old and stood in the middle of our old street in Evanston on a busy Halloween night. There were trick-or-treaters on porches and up and down the sidewalk. My father stood a few feet away. He looked so young, his face without a line. I stood in a horse costume under a streetlight as if I was the star of something.
Geary got out his glasses and bent over the table. “There’s a kind of tragedy to your horse. I like the way the nose has gotten pushed in a little. And how your father is breathing out a cloud of steam but you aren’t. Burn this area more,” he said, pointing to a spot I should have considered. “Maybe all of a second’s worth.”
“I remember stopping in the middle of the street, feeling tired and ready to go home. It was a really cold Halloween. But I forgot how my father looked in this picture.”
Geary took the print out of my hands and said, “The funny thing about his expression is that he looks devoted to you, yet he isn’t rushing to get you out of the street. You can see the lights of a car coming. And the person taking the shot…Makes me think of war photography, recording but not intervening.”
I didn’t know what to say when Geary saw the things I missed in my own life. But I was used to the fact that he rarely paid direct compliments. The flattery was the time he spent dropping his own work to help you arrive at yours.
Richard
Alma sent us off with a bag full of foil-wrapped burritos. I slipped them under the bench seat in the cab of the pickup and put the fishing and camp gear in the truck bed, following Sor’s directions. Alma clearly didn’t want him to go, but Sor said he was taking his nephew fishing.
When he wasn’t looking she pulled me aside and handed me a list of hospitals around the southern hal
f of the state circled on a highway map just in case. I assured her I would keep an eye out. Sor tossed me the keys, and Alma stood on the porch watching us go. I double-checked to make sure my wallet was in my pocket before I pulled away.
I didn’t question the old guy when he directed me to head east along the southern tip of Lake Okeechobee. Handing me a thermos of iced coffee, he said it would come in handy with the AC broken. He pointed out the window-washer fluid behind the seat in case I had to pull over to fill the reservoir. We went past the thirty-foot-tall concrete dike that surrounded most of the lake, and he told me something about the floods that had prompted it. I didn’t know—if I lived around there—whether I’d rather be protected from the lake or have a chance to see it. Sor said you could get to it from a place called Fisheating Creek, though mostly the lake was enclosed. You could drive along the top of the dike for a while, but there was no walking up to the edge to taste it, no throwing yourself in to shake off the heat in a normal way. Somehow a big, shallow lake behind a wall seemed like a useless piece of business.
After a while Sor grew quiet and looked out at the landscape.
“I always hoped you’d come down this way at some point. I could have shown you some real fishing. You do much camping?”
“Liz likes the state parks—you know, anyplace with a shower. One time we were at Yellowstone. I think Mona was eight. While her mother stayed at the campsite reading a book, Mona and I went to see Old Faithful for a second time. When we got there we found a group of people watching a car in the parking lot with binoculars and cameras. A man was trying to coax a bear into the front seat of his car on the driver’s side. His wife was sitting on the passenger side. He wanted to get a photo of the two of them together.”
“No end to crazy,” Sor said.
“I meant to ask a ranger what happened, but we left early the next day, so I never found out. I think that was our last camping trip. You know, life just takes over.”
When we got to the town of South Bay Sor directed me to a road that sent us due north through the heart of Belle Glade. Shuttered homes, closed gas stations, and small nameless markets came into view. Sugarcane filled the plains and grew up ten feet tall along the road, the smell of the plants and smoke and a dark molasses scent wafted through the open windows of the truck. Migrant workers busted their backs in the heat.
“So I was thinking about what you told me yesterday, about how you and Mona got in an accident once.” He uncapped the thermos, filled the cup halfway, and passed it to me. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I took a long draw.
I had already worked up quite a sweat in that heat. “You aren’t worried about my driving, are you?”
“No, but it got me thinking. It must have been a bad one.”
I nodded and handed him the drained cup. Then I got the wipers and fluid going. He was right about the insects. I began to hear a loud buzzing. A wasp started dancing along the dash. I glanced over at Sor, who was making quite a study of me.
“It’s funny how we’re born with so many parts,” he said. “The one that prepares for the best and the one that prepares for the worst; the one that tries to get things right, the one that’s our own undoing; the one that wants to fit in and have everyone look up to us, the one that’s ready to run free and do whatever it damn well pleases.”
I remembered the way he used to go off on these rambles. I knew what he was doing.
“I have a feeling there’s one part of you that would be relieved to say what happened that day. The part you can’t explain away.”
Until that moment I hadn’t understood that the radio in the truck was on. The volume was so low it made me think of the way Liz went to sleep to the radio or the television. I came in late some nights and watched her in the dim light from the bathroom, curled on her side, the radio glowing. I should never have left her.
“It was a hit-and-run,” I said.
“And Mona was sitting up front with you.”
“That’s right.”
“Did she get hurt?”
“Mona was just a bean sprout then. I should have had her in the back. I stuck my arm out and her head hit my arm and my arm hit the dash and after that I kept thinking if I hadn’t had that reflex … ... It scared the hell out of me.”
“I can see why a nine-year-old would struggle with something like that. Not just the impact but the idea of someone driving off that way.” Sor kind of laughed. “If only we could protect them from everything by sticking out an arm.”
“I went off,” I said, “thinking this new job was going to make everything right, and all I end up doing is abandoning them and tanking financially. Mona’s not in college; Lola barely knows who I am; Liz keeps trying to patch together anything she can to make ends meet; the house is gone.”
“I understand. I’ve known my share of hard times. The best thing is to start fresh when you get back. And remember, Mona is older now. She’s had to shoulder real responsibility. Treat her with respect, and she’ll come round. Turn at the next stop and head east until we hit the town of Loxahatchee. Road’s a straight shot from here. They ever catch the driver … of that hit-and-run?”
I felt the heat overtake me. “No, they never did,” I said and asked Sor to pour me another cup of iced coffee.
Handing it my way, he said, “Some people get away with murder.” And then he was tired, like a child excited by a trip for the first stretch but quick to nod off from the motion of the car, the humidity.
“Wake me up when we get there,” he said and leaned back. He put the brim of his hat down and dropped off.
Loxahatchee is the rural, westernmost portion of West Palm Beach County. I kept an eye out for a sign to a fishing hole. After a while Sor woke up again, as if he had heard an alarm go off.
We traveled down a long private road that ran through a vast citrus orchard and pulled up to a home with a porch that wrapped three-quarters of the way around it. The driveway spit gravel as we came to a stop. We parked under the shade of a live oak. There were various outbuildings on a property that stretched for miles into the distance, and it felt good to be firmly in the shade.
Sor was alert now, but he looked tired, more than he had the day before. When he told me to grab my gear he said, “Whatever you do, don’t act surprised.”
“About what?” I asked, but he hushed me and knocked at the door.
When it opened I was introduced to a woman in a white button-down shirt with a silver-and-turquoise necklace, jeans, and hand-tooled boots. She could have been an older fashion or cosmetics model. Her name was Honey. This was my first time in that part of the state, in this house, but I paused for a moment to let a strong feeling of déjà vu drift through. Squinting hard at me, she finally broke into a smile and grabbed me tight. In a ringing Florida accent she said, “Let’s break out the Jack Daniels.”
Sor was already lining up glasses on a rolling drink cart, fishing cubes out of the silver ice bucket. I sat down on a leather sofa and put my feet up on one of the cushy ottomans. Whoever Honey was, she clearly lived a comfortable life. I was reminded of a home in the architectural magazine where Liz’s sculpture had appeared, with the addition of a couple of snakeskins stretched on the walls.
Sor and Honey nestled in close on the couch opposite mine. She gave him a kiss on the mouth, straightened his collar, then sat back. “So tell me how my nephew’s getting on,” she said, gazing directly at me.
I had one of those classic moments of turning and looking around to see if someone had entered the room. Sor winked at me and said, “Don’t be shy.”
I was trying to puzzle out the family tree, but maybe my brain had soaked up too much heat on the drive over. Soon Honey had us up and walking around the house with our drinks, stopping in the library to see the wall of family photos. The children, three girls, all blondes like Honey, were grown and settled elsewhere. I saw that Sor figured prominently in many of the groupings. The house and the property had been in her family for generations, she said, and
she was proud that her yields were almost as big in blood oranges now as they were in navels.
We went down a wide hallway. Here she had a row of framed black-and-white photographs that I found a little off-putting for all of my uncle’s stories. Honey told me the titles as I stopped at each one. “Albino Sword Swallower; Circus Fat Lady with her Dog, Troubles; Tattooed Man at Carnival; Hermaphrodite with Dog … You know Arbus’s work?” she said.
“I’m sure my daughter Mona does.”
“We’ll expect you to come down and pay us a real visit with the whole family, then. Married to the man thirty years and this is the first time we’re meeting.” She laughed.
And then I had to laugh too … and not look surprised.
“Love of my life,” Sor said, squeezing her around the middle.
I wanted to grab the old man and pull him aside, but Honey was a constant presence. None of us fished that day, but we talked about citrus, and how carnivals were changing, and some of the travels Honey had made over the years. We had a light luncheon, then a key lime pie and good strong espresso. We watched the windows lighten and darken as the workers out in the orchards quit work for the day. Sor seemed as comfortable in this state of abundance as he did in Alma’s modest habitat.
When evening came and another meal was finished, Sor showed me a bedroom on the second floor that looked out over the groves. I had my own bathroom, and there was a tub with jets that could do just about anything but pound away my confusion now that I understood that my uncle was a bigamist.
“Have a good long soak.”
“Hold on. Help me understand,” I said.
Sor and I sat down across from each other on the twin beds. “Not much to explain, really. Alma came up from Mexico years ago. We’d act like a couple when we came off the road—you know. She was doing craft fairs, and of course I was a carny by then. When I heard the INS was out for her, I stepped up. We didn’t plan our first girl, but somehow we settled in. Alma is salt of the earth, and I love her dearly.”