44. Jehovah’s Witness, Brooklyn, 1957
45. Fullerette, Brooklyn, 1958
46. Encyclopedia salesman, Brooklyn, 1958
47. Avon lady, Brooklyn, 1958
KENNETH LOWELL: One day I came home to five-hundred-watt bulbs installed in every room, but Lil was over the moon, and that came as such a relief that I decided not to mind our house being lit like a movie set. The whole winter, ever since Sam’s cold, Lil had been depressed. If the new lighting scheme cheered her up, then hunky-dory. At first I thought it was just to brighten things up, but I should have known better. You see, Lil was against anything posed, so for her to be able to shoot at any moment, the conditions had to be perfect. In a row house with windows only in front and behind, that was not going to happen without a lot of help.
JOURNAL ENTRY, JANUARY 1958: You’re generally healthy, and this was just a fever and a cough, but I would never take you outside in that condition. When, after four days, you’d returned to normal, it couldn’t have been colder than forty-five degrees, sunny, and no wind; but once outside, you shrieked so loudly and suddenly that I thought you’d sat on a pin. As soon as I unbuckled you from your stroller to see what was the matter, you ran to the door of the house and started pounding. I thought we’d left Lomo inside, but your stuffed monkey was right there in the stroller, not that showing it to you made any difference. By this time, Mrs. Yansky had stepped outside to give me the gimlet eye. And so back inside we went, where I couldn’t find a pin or any other reason for you to be so upset, other than it was time for our walk and you did not want to go.
In the days that followed, you took off your coat as soon as I put it on (I wish I’d bought you a coat with buttons instead of a zipper), or allowed the coat but wouldn’t get into the stroller, or sat in the stroller but wouldn’t stop shrieking once I managed to get us outside. All my promises—of hot cocoa, of grilled cheese with chicken soup at the lunch counter, of unlimited readings of Benjamin Bunny—did nothing to change your mind. This isn’t your fault: you’ve always been sensitive to cold. Your poor lips turn blue even when you’ve played in the bath too long. That’s why I bought you such fabulously warm clothing, but you also hate the feeling of layers, as you’ve made quite clear. Though it was only November and winter was just beginning, I had no choice but to wait for warmer weather.
The days became difficult. My exhaustion was similar to what I remembered from the weeks after you were born, but with no physical cause, and no Deb or Judy or Cass to come to my rescue. I have no friends anymore and have only myself to blame: I’m better at being around people than being with them.
Ken’s salary allows us a Friday-evening sitter, but even if a morning nanny weren’t out of the question, asking would feel ungrateful. Thank you for the house, for the darkroom, for working five days a week while I stay home; would you please take this child off my hands in the mornings, this child you love only out of love for me? But without my camera walks, I’m a wooden puppet who wakes, eats, mothers, and sleeps as if I am being pulled by invisible strings. When I’m not taking pictures, I feel like I’m treading molasses. I tried sitting with my camera by the window, but a dead-end street in winter is a closed fist.
I don’t remember how we passed the time. I don’t remember the days as days. There’s simply a gray stretch I know I passed through because I’m not inside it anymore. At one point, I heard the sound of crying as I sat paralyzed on the sofa. As I struggled to marshal the energy to stand up and check on you, I realized the sound was coming from my mouth.
One day, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to a clean-cut man in a dark suit. Would I be interested in reading a pamphlet? It was early afternoon, you were napping, and a decent amount of light was coming through the front window. I asked him in and sat him on the recliner in the path of that diffuse light. Photographers aren’t vampires—we don’t need invitations—but it’s one thing to snap a picture in passing and another when your subject is sitting in your living room. Because I was resting the camera on my leg, the poor man didn’t realize what I was up to at first. Once he did, he was caught off guard, but he relaxed after I showed him some old prints and promised him a copy of his portrait. For the next twenty minutes, he talked about the greatness of Jehovah while I shot the roll.
I’d never thought much about indoor photography before, but a trip to the photo supply shop solved the problem of light. If Ken hadn’t suggested scheduling appointments, I’m sure I’d still be depending on fate for the doorbell to ring. When I explain I won’t be buying anything, that sends a few scowling off, but most are happy with the promise of a picture, or confident enough in their abilities to think their sales pitch will change my mind. Even the camera-shy ones become caught up in their work soon enough. I’ve learned that good salesmen are interchangeable in the best possible way. Looking at the portraits, it’s impossible to tell the face of someone extolling Jehovah from someone praising the virtues of Fuller brushes or encyclopedias. The passion to persuade is the same.
48. Cowgirl, Brooklyn, 1958
Salesmen and Bible-thumpers weren’t Lillian’s only subjects. The title should put to rest any concerns about my well-being as I straddle that vacuum cleaner wearing a shopping bag on my head and an expression like something out of Rambo. Given my ferocity, I’m guessing I’ve just found the man in the black hat. Whatever I’m up to, it’s safe to assume I’m seeing something other than the room’s armchair and coffee table, which is a testament to both my powers of imagination and my mother’s powers of invisibility.
Out of curiosity I went through Lillian’s negatives, which she kept in meticulous chronological order, in sleeves attached to their contact sheets. After eleven years in her childhood bedroom on Fernvale Street, those many, many negatives now occupy a rented storage space to spare my mother’s legacy from taking up an entire room of my apartment. Cowgirl turns out to be one of over three thousand shots Lillian took of me between January and March, after she’d installed those floodlights. It makes sense, math-wise: my mother was used to shooting at least two rolls a day. Though a lot of those early-1958 shots qualify as artful, they’re basically variations on Cute Kid, which is why this was the only one that Lillian chose for Box Two. Ultimately, all those thousands of exposures were less about pursuing her art than about preserving her sanity.
KENNETH LOWELL: Toward the end of that winter I knew something was off. When I talked to Lil there was a lag before she answered, like she was at the far end of a long-distance telephone call. This was different from the blue spell before she put in the lights. I could tell she wasn’t depressed, just preoccupied; but while Sam required a certain nonnegotiable amount of attention, Lil knew she could rely on me to take care of myself. Finally Lil said she had an idea for a camera, and could she hire a man from the camera store to build it for her? By then I would have bought her a flying elephant if it meant that living together would stop feeling like living alone. She didn’t mention the camera project for a long time after that, so I figured she had given it up.
49. Samantha and Kaja, Brooklyn, 1958
I feel like I remember this, but I don’t. My “memory” is just a mental snapshot of Lillian’s picture of me and Kaja on that metal horse. Real memories come with add-ons. For instance, I know I genuinely remember that playground, because when I see the horse, I can picture the sandbox, which in the summer smelled like pee, and which is not in the photo. Whether or not I remember this particular day, it is still the moment Kaja and I met. And that look on my face? This was a totally normal expression for people first meeting Kaja, whether they were three or thirteen or thirty. Sometimes, upon making Kaja’s acquaintance, complete strangers would give her things. I personally witnessed the spontaneous bestowal of free donuts, halvah, packs of gum, pizza slices, and once a brown fedora. This was partly because she was beautiful—how often do you see a caramel-skinned, dark-haired Swede?—but mostly Kaja just gave off a pheromone that made people want to be with her. Colors seemed brighter
when she was around. Getting to be her best friend felt like getting to walk on the moon.
JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1958: The weather was warmer but unreliable, so we stayed close to home. When you were through with sitting in the stroller, we went to the playground, where a light-brown-skinned girl was furiously riding your favorite horse. Of course, the girl didn’t know I’d promised you a ride on that horse in exchange for all your stroller time while I prowled the Promenade, but instead of fighting over it, the two of you rode together, which had the excellent effect of bending the horse much farther forward and backward on its spring. As I searched the playground for the girl’s mother, I was interrupted by a pale blond woman sitting one bench over, who spoke to me in an accent I couldn’t place. She was asking about my camera and if I was new to the neighborhood when the girl you’d been sharing a horse with came up to her to ask for apple juice. With a shock, I realized that the mother I’d been looking for and the one I was talking to were one and the same.
At first glance, Grete is not at all like Deb—she’s a tall, snub-nosed Swede—but, like Deb, she’s a straight talker who doesn’t care what the world thinks of her. This is to say that I liked her right away. She, her husband Paul, and Kaja (who isn’t older than you, as I first thought, only taller) live on Henry Street, which Grete explained was the only street in the neighborhood where they’d found someone willing to rent to a mixed-race couple. At the end of the afternoon, you and I followed Grete and Kaja back to their apartment, where Grete made no apologies for the clutter, and I felt right at home. Draped across the tables, chairs, and floor were woven pieces, some with figures and others with patterns, all in beautiful colors and finely made. When I asked about the artist, Grete laughed and pointed at the loom in the corner across from where the two of you were jumping on the couch. The blankets, shawls, and rugs were her insomnia projects. Ever since she’d learned to weave as a girl, she told me, she’d sit at her loom when she couldn’t sleep. Did that happen a lot? It came and went, she said, but since Paul’s newspaper job and their move to Henry Street, it mostly came. Grete laughed to learn I relied on a prescription to create insomnia for myself. When I saw that the radio beside Grete’s loom was tuned to WOR, she broke in to Jean Shepherd’s opening theme song, and it was my turn to laugh. We each had considered ourselves Shep’s only fan, which makes a silly sort of sense considering it’s radio for being awake at three a.m., but having that in common gave our meeting added magic.
You didn’t want to leave any more than I did when the afternoon was over. Next time, Grete agreed, she and Kaja will come to our house so I can show her my photos while you and Kaja have a turn at destroying our sofa. In the meantime, Grete and I will be connected by a certain voice calling, “Excelsior, you fatheads!” across the airwaves in the smallest hours of the night.
KENNETH LOWELL: Back then, Dexies were a normal thing. These days they’re in the same category as cocaine and opium, but understand that doctors used to prescribe Dexedrine to teenage girls for weight loss. My aunt Shirley back in Michigan kept a bottle in her medicine cabinet. And it was an amphetamine, of course, so it worked beautifully. I would wake up at some ugly hour to Lil still in the darkroom, but no matter how briefly she shared our bed on any given night, as soon as Sam started making her morning noises, Lil would pop right up, take her “vitamin,” and be ready to start her day.
50. Spit bubble, Brooklyn, 1958
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, SEPTEMBER 1958: We seem to be in sync: I’m also working with an idea that’s gone in an unexpected direction. While your “simple work poem” has become a sonnet cycle, my cabin fever has led me to invent a new kind of camera. If I’d known my idea would turn into a six-month project, I never would have walked into Montague Photo to begin with! Considering all the time Joe has put in, the price I paid is hardly fair, but he won’t take more, insisting “an agreement is an agreement,” and that building the camera was the most fun he’d had since the Eisenhower election. All I can say is that I feel incredibly lucky. First, that Ken allowed me something so extravagant—especially when I haven’t been giving him any good reason to feel generous—and next, that I found such a perfectly qualified camera technician. Best of all, Joe has finished in time for the cold weather, meaning I can devote this winter to candid indoor shots of Sam and me together, which promises to be much more interesting than what I could expect from a toddler alone.
KENNETH LOWELL: Around the end of that summer, Lil brought home the ugliest camera I had ever seen. It was like something Dr. Frankenstein would have thrown together if Frankenstein had been a photography buff. Lil’s pal at the camera shop had grafted bulk-film loaders onto either side of a 35-millimeter camera body, which let Lil shoot a hundred feet of film at a time. Attached to the bottom of the thing was a modified spring-motor drive that could automatically advance the film at four preset intervals. This meant that once Lil got the camera going, it could take a picture every one, two, five, or ten seconds until it ran out of film. With a hundred feet of film, that meant 680 exposures, taken over anywhere between ten minutes to an hour depending on how she set it. It was a pretty expensive way to take pictures, but I figured the money Lil was spending didn’t come to much more than what a run-of-the-mill glamour-puss would lay out for clothes, shoes, perfume, and makeup. The important thing was, it made her happy again.
If you look at the contact sheets leading up to this shot, it’s pages and pages of Lillian staring at me while I stare at the camera. This goes on for ten contact sheets, thirty-five shots per page. Post-Kenneth, when it was a choice between film or food, Lillian would skip meals. This shot didn’t happen until the camera had been going long enough for me to forget about it and start making spit bubbles. Of all the spit-bubble photos, this is the only one that catches a bubble on the verge of popping as it stretches from my open mouth toward Lillian’s face like a see-through tongue.
I called the camera Ro-Ro, short for Robot. The tripod was Ro-Ro’s legs and the camera lens was its eye, but mostly it wasn’t a good name; or maybe it was a good name when I was three, but it didn’t age well. As time passed, I suppose it could have become “the indoor camera” or “the winter camera,” but it is hard, once something is named, to unname it. A name makes something part of a family. Brothers and sisters and fathers have names. Until the day I told Lillian never to take my picture again, I’d enjoyed being photographed by this camera, but even so, I did not want it to have the status of a brother or sister or father. Lillian, of course, loved Ro-Ro. And because of that, the couch-or refrigerator-type relationship that I would have preferred to have with it was out of the question. This meant that whenever I saw the camera beside the coffee table or standing in a corner, I would think, There’s Ro-Ro, reminding me of the father and brother and sister I didn’t have.
Every Ro-Ro picture my mother ever exhibited came with the credit, “Camera engineered by Joe Kubiak.” Joe earned it. It is a unique and ingenious camera for which he deserves recognition, but really, I’m just as responsible for its creation. If I hadn’t made my mother stay inside, she would have been outside, with no reason to invent a new kind of camera at the only time in her life when there was money to build one. While I don’t know how much it cost to build Ro-Ro, I’m positive it cost more than new clothes, or dance lessons, or health insurance, which are just a few of the many things (breakfast cereal, cookies) we could not afford after we stopped living with Kenneth Lowell. If there had been no Ro-Ro, there would have been no Mommy is sick. Maybe Lillian would have become famous some other way, and maybe that way would have been better. Or maybe she wouldn’t have become famous at all.
51. Repairs While You Wait, Brooklyn, 1959
She is probably waiting for the bus. Probably she has been waiting for a while, and that is why her stare is so blank and her face is so empty. Her children hang and swing and pull at her dress. She has become a jungle gym for them because she’s the only thing around. It’s probably a shoe-repair shop behind her, but the
window is only half visible. This turns the REPAIRS WHILE YOU WAIT sign into a more general offer, an impossible offer to someone for whom the bus and repairs represent two of many absences perforating her life.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, MARCH 1959: Most of the time being with Ken feels the same as it’s been from the first: each of us happy, if in our own way. But then one of us will say something or flash a certain look, and I’ll wonder if I’ve been fooling myself all along. Do you remember when I told you about the Brooklyn house? Sitting at the table Judy had painted, you pinned me with that painfully direct gaze of yours and asked if this was what I really wanted. I didn’t say it at the time, Deb, but I was disappointed in you that night. I’d wanted you to be happy for me, and instead I got your stare with a question that seemed silly at best. I thought that you, more than anyone, would know the importance of time and space to work and a partner who understood those things. Your reaction was so unexpected, I even wondered if you were jealous! Now I realize you weren’t jealous and that your question wasn’t silly at all.
KENNETH LOWELL: Sam had turned four. My brother and I are four years apart, so I suppose that started it. Also around that time, my brother’s wife gave birth to number two, and several of my coworkers became fathers for the first or second time. All I know is that when I turned onto our street and saw kids playing stickball, I wasn’t just picturing Sam anymore.
It must have been a Saturday night, because Lil was not in the darkroom. Sam was asleep, and Lil was getting herself ready to come to bed when I reached for her arm. Let’s get married, I said. I had not been planning to say it, but it felt like the perfect thing at that moment, as if Lil and I were standing at a vista overlooking our future. Lil was unbuttoning an old shirt of mine that she had worn over her blouse to wash the dishes, and I remember the way her long hands poked out from the ends of the rolled-up sleeves. I remember the book beside my bed: I was halfway through Molloy and was using a bookmark Sam had colored so thickly with crayon that it was leaving flakes of colored wax on the pages. But mostly I remember the startled look on Lil’s face. I want to be Sam’s real father, I told her, and the father to all her brothers and sisters to come.
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