56. Self-portrait, Brooklyn, 1961
This isn’t the first shadow in Lillian’s work: there’s also that picture of Charles in the park. I could say this proves Lillian’s secret sense of connection to my long-lost sperm donor, but I think by the time she took this, she’d forgotten that other portrait almost as completely as she’d forgotten him.
Unlike Charles’s photo, all we get here is the dark silhouette of Lillian’s head and shoulders centered along the picture’s bottom edge. My guess is that she’s standing on Ninth, because I remember seeing rails there from the old streetcar route. The way the rails pass through her dark outline at a diagonal makes it seem like her silhouette has fallen onto the tracks and can’t get up. Depending on my mood, this feels either funny, like her shadow is a cartoon character, or disturbing, like her shadow is, well, her shadow.
If she’d opted for a boring title like Ninth Street, none of this would be an issue, but something called Self-portrait begs interpretation. Grete, as Lillian’s onetime closest friend, is better equipped for that than I am. I figured she’d be just as hard to find as everybody else, but for kicks I started by trying the old phone number that had lodged in my memory along with assorted jingles, elementary schoolteachers’ names, and state birds, dating from when my brain was absorbent and spongy. Grete picked up on the second ring.
GRETE WASHINGTON: One day Lillian arrived at my door and said, I am leaving Ken. It came as a shock, but also I was surprised when Paul left me, so I think that I am not the best judge.
Lillian was very grave that day. I think this was an expression of her fear. I understood immediately why there could not be a second child. You will stay here, I told her, and she began to cry. In the many years of our friendship, I saw Lillian’s tears only twice. This time was the first.
The next morning Lillian and I left the girls with a kind neighbor while I borrowed a car from a friend. To pack their things needed most of the day, but we finished before Kenneth returned from work. Kenneth called many times after that. Once he came to the door. I could sense that something was breaking inside him each time he asked to speak to Samantha and Samantha refused. Kenneth thought that Lillian was keeping her from him, but really Lillian was trying very hard to change Samantha’s mind. I was watching on the morning Lillian told the truth to Samantha about Kenneth. I saw all the anger inside her. At first that anger turned to Lillian, but then Samantha struck her head on the table. When you need comfort and you are angry at the only person who can comfort you, what can you do? Samantha needed her mother. So I think her heart made a decision.
Kaja and I were living in a one-bedroom parlor flat with tall ceilings. This let us stack Lillian’s materials very high. Lillian and I made a line with tape on the floor, and also a rule: no little girls on the box side of the line. It was too dangerous, not just for the girls but also for Lillian’s negatives and prints! As for Lillian’s camera, I knew she would not feel at home unless it was unpacked. When we set it on its tripod, her face relaxed a little.
I asked among the women where I worked. The first phone number Lillian tried was no good, and I think also the second, but she located an appointment with the third for the end of that week. It was bad timing, but concerning this there is only bad timing. I knew of a woman who did not see someone until she was pregnant for sixteen weeks; after some very frightening things, she entered the hospital, where a doctor removed her uterus. Even if an abortion was performed much sooner, there were many risks. If the hospital became involved, the police would come. The policeman would interrogate you in your hospital bed, and he would demand names. Sometimes in the newspaper there were articles. A mother arrested for finding help for her daughter. A doctor suspended for assisting a young girl. If an heiress or a fashion designer died from an abortion, the newspapers would report this, but not an ordinary woman. Such a plain death was not interesting or important.
The night before her appointment, Lillian gave me a piece of paper with the telephone number of her parents in Cleveland. Before now she never spoke to me of her parents, so I thought they had died. I was to call this number in case something happened, in which case I would also need to tell them about Samantha.
Tell them yourself when you are ready, I told her. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year; you will have time.
Promise me you will call, she said. Yes, I told her. If it comes to that, of course I will. Then we stared at one another—very silently, very seriously—and that was how we became sisters: not by pricking our fingers and sharing our blood but by sharing our fear.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1961: Ken was calling every night. First he would ask if I’d done it yet, and then he’d ask to talk to you. I tried to coax you to the phone every time, but you said you’d only talk to your “real” daddy. “What’s a real daddy?” I asked. “The daddy who makes you,” you said. “The daddy who makes you breakfast?” I asked. “The daddy who makes you laugh?” Each time, Ken said I’d turned you against him. Then he’d cry into the phone before getting angry again, and then cry some more. Each time I apologized—for you and for me and for everything—until one evening Ken called and I told him the date of the appointment. “That is two days before Sam’s sixth birthday,” he said, and hung up.
57. Self-portrait, Brooklyn, 1961
The location is the same, but the composition is different: all we get is the shadow of Lillian’s decapitated body. Her torso fills the frame, the rail slicing across the base of her neck along the photo’s top edge.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1961: I went to the service entrance of an apartment building and rang three times. At first no one came. I was afraid I’d written the address wrong or that something had happened. The idea of starting all over again knocked the air out of me. Soon it would be eight weeks, and then no one would take me. I tried the door again. This time a man opened it and led me down a dark hallway to a dark door. When this door opened, I realized its edges had been taped over so that light wouldn’t leak into the hallway from the other side.
It was some sort of office, but not for a doctor. I was led into a room where a second man was waiting. He looked like he was on his way to a dinner party: he smelled like Brylcreem, and he wore a brown suit jacket with a gold tie, a white dress shirt, and metal cuff links shaped like birds. After I gave the first man the money, the second man told me to lie down. There was a wooden table covered in white paper, a tray with cotton gauze, and medical tools beside an ashtray containing a lit cigar.
I lay at one end of the table with my legs dangling over the sides. The cuff-link man hung his jacket on a hook on the door. He told me to relax, but I couldn’t. He inserted a speculum. I asked if he was going to use anesthesia, but he shook his head. He picked up what looked like a long pair of scissors. I must have made a noise, because he told me to close my eyes, but of course I couldn’t, and anyway the man only used the scissor-thing to pick up a wad of cotton from the tray. He dipped the cotton in a liquid and used it to clean me on the inside. He told me he was doing something “to make the baby come out at home, just like a miscarriage,” and if I wasn’t going to shut my eyes I should at least shut my mouth. He had rolled up only one shirtsleeve. The cold cuff link at the end of his left arm kept brushing against my thigh while his right cuff link winked at me from the tray.
There was a red rubber tube like a long straw, with what looked like a wire inside it. When the man slid the tube inside me, it felt like being pinched, which didn’t hurt too much. Then he pulled the wire out and the tube stayed in, the end of it dangling out from between my legs. Next, more cotton. I suddenly pictured Mother stuffing the Christmas turkey, spooning breadcrumbs into the black hole of its body. This made me giggle in a nervous, terrible way that the man didn’t like. “You think this is funny?” he asked as he worked. “You do this for fun?” I shook my head. I was afraid I would throw up if I tried to talk. I looked away from the man and back toward the metal tray. The right cuff link had fallen onto the floor.
When the
man was finished packing me with cotton, he told me to sit up and handed me a container of brown pills. I should remove the rubber tube before tomorrow evening, he said, but I needed to take the first penicillin right away, even though it would be a few hours before anything started. “What happens now?” I wanted to know. “Now you go home,” he told me. “And on your way, if someone asks what’s wrong, you tell them you had too much to drink.” He pulled a stick of rouge from his pocket and rubbed it on my cheeks. “So you won’t look so pale,” he said.
I was worried I’d stain the seat, so I sat on my coat for the taxi ride home. The pain wasn’t too bad, and I hoped that having given birth once might somehow spare me the worst of it. The driver kept looking at me but didn’t say anything. I wondered how many pale, silent women he’d picked up from that corner. When I thought of the words “make the baby come out at home,” I kept picturing that cuff link lying on the floor.
As I rode home with my legs crossed, sitting on a coat I couldn’t afford to replace, I wondered how you and I would begin our new life. I was scared, and I was sad—for you, for Ken, for me, and for the family that couldn’t be—but I was also relieved. Does that make you angry, Squirrel? Or does it help you to understand?
Part of what made the next few days so frightening was not knowing. The cuff-link man hadn’t said anything to prepare me, and even if I’d had a doctor to call, I wouldn’t have called him. This wasn’t the sort of thing doctors helped with if they wanted to stay doctors. The bleeding started that night and continued for the next two days. It felt like being in labor, only alone and with more blood. As I sat on the toilet, I clenched my teeth to keep the sounds I was making from scaring anyone—even though you were gone during the day, there were still the neighbors to think of—but keeping my mouth shut made it worse. I could feel those sounds trying to come out other openings instead: my nose, my eyes, my ears, between my legs, except that none of those holes were big enough. My muffled sounds combined with the sounds of the blood clots as they hit the water. I told myself not to look, but each time I had to look, and each time it looked like too much blood. I couldn’t go to the hospital. I was afraid of what they’d do to me there. Meanwhile, I was leaving a blood trail down the hallway from bedroom to bathroom. In between cramps I mopped it up, to keep from staining Grete’s nice floors, and to keep you and Kaja from any unpleasant surprises when you returned home.
GRETE WASHINGTON: I do not like to think of that time. Lillian was in such pain, but she did not make a noise because she did not want to scare the girls. Even so, the pain was written on her face. Sometimes when I was with her, a small sound came from her mouth, and this was like seeing the fin of the shark and knowing the shape that was hidden below.
I told the girls that she was sick. I did not name this sickness, and they did not ask. I told them that until Lillian got better she would need the bedroom for herself, so I slept on the sofa and the girls slept beside me on the living room floor. The first day after Lillian’s appointment, I took the girls to the Metropolitan Museum. The second day, I took them to the Natural History Museum. You can pay just a penny in these places, and they will admit you. The girls were too young to enjoy such long trips, but I did my best. On the morning of her birthday, Samantha came into the bedroom so that her mother could sing to her. In the Hall of North American Mammals that afternoon, I saw her walking with a limp. Samantha, does your leg hurt? I asked. Is something wrong with your shoe? I am turning into an orphan, she said. I promised that she was turning into a six-year-old girl with a mother who would feel better very soon. She shook her head. She explained to me that she was half an orphan already. She held out her arm and the limping leg. This half, she said.
That night I sat with Lillian after the girls were asleep. I think it happened today, Lillian said. Did you see it? I asked. No, she said, but so much came out that I can’t imagine there’s anything left. The pain was so big, she said. Worse than giving birth? I asked. It was probably the same, she said, but because she did not know if things were happening the way they should, she had thought she was dying.
I am sorry I was not with you, I told her. Then you would not have been with Samantha, Lillian said, and that would have been worse. Then I am not sorry, I said. I will buy you some new sheets, she said. Don’t be silly, I said, we are sisters, and sisters do not mind such things. People will think I’m too short to be your sister, Lillian said. People think that Kaja is too black to be my daughter, I said. Fuck people, Lillian said.
On the morning of the third day, Lillian left the bedroom and announced that she was better. By the sixth day, I think that she nearly was.
58. Diner, Brooklyn, 1962
You can tell the couple in the front window is married, because otherwise no way would she be fixing his comb-over with her fingers while he eats his soup. I’m not sure what grosses me out more, her need to adjust him in public or his apathy at being publicly adjusted. It’s clear that Lillian thought there was something sweet about them. I can see how they might have reminded her of Grandpa Walt and Grandma Dot: not the tacky grooming part, but the married-for-so-long-personal-boundaries-disappear part. My grandparents were the first old married couple I met, leading me to believe that old married couples were like cows or peanut farmers, things that existed only outside New York.
By the time Lillian snapped this one, she had already taken most of the photos that would end up in the Lacuna show, and we’d been living with Grete and Kaja for almost a year. Considering Lillian’s total disinterest in housekeeping, it couldn’t have been easy on Grete to have us as roommates, but I only remember squabbles between me and Kaja over things like whose turn it was to use the blue china cereal bowl, and our fierce dedication to an endless series of competitions in which Kaja struck me as superior in everything that mattered. Probably I’d been jealous of Kaja from the moment I first saw her riding that playground horse, but my jealousy didn’t find its size and shape for years to come.
Different addresses aside, Kaja’s parents were still married. According to her mom, it was hard to get divorced in New York, but Kaja was pretty sure Grete still loved him; whereas Kaja believed her dad when he said that he was broke and divorces were expensive. Kaja preferred them split up: Paul did more stuff with her as a sometimes-dad than he’d done as an always-dad. I must have seen Paul a few times when everyone lived in Brooklyn Heights, but back then fathers weren’t any more noteworthy than postmen, and I hadn’t paid attention. Now when he brought Kaja back from Harlem on odd-numbered Sundays, I took in his wire-rimmed glasses and his skinny striped tie. I saw that he and Kaja had the same eyebrows, the same mouth, and charisma to spare, an aura of glamour that generally belonged to the rich or famous but which Kaja and her father exuded just walking through the apartment door. Seeing Paul on one side of Kaja and Grete on the other, I thought of an ice cream sundae: fudge, caramel, vanilla.
I should have been prepared for moving out. For months Lillian had been waitressing, but I was still shocked when all those months of lunch shifts added up to the first month’s rent plus deposit on a place of our own. It was a one-bedroom like Kaja and Grete’s, part of a mansion that had been chopped into eight apartments when Park Slope had started going downhill. In our living room, you could see where they’d thrown a wall right through the middle so another family could live on the other half of the first floor. We were far enough from Kaja and Grete that I was zoned for a different school, one Lillian said was supposed to be better. Grete had found a different school for Kaja, too, my mother said, so she and I wouldn’t have stayed in the same first-grade class anyway. Plus, she said, don’t you want your own bed? I did, but that didn’t stop me from crying like we were moving to China and not fifteen blocks away.
GRETE WASHINGTON: Paul did not like Prospect Friends, but he never saw this place, so really it is more correct to say that he did not like the idea of a private Quaker school. He wished for Kaja to receive a strong public education with other black children. This w
as my preference as well, but such a school did not exist. The public school where Kaja and Samantha started first grade together had many black and Puerto Rican children, but forty children were placed inside each classroom with not enough desks or books. The teacher yelled often, and Kaja was unhappy. I heard this school called bad by many neighbors who sent their children to Catholic school instead. The public school close to Lillian and Samantha’s address was considered good. This school was overcrowded also, with not enough desks or books and with teachers who yelled, but the children inside its classrooms were mostly white. At Prospect Friends, the classes were small. The teachers did not yell. There were lessons in music and foreign language and art, and Kaja received a full scholarship. This was perhaps the only time in our life together when her dark skin was a benefit.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, OCTOBER 1962: Since returning to Barrow Street would be impossible unless John could magically take me back at twice the hours, twice the pay, and half the travel time, I assumed that life after Ken would involve working at a camera shop. I’d hoped not to involve Montague Photo, in order to avoid the demotion from customer to employee; but after being turned away everywhere else—including a store with a help-wanted sign in its window—I realized Montague might be my only hope. In a way, I was right. “You see,” Joe explained as kindly as he could, “we know you’re a girl who knows her stuff, but the customers won’t know what to make of you.” This saved me a lot of time. Without Joe to set me straight, I don’t know how long it might have taken me to notice that the only women working in camera stores were in the photo enlargements decorating the walls.
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