93. Central Park, New York, 1967
Lillian’s Central Park photo feels like a self-portrait to me even though she’s not in it. The family of four standing at the left side of the photo screams out of town. Partly it’s the matching wide-brimmed hats on the two boys, and partly it’s the way mom, dad, and kids are all standing like they’re at a museum or a zoo and not a park, staring at something they’d like to keep at a distance. Meanwhile, the wild-eyed, braless, and shaggy-haired hippies scattered across the park’s lawn are acting like the family is invisible or, more to the point, irrelevant. In my mind, I pull back beyond the photo’s edge to see my mother standing with her camera, irrelevant twice removed.
Would I have called my grandparents collect if Kaja hadn’t dumped me for monogram Jenny? If I hadn’t accused Kaja of being a bad daughter and she hadn’t accused me of being a worse one? If Kaja hadn’t called me a blue-eyed devil? If I hadn’t asked her what that even meant, since she and Jenny Dufresne were the ones with blue eyes? If she hadn’t told me to leave and never come back? Probably. Sometimes after fighting with Lillian or while smoking beside a dirty brick wall, I could feel myself turning into what had scared my five-year-old self the day I moved to Park Slope and walked into that Seventh Avenue candy store. In some deep animal part of me, I knew if I didn’t stop that transformation, I’d be uprooting something basic and important that wouldn’t grow back. Cue my grandparents’ mothballed offer popping out of the mental box I’d stuck it in. I began picturing myself inside my Cleveland bedroom with its pale green carpet and matching curtains or coming home to the smell of Grandma’s pot roast at the end of the afternoon, until not living in Cleveland started feeling like an extra punishment I’d inflicted on myself on top of all my other punishments, earned and otherwise.
In the wake of the Cleveland embargo, I treated Lillian like she was invisible. Mornings, I’d maneuver past her from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and out the door. I’d been smoking at school long enough to earn a place among the other smokers: afternoons, they hung around a playground whose wooden benches had been burned and whose swings had been slashed, pairs of us taking turns going into the Bohack to knock over grocery displays or switch up labels in the produce section. I liked the smokers because the older ones treated me like a kid sister, and because the Stone Foxes left them alone. Plus, despite growing local tensions since the rumble between whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans at the high school on Seventh Avenue, the JHS 23 smokers didn’t care what color you were as long as you were willing to share, which was very Quaker of them.
When I called to apologize for my behavior, Grete informed me that Kaja had gone to live with her father full-time. In the imaginary conversations I’d been having with Kaja since our fight, I’d already told her about Lillian quashing my plan to leave Brooklyn, so real Kaja’s escape to Harlem made it easy to get imaginary Kaja to agree that I was the winner in our long-running worst-mother contest. Competitive though I was, this was not a victory I celebrated. Where Kaja’s superior mother had bowed to her wishes, my inferior one had remained unyielding: in losing, Kaja had won. The evening of Lillian’s gallery show on Grove Street, I pretended not to notice her putting on her one nice dress, ignored her requests for help with her hair, and feigned absorption in a magazine as she walked out the door.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, APRIL 1968: Thank goodness the burglars kept to the living room and that you and Yuma are all right; though to have your sense of security stolen is the worst theft of all. It breaks my heart picturing you and little Yuma hiding behind your closed bedroom door. Considering the ways the Haight has changed, I don’t think it at all “cowardly” of you to want to move. I know you’re proud of never asking Yuma’s father for anything, but maybe this once you should. I’m sure he’d be glad to help with a security deposit if it meant his son could live somewhere safer.
It should come as no surprise that my first major solo exhibition came and went with as much fanfare as a pigeon crossing the park. The few scattered reviews spent their ink airing the reviewer’s opinion on the New York v. Lacuna verdict, with the expected results. Reviewers in favor of the obscenity ruling deemed the new show “ugly” and “sensationalistic,” while those against the ruling called it “honest” and “elegant.” I suppose the only way to save my new work from falling under the shadow of the old would be to show it under a false name, but that would be as good as agreeing that the photographer known as Lillian Preston will always and forever be defined by eight photographs taken nearly as many years ago.
According to Mr. Wythe, there were a few sales and several collectors keen to meet me. One in particular, having apparently flown in by private jet, was quite direct about his interest in those eight photographs and his willingness to pay a grand sum to have them. According to Mr. Wythe, this collector left disappointed but undaunted, claiming to be a patient man. I hope, for his sake, that patience truly is its own reward.
Deb, Jane’s grandparents apologized for having gone behind my back, and I’ve decided to let Jane visit them this summer. When I told Jane she could visit Cleveland in July as usual, the joy on her face briefly revealed the child eclipsed by cigarettes and silences, insults and sarcasm. Ultimately, my anger with her or her grandparents has no bearing on their love for each other. I don’t trust them, but if they say they won’t keep her past the summer, they won’t. Jane’s grandparents may be judgmental and controlling, but they aren’t liars.
I know that if I didn’t let Jane go, I’d only lose her some other way, but just because it’s the right thing to do doesn’t make it easy! If nothing else I’m grateful that, for now at least, she’s stopped avoiding me like I’m a piece of ugly, sharp-edged furniture.
94. Old woman, New York, 1968
JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 1968: Walking to work, I came upon an old woman sitting in front of a restaurant’s dark window, her wig squarely in place, her black-stockinged legs crossed at the ankles, the locket against her shapeless dark dress making it look even more like a shroud. Her massive handbag lay on its side like a dead thing as she stared into the distance with the face of someone who knows that what she is waiting for will never come. Only the first of my exposures was any good because my hand started to shake. I felt so certain I was seeing my future that it took every bit of reserve not to grasp that abandoned figure and ask, “Tell me! Does she ever come back?” Looking at that woman birthed the same desperation that filled me earlier this week when I put you on the Cleveland plane. If I want to stop this feeling from coming back, I know something has to change.
Arriving to the house on Fernvale Street, I was ushered in to lemonade and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Ever since my grandparents had reneged on the whole “call us anytime and we’ll send for you” promise, I’d been mentally honing the righteous indignation I planned to unleash when I saw them; but now I couldn’t muster the necessary venom. I wasn’t nine anymore. Four years had passed since people across the country were calling me a degenerate. I was simply thirteen and not getting along with my mother. Even I had to admit it wasn’t quite the same thing.
My first week in Cleveland, I wrote Kaja a letter about everything that had happened since our fight: my ill-fated phone call to my grandparents, the state of affairs with my mother, my loneliness, my grandmother’s flavorless cooking, my grandfather’s constant fatigue—and my fear, since Kaja had moved to her father’s place before we’d made up, that I would never see my best friend again. Before the end of July, a letter arrived in return. Kaja loved living with her dad and wished she’d done it sooner. She was spending the summer at a Movement school that a friend of her father’s had set up in the back of a bookstore, where she was learning about black history and black art, her letter listing a bunch of names I’d never heard of. It was only her and six other kids, and four of those were the teacher’s. Because she was the oldest, she got to help teach math and spelling to the younger ones. For the first time, she felt like she was learning about
real things and real people. She wished I was there with her. It’d be good for me, plus some of the other kids needed to see that there were a few righteous white people in the world.
Midway through the summer, Lillian wrote to say she’d found a Catholic school with a special fund for “children in need” for which I qualified, thanks to my crap grades at JHS 23 and having a working single mother on food stamps. Being a photographer was a resumé detail my mother kept off that application. I thought it was funny that what had made me valuable to the Quakers would have gotten me blacklisted by the nuns. I briefly considered making a stink about being forced to join the plaid-skirt nation, but if wearing a uniform meant getting to spend eighth grade at my own desk, with my own books, without worrying about getting beaten up, it seemed like a good trade.
Upon returning home in August, Lillian hugged me so hard I could hear her heartbeat. Hearing that steady rhythm, I was flattened by the realization that my stubborn, clueless mother was nothing more than a pile of organs held together inside a flesh sack. I suddenly felt wildly protective of Lillian and privately vowed never to do anything purely for the sake of hurting her. Of course, not hurting someone for harm’s sake isn’t the same thing as not hurting them at all. Which is to say that I went on to hurt my mother in ways that I continue to regret, even now that she has been dead thirteen years.
95. Cardboard box containing 100 contact sheets marked with variously colored grease pencils, 1968–69
Once when I was little, Lillian let me inside her darkroom to see the trays, the bottles, the enlarger that looked like a miniature deep-sea diving helmet with an old-fashioned camera hanging off it. This was where Mommy worked, she told me. I shouldn’t ever come in or I’d ruin her photos. That was it until a few weeks after I started eighth grade. As if talking about going to the store for a carton of milk, Lillian mentioned that if I ever wanted to come into the darkroom, I just had to knock and she’d let me in between stages. She went on about how peaceful it was and how beautiful to watch the images appear. Then, because I hadn’t said anything, she stopped. Was that something I might want to see? At first I could only nod because my throat had dried up. Yeah, I said, trying to keep my voice even. Yeah, it was.
I ended up spending a big chunk of that year in the dark. Somehow, being with Lillian in the darkroom was different from being with her anywhere else. Talking with Nina had felt like talking to a big sister, and Grete had always felt like a friend, but it had never been easy in that way with my mother. Because the darkroom didn’t have running water, Lillian had to lug in a big container of hot water from the kitchen and then wait for it to cool to the right temperature before mixing the chemicals. She had a thermometer, but she’d been doing this so many years, she knew by touch when the water had cooled to seventy degrees.
Developing film was the first thing I learned. It was straightforward enough that, after Lillian loaded the film onto the metal reel and put it in the tank in the dark, I could hold up my end of a conversation while pouring out developer or adding in stop bath. While the film went between stages, Lillian and I would talk about changes in the neighborhood; or while we were in the kitchen rinsing negatives, she would tell me what it had been like when she first came to New York. Making a test strip, I’d talk about school or Kaja. Naturally, I never mentioned my smoking—which, true to my vow never to hurt my mother for hurt’s sake, I now hid—but the darkroom let us be as much of ourselves with each other as we were willing or able to be.
After my mother decided on the best overall exposure for a print, she identified the areas that needed to be darker or lighter. Then she listed which portions of the image she needed to keep covered or uncovered during the exposure and for how long. We kept quiet during this part: Lillian had to concentrate on timing the various sections of the print that needed to be dodged or burned and on the delicate choreography such timing required. If a particular area was in the center of an image, she’d use a piece of cardboard with a hole cut in it, or a cardboard shape attached to a wire that she could wave over the right spot, but mostly she used her hands. As the enlarger projected the negative onto the paper, she gently waved her hands or fingers or cardboard over each designated portion of the image for each preset time. Constant movement kept the outline of whatever she was using—cardboard, fingers—from appearing on the developing print. Watching my mother work in the dim red glow of the darkroom’s safe light was like watching a bird that had been awkwardly waddling around on shore finally take to the water and realizing: Oh, that’s a swan! The choreography of her hands as she heightened lights and deepened darks was graceful in a way I’d never seen before. As I witnessed that, it wasn’t like I stopped being thirteen or her daughter, but those things somehow mattered less. And because they mattered less, there was less to get in the way.
Being at Immaculate Heart was both simpler and more complicated than being at JHS 23. Pretty much everyone else had been learning catechism since kindergarten. My total ignorance of Catholicism’s greatest hits, ranging from the Lord’s Prayer to the Holy Sacraments, was a constant source of amusement; but I learned that I liked history and biology, and that I was good at memorizing dates and the various divisions of the nervous system. I met a girl named Angie who smoked under the bleachers. She showed me how to blow smoke rings, and I taught her how to slip lipsticks into her purse. When Kaja visited Grete on weekends, she and I would sometimes hang out. I’d tell Kaja about the nuns and the darkroom, and she’d teach me about Mansa Musa and Solomon Northup and all the other stuff she’d been learning at the back of the bookstore. She and Grete were fighting all the time. Her mother kept criticizing the Movement school and everything else in Kaja’s new life, and she’d tell me at great length how she and her dad were sick of it. Then I’d say something sympathetic, the way I always did when Kaja groused about Grete, and we’d head to Atlantic Avenue for halvah and Coke.
When Lillian answered the phone toward the end of March and her face went pale at first I thought something had happened to Grandpa. Then she asked me if Kaja had ever talked about leaving New York. Paul had just telephoned Grete to say that he and Kaja had moved to Detroit. I told Lillian everything I knew, which wasn’t much. Then my mother handed me the phone, and as Grete wept on the other end of the line, I forced enough air into my lungs to repeat what little there was to say.
GRETE WASHINGTON: I went uptown to Paul’s apartment, but it was empty. According to the police, this was not an abduction, because Paul and I were not legally divorced. I made a trip to Detroit the next day. I brought Kaja’s favorite spice cookies and also the stuffed bird that she had left behind. I was stupid to think that such a trip would make a difference. After I returned, I did not consider what I was making: I sat at the loom only to stop the trolls in my brain. I tried to live as before. I went to work, I saw my friends. Nothing felt as it should. My first shroud was twenty feet long. All the months of its creation, I slept beside my loom, making for myself a bed of the finished sections. When Lillian saw what I had made, she looked at me with new eyes, eyes that gazed directly at me rather than from slightly above. With a voice of admiration, she told me that this shroud was the most beautiful piece I had ever made. I thanked her. Then I told her to leave. I was trembling with anger, but of course Lillian did not understand. She asked to know if she had said something wrong. Yes, I told her. For years she had looked down on my happiness. But Grete, she told me, she always knew I was more than a simple craftsman. This beautiful work proved that she was right. I told her that I did not want this beautiful work. I did not wish to be considered complex or interesting. I wanted my daughter. Finally, I told her that really she must go before I did something we would both regret.
Every year I weave one shroud, never so long as the first. People cannot buy them, but the gallery displays other things that I am willing to sell. Not tablecloths or shawls. Whether or not I wish to be, I suppose I am an artist now.
96. Bandaged man on Pearl Street, New York, 1969
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br /> No self-respecting doctor would have crisscrossed white adhesive tape on a cheek that way. This is a home job, even though a guy wearing a suit like that can afford to see a doctor, which is what makes him so interesting. That and the noble way he’s holding his damaged face in profile, like he’s posing for a coin. The crazy diagonals of his bandage work against the perpendiculars of the city grid stretching behind him. Cover his face with your hand, and you’ve got a perfectly ordered streetscape. Take your hand away, and it all goes askew.
I got a letter from Detroit a few weeks after the move, but Kaja was a much better talker than she was a writer, so the letter was short and didn’t sound like her. I wrote back, and after that there was nothing. Write to her, my mother said. Write to her, Grete begged the few times I saw her before she and my mother stopped hanging out. Meanwhile I saw Kaja sitting at drugstore counters, and in the passenger seats of cars, and on buses, and running up the block, and walking across the street. For the rest of the 1970s, I saw her in the newspaper or on TV whenever the latest experiment in people’s liberation issued a manifesto, or blew something up, or robbed a bank, or got arrested or shot. These days I see her in dreams where I’m my actual age but she’s still twelve, like some juvie Peter Pan, daring me to sneak with her through the back door of the RKO or to stuff the latest Ingenue down my pants. Then I wake up.
That summer, Grandpa came down to breakfast in his suit; afterward he went to his study instead of his car. This was how I learned he’d taken early retirement and that Grandma was working as a part-time teller at the bank. Doctor’s orders, at least the early-retirement part. Grandpa wasn’t thrilled about Grandma’s bank job, but she said she enjoyed talking to customers and handling money in such a fine-looking place. Grandpa had been coming home from work so tired that he fell asleep at dinner, sometimes so deeply that Grandma had to leave him at the table overnight. He’d always wanted to research his family tree, plus he’d joined a flight club that built model planes with working engines and control lines.
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