Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  In September, Grete forwarded an invitation from Nina to attend an opening at the new gallery, which Lillian and I both ignored, until one day I noticed it lying beneath a dirty plate and asked my mother how many more pictures before we were ready. Ready for what? she asked. Our next show, I said. By my count, we had at least twenty good images. Lillian smiled like I’d said something funny. She wasn’t thinking about that, she said. After her show at the Grove Street gallery, she’d realized the only way to be truly inside the process was not to have an exhibition hanging over her head. She was so happy to be with me in the darkroom, working just for the sake of making good prints. It was liberating to head out with her camera completely free of expectation or doubt. She was enjoying herself far too much to think about when or how or where she’d show her work again.

  Over the past year I’d been slowly assembling a show in my mind, populated with prints my mother and I had made together. I’d imagined myself wearing one of Angie’s older sister’s dresses to the opening, pointing to a framed photograph and saying something like: She took the picture, of course, but I was with her for most of the process and . . .

  So maybe in the spring, I said.

  Probably not, Lillian said. She wanted to give her work a chance to breathe. When the time came, she’d know.

  I’d stopped looking at my mother and was staring at a hole in the fabric of the couch. We’d had that couch for as long as I could remember. The stuffing showed through where the fabric was thin. Where the fabric wasn’t thin, it was stained, and wherever you sat on it, it was lumpy. I looked around: everything we owned was run-down and dirty and semi-broken. And nothing my mother might or might not do was going to change that.

  As Angie and I passed the Bohack after school the next day, it occurred to me that I could work there. The week after we turned in our applications, the manager started us on the registers. Angie was no good at it, and only boys were allowed to stock shelves, but soon enough I was as fast as the old-timers: seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who’d been at the grocery store for years but who, like me, had started out in ninth grade by lying about being sixteen. With my earnings and my employee discount, I could afford to buy things like Cheerios and butter and bottled salad dressing. I could take home free steak or pork chops or chicken that was at its sell-by date, which Lillian was perfectly happy to pan-fry until it became a chew toy but which I learned how to properly cook, an event I informed Kaja about via telepathic message, since our pen-and-paper correspondence had dried up. Afternoon shifts meant doing homework after dinner. This cut down on darkroom time, but from the red bell-bottoms I bought with my first paycheck to a life that wasn’t all bologna and spaghetti and canned stew, the big difference between making contact sheets with Lillian and working the register at the Bohack was that one changed nothing, and the other changed everything.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1969: Squirrel, I’ve never gone through your backpack or purse or rummaged your drawers. I’ll never know if you keep a diary under your pillow. Somehow respect for your privacy, along with your modesty after you became Jane, stopped me from asking questions. After forcing you to face so much, so young, the least I could do was not rush you into discussing something before you felt ready. And so I—who defied generations of prudish Methodists by explaining to you at a young age where babies came from, and why Mama bled once a month—told myself that when your time came, you would come to me.

  This afternoon I looked out the window and saw a young woman carrying groceries. A few minutes later, when you arrived from your cashier shift with your Bohack bags (and smelling of the cigarettes you think I don’t notice), I realized that the woman I’d just seen was you. At that moment, my mind’s outdated images of you were cleared like sleep from the corners of my eyes. I launched into all the motherly questions I’d been saving, even as your face—along with the woman’s body I’d somehow managed not to see until now—told me I was too late. You explained that everything had been “taken care of” in the embarrassed voice of a waiter who has spilled the soup, and I realized that I had failed us both.

  Do you remember when I’d strap you into your stroller to explore the world? That was what I called it, and when you turned two, “expordewhirl” was one of your first words. I’m not usually nostalgic, but when I close my eyes, I picture you in your green sweater holding Lomo as if the stuffed monkey is your own fuzzy Leica, and I feel like I’m fighting a swift current.

  97. Untitled [View from the apartment window], Brooklyn, 1970

  From a vantage point of four floors up, it’s impossible to tell if these three boys are playing or fighting: all we get are their bodies running down the middle of the street, as viewed from above. The one carrying the leafless sapling twice his size might be making off with a prize or improvising a weapon from what was at hand; the other two could just as easily be his advance guard or targets fleeing his attack. Traditionally, when winter hit, and all the good light came and went while Lillian was stuck behind a Wall Street typewriter, she became even more vigilant about weekend camera time. Hence my surprise one Saturday, when I woke up at my usual late hour to find her sitting on the couch and taking pictures through the window. Lillian asked if I wanted to go over contact sheets with her—like this wasn’t something I’d quit months ago, after she’d told me about needing to give her work a chance to breathe—but I was meeting friends at the ice skating rink in the park. Who was I meeting? she wanted to know. Angie, I said, and a few girls from the store. My list was accurate, as far as it went, but left out Danny McAlister. Not because he was a boy, which I didn’t think my mother would mind, but because he’d already graduated from high school, which I guessed that she would.

  I don’t know how many more Saturdays I woke up to my mother taking pictures through the window before it occurred to me to ask if something was wrong. She said she was just a little draggy, and supposed it was one of those colds that can be hard to shake, or maybe the dregs of the flu she’d had over Christmas. In retrospect, this should have triggered an internal alarm, but I had other things on my mind, like whether I should wear my blue skirt or my red pants to the movies, and if growing my hair out would make me look older. Angie thought it would, but Danny liked it short because he preferred a girl who stood out from the crowd.

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, MARCH 1970: It’s because I can remember being fifteen that Jane makes me feel so old. Fifteen was when I picked up a camera and felt the curtain of my life lifting. That feeling chimes every time an image spreads across a piece of photo paper but now, instead of being fifteen, I’m thirty-five. Before you laugh, I know perfectly well that thirty-five isn’t old; but Deb, I’m so tired! I’m sure my tiredness comes partly from being in mourning. The darkroom hasn’t felt this lonely since the summer I moved from East Sixth to Brooklyn Heights and left our darkroom hours behind. Having Jane with me reminded me how that small space expands in the right company. I know her new independence won’t erase our shared time just as distance hasn’t erased yours and mine, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad to see it end.

  I thought I was ready for Jane’s teenage self. Then I met her boyfriend and felt so dizzy I had to sit down. It’s one thing to hear a boy’s voice on the phone; it’s another to see him at your front door. Jane hadn’t told me he was older. He seems nice, but Deb, he’s eighteen!

  Between any two people, there is always an unbridgeable distance. I used to think basic biology meant that the gulf between me and Jane would be smaller than the one between you and Yuma. Now I know that isn’t true. Son or daughter, your flesh can attain a shape so different from anything you could have imagined that the notion it was once inside you feels like a fairy tale.

  98. Untitled [Child playing hopscotch], New York, 1970

  A few weeks later, Lillian stayed in bed as I got ready for school—Lillian, who only ever took sick days to buy herself more camera time—and at the end of the afternoon, when I came back from Bohack’s, she was still there. This went on
for about a week before she made a doctor’s appointment. Things seemed normal for a while after that. Could I bring home more steak? she wanted to know. The doctor said it would help. Then one Friday I came home to an empty apartment—unusual but not unheard of, since sometimes my mother got sidetracked on her walks home from work.

  At this point Danny and I had passed the ten-week mark, which Angie and I agreed was the big time. During our Friday-night home-by-nine-thirty movie dates, Danny and I would start by sharing an armrest during the opening credits, then let our hands wander as we pretended to watch the movie; but after ten weeks of that, I was bored. Enter the Friday I got home from Bohack’s and Lillian wasn’t there. Looking back, I should have known that my mother took camera detours only in spring, when the light lasted longer, and not on the way home from work in winter, when the light was gone by four. Rather than worry, I got inspired. After putting away the groceries, I changed into my skirt and wrote a note that I was sleeping over at Angie’s. I met Danny for a movie and didn’t show up at Angie’s until after midnight, just as The Dick Cavett Show was marking its halfway point with “Glitter and Be Gay.” Arriving home the next morning to no Lillian, I figured she was out taking pictures. When the phone rang, I was so sure it would be Danny or Angie that for a second I didn’t recognize my mother crying at the other end.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1970: After the embarrassment of fainting and being brought to the emergency room like a nineteenth-century woman with the vapors, worrying about you distracted me from the blood draws, and the thick needle at the bottom of my spine, and the odd repeated questions: Had I ever inhaled a lot of benzene? Or swallowed a lot of aspirin? Or taken something called Chloromycetin? I asked if that was the same as Dexies. No, the doctors said as they inserted another, much thinner needle into my arm. My daughter doesn’t know where I am, I told them. I called and called, but you didn’t answer, and my worry reversed itself. I don’t know where my daughter is, I told them. Was there someone I could send to the house, they asked, or a friend of my daughter’s I could telephone? I didn’t know Angie’s telephone number. I even tried calling Grete, though it’s been at least a year since we’ve spoken, but there was no answer there, either. I spent the rest of that night lying awake, dialing our number, and listening to it ring. At one point I dreamed I was gripping your skeleton and awoke to the phone in my hand—so that when I did reach you the next morning and learned you’d been with Angie after all, my relief overshadowed the doctor’s diagnosis by the end of the following day. You are safe, and I have leukemia. Between that and its opposite, this is the option I would choose.

  99. Untitled [Sleeping hospital patient], New York, 1970

  Judging by the angle, Lillian must have been standing beside the bed, gazing down on a roommate, since she couldn’t have practiced her usual photography-walk method as a Memorial inpatient. Surrounded by the whiteness of the bedsheets, the sleeping woman’s head and one visible hand look like anatomical specimens, carefully laid out for inspection. That, plus Lillian’s off-center placement, turns what could have been a peaceful image into something foreboding.

  The first few days Lillian was in the hospital didn’t feel that different for me, except for not having someone to say goodbye to in the morning, and no one answering back when I said things to the closed darkroom door as I watched television or did homework after Bohack’s. My mother explained that since the cancer cells were only in her bone marrow, all she needed were a few transfusions to bring up her red blood cell count, and she’d be released from the hospital. I told her I was fine at home on my own. It sounded like she’d be let out pretty soon and, anyway, I was the one who cooked dinner and bought groceries, but Lillian didn’t like that. Angie’s mom didn’t like me, so staying there was out. When Danny’s mom called the hospital to say I was welcome to stay with them, I didn’t think my mother would go for it, but she did. Angie said I was probably the only girl in South Brooklyn with permission to live with her boyfriend. She sounded so sure I lived a charmed life that I almost believed it.

  By this point, I’d eaten so many times at Danny’s house that living there didn’t seem like too much of a stretch. The McAlisters said grace before every meal, and there was a crucifix in every room except the bathroom. Mrs. McAlister went to Mass every morning and was a light sleeper besides; after the third night, I gave up on the idea of Danny sneaking out of his room after everyone else was asleep. Mornings, I walked to school with Danny’s brother and sister. Afternoons, we’d do homework together at the kitchen table after my Bohack’s shift. Friday and Saturday nights, Danny and I had to be back from the movies by nine-thirty or face Mr. McAlister. Ironically this meant that during the two weeks I lived with Danny’s family, we fooled around less than before; but our brief opportunities buzzed with the combined electricity of living like boyfriend and girlfriend and brother and sister all at once.

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, APRIL 1970: I’d been blaming the aches, breathlessness, and tiredness on some sort of flu, but I should have known from my camera hand that something more was wrong. For the first time, it felt like deadweight. Even after the transfusions, that heavy feeling is still there. Though I haven’t stopped taking pictures, snapping the shutter has become an empty reflex, like a hiccup or a sneeze. I know this should upset me, but that would require energy I do not have.

  When I told Jane I had leukemia, she asked if I was going to die. I told her that in rare instances leukemia went away, that sometimes it could be staved off; and other times chemotherapy brought remission that lasted years. Deb, I’ve always prided myself on being honest, but I didn’t see the point in giving Jane the numbers. That the majority of leukemics die from infections or pneumonia. That ninety-five percent who undergo chemotherapy die in two years. For the first time in my life, I understand the value of a partial truth.

  I can’t bring myself to inform my parents yet, but I telephoned Mr. Wythe straight away. Despite my not having been in touch for two years, he immediately wanted to know if there was anything he could do. “Is this how you treat all the girls?” I asked him. “Only the ones I represent,” he told me.

  100. Untitled [Leukemic woman putting on lipstick], New York, 1970

  Because she’s awake and her head’s in three-quarter view instead of in profile, it takes some looking to realize this is the same hospital patient Lillian caught sleeping, but it makes sense, given the circumstances. I can’t help thinking the parallels with Makeup artist on the uptown train and Getting ready are deliberate, but maybe applying lipstick requires the same absorption no matter whose mouth it is. Lillian never introduced me when I visited, so I don’t think they were friends. That means either Lillian took this picture on the sly, or her hospital roommate was too sick to object.

  When someone becomes ill in the movies, it’s dramatic, but in real life it is incredibly boring. Even the guilt and the fear and the sadness become things you live with, such constant weights that, after a while, you stop feeling anything. I guess because of the way my mother and I lived together and apart, it was easier to forget that she was sick, or maybe I just didn’t want to remember. Sometimes I didn’t think of it until the afternoon. Sometimes I didn’t think of it at all, and I’d jerk awake the next morning with the breath knocked out of me. When I called the hospital, it seemed like Lillian was asleep or getting treatment half the time, and the other half she’d ask about school and I’d ask about her blood cells, and then we’d both dumbly sit there holding the phone. Visiting the hospital after work was out because that meant riding the subway at night, so I’d wait for Saturday to take the train up to Sixty-third in Manhattan, then walk toward the river. It was weirdly clean and quiet up there. Old ladies in fur coats and pinched faces held small dogs and fancy-looking shopping bags as they teetered in and out of stupid-looking stores. I knew I didn’t belong, and the old ladies knew that I knew it. I kept hoping one of them would ask what I was doing there so I could yell back that I was going to the hospital to visit my mot
her who had leukemia, and would they like me better if I was shopping for jeweled hairpins and miniature fruit? Except that none of them ever said anything to me, so each time I had to walk to the hospital without yelling at anyone.

  Other than the IV that was feeding good blood cells into her arm, my mother just seemed pale and tired. At first I couldn’t help wondering if the doctors were wrong and maybe she only had mono. Then she got a fever. The next time I visited, she told me they needed to put her on antibiotics. She hadn’t told my grandparents that she was sick, but now she thought it was time. As she said it, I saw the dullness of her hair and eyes and how the skin of her face looked waxy and weird. I saw the boniness of her finger as it slowly turned the phone dial. I realized everything I’d been telling myself—that she was slowly getting better; that the doctors might have made a mistake—was wrong. Mama, she said in a voice I’d never heard before, speaking a name into the phone that she’d never used. Mama, I have bad news.

  Grandma offered to come for a few weeks, but trying to picture my grandmother in South Brooklyn—walking down streets lined with trash and broken glass; passing buildings with boarded-up windows and stoops where junkies hung out; or just staying in the apartment she would hate even if I tried to clean it up—was like trying to picture a unicorn in Prospect Park. Tell Grandma to stay in Cleveland, I told Lillian; things at the McAlisters’ were going fine. Next I rode the IRT back to Brooklyn. From the apartment, I called Mrs. McAlister and told her that I had just brought my mother home. Thanks so much for your hospitality, I said. Then I went into the bedroom and closed the door. The air was sour, and the sheets on both beds were stained. There were dishes with old uneaten food on both nightstands and on the floor. I leaned out the window as far as I could. The streetlights were broken, and it was a clear, cloudless night. I counted six stars.