Black & White (5 page)

A
CRITIC
once wrote that Ruth Dunne’s work was a “hedge against memory.” The phrase had wounded Ruth.
They don’t understand,
she said at the time.
Why do they write about things they don’t understand?
As a little girl, Clara thought she knew what the critic meant: Ruth’s photographs were like a privet hedge—rising tall and green and dense, standing between her and her own memory. She struggled to remember things. At night, lying in bed, she would try to pry the branches apart, to glimpse a single moment, a sight, a sound. But it was impossible. So, instead, she kept a portfolio of Ruth’s work by her bedside. Sometimes, when she couldn’t fall asleep, she would rest the heavy portfolio on her chest and study the images of herself, searching for clues as to who she really was.

The first image is almost a memory. Clara is three. She is naked, splashing in the warm water of her bath, deep inside the claw-footed tub on the top floor of their first house in the country. The house is an early Victorian with a big front porch, the rooms painted in pastel sherbet-colored shades by its previous owners. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is hitting the old glass windowpanes, a liquid orange light setting the room aglow. Plastic toys float all around her: a sailboat, a rubber duck, a foot-long green lizard. Clara’s hair is long and wavy. It has never been cut. When she holds her breath and goes underwater, she keeps her eyes open and watches her hair move across her face like seaweed on the surface of the ocean.

Robin is sitting on the bathroom floor, flipping slowly through the pages of
Green Eggs and Ham.
She’s five years old and can already read. She’s asking questions in her high little-girl’s voice:
Why is the train underwater? Why is that guy purple? Wait a minute, he can’t fly!
Clara can tell that the questions are driving her mother crazy. Ruth’s forehead is knotted, her mouth turned tightly down as she kneels on the bath mat, soaping Clara’s back.

“It’s a
story,
Robin,” Ruth says. “Can’t you just accept that it’s a story? You’re such a literalist.”

“What does ‘literalist’ mean, Mommy?”

Ruth sighs. Robin is not a believer in make-believe. She wants an answer for everything. Robin knows that Santa can’t possibly squeeze down the chimney, he’s too old and fat. And she knows that the tooth fairy is just an invention. Fairies don’t really exist. Her daughters are opposite in nearly every possible way. Robin is olive-skinned and tough, with short Buster Brown hair, and has frown lines at the age of five. And Clara—Clara is a frail little firefly, a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, with long Botticelli waves and amber eyes that seem to accept whatever they see.

“‘Literalist’ means,” Ruth begins slowly, each word seeming like an effort, “someone who thinks that everything has to make sense.” Her hands move smoothly over Clara’s buttocks, efficiently soaping her private parts. But then something changes. The moment freezes, and Clara would swear, when she thought of it years later, that she could hear a shutter snap. Clara has put the foot-long green lizard in her mouth as she leans back in the tub, her hair floating all around her like a halo.

“Wait.” Ruth’s voice catches. “Hold on.” She stands quickly, backing out of the room, still looking at Clara in the tub. “Robin, watch your sister.”

“But what am I supposed to do?” Robin calls. “Mommy—I can’t swim!” But Ruth has already run down the two creaky flights of stairs to the kitchen, where her camera bag is by the back door. Then her feet pound back up the stairs, two at a time, and into the bathroom. She snaps a lens into her Polaroid, crouches down.

Clara takes the lizard out of her mouth.

“Honey, could you put that back in there—the lizard? Keep doing what you were doing before.”

“Why, Mommy?” The lizard has the chemical-sweet taste of plastic. Besides, the bathwater is getting cold.

“Just for a second, Clara.” Ruth is poised, one knee on the bathroom tile, the other ready to pivot. She pushes her long hair behind her ears and squints through the lens.

“Mommy, why does he try the green eggs and ham?” asks Robin. “And anyway, why is the ham green?”

“Quiet, Robin. Mommy’s concentrating.”

“But I just need to know—”

“Hush!” Ruth’s voice is sharp.

Clara leans back in the water, trying to remember what she had been doing at the moment Ruth ran down to get her camera. She allows her head to lean back, her hair to float again. The leaves from the huge white birch in the backyard are pressed against the bathroom window, and they look to Clara like hundreds of birds fluttering outside. Her whole pale body—long, for a three-year-old—is stretched out in the small claw-footed tub. She puts the lizard back in her mouth and tries to keep from shivering.

Her ears are underwater, so she doesn’t hear the click and whir of her mother’s camera. Ruth takes five or six shots in the fading afternoon light. Clara watches her mother’s face as she snaps a frame, then lowers the camera.

“Honey, put one foot up on the side of the tub—exactly, like that.” Ruth adjusts slightly, then snaps again. Ruth is not dreamy. The gauzy layer of absentmindedness that usually surrounds her has been replaced by a quiet and complete attention.

“Mommy, why won’t you talk to me?” Robin asks. She has moved out of the way, out of the line of the camera’s vision. Her back is up against the tile wall. “I’m just asking you a simple question.”

“Okay,” Ruth says as she clicks the lens cover back in place. She helps Clara out of the tub. Clara’s lips are blue, her teeth chattering. She doesn’t like the way her mouth feels. She needs to brush her teeth.

Ruth turns wearily to Robin. “What was the question again, sweetie?”

“You never listen!” Robin slaps the wall as hard as she can. The tips of her ears and her nose are bright pink. But she doesn’t cry. In their entire shared childhood, Clara will never see her sister cry.

The photographs of Clara snapped that summer afternoon are merely studies for the work that will eventually become
Clara with the Lizard.
The following morning, their father takes Robin hunting for bugs in the swamp behind their house. They set off in their matching baseball caps and backpacks, magnifying glasses hanging around their necks, long socks and sneakers protecting their pale ankles from ticks. The bug hunting was Ruth’s idea—though Nathan has no idea why she has suddenly taken an interest in entomology. They’ll be gone for at least a couple of hours.

She doesn’t ask Clara to come upstairs to the bathroom until she has set up the shot. Yesterday’s Polaroids are taped to the bathroom mirror. The morning light through the flimsy lace curtains on the bathroom window has been blocked by several layers of black construction paper, masking-taped to the tile walls. Ruth’s lights have been set up, along with a circular silver reflector. She has run the water in the tub hot enough so that Clara will not get cold too quickly.

It’s the middle of the morning, a strange time for a bath. But it’s so rare that Clara gets to spend alone-time with her mother, she doesn’t complain. She sets aside her Barbies and allows Ruth to hoist her into the tub. The lizard is there, along with the toy sailboat, the rubber duck.

“Okay, Clara. We’re going to do a little work now,” says Ruth. “I want you to help me. You’re my model.”

Clara has vaguely heard of models. They’re the beautiful older girls on the pages of the magazines that are always lying around the house. She feels proud that she’s a model—her mother’s model.

“Lie back. Let your hair get wet,” says Ruth.

Clara dunks her head in the water. She lets her whole face get wet. When she emerges, she has tiny drops of water on her eyelashes.

Ruth bends over the tub, then holds a light meter near Clara’s chin, just above the surface of the water.

“That’s perfect. Now put the lizard in your mouth,” says Ruth.

“But it tastes yucky.”

“Just for a minute—I promise.”

Clara does as Ruth asks. She strains to remember what she did yesterday. She puts one bare foot up along the porcelain side of the tub, just like Ruth wanted her to do before. She puts the lizard in her mouth and tries to ignore the taste. It isn’t so bad, really. Kind of like the soft fat-free yogurt that her dad let her try one day when he was pushing her in her stroller down Broadway.

Ruth is completely still, except for the movement of her hands as she focuses and shoots. Time disappears. Five minutes go by, or fifty. Clara feels warm, even as the water starts to cool off. She has never had her mother look at her for so long.

“We’re done,” murmurs Ruth. She lowers the camera, places it on a dry spot on the bath mat. “Come on out, sweetheart.” She wraps Clara in a big fluffy towel, then holds her close. Clara can feel both of their hearts beating.

“Thank you,” Ruth whispers into the top of her soaking-wet head. “You’re such a good girl.”

Ruth made only sixteen prints of
Clara with the Lizard.
Not too long ago, Clara read on the Internet that the sixteenth had set a record at Sotheby’s for Ruth Dunne’s work, selling for $240,000. Even though it was work from very early in Ruth’s career, the image was seen as iconic. It was the moment she had found her true subject matter.

Clara could picture the quiet frenzy of the auction, of course: the well-dressed crowd in their folding chairs, their suited legs crossed, hands fidgeting on their paddles. And in the front of the room, on an easel—as well as projected on a twelve-foot screen—there she was. Her mouth around the lizard, her eyes huge and glistening, her leg raised on the edge of the tub, her
private parts,
as Ruth liked to call them, splayed open. The soft smell of the summer day, the innocence of a three-year-old girl, who wanted to please her mother so much she would do whatever was asked of her.

T
HE DIGITAL CLOCK
reads 8:53 in the morning. For a long disorienting moment, Clara has no idea where she is. She hasn’t slept this late since before Sam was born. The venetian blinds almost, but not quite, block the harsh light filtering in through the south-facing window. The ornate brass ceiling fan is motionless above her head. The walls are an improbable pink, so bright they look like a mistake. She sits up in bed, the fog lifting, then swings her legs around, her toes meeting the thick ply of the cream-colored wall-to-wall. Robin’s apartment. The guest room. Never before in Clara’s life has she felt like such a guest.

They’re all gone for the day, just as Robin said. The three kids are off to their three different schools. Ed, Robin’s husband, left at six for the gym, to get his workout in before arriving at his law firm. Robin’s personal yoga trainer has come and gone by now—Robin mentioned that he comes daily at seven—and Robin herself is undoubtedly into her second cup of coffee (her yang to the yin of yoga) and cycling through her morning call sheet. The housekeeper is here. Somewhere, on the other side of the apartment, Clara hears the faint sound of a vacuum running.

How has Robin gotten so rich? Or is this simply how upper-middle-class dual-career Manhattan lawyers now live? She has no idea. She may as well have spent the past fourteen years in the Sahara. That’s how little she knows about this universe—the world she left behind. Her eyes fall on the bureau, wood and orange Formica, a piece of fifties kitsch. On top of the bureau there is a framed color snapshot of the four of them—Robin and Clara, Ruth and Nathan Dunne. They’re walking in Central Park: Clara and Robin in a double stroller, Ruth and Nathan looking young and disheveled. A young family out for a Saturday-morning walk.