Her Mother's Daughter (38 page)

There was frustration in all this, because I was not at the time
taking
photographs: I couldn't afford film. But one night I told Brad, sort of casually, that I wished I could take pictures of the kids—they were so cute, this age passed so quickly, every argument I could come up with. I was hoping only for a couple of extra dollars for film. But he got excited by the idea. He had little to do with the kids, he wasn't interested in them, but the notion of taking pictures of the kids appealed to him. A few nights later, he came home with a new camera for me (“All you have is that ridiculous Brownie, can't take decent pictures with that”), a big Kodak that made me almost cry because if I'd picked it out, I'd have bought a used Rollei, which would have cost only a little more. But I wasn't carping then, I took what I could get however I got it. And he bought me three rolls of film: color film. I knew of course that great artists with the camera used only black and white. But I didn't complain. I did wonder how he could afford these things. A new idea entered my mind: Brad had more money than I did. We weren't sharing, I was getting an allowance.

By then, our relationship had deteriorated to the point that I dared not mention my new awareness. Brad and I hardly ever saw each other. He worked every day, even though he didn't have to. He was trying, he told me, to “take some of the load off of the old man.” But I knew what he was doing was trying to prove something to the old man. On slow days, he did reams of paperwork for the agency. His father now had to come in only on weekends and maybe one or two days a week. The rest of the time, he played golf, “making contacts,” he claimed.

The truth was Brad didn't want to be home. Home meant a four-room apartment, two screaming kids, and me, wearing my old jeans and one of his discarded shirts, trying to think up a game that would occupy the kids until bedtime. Nights we sat, he with his newspaper, me with my photography book or a novel, at least until television became cheap enough for him to come home triumphant one night with a twelve-inch set, crowing as if he'd bought it for me. I hated the thing, but after that I couldn't escape it unless I went to bed early to read while he watched the roller derby or Milton Berle or wrestling or whatever other garbage was on it, anything rather than come to bed with me. I couldn't blame him. I wouldn't have wanted to go to bed with me either. When you have no self-esteem, you have no desire, and you can't imagine anyone else could desire you. Whatever sexuality I'd possessed had vanished, and I thought I finally understood Hamlet's outrage with his mother for wanting to fuck even though she was thirty-five or forty. Here I was, twenty-one and a half, and I'd already outgrown desire. Brad didn't have much either, so we rarely screwed. I noticed he was horny mostly after we'd been to the movies and seen something with almost-naked women in it, or with extreme violence. Then he'd be insistent about sex, and screw with his eyes closed as if he couldn't bear to look at me. And he'd ram himself into me as if sex were some kind of self-assertion, and he was proving he'd learned enough of it to be a good salesman.

Anyway, I acted thrilled with the camera and the film, and the very next day, I started to take pictures of the kids. But that's not a simple matter. All those adorable things kids do, they utterly refuse to do when there's a camera aimed at them. The first time I tried it, I had an odd kind of success.

I was feeding Billy, who was about six months old and able to slump in a padded high chair. Arden was hovering around us angrily, and I knew she was jealous, so I talked to her and tried to caress her as she passed me. But she darted away from my hand. There was a toy on the tray of the high chair—a suction cup with a rattle affixed to it. If you pushed the thing, it rattled, but didn't fall off the tray. It was intended to save mothers forty-four bends a day. Arden very suddenly went up to the high chair and looked at Billy and pushed the rattle. Billy grinned with delight, and Arden did it again. Although the expression on her face was not sweet, I thought she was being sweet almost against her will, and I was enchanted. It was the first time she had paid any attention to him at all, except to demand a bottle every time he had one—although she'd been weaned before he was born.

So up I got, excited. It was November, and grey. First I pulled Billy up out of the high chair right in the middle of his lunch, and set him on the floor and carried the high chair out to a little wooden porch at the back of our apartment. It had a roof, but more light than the kitchen. I bundled both kids up in snowsuits, put on my own coat and hat, got the camera and some cookies, and went outside with them.

The light was pale and pearly, and I opened the shutter wide and held the camera to my eye.

“Push Billy's toy, sweetheart,” I urged Arden. She glared at me. “Go on, do what you did before, honey. Then you and Billy can both have cookies.” “Cookie” would be Billy's first word; Arden's first word had been “no.” It was “no” now, too. She was just about to be two, and had a head full of blond curls and big blue eyes with rage in them. Wherefore, I wondered. Whenever my mother was disgusted with me, she would announce, “I hope when you have a daughter, she is just like you, stubborn and willful and impossible!” I thought my mother's curse had come true, because Arden had always been those things.

I sat down on an old wicker chair with a broken arm, and prepared for a long wait. While I waited, I played with them, pushing the rattle for Billy and telling Arden to look at the bird settling out on a bare branch, asking her if she wanted to play patty-cake, whatever. But she watched me as warily as any Eve a snake, and Billy drooled, oblivious to all of it. I kept this up for ten or fifteen minutes. My feet were getting cold. Then I urged her again.

“Come on, honey, show me you know how to push the rattle.” Saying this, I recalled Dr. MacVeaney, and hated myself. But Arden was smarter than I had been. She headed for the back door, pulled the storm door open, turned to me, and, setting her teeth in a wide grimace, she screeched long and loud.

I got a great picture, if not the one I'd intended.

Still, it wasn't the sort of picture other mothers would want, I knew that. I had to wait until the following summer to get that kind, wait for a time when I could be outdoors with the children, lying on the grass in the park with my camera ready at all times. I couldn't pose them. But eventually I did come up with a set of snapshots that would make every mother on my block jealous.

I caught Arden with a butterfly. I'd dressed her up in a little smocked dress my mother had made for her. I didn't normally put such things on her, because I hated to wash and hated even more to iron, but I bethought myself of my grand plan and put first things first. I'd taken the kids to my mother's that day. She had a nice garden, with three big beds of flowers, and a lot of green, and the old Adirondack chairs my father had made years before that were still as strong as new, and which he repainted so they still looked new. My mother and I were sitting outside drinking iced tea and the kids were running around in the garden and I kept putting the camera up to my eye and dropping it, so they'd lost any self-consciousness, and then it happened. A butterfly landed on a zinnia. And Arden was standing right there: her little arms were held out stiffly like wings, and her whole body leaned toward, yearned toward the butterfly, and her face was awed and open and I got it, I caught her.

In another one, Billy had toppled on his backside, as he often did, and he looked plain startled, and I caught that. And then, suddenly, Arden ran over to him and reached out her hand to help him up, and said “Don't cry, Billy,” although he wasn't crying, but I almost did, and I caught that too. A moment of sibling affection! I knew every mother on the block would drool for such a picture….

When my set was complete, I began to show them around. I knew most of the young women in the neighborhood—we all met each other pushing carriages in one direction or another. And sometimes I'd have coffee with one or another. We were all poor, we didn't have to be ashamed in front of each other. The distinctions were there—one's husband was going to law school, another was doing his medical residency: we knew who was upwardly mobile and who was not—at least we thought we did. Actuality often confounds stereotypes. Every degree of education mattered: the women who had one year of college felt a superiority over those who had only finished high school, and the one who had been a second-grade teacher tended to behave as if all of us were in the second grade.

I, of course, paid no attention to such snobberies. I was “above” them. I was simply disguised by my life-style, but I knew that one of these days, I'd haul the easel back out and get some new paints and start again. Meanwhile, I was entertaining myself with photography.

As I had expected, all of them envied my wonderful shots, and wanted some of their children. No one had much money, though, and for a while, there was only the envy and the admiration poised over the coffee cup. But one day, Milly Cooper, the most good-hearted and open of the women on the block, burst out in her Nova Scotia accent: “Oh, I wish you would take some pictures of
my
children!”

That was all I needed. I paused, considered, offered hesitantly: “Well, I could, I guess….”

“Oh, could you, Stahz? I'd be ever so grateful!”

I acted as if I were only then figuring it out. “Well, if you could pay for the film and the developing…”

“Oh, of course!”

“We'll have to have two rolls, to make sure we get a good set….”

“Oh. Well, sure, whatever you say.”

“And I'd just charge the price of an extra two rolls for my time. How's that?”

She was thrilled, and planned to go immediately to Modell's, which sold a cheap brand of film. I had to derail that, but I was able to soften the blow by saying my fee would be for the price of black-and-white, which was cheaper than color. I don't remember what the whole thing cost, maybe ten dollars or so, much less than a professional photographer would have charged. After Milly, the others, as I'd expected, soon came to strike the same deal. I had enough work to occupy me for months, because of course, the women on the block all had friends, sisters, sisters-in-law, and cousins who lived elsewhere, and who also talked, and who in turn had friends, sisters, cousins, and so forth.

I had no idea at the time that my “hobby” was the beginning of a career. I was doing it for pin money—well, film money. It took enormous amounts of time. We'd get together—the woman and her children and me with mine—at her house or the park. I preferred outdoor settings, but good weather would last only another few months. I didn't like using flashes on babies, and couldn't afford to buy regular studio lights. So I photographed almost every day, and sometimes twice a day, trying to garner as much film as I could for the winter, when, I thought, I'd work on my own.

We'd sit around—I told the mothers this was the only way—with coffee or a thermos of lemonade, with blankets and toys, and we'd wait. I'd take two rolls of thirty-six shots in the course of the afternoon, and since I was very patient there were always at least twenty-four wonderful ones. There would be shots of babies falling asleep; or their first sight of their mother on waking up; or rubbing their eyes, or crying—all cute as they could be, enough to make every mother melt.

I felt a bit squeamish about what I was doing, as if it were—unworthy. Well, I'd had a male education. I mean, I'd learned to respect what the philosophers, novelists, historians, I'd read respected. I had been Very Serious as a young person, and I knew that the whole business of women and babies and housework was frivolous and mindless and even contemptible. No philosopher I had ever read had taken women seriously. What women felt about life in general, or their own lives in particular, didn't seem to interest anyone.

But here I was, listening to these women for hours every day, and I couldn't avoid seeing their unspoken anguish, their fears, their rage. Nothing around us in those days suggested that a woman had any such feelings, or any concerns beyond her children, her husband, her house, and her neighbors; and the women I knew felt illegitimate in expressing them. Still, they seeped out, steamed out, came out willy-nilly, and what I didn't hear, I saw.

Because often enough as I was aiming the camera at what promised to be an adorable shot of Johnny eating a cookie, what I caught was Johnny socking Mommy in the eye, and the rage that crossed her face in that instant. Or, as Mommy was arranging baby on a pretty pink blanket she'd washed and dried for the occasion, baby, naked as she was, decided to shit: the picture showed baby's pink straining face, a mustard-color stain on the blanket, and Mommy's frustration. What I ended up with was a complete record of the emotional interactions of mothers and young children, with all the anger and despair and frustration and weariness as well as the delight and affection. Whatever appears on film is in some way exaggerated: any instant, caught and frozen out of the flux of expression, seems stronger, more permanent, than it actually is. So when Baby comes over and wipes his hands on Mommy's fresh white blouse, laundered expressly for the picture-taking, and leaves behind a trail of chocolate from his Oreo, and she sees the mess, she will register dismay, anger, amusement, and forgiveness, all within the span of a minute. But if I am sitting there with my camera, I will catch only one or two of those expressions—the anger, say, and the sad tail end of the forgiveness.

I never showed the women the “negative” pictures. They were not wanted. Still, I kept them myself. I don't know why. I could never use them for anything. Who wanted pictures of angry mothers? And besides, the pictures were in color. Who knew then that it was precisely this kind of thing that would embark me on my later career? Whenever I get a commission these days, it's for some series of pictures of women and children—even though I first established myself as an action photographer, and did good work in war zones. Nowadays I often get in touch with the local UNICEF agency, for contacts and assistance, and every time I enter a UNICEF headquarters, there they are, huge blowups of Indian or Tunisian or Malaysian women looking adoringly at their babies, holding them, caressing them. I just shake my head, because you hardly ever see a poor mother treating her child like that. You see worn young mothers, cadaverous themselves, with babies lying on their laps in a stillness close to death; you see mothers watching their children with empty eyes, the little ones in rags, with sores on their bodies, as skinny as their mothers. The gaze of people long hungry or extremely tired and with little hope is not focused on this world; and they have no energy for gestures of love. The love is there: the women will give the children whatever food they have, denying themselves. But it does not advertise itself.