Her Mother's Daughter (67 page)

You are under surveillance and any flaw can earn you a One or a Two in some man's book, can turn you into a dog, a cow, a sow, a slob, a slut, a slattern: an undesirable woman. You must correct all your flaws. Aline once told me I had to change the way I walk. How can you change the way you walk? Models do, she said. Train yourself. Why do you think they have those girls walking with books on their heads? You must be erect, graceful, and sway your hips very slightly, not stride along the way you do, unaware, uncaring of how you appear, like a man, like a truck driver.

I didn't see the purpose of all that bother. Back in the old days, I felt Brad desired me, in the new days when we were young, before the world got us. But he desired me the way I was. Then. I thought. I know.

These men in the terminal were different. They don't know me, how can they desire me? They desire an image, me but not-me. As I sat there feeling them look at me I suddenly remembered my bewilderment as I'd watched other women walk along carrying themselves as if their every movement was being photographed, as if they were expensive pieces of merchandise that might break with a sharp gesture, an unself-conscious expression. And for the first time I understood what they were feeling. And I understood why in a corner of my heart I have always despised women and not wanted to be one.

Oh, I'm learning so much, just sitting on this plane, just being out in the world, I feel as if my head will explode.

Still, it's nicer to be noticed than to be invisible. Besides, it aroused me in a funny squirmy way, as if I had worms in my intestines. It made me feel…powerful. As if I had something that other people, well, men at least, want. And would give something to get. And I have the power to confer or deny it.

I haven't been aroused in a long time.

Maybe that's the way it really is, sex—conquering and surrender on both sides, a tacit battle that each one feels they've won. Maybe my love and Brad's was just puppy love, as his mother said…. Oh, everything's beyond me.

Get off that. Russ Farrell said that usually they send a reporter with the photographer so they can coordinate their material. But the reporter they hired for this piece couldn't make it at this time, so they were sending me alone and the reporter would use my contact sheets as a guide. It made no sense at all to me, especially since I'm new and the reporter is an old hand. He'd resent them giving me the right to select what would be covered. My theory is they want to be sure my pictures are good enough to warrant the second expense. They don't really trust me yet. But maybe I'm paranoid.

Anyway, I'll be on my own out there. A man named Mike Bostwick is to meet me, he's in charge of Liaison and Public Relations, he'll be my guide while I'm there. I can see him: late fifties, liquor-reddened nose, sun-reddened neck. He'll talk in spurts of disconnected syllables. Hard r's, elongated diphthongs, “The ay-a's fahn, may-am.” A man's man. Oh, Anastasia, you need to sleep.

J
ANUARY
13. S
IERRA
N
EVADA
!

It's night now, thank god. I'm in a shabby motel which is all there is within forty miles of the dam site. Plastic furniture and a hideous patterned carpet that hides dirt. But a nice big clean bathroom, a shower, lots of hot water.

I don't care that it's seedy. This is my first trip away from home alone, and one of the damned few times I've ever been away from home at all.
I AM ALONE.
No kids, no TV, no one hogging the bathroom. It feels wonderful. It is luxury. It is freedom.

Yes, I remember feeling that, the luxury of aloneness, like silence you can stretch your body into. When did traveling stop feeling like a luxury? When did it turn into weariness, one more metal and plastic motel, another anonymous corridor with fifty identical doors, another anonymous plastic room, a view of a parking lot, or the concrete wall of the next building? The only thing to be grateful for is the bathroom, a clean toilet, and a hot shower. American talent like Joyce's Romans: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset. You hope the bed will not be too soft, the pillows not lumpy; that the windows will open and there is not too much street noise, or if there is street noise, that the air-conditioning works. By now, you know when you first walk in and set down the camera bag, the tripod, and your knapsack, how bad this room will feel when you return to it later that night, much later—after the high of shooting in the shifting lights, seeing, seeing, jumping from place to place, bending and lifting tripod, cameras, every part of you stretched—then drinks, dinner, surrounded by admirers, How thrilling it must be to photograph for
World,
How does it feel to be the only woman, How did you manage that wonderful effect in the pictures of the oil refinery, the Verrazano Bridge, the Greek islands, the Berlin Wall….

Then it's over and silence clasps you as the door to your room shuts. Life is still going on out there, somewhere, but you can't hear it, there is nothing but this room, not even ugly, just bland. Not even any room service so you can call down for a last drink to calm yourself, to keep you company. There's a television set, but in most cities even that is dead by the time you get back to your room. Nights when the dread of isolation is so strong you invite a man back to your room with you rather than go there alone…. No, Anastasia, don't use that as an excuse. You sound just like a man.

I am tired. Landed at LA after a six-hour flight, then had to hop over to another terminal where I boarded a small commuter plane for Fresno, then another long walk to meet the turboprop plane that brought me here. In the mountains, the turboprop plane would drop every once in a while, several hundred feet in an instant, leaving my stomach on the ceiling of the cabin. Terrifying.

Arrived around six my time, high afternoon here. Met by Mike Bostwick, who is
BEAUTIFUL.
Tall, muscular, trim, blond, hair thinning but still there. All-American grin, eyebrows that rose in the air when he spotted me and stayed there. Like the men in the terminal at Idlewild. I don't know what to do with myself; I sort of wanted to cross my legs at the groin, put a finger in my dimple (if I had one), and bat my eyelashes. I also wanted to slap his face at his arrogance, at his unthinking appropriation of my body….But I knew—how do I know these things? I am an inexperienced woman. Have I always known these things?—I knew that whatever I did or thought I was doing, he would read in his own way, and that I could never pierce his way of reading enough to make him see
me.

What I did was act like a man. I blanked out all expression from my face except an empty smile, I strode forward and stuck my hand out to shake his. I hollowed out my voice, and acted a little cool and a little weary as if I had made hundreds of trips like this. It helped that I was so tired; I didn't have the energy to be expressive. He responded to this; he wiped that look off his face and began to treat me professionally. But every once in a while he'd glance over at me to check out the image, to see if the inexpressive professional was still there.

He wanted to drive me to the dam. I was tired: I would have loved a bath, a hamburger, and a bed. But I didn't want to seem in any way weak, and it would save time the next day if I got a sense of the layout tonight, so I said sure. We threw my things in the back of his Jeep and took off on an incredibly bumpy ride around the massive project. Mike reeled off statistics: I hope he has them all written down somewhere and will give me a PR packet, because I couldn't possibly remember them. I was having trouble keeping my face from showing disgust: the whole thing looked so ugly to me.

Not the mountains: the sun was low, dyeing the lower sky a burning coral, casting purple swathes far across the hills behind us, darkening those ahead. The earth was dry, the color of clay, and the Jeep spit up dust as we traveled. And there, in the middle of all this serious nature, was this huge white thing, a monstrous bathtub surrounded by machines that dwarfed the men who ran them. He stopped when I needed to jot down some notes about the light, and Mike waved to men in white helmets who peered at the Jeep, waved, and turned back to their blueprints, their machines, their Cokes. Mike's voice was full of awe at the size of the project, at its difficulties, all being overcome. I tried to see it as he did. I know that's what
World
would want.

The sun set suddenly—it just slid down behind a mountain leaving us in a purplish twilight. Everyone seemed to know that was coming; they'd already packed up their gear; Jeeps and vans started up from all around the project as the men headed to the shantytown of prefabs they live in. Only the executives live at the motel, and they, Mike said, were planning a dinner in my honor that evening. I had to act pleased, even though my eyebrows felt stuck to my forehead with clayey dust, my mouth was dry from it. I'd been up since five in the morning, and by now it was eight at night for me. But I took a hot bath and lay down for an hour before dinner, which is the only way I got through it.

I “dressed” for dinner—that is, I put on a skirt. This was probably a mistake. They hadn't expected
World
to send a woman to photograph their dam, and I think they were a little outraged about it as if having a woman shoot it diminished it somehow. And the skirt emphasized my sex. On the other hand, they were starved for female companionship, and had slicked themselves out in suits and ties and haircream and were as courtly and polite as Southern Colonels. The problem was that after they had flirted as far as decency permitted, they had no other conversation. After all, men flirt with the ladies over cocktails; after that, they talk to each other. And they had me for the whole evening. We were all relieved when dinner was over, and I know they blessed me for pleading tiredness and going to my room after coffee, leaving them to each other and their after-dinner drinks.

Breakfast was at 5:30; by 6 Mike and I were out in the Jeep in hard hats of our own, bumping along the clay mountain roads worn into ruts by huge trucks. I was glad then for my introduction to the place the night before, because I was able to direct Mike to places I had noted then as offering spectacular prospects. I walked along narrow paths and catwalks, lugging my tripod and cameras; I rode up the side of the dam in a makeshift elevator; I got up on top of machines; I climbed over railings, I ducked under railings, and I had myself tied to railings that edged the clifflike sides of the dam, while I hung over and shot down. I grew more and more excited. What seemed ugly and uninteresting last night seemed complex and challenging when I looked at it through a camera—the way color suddenly blooms when you bring a blurry slide into focus in a projector.

The difficulties of photographing it excited me about the difficulties of constructing it. For example: a gorge they needed to cross was impassable; they spent days trying to come up with a way to cross it. Finally, they set an archer to fire an arrow across. The arrow was attached to a heavy line of wire. On the other side of the gorge, men waited until the arrow hit, caught the wire and attached it to a heavy reel, and presto, they had a washline, a ski lift. They needed to get a truck to the other side of the Feather River, so they devised an aerial ferry and hoisted it across. Brilliant!

There were other wonders, and before we stopped for lunch—dry ham sandwiches in waxed paper, and beer, consumed in the shade of a foreman's shack—I was sharing Mike's enthusiasm. I had trouble staying awake after the beer, and napped for a while, just lying back on the hard ground (clearly, if I was going to work with the men, I was going to have to drink like the men), but when I woke up, I was full of energy and a newborn belief in the miracles wrought by Man.

Oh, what shots I got! Mythic: man against nature: mere muscle and brain challenging the enormity of a vacant mindless nature, full of traps and wiles, offering death at every step, hindering the Fisher King from bringing water to the wilderness. I shot the men's faces full of strain as they stared upward, watching to see if the aerial ferry would in fact work; I shot their sunburned arms, muscles straining to turn a wheel, to work the handle of a reel, or relaxed, lighting a cigarette. I shot the machines that dwarfed them, but which they controlled; I shot the gigantic apparatus itself, the dam, from all angles in many lights. By evening, the dam had been transformed for me into a massive basin of holy water shimmering in the sun, the redemption of the arid hills….

I was so busy leaping around doing gymnastics, I kept forgetting my professional, my
masculine
act, and by late afternoon, Mike and I were giggling together like high schoolers—after all, it was Mike who tied and untied me from the railing, who reached out a hand to help me back from my perches. And each time he touched or grabbed me, something felt—well, it contributed to the excitement of the day for both of us. So it wasn't a surprise that when we reached the motel in the sudden twilight, he asked casually whether I had enough stamina to drive another thirty miles that day, to a little town in the mountains where there is a restaurant that serves great steaks.

He's really a nice guy. It's just the way he talks that put me off—those bursts of technical language, everything said in as complicated a way as possible. Like he says “aircraft” instead of plane, and “personnel carrier” instead of minibus. But I guess he can't help it, they all seem to talk that way. He's okay. I am still tired from yesterday but I hated to admit I don't have as much stamina as he, so I said yes. And besides, he's attractive, and he'd flattered me, we'd had fun that day….So after a shower and a shampoo to get the clayey dust out of my hair, and an hour's nap, I met him in the motel lobby where we had what he called a “camel stop” to prepare us for the long dry ride—a Bloody Mary for me and two bourbon old-fashioneds for him (the things these men drink!).

We drove the curving dark mountain roads for nearly an hour to a log cabin with red-checked tablecloths and candles in bottles and had a dinner that was anyway better than the one the night before. The food wasn't that important: here I am, me, the mother of two from Lynbrook, Long Island, in a strange place in the Sierra Nevada with a handsome exciting man. I am having an adventure!