Eight Girls Taking Pictures (44 page)

“Mommy?” Their almost-four-year old, Teddy, who had been occupied with a set of colored blocks, stood next to her. She climbed onto the chair that Miri used to steady her camera, the high back acting as a guard. Miri could see that the four teens were no longer in the position she wanted, too far apart to be captured in a single frame and carrying too little tension individually, these kids who wanted to be anything but kids. Miri looked down at Teddy, who told her that she was hungry. With one final glance out the window, she gently set her camera down next to her other camera, a Contax, and the rolls of film she always kept on the unused end of the dining room table, before lacing her fingers through Teddy’s dark curls. She picked up her daughter’s soft little hand and kissed her perfect fingers.

Their first daughter was born in 1955 while David was in Venice for a showing of their film. The baby arrived a month early, otherwise David never would’ve gone. Unlike many fathers-to-be, he wanted to be with his wife. Though Miri was happy about the baby, she was worried that having one would change everything; that is, she couldn’t quite picture how she would take care of the baby, the apartment, and still work. And for someone who had taken pictures since she herself was a child, and been working and on her own since age seventeen, Miri simply couldn’t imagine not working. Not taking pictures. Additionally, she and David had a second film lined up just before Miri discovered she was pregnant. David assured her that a baby was only
a
change in their lives and nothing more.

But she hadn’t counted on being as tired as she was (or having a first child at thirty-four years old), nor could she have known how much she would love being with Teddy. She loved her company, her smell, her toothless smile and smooth little feet without feeling particularly maternal or, at least, what she imagined maternal was meant to feel like.

Elizabeth came along in 1957.

Between Teddy and Elizabeth, David began his second movie, coming home or calling (depending on the length of the shoot) to check in with Miri and keep her informed as if she were there, since they had developed the story together. Miri knew that he missed working with her; their shared professional life added a dimension to their attachment. He wanted her there, but she couldn’t be there because someone had to be here.

And this was her paradox: She wanted to be in two places at once, to be two people at the same time. If she could split herself, one Miri would be happy spending all day with her toddling children with no thought about doing anything else. They would play with toys on the floor, or she would enthusiastically read to them. Nap when they napped. Eat when they ate. Her other self would be making movies with David. Or possibly taking pictures on her own, with no lingering regret about not having children, or not being home with her children. She wondered if she felt this constant, low-grade conflict because she’d had a childless life, a profession prior to motherhood, only to discover too late that you cannot replace one life with the other, and now she often lived in a place of suspension where she loved two things too much.

It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren’t forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian
strada.

So she told herself that she’d never had coffee in the piazza outside the Pantheon, never watched the changing light within; there was never a confection of a fountain where tossed coins could tell her future. The art of forgetting, she believed, could be learned.

Some days it shamed her to want to be anywhere but home making jelly sandwiches and reading the same books that she had read a thousand times and using nap time to pick up the house, only to find herself drawn to the dining room window overlooking the park. She would watch the pedestrians and the sky, the trees, and the way the countless
windows lit up, wondering what was going on behind them. Up to that spring afternoon, Miri had taken the occasional picture of people below on the sidewalk, or a horse-drawn carriage; an event in the meadow, lazily leaving her cameras and film on the dining room table.

She loved Teddy and Elizabeth, and her marriage to David—she adored him and he was good to her; they were both products of their time and nothing more. But the fact was that she couldn’t square the force of her love, the sheer monumental quality of it, with her nostalgia for her former life. She was a puzzle of miscut pieces.

A postcard from Daisy Miller:
I have the most marvelous all-over tan, courtesy of Mykonos, Santorini, Thassos, and Chios. Have you ever been to Corfu? Did you know the people are named for the love child of Poseidon and some nymph he abducted? Hope all is well. Kisses.

Miri placed the postcard of the unbelievable blue of the sea in her desk drawer.

1961, New York City, Central Park West

Sometimes when she sat, chin in hand, gazing out the window at the park, the expanse of the meadow empty or crowded, depending on the weather and the season, Miri was joined by Teddy or Elizabeth, six years old and four years old, respectively. It occasionally troubled Miri to see them in imitation of herself, her wistful expression as she took in the world outside her window. It wasn’t always easy being a woman of forty with young children. She realized it was both good to have had a life before having children (which, in all truth, was simply a different sort of life) and hard to have had a life before children. Like a variety of phantom limb syndrome, you would wake some mornings not quite rested for having two small kids, and in your sleepy state believe yourself to have the unplanned day spreading before you, only to hear the voice of your four-year-old daughter.

Elizabeth looked out the window, then called her mother over to show her something: The Central Park horses were all done up with
pastel-colored streamers, their manes and tails brushed, or braided. The drivers were in jewel-toned velvets and silks. “Mommy,” Elizabeth said, “you need your camera.”

This wasn’t the first time that Elizabeth or Teddy had called Miri to the window to see something, along with the insistence to bring her camera. In no time at all, taking daily pictures from her window became as integrated into Miri’s home life as making the beds, doing the laundry, or cooking dinner.

She went so far as to set perimeters for her pictures: two cameras, three lenses, no filters.

She still missed some shots because Elizabeth was in the bath, or Teddy had fallen down, or someone wanted something from a high shelf, or a squabble had to be mediated. But at some point, her day began to revolve around life outside the window as she recorded dawn, and dusk, day and night. Winter, spring, summer, and fall. And every imaginable event, from weddings to picnics, to concerts, to sunbathing, to lovers’ trysts and lovers’ quarrels. Protests and parades. And the ever-changing skyline of New York City.

Much later in her life she would write of the window pictures:

My situation was ideal, I suppose (although I don’t remember thinking of it quite that way at the time). My children, of course, were also there on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, so they got photographed, too, just like the view. 6:00 a.m.: mist/feedings . . . 2:00 p.m.: view/playpen time . . . 5:00 p.m.: dusk scene/baths . . . 10:00 p.m.: night shot/baby asleep.

Now that I think about it, I don’t see how anyone but a housewife could have got all this done.

In retrospect, it seems one of the main things I did was wait.

Another postcard from Daisy:
Cairo is shockingly great. Beirut is romantica. Fez is like a dream—not a dream, but like a dream—a distinction I know you understand. Kisses.

Miri placed the postcard of the casbah in her desk drawer, then went to change the sheets on the beds.

1963, New York City, Central Park West

The women’s magazine that had originally published Miri Marx’s portrait of Daisy Miller, titled
An American Girl in Italy, 1951,
as she walked the gauntlet of men in Rome, decided to run it again, as part of a travel piece. Many women readers remembered it from the first time it ran, when it had been part of Miri’s photo essay about a girl happily traveling alone. The mail that poured in to the magazine in 1951 expressed a pleasure in seeing this daydream of a lazy day in Rome as a beautiful, unfettered girl followed her heart’s desire; they particularly liked the picture of Daisy strolling down the Roman street with all male eyes upon her.

But everything had changed in the wake of
The Feminine Mystique
and civil rights and the publicly expressed discontent of women.

So when the photo ran a second time in a spread on women photographers, young women took exception. “Look at her face,” they cried, “and tell us that she isn’t feeling fear! The men are menacing!”

“ ‘The men are menacing’?” said Miri to David, laughing and baffled. “It was a lark,” she said. “It was fun.”

This was before feminism took another odd turn, when sex became something that oppressed
and
liberated women, depending; when it seemed that women were being encouraged to pursue who they really were, unless that included being a housewife, which, somehow, was no longer a politically acceptable choice. Women sometimes turned against women, as time and perceived societal roles churned and lurched forward. Change is seldom one smooth, uninterrupted process, and most women remained in the house whether they wanted to be there or not. Miri was frustrated because she had been raised as if women were already equal, with no expectations that she would stay at home, yet there she was, willingly, and still knowing what it cost her.

Another postcard from Daisy:
Romania, Russia, caviar, and men. The sort of diffused lighting that you like. Can’t wait for London and Paris. Kisses.

Miri ate the rest of Teddy’s leftover tuna salad sandwich, then placed the postcard of a man lying on the ground with a bear sitting on his back in her desk drawer.

1965, New York City

In the catalog copy for an exhibition of works by Miriam Marx called “A World from My Window/ Oculus” Miri wrote:

If you want to know what it’s like to be a housewife, I can show you:

Reddish yellow sunrises behind buildings with the park lights still dotting the darkness of the park, a lavender haze of sky, and buildings, a green foreground, billowing clouds skidding in the sky, rainy streets marked with yellow lines, a horse-drawn carriage, hot-air balloon, a purple sky, a thousand released balloons, cars, a parade, a red sky with black smokestacks, more snow, more ice, crowds of people in the sun, at a wedding, in protest, at a concert, winter, spring, summer, fall. Fireworks, political rallies, a presidential motorcade, the sun, the rain, the heat, the cold, the fog, the fog, the fog. Red, purple, blue, white, yellow, lilac, gray, black, pink. Geometry and movement. Buildings and cars. Helicopters and horses. Three people and a dog looking straight up at me.

Cymbeline Kelley was one of many who made the trip uptown to the photography center to see the window pictures. As she moved slowly from picture to picture, she thought about how perfect they were, with this housewife showing the patience of a field photographer, waiting. She understood Miri Marx as a modern Rapunzel, high above, watching the outside world.