Eight Girls Taking Pictures (55 page)

Jenny couldn’t decide if the picture was pleasing or disturbing (the crushed bug, the rotting shoe, the dinner fork, the naked child in the semiarid environment). Despite the fact that there were no real markers of an era, not even the length of the boy’s hair, the picture looked decades old. She said without thinking, “His mother was the photographer.”

And everything that she had been searching for was found.

The picture left nothing out: The composition, and the capture of the right moment, no simple task with the Seneca, said that the photographer knew what she was doing (and, perhaps, had gotten the child to comply). The age of the picture, and the nudity of the child in the unkempt garden said that she was at home and used to being at home. But the picture was not a snapshot of her child exactly—it was a picture of childhood, and it was this distinction that revealed the reach for art in the photograph.

No one except another woman with children of her own could read that conflict between motherhood and the constant push to create. Was this picture of the boy in dirt the picture she wanted to take, or the picture she ended up taking? There was the art-mother problem in that children and art asked for the same things: your undivided attention. Art required solitude, a disengaged mind, free to sort through the inconsequential and the profound, sifting through the mess in the mind until it found what it sought.

But kids interrupted this process at every turn, whether it was because they needed you or because you needed them.

Jenny adored her children so deeply that she could hardly stand it, because the world was as rough as it was wondrous, and being a parent threw that knowledge out of balance much of the time.

She was the least mystical person she knew. Life was right now, and when it was over, well, it was over. But when she saw the picture of this woman’s child, it was like being handed a key.

“How do you know the father didn’t take the picture?” asked Sam.

“It’s too intimate. It’s too ordinary. This is a picture of the everyday; there are limitations.”

Sam clipped the print to the slender line that spanned the darkroom.

Jenny’s pictures of her girls were of bruises and scraps, of roller skates and pets, candy cigarettes, pearls, and gloves, games played, swimming and hair wet and tangled from the pool. They were of napping on the fake beach, on an old mattress, in the grass. Playing dress-up, playing with lipstick, blush, and nail polish. Rhinestone barrettes, and felt-pen pictures drawn on tanned skin like little tattoos. Acting in the garden’s terraced amphitheater. The girls were streaked with chocolate or circus-colored melted Popsicle sugar, standing around in bathing suit bottoms or cross-backed sundresses. There was blood, and tears, childhood mishaps, and ice cream. Dogs and birds and Sam Tsukiyama’s bemused cat pictured stretched beside Agnes, both fast asleep on the green canvas of a garden chaise longue; tiny twigs and grasses along with dirt gathered in the tufts and folds of the pad.

Every so often, clothed adults were pictured in the periphery of the children’s lives, talking among themselves, eating or drinking, paying no attention to the unfolding of childhood.

“I’ve never cared about things,” said Jenny. It was one of the aspects of her that Abner most loved; she genuinely wasn’t interested in clothes or
jewelry or furniture. She cared about the ephemeral: images, her dogs, love. Summerplace. All the things you can enjoy but never really possess.

The summer of 1986, Sam and Jenny appeared inseparable; everyone saw them everywhere. When they came to town to pick up ordered chemicals from the post office; purchased glass plates from Acme Glass and Windows; went marketing, or filled Jenny’s Scout with gas, it was even more damning that these activities were domestic. Errands were a married activity.

So when they were seen eating lunch on the patio of a café, or stopping for ice cream, their laughter, their intense conversations, the way they were unaware of the world moving about them made everyone feel sorry for Abner. There he was, teaching summer school, in the weird freeze of an air-conditioned classroom, or meeting with students and other faculty, when he’d rather be outside (they believed) while his wife and her “friend” were acting so “familiar.”

Those poor kids—already too free by half—who knew what they saw out there in that “garden.”

If only Jenny would explain herself. Not that anyone would believe her, which was the paradox of explaining herself; the weekenders and workers were convinced she must have something to hide. Her hands were always stained with chemicals; she didn’t even bother fixing herself up for her poor husband.

“We should just rig a tiny camera onto her collar,” whispered Jenny to Sam as they tried to track Kali on one of her daily rounds.

They were following the cat to settle a bet about her daytime activities. Sam said she preferred the patio next to the Huxley house, and Jenny said that she snuck off to the cycad garden.

Instead, Kali turned and walked toward them, greeting them with her tail in the air, as if she wanted to join in on whatever they were stalking.

Here was the part that confused the question of What Goes On Out There for the people of Stellamare: Abner and Sam could sometimes be seen together, at the nursery, or engaged in hours-long conversation following a leisurely lunch on the deck of a local restaurant. Instead of defusing speculation regarding the relationship of Jenny Lux and Sam Tsukiyama, seeing Sam with Abner made it more volatile.

The girls were playing cards. Seven-year-old Babe was wearing a rhinestone brooch in her messy hair and a green plaid sundress. Bunny wore pearls around her neck and wrists and was in an old vest of Abner’s, no shirt, and a pair of underwear. Little three-year-old Agnes had just cut her own bangs, gouging out an uneven swath from the otherwise thick, brown hair that she’d inherited from her mother. She’d even nicked her left eyebrow in the process.

Jenny set up her camera, peering through the viewfinder and waiting for the right moment, then calling out “Freeze!” The girls were natural models, knowing not to alter a thing, yet making their inaction appear unforced. They had mastered the art of behaving as if no one was watching them.

Sam was nearby, alternately talking to Abner and another guest while loading glass plates for Jenny and handling the exposed slides.

“How did you learn to work with glass plates?” asked the guest, a colleague of Abner’s at the college who taught composition and frankly hated doing it.

“I was a photography student, and I heard that Cymbeline Kelley was looking for an assistant.”

“You’re kidding,” said the professor.

Jenny turned her attention from the girls. “Why didn’t I know this?”

Sam said, “She got a Guggenheim and needed someone to help her print a barrel of glass plates.”

“A barrel?” asked the professor.

“I was really just one of the boys who helped her.”

“What kind of camera did she use?” asked Jenny. “For the plates, I mean.”

“I don’t know. When I knew her she only had the Rolleiflex.”

“When was this?” asked Jenny.

“I must have been twenty, twenty-one. The project took a couple of years. She really couldn’t do it herself, so once she taught me, I became pretty proficient. The fact that I became the ‘print guy’ was really one of timing.”

“She must have been close to ninety,” said the professor. “What was she like?”

It was then that Bunny took all the cards, laughing, and threw them into the air, making Babe furious (she was winning) and Agnes sigh in imitation of adult exasperation, which pretty much ended the conversation.