Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (5 page)

For a little while, as I scrambled to work out everything I had to do for this shoot, I told myself I had been crazy. Grampa was fine. He had thought of a million laser-sharp questions on the spot — and I had probably only considered half of them ahead of time. He actually
was
saving me from looking like a moron in front of Angelika.

When I was ready, Grampa sat very solemnly and looked at me with great gravity. I checked the light meter on the camera, moved one of the lights a little closer to his stool, and started snapping away. I took maybe twenty pictures from the front, and another fifteen from the sides, moving closer and farther from him. I just couldn't seem to get a decent shot, though. Grampa noticed my frustration, I guess, because he said, “If the setup isn't working, don't keep banging your head against the wall. Try something different.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“How should I know?” he replied. “You're the photographer.”

Then I had an idea: I turned off all of the lights on
one side of Grampa, and switched the camera from color to black-and-white. With one peek through the viewfinder, I knew I had it right now: every line in Grampa's face, every shadow around his eyebrows, stood out in stark relief. Before, he had just been some old guy in a chair. Now the image I was seeing had real, magnetic power.

I snapped off three shots from slightly different angles, but as soon as I peeked back at the first one, I knew I had my shot. I couldn't wait to get this loaded onto my computer and show him how great it had come out. I knew he was always an incredible stickler about cleaning up and packing everything away after a shoot, so I put everything away very neatly. I covered every lens, double-checked that I had turned off the camera, zipped everything into the camera bag, and then double-checked all the zippers and buckles on the bag. Grampa once told me he'd forgotten to check his bag's straps on a shoot at the Grand Canyon, and watched in horror as two of his favorite lenses had gone bouncing and smashing off the edge
and into the gorge hundreds of feet below. I wanted him to know I had been listening.

I got everything squared away and turned back to Grampa. He was leaning forward on the stool, looking expectant. “Hey,” he said, “I don't have all day. Are you going to take my picture, or what?”

If you don't want to have lots of unexpected hassles in your life, my advice is that you should never be too good at anything. I mean, if Angelika and I hadn't done such great work on our portraits, the rest of my year would have been about ten million times easier.

She came over on a Saturday afternoon. I had no idea what to expect. Was this a date? Because aside from meeting up with a bunch of girls at the ice skating rink every Saturday in middle school, and that one time I fooled around with Sheldon Kleiderman's cousin Abigail in an empty Hebrew school classroom during Sheldon's bar mitzvah, I wasn't exactly the king of experience in the chicks-'n'-babes department.

And did I want it to be a date? I mean, Angelika was so cute it made me uncomfortable to look at her, but then again, if I fell for every girl who made me uncomfortable, I'd never get anything done. Plus, aside from being cute, who knew what she was like? I knew nothing about this girl. Maybe she was a cute, boring nerd. A cute, vicious psycho. A cute axe murderer.

Just in case, I spent the whole morning running around cleaning everything. I even vacuumed the basement while my mother stared in shock. Then there was the frantic and repeated use of mouthwash, the agonized checking and rechecking of wardrobe, even the ultra-long shower, which lasted until the water started losing heat and my father yelled through the door, “What are you doing in there, Pete? Your
sister
never took a shower this long!”

For the record, I am not so sure that was true.

But eventually, cleaned, jeaned, and fresh of breath, I stood at the doorway and let Angelika into my would-be love lair. Admittedly, both of my parents were hovering around and gawking, which wouldn't
have been my choice for setting up a steamy photo-shoot atmosphere. And when the awkward introductions were done and Angelika and I went down to the basement, my mom made a big show of leaving the cellar door wide-open behind us.

I figured at least I was a nice-smelling child of embarrassing stalkers.

As soon as we were alone — or at least semi-alone — Angelika said, “So where's all this fancy equipment I've been hearing about?”

Why did everything this girl said have to sound so flirtatious, like each sentence had some hidden meaning? I decided she was probably talking about Grampa's cameras and lenses. Probably. I opened up the camera backpack and took out Grampa's main camera body, along with two different portrait lenses. “Um, well, h-here's what I thought I'd use to start with,” I stammered. “I think it makes sense to try for some, uh, full-body shots” — UGH, that sounded sleazy — “and then, if we don't like what we're getting, we can get a little closer in. With this
telephoto lens, I mean. Not like I'd be, uh, getting closer to you. Uh.”

That's great
, I thought.
End a freaking sentence with “Uh,” why don't you? Smooth.

She giggled, then got serious. “Sounds like a plan.” She pointed to the stool I had set up for my grandfather during his practice shoot. “Is this where you want me?”

That was when the sweat started to soak through under my arms. “Yeah,” I said, grabbing the camera and rotating the first lens into place. I looked through the eyepiece at her, at which point I realized she was wearing a white shirt, and I had hung a white backdrop. If I took the pictures this way, Angelika would look like the world's cutest floating head. I got to work switching backgrounds, while Angelika asked me personal questions. I've always hated personal questions, but at least it was better than sweating into the awkward silence.

“So where'd you get all this gear?” she said.

“Uh, my grampa. My grandfather. Paul Goldberg. He was a professional photographer. Maybe you've
heard of Goldberg Photo? He did weddings, parties, commercial shoots…. He even won a lifetime achievement award from
Modern Bride
magazine.”

“Doesn't he have a truck with a yellow mountain on it?”

I nod.

“I think I've seen it around town. So, uh, he left you this stuff in his will? That's really touching.”

“No, he's not dead or anything. He's retired, that's all. Over the summer, he decided he'd had enough of photography and gave everything to me. I mean, we always did a lot of shooting together anyway, plus he's getting older and he just —”

“Can't shoot anymore, huh?”

I turned and looked at her. Of course, I'd had that very same thought, but I didn't like hearing somebody else say it. “He
could
still shoot. He just decided it was time to quit.”

“Suddenly?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Um, please don't take this the wrong way, but what you're saying about your grandfather reminds
me of something that happened with my grandmother. She used to love playing bridge with her friends every Tuesday and Thursday, and then one day she stopped going. Dad asked her about it, and she said, ‘What the hell is the point of playing if I can't keep track of the cards?' We had noticed she was starting to forget things, but we didn't know it was such a big deal. Until all of a sudden, it was. Has your grandfather been … well … different lately?”

I thought I knew what she meant, but that didn't mean I wanted to admit it. “Different how?”

“Well, for one thing, before he gave you his stuff, did you notice him making any unusual mistakes?”

I thought about that eagle flying right across Grampa's viewfinder, and nodded.

“Spacing out? Maybe forgetting common words once in a while?”

Again, I saw the eagle. Then I remembered something else: Once, in July, we had been sitting at a diner having breakfast. He had been sugaring up his coffee, and then when he was ready for the creamer,
he said, “Pete, please pass me the … uh … white stuff.” Was that a danger sign?

I nodded.

“And then, out of the blue, he quit photography?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded slowly. “Just got disgusted and walked away, right?”

“Yes, but — what are you trying to say?”

“Peter, my grandmother had Alzheimer's disease.”

I had heard the term but wasn't one hundred percent sure what it meant.

“That's when an older person's brain deteriorates faster than normal.”

Aha. “Wait, I didn't say his brain was abnormal or anything, I just said —”

Angelika cut me off. “Does he seem OK most of the time?”

It was my turn to nod.

“But then all of a sudden, he blanks out?”

“Yeah, but my mom said he's fine. And he's her dad — she knows him better than I do.”

“My grandma was my dad's mother. He insisted
that she was fine, too. And then one day we went over there for Sunday dinner and found her standing at the head of the table, trying to carve a raw chicken.”

Swell.

“But the first signs were when she started dropping out of activities, like the incident with the cards. Sound familiar?”

Grampa had never played bridge, but other than that, yeah. I didn't feel like hearing any more about this, so I said, “I don't know. Can we try shooting now?”

Unlike AJ, I guess Angelika could tell when to let a subject drop, because she smiled brightly, struck a pose on the stool, and said, “I'm ready for my close-up now!” I was really, really glad I had practiced this with Grampa and gotten all the camera settings right, because he had been telling the truth: It was hot under the lights, and looking at Angelika made it terribly hard for me to think clearly. The whole situation just seemed so — I don't know —
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition–esque.

Don't get me wrong. Angelika obviously wasn't wearing a bikini or anything, just jeans and a white dress shirt with a collar. But she was smiling and pouting, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth once in a while. And me? I was dying.

When we took a break to switch lenses, I got her a glass of water. She gulped it down in about three seconds, which made me wonder if she was thinking, um, impure thoughts, too, or just having a field day putting them in my head. I just kept telling myself,
Chill, chill, chill. You don't know this girl. You don't know this girl. You don't know this girl. Sure, she's funny. And smart. And hot. And OH, HOLY COW, DID SHE JUST FIX HER BRA STRAP? Wait, what was I saying again?

Eventually, when the basement was starting to feel like Satan's private sauna, my mother came downstairs to offer us homemade brownies. Angelika turned to see what my mom was carrying, and without thinking, I snapped off three frames of her face just as she set her eyes on the brownies and smiled.
This wasn't like the sexy, posed smiles Angelika had been working for the past half hour, or the smirk she put on in class while she was making sarcastic anti-teacher comments. It was just real. She looked almost like a little kid for a second or two.

When Mom had gone back upstairs, we fired up my computer and looked over everything we had gotten. And you know what? Those three shots of Angelika looking at the brownies were
the
ones. Which proves two things:

• Like Grampa always told me, you can't force the shot …
  
• … but when the perfect image presents itself, you've got to be ready.
  

Next we shot maybe fifty pictures of me, and then my dad came downstairs to tell us Angelika's mother was at the door. Angelika took the memory card with her, so I had no idea whether she had gotten any good shots, but that was OK. I knew I had aced my half of the assignment. Plus, wow. I was almost
starting to think AJ had been right: Angelika was giving off signals — signals so strong even a moron like me could pick up on them.

Now all I had to do was figure out what to do next. And, barring a sudden and unforeseen bar mitzvah party, I had no clue how this part was supposed to happen.

At our next photography class, Angelika came in with a huge smile on her face and her hands behind her back. I could tell she was holding something but couldn't tell what it was. I asked her what she was hiding, but she just ignored me and edged her way over to her seat. I asked again, and she said, “You'll see.”

I asked, “Can I see it now?” and Angelika shook her head. I said, “Pretty please?” and she shook her head again. Then she winked. So I tried to reach around her back with one hand, but she twisted away. I reached around with the other hand, too, which meant I had my arms completely around Angelika when Mr. Marsh walked in. I could feel two things: First, she was holding one of those cardboard
tubes you put posters in, and second, I really didn't want to let go.

Until Mr. Marsh cleared his throat behind me. Angelika and I separated in a big hurry, while the upperclassmen all around us laughed. As we scrambled into our seats, I distinctly heard Erika, one of the senior girls, say, “Ooh, look, the fur-resh-mannnnnn is turning red. It's just so adorable!” I don't know why all these older women think the word “freshman” has three syllables.

Anyway, Mr. Marsh said, “I hate to interrupt yer … ahem … social time, but we gotta get started. Now, what's that yer holdin', Miss Stone?”

Angelika didn't look half as mortified as I did. In fact, she seemed kind of pleased with herself. “It's our project, Mr. Marsh. We did our portraits at Peter's house on Saturday, and then I went home and worked on the images in Photoshop. Peter hasn't seen them yet, so I was, um, hiding the tube when you walked in.”

The only senior guy in the class, Danny something, whispered so everybody could hear,
“Ooh, they're playing Hide the Tube! Way to go, little fur-resh-mannnnnn!”

Apparently, senior guys say it that way, too.
Kill me
, I thought.

“May I see the photos?” Mr. Marsh asked, ignoring the tide of laughter that was breaking across the classroom. He made a beckoning gesture, so Angelika stood and brought him the tube. Then, right in front of everyone, he took the cap off of one end, and pulled out a bunch of rolled 11 x 14 inch prints. One by one, he hung the prints from clips over the whiteboard. Next, he asked the whole class to gather around and see.

I kind of wished I were still across the hall in the boring beginners' classroom with AJ. Because you know what? When you're bored, you're safe.

I was the last person to make my way to the board, which meant that I had to look over people to even see what the prints looked like. Danny and Erika parted to let me slide in, and I got my first look. Holy cow! The shots were amazingly good. Angelika had printed the best shot of herself smiling at the brown
ies three times, in three different ways. There was a sepia-toned one that looked like an antique, a black-and-white one that emphasized her dark hair and the gleam of her teeth, and finally, a highly processed color one that took my breath away. Angelika had edited the colors so that everything was washed out but her eyes and her lips.

Mr. Marsh gushed over our work, complimented me on the sharpness of the image, and then asked Angelika where she'd gotten so good at editing and printing. It turns out her mom is a graphic designer for a huge publishing company in Allentown, right near where we live. I couldn't believe Angelika hadn't mentioned that when I'd been bragging about my grandfather's photography career.

Note to self: Ask girls questions.

Angelika had printed three different shots of me. They weren't as amazing as the ones of her, which made sense because we had spent so much more time on shooting her, and of course because she was so much better-looking than me. They weren't terrible, but they weren't great, either. Mr. Marsh
made some technical comments about the shots, and then said, “Well, kids, I am really impressed. For the prints of Angelika, ya both get an A. For the photos of Peetuh, I could give ya both a B now, or ya could go back and try ta shoot some more. Trootfully, I would encourage ya to take another stab at it. Ya seem ta enjoy each other's company, an' I wouldn't wanna leave ya wit' any …
unfinished business
. Heh-heh.”