Mary Coin (15 page)

My throat hurts. He took my baseball glove. I’m hungry. But I’m still hungry. I’m thirsty. I’m so bored
. But Vera loved them so! They would bake oatmeal cookies. That would pass the hour until bedtime. And the children didn’t fight when they helped her in the kitchen as long as she gave each one a spoon to lick. And, oh! Miller! You broke the flower vase! Oh, it’s all right. I didn’t mean to be mean. Yes, Philip, it is funny. Mean to be mean. It was a special vase, yes. But it doesn’t matter, does it? (Yes, it did. Everett had brought it back from Kayenta. She was no longer his wife, but there were pleasing emotions that could still be roused by a vase or one of the carved canes Philip kept by his bedside at the Wilson home.

Bedtime!

Monday morning finally arrived. She rose early and drove the boys back to Oakland. Mrs. Wilson patted their heads as they filed past her, as if counting them to make sure Vera returned all that she had taken out.

“I’m a little bit jealous of you, you know,” Mrs. Wilson said as Vera was leaving. “You do whatever you want.”

“I do what the government tells me to do.”

“You talk to people. You talk to strangers, for heaven’s sake!”

Vera had once overheard Mrs. Wilson tell her husband that Vera was not very attractive in her slacks and sturdy shoes and with her hair cut as short as a boy’s.

“I don’t talk to anybody,” Mrs. Wilson said wistfully. Suddenly she brightened. “Hey now, did Miller show you his painting?”

“What painting?”

“The one he made at school. I told him he takes after his father.” She turned and called back into the house. “Miller! Miller?”

Miller came to the door, his face expectant. It was cruel of Mrs. Wilson to call him back, to make him think that maybe Vera would take him again.

“Show your mother the picture you made!”

In a moment, Miller reappeared with a sheet of heavy paper on which he’d drawn a woman wearing a cocked cap and slacks. The woman held a camera to her face. He had a sure hand and his rendering of the camera was particularly detailed. The lens stared out from the housing like an eye.

“That’s lovely, Miller,” Vera said. “You are a very good artist.”

“It’s a picture of you holding up your camera!” Mrs. Wilson mimed holding a camera in front of her. “I said why don’t you draw your mama’s face? She has such a pretty smile. And do you know what he said?”

“No.”

“He said, ‘I don’t know what she looks like.’”

“That’s ridiculous. Miller knows what I look like. Don’t you?” She felt ashamed to display her insecurity in the form of this question. “Don’t you, Miller?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“What color is my hair?”

“Brown.”

“And my eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Well, they’re hazel actually. So next time you can draw a picture of my face. Now go and get ready for school.”

“I thought it was such a funny thing for him to say!” Mrs. Wilson said, after Miller had disappeared into the house.

“I’m sure you did,” Vera said. When the woman did not catch her sarcasm, she felt a mild victory, but she was still unsettled. “My children know what their mother looks like.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mrs. Wilson said, nervously patting her apron pockets as if she could already feel their emptiness should Vera decide to find a new placement for the boys.

Vera drove home and went directly to the darkroom. She was right about the picture. Of the six exposures, the one that she had felt at the time, felt in her gut as if there had been a sudden synchronizing of all the heartbeats in the world—that was the one. She sent it to Washington that afternoon and sent another copy to the
News.
She was not in the habit of submitting photographs to the papers, but the woman and those children—she couldn’t explain it. She had seen worse—children covered with sores, pregnant women who looked too weak to make it through the ordeal of birth—but this woman and her children, that baby in her arms—there was no time to wait for the people in Washington, there was just no more time.

•   •   •

T
he picture was published the following week. Not long after, a shipment of supplies was delivered to the pea pickers’ camp near Nipomo.

“It doesn’t do that woman and her children any good,” Vera said. She and Patrick were lying side by side in bed at a tourist cabin outside San Bernardino. “I’m sure she’s long gone from that place by now.”

“It’s for the greater good,” Patrick said.

“Oh, what does that even mean?” she muttered.

“It means that—” he began in his patient, teacher’s voice.

“I know what it means, for God’s sake.”

Vera reached for the water glass on her bedside table. It was smudged with the imprint of someone else’s lips. Well, they’d stayed in worse places. She drank, then wiped her mouth with her sleeve. It would be two weeks before she saw her children again.

They were safe, she reminded herself. They were well cared for, even if that Wilson woman was insufferable. Patrick leaned over and kissed her neck. She had argued that they ought to drive to Berkeley for the weekend, but Patrick was right: they could not afford to waste that kind of money on gas. And they had already told the children what the schedule would be, and it might be confusing to them in the future if plans were not fixed. And, he’d argued, it would be good for the two of them to have a weekend alone even if they had to spend it in a dirty room. He had a way of separating everything in his mind so that one concern did not affect another. The work was separate from the children. The issues in the marriage were separate from the inevitable tensions that arose when they worked together. But to her these considerations clustered in an unyielding knot that sat in her stomach and never loosened unless she was absorbed in taking pictures or ensconced in the quiet of her darkroom focusing on making good negatives. So the work was an antidote to the guilt, which arose because of the work. And around and around.

“She said they ate dead birds,” she said.

“Who?” His voice was muffled by her skin. She looked down and saw his erection pressing against the material of his pajamas.

“That woman in the photo. She said her daughter was good at killing birds.”

He leaned back against the thin pillow and sighed.

“Philip is relentless with Miller,” she said. “Always picking on him. He puts that knife in and twists. What does Miller have that he’s got to be jealous of? Philip is older, he’s stronger.”

“It’s the way of brothers,” Patrick said.

She exhaled heavily. Patrick had a habit of ending a discussion he was not interested in with these sorts of meaningless platitudes.

“When Miller was little, just learning to talk, he’d look at something, a window, say, and he’d call it ‘that rectangle that you look through,’” she said. “And Philip, no matter where he was in the house, would hear it and say, ‘The word is
window.
’ I swear, that boy can hear his brother make a mistake a mile away, but try to get his attention when you’re standing right in front of him.”

They were quiet for a while.

“I always liked the way Miller described it, though,” she said. “A single word reduces a thing, don’t you think? A window is nothing. But a rectangle that you see through . . . that’s something, isn’t it?”

•   •   •

T
he ocean roar was so loud at night that even though the cabin sat high above the shore, Vera had the sense of the waves lapping at the walls. Sitting opposite the photograph, she felt small inside of time. A rectangle that you look through. The feeling of seeing an image emerge from a bath, the blacks and grays separating themselves from the not-quite-whites. It was like a birth. There you are, she’d said to each of her sons when they were born. There it was: a newly printed photograph. The thing suddenly real in her hands. And then it left her hands and went into the world and became this—She looked at the picture. At first she had been proud of the attention the photograph brought to the farmworkers. And she would be lying if she said she did not enjoy the recognition that came with its publication. It had given her a career. You could say you didn’t care, that all that mattered was the work. But that was bunk. Everyone had an ego. But sometimes, when she was introduced at a party or a conference, she could see the faces of her new acquaintances adjust as they scrolled through all they knew or had heard about the photo and then related to her as if she were a set of assumptions.

A bird flew into the window of the cabin with a sharp clap of sound and dropped onto the deck. Vera walked over to the glass and saw the mark where the accident occurred. The bird lay in a pool of amber light thrown by the outdoor fixture, injured but still alive. It tried to rise to its feet. It flapped its tail feathers but could not manage any real movement. It opened and closed its beak, then spread its wings and began to rock from side to side in an attempt at liftoff. Stretching its neck at an odd angle to work against inertia, it managed nothing except small lateral movements across the deck.

“Come on. Come on,” Vera whispered. But even as she urged the bird to life she knew it was useless. She should call Patrick. He could go outside and throw the bird into the air in the hope that, with a little help, it would find its wings. But she knew the bird would only fall back to the ground and undergo another devastating impact. It was too late for the bird. Its initial collision with the window had done it in, and anything she might try would only serve to salve her guilt, nothing more. She could not turn away, though. It would be a horrible thing for the bird to die alone. She would be its last witness. But a witness only looks. She had seen so much in her life, but she understood so little.

I and my children . . .

She gave the dying bird her gaze. That was all she knew how to do, and it wasn’t enough, in the end. The bird folded its wings into itself and was gone. It had taken a terribly long time for it to die. A lifetime, it seemed to her.

“Vera?” It was Patrick, hair askew, his pajama bottoms twisted around his waist.

“A bird has died on the porch.”

“I’ll get it,” he said, grabbing tongs from the fireplace.

“Leave it be,” she said.

“We don’t want a possum.”

“Please, leave it be!”

“Vera?”

She was crying now. He put his arms around her and whispered into her hair.
Shhhh. Shhhh.
Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child? They didn’t want the anger, the inconvenience, the ungainly mess. Patrick needed her to be docile. She would do that for him. He was so good. She let him lead her back to bed and lay passively while he tucked the sheets around her. He drew the blanket under her chin, smoothed her hair. He told her she looked fine.

22.

A
s requested, Miller and Philip brought their wives and children for the weekend. Vera took out her Nikon and cleaned the lenses. If she could muster the energy, she would begin her project. She decided that, in order to make photographs of any resonance, she would have to treat her children and grandchildren, at least photographically, as strangers. And, as she always did when she began to work, she would start by watching. She would see how they moved, how they grouped themselves, how the house and the ocean worked on them. People in places.

Walking toward the cliff’s edge, her Nikon slung around her neck, she leaned heavily on her cane. She had resisted the cane—after all those years of masking a limp, a cane seemed a particular insult. But she had fallen twice in the last few months, and now Patrick insisted on it whenever she left the house. She felt the sea wind swoop up to greet her. Down below, the coastline was cut in such a way as to suggest that the ocean had taken a ravenous bite out of the land. The children scampered on the beach.

People in places. It was only when she had left her studio and had begun to photograph men and women in the context of their lives that she had known what to do with hers. She was surprised it had taken her so long to figure this out. She had spent her childhood in a city where, despite the tall buildings and bridges, the real monuments were human—the somber faces of men and women lost in their exhaustion as they trudged home, the stretched mouths of vendors hawking bok choy in Chinatown, the little boys with curled forelocks racing among the food carts on Delancey. She hadn’t had a camera then, hadn’t even thought about taking a photograph. And yet, when she looked back, she counted those images as her first pictures.

Her grandchildren chased the waves in and out, hoisted kites into the air, or threw glops of wet sand at one another. Their bodies were exuberant exclamation points, bent-over commas, crouched and contemplative periods.

“Don’t you want a chair, Mother?”

It was Miller. She had not heard him come out of the house. Tall and lean, he had inherited Everett’s stance in an almost chilling way. Her first husband’s erect posture suggested the showman but masked a deep unease. When Everett sat, one leg bounced restlessly against the other. His long fingers whose passage across her skin she had once craved and whose travels across other bodies she had envied were always at play as though he was marking the seconds as they passed. Miller had adopted Everett’s long-legged habit of kicking his feet out in front of him when he walked. Of course, it had occurred to Vera that he might have picked up his odd gait from her, the way a child takes on a parent’s accent or an idiosyncratic gesture. Her limp, and the embarrassment and ambition it had created in her, were not the qualities she had wished to pass on to her younger son.

“Take me down to the beach,” she said, motioning with the end of her cane.

“If you’d like, Mother.”

He was so cordial. When she called him on the telephone and he was busy with something, he would say, “May I call you back?”
May I,
as if she were a business associate who required a particular formality.
I am your mother!
she always wanted to shout. But if you had to claim a thing it wasn’t really yours. Philip was lighter of spirit. He didn’t mind making a joke of hard times, teasing her about how lucky he was to have lived with the Wilsons all those years; otherwise, how would he have picked up Mr. Wilson’s highly scatological vocabulary?

Miller grasped her arm and guided her carefully down the wooden steps.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“What?”

“Anything. Tell me how you are.”

“I’m fine, Mother.”

“No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.”

“You always like to stir things up.”

“I just like a plain answer.”

“The plain answer is that I am fine.”

“How is your work?”

“Busy.”

“You chose the right place to be a geologist, I suppose. All those earthquakes.”

“I’m not a seismologist, Mother. You know that.”

She did know this, of course. He worked for an oil company. She had only been trying to make a feeble joke, but he was not one for small talk. In conversation, they were like people who had gotten lost on the way to somewhere but were both too stubborn to ask for directions. She stumbled over a rock, and he caught her.

“Are you all right, Mother?”

“Fine. I’m fine,” she said, then laughed. “We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

Sometimes she wanted to shake him. Mrs. Wilson had once said that Philip was easier to love. Vera had thought the woman cruel for saying it. “I love my boys equally,” she responded, insinuating the woman’s inferiority. But of course this was not true. She loved them differently; it was impossible not to. Philip, the playful extrovert, gave her confidence. Miller had been so quiet and hard to reach, so prone to tears. He had made her feel that nothing she said or did could make him happy.

Once on the beach, she walked away from him. She hoped she could manage the shifting terrain of the sand without making a fool of herself.

“Grandma! Grandma!”

She waved. The children continued their games. She padded along the scalloped line drawn by the tide, her sneakers and the tip of her cane making loosely formed indentations in the wet sand that were quickly filled by incoming water. She watched as the imprints disappeared. It was the opposite of a photograph coming to life. But that was not life, was it? Life was this sinking in, this evaporation, this dissolve until what was there might never have existed, its brief presence leaving no trace. Perhaps it had been a monumental self-delusion to imagine that her work had captured life. Hubris, really. As if life could be stilled when it was always running, always moving, just like her grandchildren.

She reached the place where a serrated line of rocks prevented her from walking farther. She was overwhelmed with a profound lassitude. Her throat felt tight. Had she taken her medication? Was it possible that she was no longer able to walk a few feet of beach? Doors were closing one after the other and too fast. The children lay on their towels now, shivering probably; the water was so cold. Beyond them stood Miller, a black figure backlit by the sun. He had lifted his hand to his brow presumably to keep her in his sights, and a near perfect triangle of sky showed through the space created by his bent arm. Vera’s eye immediately framed the image. Would she include the sea? That would be mawkish. And it would have nothing to do with Miller, right at this moment on this beach. Miller, her inscrutable son whose dutiful attentions could not be mistaken for love. She raised her camera to her eye, shifting him to the center of the frame. But she was too far away. It would be no good unless she could get closer.

Climbing back up to the house was difficult. The impatient children squeezed past with their towels and buckets and sandy thighs and ran ahead. She squeezed Miller’s arm to let him know she needed to rest.

“I’ll get Philip,” Miller said. “We’ll carry you the rest of the way.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Philip might make a joke of it. Queen Vera being borne by her loyal subjects—something like that. A quip that would have suggested their family history but in a way that gentled the past. For Miller it would be just one more instance of his mother’s selfishness or whatever it was he told his wife, or probably didn’t tell her.

•   •   •

A
fter her nap, she sat at lunch, enduring the worried glances of her family. Despite having no appetite, she felt a renewed energy and was ready to begin her project. After the dishes were cleared away, she slung the Nikon around her neck, gathered the children, and proposed a safari. It was their favorite activity when they came for visits. Once they were outside, the little boys raced around finding sticks to serve as guns or arrows for bentwood bows although they knew that a safari with Grandma, even a make-believe one, was of a different sort, and that they would be hunting not with weapons but with their eyes.

“Be still!” she said, holding her cane out to stop their movement. A squirrel was perched on the tip of the Alphonso mango. “See there?” she said. The children crowded around her, following the line of her outstretched finger. Gasps of recognition and a whine from Maggie who could not see the squirrel and felt left out. “See the stripe on its back?” Vera said. “Tell me what else.”

“It has a long tail,” Benjamin said.

“Where is it? Where?” Maggie complained.

“What else?” Vera said.

“Fingers grabbing,” Teddy whispered.

“Claws,” she corrected. The children watched the squirrel. She took a picture of Ben wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve. Suddenly the squirrel sensed their presence and darted away. Maggie’s expression crumpled into righteous anger as she realized she had missed the excitement. Vera took a picture of the moment before tears. She took another of Teddy crouched over something in the grass. Of Maggie, this time laughing. The satisfying click of the shutter. The feel of the cold metal against her eye. Blur to focus.

Teddy found a fallen branch split into the shape of the letter
Y.
Ben pointed out the way the angle of the roof cut a cloud perfectly in two. The children were getting good at seeing what was not obvious, and her praise was extravagant. She took more photographs. Teddy studying a mushroom. Ben leaping up in a vain attempt to capture a butterfly. Maggie with her expression of perpetual anxiety about being left behind by the bigger boys. Teddy, again, with his heartbreaking elbows. Ben, who had a tubby boy’s waddle to his run and who seemed enviably at ease in the world.

“Grandma! Look! A snail!”

“Grandma! Come here! I found a dead bee!”

There was so much to look at. Still so many unframed worlds for her to capture. The sense of time slipping away, of these perfect children eluding her. Her throat closed. She needed her oxygen.
No.
She needed to sit down. Where was the chair? She could not get a breath. Her head was spinning. Not in front of the children. Not yet!

•   •   •

I
t was dark. She lay in her bed. The screen door leading from the kitchen to the yard squealed softly. The scrape of someone bumping into one of the dining room chairs. How had she gotten here? The last thing she remembered was being in the yard with the children. Patrick slept by her side. The sound must have been one of her sons, restless in the night just like his father. But when the bedroom door opened, she saw a small figure backlit by the soft glow from the outdoor lights.

“Grandma?”

“Come closer.”

It was dear Teddy, standing by her bedside now, his wrists showing below the too-short sleeves of his pajama top.

She put out her hand to touch him. “What is it, darling?”

“You fell down at the safari.”

“Yes, I did. I’m sorry.”

“Did you die?”

“No. Not yet. Can’t you sleep?”

“I heard something,” he whispered.

“What?”

“I think it was a bear.”

“There are no bears here.”

“I think it was a bear, Grandma.” His voice trembled.

“Do you want Grandpa to take you back to the teepee?”

“I don’t want to sleep there anymore.”

“Do you want to sleep with me?”

“Yes.”

She lifted the corner of her blanket, and he slid in beside her. He laid his head against her chest and snaked his arm across her stomach. She prayed to a God she didn’t believe in to keep her alive through at least this night.

When she woke in the morning, she was alone. She heard the sound of breakfast outside her bedroom, the clinks of cereal bowls, the hum of conversation. It took her a long time to sit up. Every muscle in her body hurt. Finally she managed to pull on her bathrobe. It took another five minutes to stand.

When she entered the kitchen, Teddy saw her and lowered his eyes.

“What do you have to say to your grandmother?” Miller said.

“I’m sorry,” Teddy said.

“Sorry for what?” Vera said.

“For disturving you,” Teddy said.

“Disturbing,” Miller corrected.

“But it was no distur
v
ance at all,” Vera said, winking at her grandson.

“A boy his age should be able to sleep on his own,” Miller said.

“It was just a nightmare,” Vera said to Miller. “You had your fair share when you were his age, crawling into bed with me and your father at all hours.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” Miller said stiffly.

“Well, of course you did. It got so that we talked about putting a lock on our bedroom door.”

“Maybe you should have,” Philip said, grinning. “You would have saved me some very traumatic experiences!”

“Well, Everett and I were in the habit of sleeping in the raw. And you boys surprised us a time or two.”

She was immediately aware of her mistake. She and Everett had been in bed when they told the boys that they were separating, not long after that awful time in Taos. They had decided to avoid the funereal quality of a serious conversation—boys on the couch, parents standing before them to issue the news. They wanted things to feel normal, like any other morning when Philip and Miller would burst into the room, filled with energy and ready for their parents to tell them what adventures the day held. Had they actually thought that would be best? To lie in bed and tell their children they were no longer going to live as a family? What she wanted to say was that it had been lovely to see Teddy’s spectral presence in the night, that to have him lie beside her had been such late and unexpected luck. But she had queered the image.

By late morning, the adults were preparing to leave. Mellie and Philip’s wife, Nancy, looked here and there for lost toys and missing socks. Philip and Ben tossed a football in the yard. Miller stood by the cliff’s edge. The wind filled the back of his shirt and blew his trousers against his legs.

Vera put her camera around her neck and joined him. Together, they studied the ocean. The waves were topped with whitecaps. Patrick was swimming with Teddy and Maggie.