American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [53]
Now she had come to take other pictures away. She felt no qualms about taking them; she felt they were rightly hers. She thought of the pictures as a kind of shadow self, her ghostly twin. They represented an alternate life, what she might have been, not a photographer but a photograph. A subject, an object, an object of affection if there had not been the photographs. The photographs reflected her missing self, the negative that she felt herself to be. She saw them everywhere, scattered carelessly around the room. The old ones had been black and white but these were Kodachrome and infused with the melancholy yellows and reds of the era, the muted bleached-out colors of a city afternoon. A child on the subway looking up at an advertisement, her mother staring down at her, their bodies twisted both toward and away from each other. A group of children in the park, one persuading the others of something, a face gripped with determination and laced with contempt. A little boy lying down on the sidewalk looking skyward with a carefree arrogance. All children in every one of them, but none innocent, each individual. The artist had seen every one of her subjects as a person and had not shied away from the humor and terror just below the surface of their faces and lives. Iris glanced at them quickly, her ink and chemical siblings, and threw them into a shopping bag. She gathered contact sheets and rolls of film. She left the wedding photograph where it was. She left.
Out on the street with her vigilante shopping bag she felt watched, as if people would know what she was carrying, what she had done. Then, overeducated girl that she was, she thought how ironic that was, that she would feel herself watched, looked at, as if she herself were a picture. She had turned herself into a photograph! Perhaps that way she could get some attention! She smiled to herself and looked quickly to the side before crossing the street. It was warmer out than she had expected and her feet were swelling slightly in her shoes. She was getting blisters. But still she continued walking, afraid to stop, to lose momentum. It was a long walk home. She calculated: from Twelfth Street uptown, over seventy blocks, more than three miles. There was a manic energy to her movements, her legs scissoring exceptionally quickly, her head switching side to side to check for traffic at every crosswalk, strands of her hair flying as she propelled herself home. Home, where the baby would be, where Alex would not be, yet. Iris tried to construct a warm and welcoming feeling from the notion of home, but she had never actually experienced that. Even as a child, although home had been friendly and her parents doting in their way, home had never felt like a place where one could actually be understood. Her sense of not belonging, she later grew up to believe, was what everyone felt, and so she did not dwell on it, but of course it hurt, it confused her, and then when there was an answer, or something to pin it all on, she clung to it. The bag was getting heavier.
She stopped. She put the bag down. It was a large lavender thick paper bag from Bergdorf Goodman with an image of black silhouetted shoppers parading at an angle up the side. Iris had saved it from the purchase of a new dress. A crocheted dress, very of-the-moment, something Alex would like and yet not fully appreciate. Certainly he would not appreciate the price. She rubbed her hand. The twisted paper handles of the bag had dug into her palm, creating new lines, a new future, she thought for a moment. Then, and this was the way her mind worked, she seemed to enter that new future and for an instant the past disappeared. She was standing on a street corner with an overstuffed Bergdorf’s bag at her feet, a breeze blowing over from Madison Square Park tangling