American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [54]
A photograph, she thought suddenly, is like an ink and chemical memory in the mind of the subject being photographed. I am standing here, she thought, and a picture of me would be a picture of what I can imagine, as if the image itself were lifted from the mind of the woman being photographed. I should write an essay about that idea, she thought. And then she picked up the bag and kept walking.
1937
Joe and Pearl sat in the living room after dinner with the lamp on. Outside the winter night had long ago gone dark. He was studying and had his books piled up on the low coffee table, his feet up next to them, crossed and in socks. She was knitting and her fingers moved with furious intent, whipping around each other and sliding the needles through the yarn with a machinelike choreography and precision. He asked if she was making something for the baby. She said no that the yarn she was using was too rough. She was making him a scarf.
2005
Milo lay on his bed and touched the thin sheets, the lonesome blanket, the sandpaper wall. He would miss this pathetic bed. He looked up at the ceiling and today there was no swinging house. No saxophone case coming through the plaster. They had given him a date when he could leave and suddenly life seemed very simple and earthbound. He had hoped for this and dreamt about it. He had talked about it with Honor during their visits in the yard. He had worked hard in physical and occupational therapy to be able to reach this day. Now the day felt frightening in its ordinariness. The ceiling blank and cold and white. In moments of calm he felt as though he were impersonating a normal human being, someone who wouldn’t be frightened by an empty room or made despairing by the thought of losing that room. He was just feeling an ordinary sadness, he told himself. It did not have to go any further than that.
He turned on his side. His legs felt strong but tired. He had worked them hard this morning. He looked at the wall. He saw shades of lavender and pink in the light on the wall. No yellowing kitchen. No city lights. Just the color of this day in this room. Then his hand reached out to the wall and he saw his fingers touch the wall and he saw them stroking the wall and he saw them touching the wall as if he were pressing keys. Keys on a saxophone, keys on a typewriter. He looked at his hand and it was touching nothing, a blank wall, a blank page. He tried to take it away but he knew that he wouldn’t. The pull was too strong. Reaching out to the wall was like reaching back inside to something long gone and sorely missed, something that had abandoned him the way the stars abandon the city sky because there is too much reflected light, something there if he could only see it. If the city could shatter and the stars could return, that was what he was reaching for.
A black case moved through the wall and sat on the bed. It opened to reveal a typewriter.
1969
Iris put the shopping bag in the back of the closet. She moved the typewriter case in front of it. She let Geraldine go and went to check on the baby. Soon, Alex would be coming home for dinner from the hospital. She would have to start cooking.
She changed her dress and put on different tights. It was 1969 and she wore dark tights nearly every day. Her hair was brown and straight and parted in the middle. She wore it chin length and when she had it done it curled under her pretty chin. She had green eyes and black glasses which only accentuated her prettiness. She had changed into a navy blue dress which hit her at