Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [21]
Then they let him go home, but only by ambulance. We fixed a bed in his studio and laid him flat upon it. His face lost a little of its chalkiness. He started acting more natural, fussing at the itchy tape they had bound his broken ribs with. It worried him that customers were being turned away. “Charlotte,” he said, “you know how to handle that camera. I want you to do it for a week or so, just till I’m back on my feet. Can you manage?”
I said yes. I was numb by then. Now that he was safe it had hit me finally where I was: home, trapped, no escape. My mother couldn’t even sit him up without me there to help. I saw my life rolling out in front of me like an endless, mildewed rug.
It seemed to me that photos froze a person, pinned him to cardboard like a butterfly. Why would anyone want them? But people did, apparently. Poor-white mothers in rayon shifts, holding overdressed babies. Soldiers with their arms around their skinny, frizzy-haired girlfriends. I took their pictures indifferently. The camera was old and clumsy; almost anything you did to it had to take place in the dark. But I’d been using it most of my life, and couldn’t see why my father became so anxious and critical all of a sudden. “Move that lamp off somewhat,” he would tell me from his bed. “You don’t want such a glare. Now get yourself more of an angle. I never did like a head-on photograph.”
What he liked was a sideways look—eyes lowered, face slanted downward. The bay window displaying my father’s portraits resembled a field full of flowers, all being blown by the same strong breeze.
In the darkroom (a walk-in closet, remodeled) I had attacks of shortness of breath. I would grit my teeth and endure, meanwhile developing prints with the sensible half of my mind. Everything about that place was depressed: cluttered or leaking or peeling. All the labels had come off the bottles of chemicals. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. It seemed my father didn’t care any more than I did.
But you would never guess that from the way he acted. Fuss, fuss. Questioning every little thing I did. When it came time to show him any prints he would have me hang them on the clothesline near his bed. Then there’d be this long, disapproving silence while he lay frowning and pinching his mustache. “Oh, well,” he’d finally say, “most of these people have got no judgment anyway.” Yet I didn’t think I’d done so badly. In fact I think a lot of the customers preferred me to my father. My father had such set ideas, for one thing. He still photographed children against that Ionic column of his. Me, I would take a picture any way people asked. I had no feelings about it.
We lived in a smaller and smaller area of the house, now—shutting off floors my father couldn’t climb to, rooms we couldn’t afford to heat. Our neighborhood had narrowed too. The pickup was on cinderblocks out back, and anyway neither Mama nor I could drive, so we did all our shopping on foot. And nobody came to visit us. The Emorys next door had moved away by then; the other neighbors thought we were peculiar. All my friends were in college or married, divided from me forever after. It got so I would welcome the most random customers like long-lost relatives. But I saw how oddly they looked at us. I knew the picture we made: fat mother in elastic stockings, shriveled father, sullen spinster daughter. House where everything was mislaid under something else, and bats were surely hanging in the turret.
Markson College