“Good God, Winter,” Brown said, peering at the photo strip. “What are you, two years old? Can you not sit still?”
But I had quit looking at myself in the photos and was looking instead at the bartender. Unlike me, he was not fidgeting or trying to hide his hands. He was not looking straight into the mirror, nor did he look stern. In each photo he was looking down at me, and his face had a certain look on it. Not of laughter, or impatience, or forbearance in a let’s-get-this-over-with kind of way. None of those words applied. I looked from the photo to him, the real him, and that look was still on his face. Though Brown was standing next to us, the sound of his voice and the laughter in it receded. The feel of the buckskin vest brushing my arm as Sunshine put it on was barely there. The bartender looked at me and I looked at the bartender.
“Chris?”
That was the sound of my voice, almost inaudible even though it was me talking. Me saying his real name for the first time. He nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”
And it was. It was him. Him with that look on his face, nodding and now the beginnings of a smile, because was I looking at him the way he was looking at me? As if I loved him?
Not as if.
The world rose around us again: Sunshine and Brown standing next to Chris and me, both of them silent and watching, knowing that something had just happened. A group of teenagers bent over the trunk of dress-up clothes, waiting their turn for the photo booth. Johnny Cash sang about a ring of fire on the store PA system. My mother’s words floated into my head: Bullshit. Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.
The car heater blasted on the way home, drowning out conversation, not that any of us were talking. Much had already been said, and most of it silent. I held Chris’s hand in the backseat of Sunshine and Brown’s station wagon but I didn’t look at him because my mind was filled with fifty-fifty and everything it meant in that moment: I had found him, I didn’t want to let him go, and I didn’t want him to live through what I was living through, either. Flip sides, same coin.
We were halfway up Turnip Hill Road, me studying the photos again, when something else came to me. The look on Chris’s face was familiar. You have seen that look before, I thought. But where? I kept looking at the narrow strip of photos, chemical-smelling and still a little tacky to the touch. Me in motion, the bartender straight and still, that soft look on his face. Then I knew.
That thin wisp of worn photocopied paper propped up on the kitchen shelf in the cabin. My mother, younger and smiling. The look on her face was the same look on the bartender’s face in the photos in my palm, shimmering up from the frayed paper on the shelf next to Jack. She had saved that photo all these years, ever since she stopped wearing that pretty shirt. In it, she was looking beyond me, at whoever was taking her photo.
My mother had loved someone. And someone had loved her back.
Final Jeopardy
It was not possible.
That was my first thought. Because had she ever been on a date? Had she ever kissed anyone? Had she ever asked someone to a Sadie Hawkins dance, or been to a prom? Had she ever gone to a bar with someone and put quarters in a jukebox and played pool and ordered a second cocktail because she was having fun? Had she ever sat across from a man who had put on a clean shirt for the occasion, at a small table with a tablecloth and a candle and not one but two menus, one for wine and one for food? Questions shoved up against each other in my head.
No and no and no and no and no.
The interviewer, her legs crossed, her fingers hovering over her keyboard—“Miss Winter, to your knowledge, did your mother, Tamar Winter, ever go on a date?”—No, before the quotation mark was fully slotted next to the question mark. “Did your mother, Tamar Winter, ever go on a dateNo.” A broken sentence. Part question but mostly No.
Why so quick with the No, though, Miss Winter? Wouldn’t you want her to have gone on a date? Wouldn’t you want your mother to have had some happiness in her life that way, a few hours where she was not just your mother, but a young woman out with a young man who thought she was lovely?
Lovely? Lovely? Stop it.
It was not possible to think of her as anyone other than exactly who she was, who she had been: a woman of the north woods, a lumber-woman in a lumber jacket, a splitter of wood, a remover of decals, a non-Sunday singer in a choir, a manless woman, a boyfriendless woman, a husbandless woman, a dateless woman, who was, who had been, my mother. The word lovely did not apply, but for the fact that it did.
After I waved goodbye from the porch, I went straight to the shelf in the kitchen. My mother’s faded face smiled up from her perch next to Jack. My heart skipped a beat and then began rocketing around its prison of sinew and bone, looking for a way out. Et tu, heart? Heart, quiet thyself. But the wayward heart did not listen, and down I lay on the floor, photo flat against my shaking chest, the diminished stacks of books-as-coffee-table rising around me.
New images of my mother scrolled by, leaping and dancing across the spines of the remaining books of my childhood. Tamar with her hair French-braided, wearing that pretty white shirt, standing on the porch and smiling as a car drove into our driveway just beyond the frame of the picture. Tamar at the Boonville County Fair holding the hand of a faceless, bodiless, voiceless man just beyond the frame of the picture. Tamar at Hemstrought’s Bakery in Utica, pointing at a half-moon cookie and smiling at a man just beyond the frame of the picture.
Just beyond the frame of the picture. He, whoever he was, was there. Had he been there all along?
“You are way overreacting here, Clara,” I said out loud as the photo and I lay on the floor by the books. “Calm the hell down. It’s a photo.”
But there are times when you know a thing, immediately and of a piece, and you can’t un-know it. You can’t convince yourself that you are overreacting. I held the photo above my head and looked at it this way and that way, sideways and upside down. Nothing made the look in my mother’s eyes go away. Nothing from here on out would make the softness, that softness I had never seen, go away.
Who? When? How? Where?
* * *