My parents were technically still married, but my mother lived with the tribal peoples of the southwest African coast and was only home for a month here and a month there. When she was stateside, she made me uneasy. We did not have conversations—talking with my mother was more like taking a series of oral quizzes on subjects ranging from feminism to socialism to my feelings about my own sexual identity. She would sometimes ask me to sit on the couch with her so she could read me an article about genital mutilation from National Geographic. She would announce that the practice of women shaving their armpits was a form of patriarchal control and then look at me with a certain hostile fascination, as if she expected me to disapprove of the wiry gray thatch beneath her arms. Once I asked my father why they didn’t live together, and he said because she was brilliant.
She was, too, I think. I’ve read her books, and they aren’t what you’d call page-turners. But I admire the way she could fold together a series of small observations and then suddenly spread them out before you—open them like a fan—to reveal a single great insight. Her curiosities gripped her entirely, held her transfixed. I don’t think there was room in her head to wonder about her husband and son.
I stretched out on the couch, underneath the picture window, in the dimness of the living room. I was running my thumb along the edge of the photo in my shirt pocket for maybe half a minute before I realized what I was doing. A part of me didn’t want to look at it now or ever, which was a peculiar way to feel. It was, after all, just a photo of me sitting next to the soda machine, reading a magazine. There was nothing wrong with it, as long as you didn’t know that it had been taken today but showed something that had happened days, or maybe weeks, ago.
A part of me didn’t want to look at it—and a part of me couldn’t help myself.
I picked it out of my pocket and tilted it to examine it in the afternoon’s weird stormlight. If ghosts have a color, then they are the color of an August thunderstorm getting ready to break. The sky was the exact filthy gray of a Polaroid just beginning to develop.
In the photograph I hunched over that crumpled copy of Popular Mechanics, looking fat and unlovely. The fluorescent lighting above gave me the bluish tinge of the undead in a George Romero picture.
Don’t let him take a picture of you, Shelly Beukes had told me. Don’t let him start taking things away.
But he hadn’t taken a picture of me. I was in the picture, but he hadn’t pointed his camera at me and pressed the button. In fact, he hadn’t taken a picture at all. I had—and I’d been pointing the Solarid at Mat.
I dropped the photo with a kind of revulsion, as if I had suddenly realized I was holding a squirming maggot.
For a while I sprawled in the shadowy cool, trying not to think, because everything in my head was rotten and strange. Ever try not to think? It’s like trying not to breathe—no one can do it for long.
Maturity is not something that happens all at once. It is not a border between two countries where once you cross the invisible line, you are on the new soil of adulthood, speaking the foreign tongue of grown-ups. It is more like a distant broadcast, and you are driving toward it, and sometimes you can barely make it out through the hiss of static while other times the reception momentarily clears and you can pick up the signal with perfect clarity.
I think I was listening for Radio Adulthood then, remaining perfectly still in the hopes that I could catch a transmission carrying useful news and emergency instructions. I can’t say anything came to me—but in that moment of enforced stillness my gaze happened to settle on the small collection of family photo albums that my dad had arranged on the top shelf of the bookcase in the corner. My dad liked to keep things in order. He wore a tool belt to work, and everything was always in just the right place—the pliers in a holster, the wire stripper snug in a loop that was meant for it.
I picked an album at random, dumped myself back onto the couch, and began to turn through the pages. The oldest photos were glossy rectangular squares and—hold on to your hats, kids, I’m not making this up—were in black and white. The earliest showed my parents together in the days before they married. They were both too old and too square to be hippies, and I’m not sure I can honestly describe them as an appealing couple. My father’s only concessions to the time period were bushy sideburns and tinted sunglasses. My mother, the great African anthropologist, wore khaki shorts pulled up above her belly button and heavy hiking boots, even to family reunions. She smiled like it pained her. There wasn’t one shot of them hugging or kissing or even looking at each other.
There were at least a few shots of them taking turns holding me. Here was my mother on the floor, dangling enormous rubber keys above a chubby infant on his back, who grasped at them with fat fingers. Here was a picture of my father up to his waist in someone’s aboveground swimming pool, clutching his naked toddler in his arms. I was already a butterball.
My most frequent companion, though, was not my father or my mother but . . . Shelly Beukes. It was kind of a shock, really. When she retired five years earlier, I’d felt nothing in particular, was as indifferent as I would’ve been if my father had told me we were replacing an end table. Are you shocked to hear that a privileged seven-year-old from the Valley took the help for granted? My dad didn’t talk to me then about her open-heart surgery. He just said that she was a little older and older people needed more rest. She was in the neighborhood, and I could go see her anytime.
And did I? Oh, I dropped in on rare occasions, for tea and date cookies, and we sat in front of Murder, She Wrote, and she asked me how I was doing. I’m sure I was polite and ate my cookies quickly so I could go. When you’re a kid, spending an afternoon in an overheated living room with an old lady in front of daytime television is like winning a ticket to Guantánamo Bay. Love doesn’t figure into it. Whatever I owed her, or whatever I might’ve meant to her, never entered into my thoughts.
But here she was, in photo after photo.
We clutched the bars of a jail cell in Alcatraz, both of us putting on mock-horrified faces.
I sat on her shoulders to pluck a peach from the branches of a peach tree—my free hand crushing the brim of her straw hat down into her face.
I blew out candles while she stood behind me, hands raised, ready to clap. And yes . . . by this stage, the pictures were all Polaroids. Of course we had one. Everyone had one. Just like everyone had a VCR, a microwave, and a WHERE’S THE BEEF? T-shirt.
The woman in these photos was old but had bright, almost girlish eyes and a mischievous smile to match. In one Polaroid her hair was the red of a neon beer sign in a bar. In another it was a comical shade of carrot, and her nails were painted to match. In the snapshots she was always grabbing me, tousling my hair, sitting with me in her lap while I ate one of her date-filled cookies—a chubby little kid in Spider-Man Underoos with grape-juice stains on his chin.
About two-thirds of the way through the book, I came across a photo of a long-forgotten backyard barbecue. Shelly’s hair was Arctic Blu–colored this time. She had Larry with her, the Afrikaner wearing too-tight sand-colored trousers and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled back to display his Popeye forearms. Each of them had one of my hands—I was a blur swinging between them in the dusk. Shelly was frozen in the act of whooping. Bemused grown-ups stood around watching, holding plastic cups of white wine.