Linda, of course, had a fat album of photographs of everyone she’d ever met and every boring place she’d ever been. In several of the photos from their trip across the country, all you could see was one of Robin’s blurred arms or legs against some scenic background, as she’d tried to escape Linda’s camera, always aimed at her like a loaded gun. Linda had added captions, neatly printed on narrow strips of tape affixed to the plastic sleeves in her album: “A Memorable Day in Moline” or “Robin at the Grand Canyon,” although only Robin’s elbow in the foreground, looming larger than the Canyon, attested to her presence there.
Robin refused to look at the album when Linda periodically dragged it out, and she’d managed to lose the few snapshots of herself as a baby that Linda had dug up in the back of a closet before they left Newark. They were badly faded and stained black-and-whites that had been taken with an old-fashioned Polaroid camera. Linda made a big fuss when she found them, like she’d just discovered buried treasure, but Robin was only a bald-headed, bald-faced little blob in a stroller, or behind the prison bars of a crib. And a couple of photos with her mother and father were no better. Everyone’s features had practically disappeared, except for her mother’s dark lipstick and darker hair.
Lucy showed Robin how to fill out the envelopes for incoming film and tear off part of the flap as a receipt for the customer. Within minutes, she was asking the appropriate questions with professional cool: “May I help you? How many sets of prints do you want? Matte or glossy? Three-by-fives or four-by-sixes?”
There was a darkroom and a photo studio in the rear of the store, behind a black curtain. Mrs. Thompson did the custom developing and printing back there and Mr. Thompson took the pictures. Polaroid passport and ID photos were specialties at Images, but they also did a lot of formal portraits. There were poster-size blowups of drooling babies and smiling brides all over the walls of the shop. One photo in particular caught and held Robin’s attention. It was a group portrait—there must have been at least fifty people sitting and standing in the sun on a lawn in front of a large white frame house. Three old ladies sat front and center on folding chairs, with babies on their laps and dogs at their feet, and a crowd of men, women, and children all around them. “It’s a family reunion,” Carmel explained, coming up behind Robin.
Robin had no living relatives beside Phoebe and her mother, who had elected not to be counted. She didn’t even know fifty people, and couldn’t imagine a family that large. “Looks more like an accident,” she said under her breath. But with Carmel, and then Lucy, beside her, she continued to examine the picture, as if it was one of those puzzles where you were supposed to find hidden objects in the trees and clouds. She saw a barbecue near the porch of the house, with threads of smoke rising from it, and some abandoned toys in the grass: a wagon, an overturned tricycle, a doll. The shrubs that bordered the house had bloomed, and some of the blossoms lay in the grass, too, like crumpled Kleenex. Summertime, Robin figured, somewhere else. Then she noticed a couple of familiar faces, first someone who resembled Garvey—with a flattop like his and that same crazy expression in his eyes—and then the girl standing next to him, who looked a lot like Lucy. Why, it was Lucy! Her hair was a little different, but she was wearing her Naughty by Nature T-shirt, and that was Carmel standing next to her, half hidden by a boy making devil’s horns on the head of the boy in front of him. Two of the other kids—a boy and a girl—seemed to be in the midst of combat the moment the picture was taken; their arms were a flailing blur and the girl was grimacing against a blow. Next to the girl was that woman Robin had seen in the Thompsons’ kitchen, Lucy and Carmel’s Aunt Ez, wearing the elaborate garb of an African queen instead of her apron. Lucy’s grandmother, Robin realized, was one of the old ladies up front. A coolie hat shaded her face, and a corsage of roses drooped on her breast. Robin searched the rows of faces until she found Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, too. Some of the people were smiling, while others squinted in the sunlight or looked dreamily toward the horizon beyond the camera.
“It’s you,” Robin said accusingly.
“Yeah,” Lucy admitted. “And that’s my cousin Mallie I told you about right behind me, and Aunt Berta behind her. And there’s the twins …”
“Daddy took it,” Carmel said.
“But he’s right there,” Robin said, pointing to Mr. Thompson, who was standing to the left side of the assembly with his arm around his wife.
“He had to set the timer and then run for it,” Lucy explained, and Robin thought now that his smile looked a little breathless, and that she could almost see the empty space he’d filled seconds before the shutter clicked.
“It’s in Roanoke,” Carmel said, “where our other grandmother lives. We have to go there every July, on her birthday.”
Two grandmothers, and a whole army of aunts, uncles, and cousins. The camera probably had to be set up about a mile away to get them all in the same frame like that. The scene was sharply real. It was practically possible to hear people’s voices, and to smell the barbecue’s smoke and the scent of the grass and the flowering shrubs. Robin had the feeling that if she looked much longer, the picture would come suddenly and scarily to life, and that she would find herself trapped inside it, an intruder in that family spectacle. She turned abruptly away, pretending to be absorbed by another picture, of two children, probably a brother and sister, in their white confirmation outfits, like a midget bride and groom.
“Take a picture of me and Robin,” Lucy implored her father as he went by, and ignoring Robin’s protests, she maneuvered her into the studio, where Mr. Thompson stood the two girls against a hanging bedsheet painted with a backdrop of mountains. Robin hated having her picture taken. At the sight of a camera, her neck always collapsed under the sudden weight of her head. And what were you supposed to do with your hands, your mouth, your whole twitchy, unphotogenic self? When it was her turn to pose for an individual school picture in the fifth or sixth grade back in Newark, some nerdy boy had warned her not to break the camera with her sour puss. She’d gotten even by digging her fingers into his arm until he shrieked, but the fury was still in her face when the shutter snapped. A couple of weeks later, the teacher sent the photographer’s proofs home with them to show to their parents, so they could order copies. Most of the kids had idiot smiles on their faces, smiles made to be flashed in wallets, displayed on mantels, and mailed to distant, doting relatives, but Robin was frowning darkly, and her white-lashed eyes gave nothing away. She looked like an angry zombie, like something just coming awake in a pod. To make matters worse, the word “proof” was stamped right across her face. Proof that she was ugly, stupid, mean. She hid the picture under a pile of junk in her dresser drawer and never bothered mentioning it to her father. Every once in a while, she’d go through the stuff in that drawer, looking for something else, and find her own marked face staring up at her. That picture, too, was misplaced or thrown out in the mess of moving.
Unlike the school photographer, Mr. Thompson didn’t instruct his subjects to “Say cheese!” and he didn’t ask them to freeze like dummies into stiff-necked, unnatural poses, either. He just kept up some low-keyed patter, almost to himself—“Got to set you up here, got to get this just right … Oo-kay, ladies, just a minute now”—while he played with the lights and a big white umbrella Robin couldn’t figure out the use for. “What are you doing, girl?” he said to Lucy, who was fussing with her hair and trying out a series of peculiar smiles. “This is you and your best friend, right? Now you think about that, never mind your hair,” he said. “Just think about going somewhere nice together, and having a good time.”
Robin, at a loss for the proper fantasy, nibbled at a hangnail, her sole attempt at grooming. She could only picture herself and Lucy at school, hardly “somewhere nice,” or at the mall, where they hung out for want of a better place to go. Then she glanced behind her at the fake purplish mountains that quivered a little under the air-conditioning vent, and tried to imagine walking toward them with Lucy,
maybe for a picnic or a campout or something. That didn’t work at all, so she quickly switched gears and projected them at the beach, and then at Disneyland. But nothing seemed to work, and in desperation she turned to look at Lucy, who was looking intently back at her, which made her laugh in surprise, and she heard the camera click and click.
Later they returned to the front of the store, where they waited on a few more customers. But after a while the fun of it began to wear off—it was only work, after all—and Robin’s feet hurt and her empty stomach had started growling. She yawned loudly to cover the noise, but of course Garvey heard it. “Who did that?” he asked, staring straight at her. There were a couple of kids like him in school, kids who always had to name the burpers or farters, to single them out for group recognition and torment. There was this great comeback you could use if you were the one who farted. You could say, “Whoever smelt it dealt it,” diverting the laughter and unwanted attention from yourself to the fink. But there wasn’t a similar snappy answer for this situation, so she only said, “Don’t look at me,” which made everybody do just that. She would clobber that kid when she got him alone.
“No big deal, your stomach’s only saying you’re hungry,” Mr. Thompson said, opening the cash register and pulling out a few bills. “You girls go get some lunch now. Go to Henry’s and bring something back for the rest of us.”
“Something low-calorie for me,” Mrs. Thompson said. “But not too low.” She was always trying to diet, according to Lucy, although she wasn’t that fat.
“Hey, what about me?” Garvey demanded. “Why can’t I go?” But Mr. Thompson silenced him with a glance and the girls were soon outside, and free. They walked three abreast, with Robin in the middle and their arms linked, like a line of chorus girls. They zigzagged down the street and around the corner, singing an En Vogue medley and bumping hips and cracking up with laughter. Two older boys sitting on the hood of a parked car made catcalls and kissing sounds at them as they went by. One of them yelled out, “Hey, look, it’s a Oreo cookie! Hey mama, wanna gimme a taste?” Robin paused long enough to say, “Asshole,” but her friends gripped her arms and pulled her swiftly along.
Henry’s was a coffee shop, where they ate burgers and fries and drank bright blue Slurpees. Some of the people eating at other tables and at the counter gave Robin funny looks, but nobody said anything to her.
On the way back to Images of You, they looked in a shoe-store window, admiring stiletto heels you could use as double-duty weapons—to drop-kick and stab somebody at the same time—and then they lingered at the window of a jewelry shop. Lucy and Robin ogled dangling earrings and Carmel chose matching wedding rings for herself and her future husband. They’d brought cheeseburgers and fries for Mr. Thompson and Garvey, and a tuna salad for Mrs. Thompson, who seemed disappointed when she opened it, and defiantly ate several of Mr. Thompsons fries. Garvey complained that everything was cold.
A little later he made a weak attempt to scare Robin in the darkroom, after Carmel had taken her there to show her around. He was hiding behind a file cabinet and he jumped out and yelled “Yo!” at her. But Carmel had warned her he’d probably do that, and she’d heard him breathing in the red darkness, so she yelled “Boo!” almost at the same moment, and then they both screamed a little in the aftershock.
Lucy explained that all of the color film was sent out to a lab for processing, but that her mother did the black-and-white custom work herself. When business finally slowed down, Mrs. Thompson came to the back to demonstrate. The room was small and the girls crowded around her in front of a row of trays. A blank page of paper floated in the first one in a pungent chemical brine. “Pee-yew,” Carmel said, holding her nose, but Robin liked the caustic smell, just as she liked the smells of gasoline and bus exhaust that most other people hated. Although she had seen something like this in a movie once—when the submerged photograph slowly revealed the identity of a serial killer—it was still kind of exciting to watch the picture magically appear. No killer came into being this time; there was only a cloudy mass at first, which gradually revealed itself to be two figures standing in front of a mountain. The mountain looked like a regular mountain, like somebody really could have a picnic or a campout there. As Robin gazed into the tray, the details of her own faint features and Lucy’s defined themselves: the very shape of their nostrils and lips, the complicated patterns of their hair, Lucy’s delicately etched eyebrows, and every loose thread in the ripped knee of Robin’s jeans. If she didn’t know better, she would think it was some kind of miracle. At the instant of absolute focus, Mrs. Thompson caught the picture with a pair of tongs, pulled it from the tray and plunged it into the next one, to stop the developing. The picture was dunked twice more, in the other trays, then rinsed at the sink in the corner and hung, dripping, by a tiny clip, from a nylon clothesline overhead. A little while later, when the print was dry, Mrs. Thompson put it into a folded cardboard frame and gave it to Robin to take home as a souvenir.
There were other pictures of Lucy and Robin from that shoot, which Lucy brought to school to show Robin the following week. But that first picture proved to be the best one, somehow perfectly true, yet flattering at the same time. The two girls were looking at one another and smiling, as if they’d just been reunited by joyous accident at the foot of the mountain, after a long separation. They could have been mountain climbers who had lost one another in a blizzard. Or they might have been sisters, mysteriously separated in childhood. Or merely friends, having a good time together somewhere nice, of which Robin now had undeniable proof.
12
Dreamscape
LINDA WAS HAVING THAT horrible dream again, the one in which she goes to bed, leaving the oven on, and then wakes to find the whole place in flames. Of course she wasn’t ever really awake when she thought she was, and nothing was ever actually burning. Any one of several different things could trigger the dream: a slight fever, a distant siren, her alarm clock ringing, or even the aroma of a neighbor’s late barbecue.
This time it was particularly vivid—sirens again, frantically screaming, and a persistent smell of smoke. “Oh, no!” Linda cried, as she sprang up in bed, coughing, certain of real disaster, and that somehow she had caused it. Within minutes, she was in front of her television set, shivering in spasms while she watched the world go out of control. She’d already seen the coming attractions of this catastrophe in other news bulletins—the beating last year of that black man by those four white policemen, and then their acquittal today in Simi Valley. During the videotape of the beating, she’d leapt up from the sofa and said, “Wait! Don’t!” with her hand raised like a traffic cop’s, as if she could halt what was happening on the screen, or even reverse it. Afterward, she hated the way she felt, heartsick and powerless, yet responsible at the same time.
Still, Linda was as unprepared as the newscasters seemed to be as they struggled to put words to the terrible new pictures they were showing, pictures of blazing fires, of looting, of absolute chaos. She ran from the room several times to check on Robin and Phoebe, who, to her amazement, slept through everything, slept through history, as she would later think, as all children should be able to do. But right then, while it was happening, she only registered a general sense of horror and a fear that mortal danger was approaching fast, like an enemy on horseback. She had to keep seeing for herself that the girls were still all right. Among the scattered, stammered sentences coming from the TV, she heard “awful, awful,” “South-Central,” “torching,” “raging fire,” and “state of emergency.” Nathan lived in Compton, practically on the edge of South-Central L.A. Linda had driven through its streets many times on the way to or from his place, as he must have done just as often coming to see her, and they’d gone shopping there together once or twice. They were supposed to have met that very evening for dinner at a Korean restaurant only a mile or so from where all the turmoil was now taking place. But Nathan had called during the afternoon to cancel the date.
It was L
inda’s day off from the Bod, and she was just sinking into a scented bubble bath when Robin banged on the bathroom door to say that Nathan was on the phone. He told Linda he was getting the flu or something, that he was leaving work early and getting right into bed. She was disappointed about the broken date and concerned about him, and she offered to run over that evening, after the baby was asleep, to bring him some soup. “No, no,” he said. “My appetite’s really shot, I won’t want anything.”
She asked if he had any fever, and he mumbled, Maybe, yeah, he probably did. Chills? she wanted to know. Sore throat? Aches and pains? Her questions seemed to exasperate him; he barely answered them. Men and sickness, she thought with fond impatience. Even brave, sweet Wright used to become a martyred monster when he caught a common cold, groaning and honking in bed until she had to drag her pillow into the living room to get some sleep. “Poor baby,” she said soothingly to Nathan. “You take it easy, and I’ll call you later to see how you’re feeling.” But he told her not to, that he was going to just try and sleep it off.
Maybe it was only the power of suggestion, or the fact that she was still damp from her interrupted bath, but after she hung up Linda started to feel chilled and achy herself. Robin was sealed inside her room, as usual, deafening herself with a blast of heavy metal, and when Phoebe passed out right after her next feeding, Linda lay down on the bed to take a little nap. When she woke to all that chaos, it was after nine. There was evidence in the kitchen that Robin had made herself supper from an assortment of cans, and she had given Phoebe one of the relief bottles of baby formula. Unlike Robin and Phoebe, Nathan was a light sleeper. When they dozed off together at his apartment after making love, and she got up carefully later to go home without disturbing him, he always felt her slightest movement and came awake. “Don’t go yet,” he would say in that drowsy, seductive voice, or he’d simply start to kiss and caress her, as if she were starring in an erotic dream he was having, and she would lie down beside him again for a little, blissful while.
Tunnel of Love Page 11
