It's a Whole Spiel

by It's a Whole Spiel- Love, Latkes

  For a moment, a shadow gets in the way of the glass, and I think someone’s stepped in front of me, purposefully blocking my way.

  But when I wipe the lens, the shadow’s gone. It was only a smudge.

  The plan is simple: there are no pawnshops in this town my mother chose for us—there are touristy boutiques with fancy windows, and there are cozy shops with lots of decorative glassware, but there’s nowhere to sell something used, and possibly cursed with disappointment. I’d done my research while I was letting the designs on my nails air-dry. Obviously I could just sell it online, but that could take too long. What if I got no bites? I found out there’s a booth at the flea every Saturday, and time is ticking. School starts Tuesday. And maybe I needed the excuse to get out of the house. Maybe I know what’s best for this sad, old camera as it knows for fresh, new me.

  I spot the tables in the distance and start moving toward them. There’s a big banner that says DEVINE BROTHERS USED PHOTOGRAPHIC (NO DIGITAL—THIS IS NOT AN APPLE STORE) EQUIPMENT.

  “Hello, sirs,” I say into my high collar, rehearsing my intro as I walk. “I’m new in town, and I’ve got something for you. What’s your best offer?” I try the “hello, sirs” in different octaves, but each time it comes out tinny and artificial. My mother said I’m trying too hard. This whole thing sounded better in my head, the way my clothing concepts do before I open the jaws of the scissors. I’m almost there, and I’m tempted to turn back and hide behind the tree again, when I spot her on her island near the Devine Brothers’ U-shaped bank of tables. I swear there was nothing there before. But now she is. Suddenly some random girl, completely out of place at the flea market. I have no worldly idea what she’s doing here. She’s not browsing. She’s not haggling. She’s out in the open under a yellow umbrella, not caring who sees her.

  I check with my hand to be sure, but it’s not raining.

  Maybe she’s one of the vendors, but she doesn’t even have a table. She’s on the ground on what looks to be a blue bedsheet. There are some white pieces of paper fluttering in the wind, sometimes coasting away, that she keeps trying to hold down without at the same time losing the umbrella. Is she selling something? Offering to tell fortunes? Is this some kind of performance?

  No one at the flea market acknowledges she’s even there, like she blends into the background.

  But I see her. How could anyone mistake her for a piece of scenery or a pocket of air?

  Back home I’d secured myself a group of a few friends. We dressed mostly alike, an unspoken uniform I kept to religiously. I’d go along with whatever they said, doing what they wanted to do, being where they wanted to be, but there were always moments when my real feelings and tastes leaked out. They’d turn to me all shocked when I admitted I didn’t like the song they were playing on repeat, or wasn’t following the sports team, or spent an entire weekend under the spell of a book. These weren’t freakish things—I knew that, didn’t I?—but sometimes they acted like I wanted to tattoo my face and join a coven.

  I use the camera like a periscope. I turn the focus. Sharper, sharper, as sharp as I can get with this old thing. The girl is maybe my age, as far as I can tell. I hold the camera steady from where it hangs around my neck and over my heart. She’s looking back. She’s looking at where I am. She nods once, then returns to arranging her wares on her blanket. Now she’s using rocks to hold everything down while the umbrella dangles in the gravel. There’s still part of a field between us, and two portable toilets and a couple of trees, but she’s found me. And she wants me to know it.

  I go to the Devine Brothers’ tables, ignoring her completely. The camera is straining my neck and knocking with the heft of a dumbbell against my rib cage. I saw on eBay that vintage cameras like this can go for three hundred dollars, but something tells me it’s worth so much more. Thinking in a dollar amount feels wrong. Pop Pop died with this thing on his shelf, collecting dust. He never sold it.

  The tables are spread with every kind of camera body, lens, filter, wire, and other nameless items to the point of pure chaos. Nothing is new, and nothing has a price on it. I’m their only customer, and you’d think they’d be more welcoming, but instead, one of the Devine Brothers flinches at the sight of me. I forgot for a moment that I’m wearing this outfit.

  “It’s one of them,” he says out of the side of his mouth. “Looks like she’s got lots of pockets.”

  “Go play with the rest of your weird friends,” the other brother says, waving off into the distance. “If we see you even think of shoplifting, we’ll call security.” He has a beard, which makes me decide he cannot be trusted.

  “I think she’s going to stun us or decapitate us with that hat.” The other, beardless brother has an odd-shaped grin.

  It takes a moment to comprehend that they were serious at first, and a whole bunch of signs decry shoplifting and promise prosecution, which I guess is meant for the teenagers of this town, but now they’re making fun of me. Don’t they see the camera in my hands? Then I realize my veil had it concealed, trying to swallow it up. I part the netting to allow the camera’s double-snouted nose to come out. I hold it up.

  “Aha,” says one of the brothers.

  Now they’re interested. Now they want me to stay.

  I clench the camera in my two hands, and it warms to the exact temperature of my body, as if it’s gotten used to me already. There’s something about it that feels exceptionally right, a familiarity in my fingers that makes me forget for a moment why I’ve come here. I’m remembering a photograph of Pop Pop—my mother had it in a frame. He had dark eyes and dark hair, like mine, but that’s not the thing I’m remembering. I’m remembering that he had a certain set to his face, an expressive scowl, which was something people always pointed out on me.

  Why don’t you smile more, Simone?

  You look like hell froze over, Simone.

  She can’t help it. She always looks like that.

  Why was I only now realizing that this man I’d never met—but whose name I carried—and I shared the same scowl, as if a photograph of him was pressed flat over my face? And that no matter how hard I tried, I always stood out, always looked different, never fit in, not ever, not there, and not here?

  I wish I could’ve met him.

  “Is there a reason you’re pointing that Rollei at us or what?” one of the brothers asks.

  I segue awkwardly. “I’m wondering how much you’d pay for this, if I wanted to sell it….”

  “Speak up.” That’s another thing people say about me: I always talk too soft. My mother used to say that Pop Pop didn’t talk much. He’d sit on his recliner with his three different remotes on the table beside him whenever she visited. He barely left the TV room.

  I repeat myself, a cloud of self-consciousness descending.

  “Do you want to sell it?”

  I mean to say I do, yes, that’s why I’m here, but instead I go, “I possibly maybe might.” The lines I practiced drop into the dust.

  “Give it here. Is the lens scratched? We’re not paying for a dud.” The beardless brother has his hands out, and so does the other brother. They both want to inspect it, and yet here I am, with the leather strap still wedged in place on my neck. The strap cuts a deep groove into the skin above my shoulders, and it would be easy to let the camera go, easy to let them take it. I’d feel lighter. My mother wants it gone. She said get rid of it. And yet.

  I shouldn’t be doing this—I shouldn’t. But who here will stop me?

  Here is a story I heard about my great-grandfather, who was once named Jonathan Cohen: He bought his first camera at the age of sixteen (the age I’m weeks from turning in this new town), and he bought it used, with money that he was supposed to save for books at school. When his father found out, he was told to return it immediately, and instead Jonathan left home and rode the bus. It was a double-decker, and he sat up top
. He rode the bus up Fifth Avenue and down, and to prove to his father the camera was worth something, and his future could be of his own making, he took pictures all the way, carefully composing each one, since there were only a precious twelve frames on the roll of film. It was only when they were developed, months later, that he saw they were blobs and streaks and blurs. This would have been the 1930s, the years leading up to the war. My family was safe in New York City then, arguing over cameras and art school. And still he came to think he needed to hide, that in order to get a job, he needed a new name, one that sounded more American, safer, less weird, and washed away who he really was. Is that even a story worth telling? Could it be the same camera? Why does it matter so much that I could have another name?

  The camera’s heavy bottom is growing warm. It brims with heated electricity inside like a motor revving. Probably it’s from being out in the sun, just like my whole body is close to overheating inside the dark getup, under the knee socks, under the hat, inside the lace gloves.

  From the corner of my eye, a flash of yellow. I get a sense that someone in particular is observing me and listening to every word. I feel sure, the way my great-grandfather may have felt so sure he was taking beautiful, memorable photographs of the moving city beneath his feet, and he came away with nothing.

  It’s here that someone comes up to browse the telephoto lenses and the brothers give up on me, distracted by a possible sale. I could lift the strap over my neck and plop the contraption down on the folding table and call them back over. But something’s pulling my attention.

  The girl. She’s waving her yellow umbrella at me.

  She’s surrounded by a circle of black-and-white photographs that she’s successfully kept from the wind with well-placed rocks, some still muddy from the nearby creek bed. I try not to look at the singular white line of her part, because it’s crooked, I suspect on purpose, and I also suspect she’s the kind of person who wants you to notice and wants you to comment on it and I would not.

  Still, I step closer.

  “You can sit,” she says. “I’m Goldie, by the way. You can visit for as long as you like.”

  “I’m Simone,” I mumble. There’s nowhere to sit, and I shuffle on my feet for a moment, fiddling with one drooping sock.

  “Just move Molly Picon. Or let Anna Sokolow and Gertrude Weil snuggle up, though I usually like to keep the Gertrudes together. No, no, don’t move Emma Goldman—she’s my favorite, and I always want her up front, in the middle.”

  I sit in her circle, taking the place of one of the black-and-white faces from her collection. The names are all handwritten on the photographs as well as a year and what each woman—they’re all women, I notice—offered up to the world.

  Dancer/choreographer. Actress/entertainer. Activist. Anarchist/writer. Athlete. Biochemist. I’ve never heard of any of them.

  Besides, who’s she? I give her the once-over my mother gave me, and I come back with a waterfall of colors—bright ones, worthy ones, rainbows from here to the clouds and nothing bland. She’s got rosy cheeks, long hair that doesn’t care it needs a comb, long limbs that take up space, and an air of confidence I wish I could bottle and take sips from on Tuesday. Instead, I focus on her photographs. I pretend she’s not as impressive as she is and that I want to compliment her on her choice of expression.

  “Are these for sale?” I ask.

  “Do you want one?” She lifts up Bobbie Rosenfeld and Gertrude Elion, one in each hand. “Five cents or free, depending on if you’ve got five cents. I don’t make change.”

  “You sell pictures of random people for five cents each?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve never sold one, not all summer. I come to the flea every Saturday, but I guess I’m just sitting here while my parents keep an eye on things over there.” She points, vaguely, in the direction of a gaggle of adults.

  “And they’re not random,” she adds. “These are Jewish heroines. I like to think of our history. What we were known for—the good things. The great things. What we’ve done.”

  “So these aren’t people you know?” I ask. I figured they were family members. Great-aunts. Second and third cousins. Great-great-grandmothers, maybe.

  She laughs. “Not all Jews know each other, you know.”

  I peer at Molly Picon.

  “The great comedienne of Yiddish theater,” Goldie tells me. “Molly was world-famous, I mean all over the globe. Did you know she made the very last movie in Yiddish in Poland before the Holocaust?”

  I didn’t know that. In her photo she wears a jaunty beret and has big dark eyes. My own eyes drift to Goldie’s expressed favorite, Emma Goldman, anarchist and writer, who wears glasses perched on the bridge of her nose and a thoughtful expression.

  “Emma! Oh, Emma used to speak to giant crowds—everyone, and I mean everyone, would come out to hear her—a true feminist who believed in equality for all people; that’s what anarchism is. Emma once said, ‘I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.’ Isn’t that beautiful, and important, too?”

  I nod. It made me think of what was important—truly important—to me. I was so focused on the outside, I wasn’t yet sure what my inside self wanted.

  “You’re new in town,” Goldie says, not in the form of a question. “I’d remember if I saw you before. How could anyone forget?”

  This is the best compliment I’ve had all morning. “Do you mind?” I lift the heavy, hot camera off my neck. I have to remove the hat to get the camera off, and there’s a bit of a wrestling match with the veil, but finally I’m able to set it all on the ground.

  Goldie makes no comment about my awkwardness. “Who’s that man you were with?” she says. “He was just here. Where’d he go?”

  “Who, them?” The Devine brothers are studiously ignoring me now. “I don’t know either of them.”

  Suddenly I lean forward over her photos (Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist; Birdie Amsterdam, state supreme court justice), and I offer something I haven’t offered before. “I’m Jewish too,” I say. Then I add, self-consciously, “Kinda.”

  I look down. The camera has gone quiet, as if there’s a recording device inside or an actual listening ear.

  “What do you mean, kinda?”

  “My mother is. I’m half.”

  “Then you just are,” she says with a shrug. “It’s not that complicated.” Here is another thing in my old school, my old life: I wasn’t much of anything there. Maybe that was part of what made me so uncertain, so malleable and able to disappear into the walls. Maybe I need to choose the things I want to be, and only then can I come into the light.

  “You can’t sell that, you know,” Goldie says, indicating the camera. “I don’t even need to know where it’s from, but obviously you need to keep it.”

  “Miss,” one of the brothers is calling. “Miss.”

  “They don’t mean me,” Goldie says.

  I look up, but the sun’s in my eyes, and it’s the way it felt when I couldn’t see who I was anymore when I looked in a mirror. When I was trying too hard to be someone I was not. When I went along with what everyone else said. I may have the same name, but I’m turning different now, outside and in. These guys who might want to actually buy my great-grandfather’s camera don’t know a thing about it, and it’s not for me to explain.

  “I changed my mind,” I tell them.

  “Let’s take a look,” one of the brothers says.

  “I said”—and that comes out in my new loud voice—“I changed my mind.”

  Goldie clucks her tongue, I think in appreciation. The brothers shrug—they didn’t care anyway. I’m the one who cares. I should have cared from the beginning.

  “There’s film in here,” Goldie says. She shakes it, but it doesn’t rattle. Still, she puts her ear to it and closes her eyes. Then she nods. “There’s room on the roll.”


  “You can’t tell just by listening,” I say.

  She guffaws. Her teeth are crooked, I notice for the first time, and she doesn’t even bother to hide them. “Of course not. Film doesn’t tick. If I open the back, the sun’ll destroy the last pictures your pop ever took.”

  “Pop Pop,” I correct her. “That’s what my mom called him. I never met him.”

  She’s putting her eye to the hole in the hood when it occurs to me. She’s seeing through it, finger poised on the shutter button, as I think it.

  Did I even tell her about Pop Pop? Did the words “pop” or “pop pop” ever cross my lips?

  She winds the crank and then says, “It’s ready. Look just like you’re looking. You’re perfect.”

  “Wait!” I say. I lift the hat with the hanging veil and position it back on my head. It may be hot out, stifling even, and I may look like something out of a monster movie, but there’s also this cool, tingly sensation as I don it and embrace being fully myself. Or at least the self I am here and now, this moment, in time for Tuesday.

  I smile, wide. The hole in the veil shows I’m smiling with all I’ve got.

  When she clicks the shutter button, I see the spiral of the eye close. It takes a few seconds. But also it takes a year. It takes a hundred years. It takes me back to where I came from, and it tells me who I might have been or at least who I was. I don’t want to blend in. I want to be bright.

  The shutter snaps, and Goldie replaces the caps on the lenses and offers the camera back to me. “He was right there watching,” she says in a low voice, “but I guess he went off to the car or something. I think he wanted me to tell you that.” She’s squinting into the distance, using her hand to shield her face from the sun, instead of the umbrella.