Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  “ ‘The men are menacing’?” said Miri to David, laughing and baffled. “It was a lark,” she said. “It was fun.”

  This was before feminism took another odd turn, when sex became something that oppressed and liberated women, depending; when it seemed that women were being encouraged to pursue who they really were, unless that included being a housewife, which, somehow, was no longer a politically acceptable choice. Women sometimes turned against women, as time and perceived societal roles churned and lurched forward. Change is seldom one smooth, uninterrupted process, and most women remained in the house whether they wanted to be there or not. Miri was frustrated because she had been raised as if women were already equal, with no expectations that she would stay at home, yet there she was, willingly, and still knowing what it cost her.

  Another postcard from Daisy: Romania, Russia, caviar, and men. The sort of diffused lighting that you like. Can’t wait for London and Paris. Kisses.

  Miri ate the rest of Teddy’s leftover tuna salad sandwich, then placed the postcard of a man lying on the ground with a bear sitting on his back in her desk drawer.

  1965, New York City

  In the catalog copy for an exhibition of works by Miriam Marx called “A World from My Window/ Oculus” Miri wrote:

  If you want to know what it’s like to be a housewife, I can show you:

  Reddish yellow sunrises behind buildings with the park lights still dotting the darkness of the park, a lavender haze of sky, and buildings, a green foreground, billowing clouds skidding in the sky, rainy streets marked with yellow lines, a horse-drawn carriage, hot-air balloon, a purple sky, a thousand released balloons, cars, a parade, a red sky with black smokestacks, more snow, more ice, crowds of people in the sun, at a wedding, in protest, at a concert, winter, spring, summer, fall. Fireworks, political rallies, a presidential motorcade, the sun, the rain, the heat, the cold, the fog, the fog, the fog. Red, purple, blue, white, yellow, lilac, gray, black, pink. Geometry and movement. Buildings and cars. Helicopters and horses. Three people and a dog looking straight up at me.

  Cymbeline Kelley was one of many who made the trip uptown to the photography center to see the window pictures. As she moved slowly from picture to picture, she thought about how perfect they were, with this housewife showing the patience of a field photographer, waiting. She understood Miri Marx as a modern Rapunzel, high above, watching the outside world.

  There was no mistaking that Miri Marx’s serial portrait of her New York City neighborhood was as much a portrait of Miri as a wife and mother as Cymbeline’s garden pictures were of her life as a wife and mother. Cymbeline thought, We abstract the experience and the men only see what we do as sweet, sentimental, missing the meaning entirely as they view us as women who make photographs in our spare time. They don’t take our subject seriously because they cannot see it—even when Miri Marx writes, If you want to know what it’s like to be a housewife, I can show you. Nor do they consider the steel it takes to raise the kids, run the household, be a wife, and still keep alive the artist part of you. Picasso, thought Cymbeline, could show the many angles of a woman’s face simultaneously; try showing the many angles of a woman’s life simultaneously.

  Before she left the show, Cymbeline marveled that, in its way, so little had changed since her own garden–domesticity pictures, forty years earlier. (And men wonder why women are “impatient” and short-tempered.) Still, Cymbeline was in New York to shoot a glittering luncheon to be attended by a famous modern dancer, a famous movie star, a celebrated painter, and two well-known musicians (one classical, one jazz) for a popular magazine. We must take our victories where we find them, she thought, then went on her way.

  On an early summer day with a morning shining like a new dime, Miri dressed in the bedroom as she listened to David making breakfast for the kids. He was trying to tell them about dinosaurs and how the animals at the Natural History Museum weren’t alive, a concept that both kids understood, but with which Teddy, nine years old, struggled. Elizabeth, at seven, sometimes called the museum “the zoo,” because of the hall of taxidermic African animals, with the man who had originally collected and stuffed many of the specimens buried in the gorilla diorama. As young as she was, she didn’t have a problem seeing the “standing still animals at the zoo” along with the “bone lizard,” as Teddy had called the dinosaur skeletons when she was younger. Miri had never liked the stuffed animals; they were in a hall of dead things, and she could barely abide being there, something Teddy shared with her mother.

  The first time Teddy saw the stuffed animals, she was satisfied, with no need to ever see them again, much to Miri’s relief. No, her girl preferred the starry heavens of the planetarium. Like her mother, Teddy loved looking at the sky, always different and changing; she especially adored the stars. David had bought some glow paint and carefully and accurately reproduced a winter sky of constellations on the ceiling of Teddy’s room, complete with a Milky Way made by running his thumb across the bristles of an old toothbrush loaded with glow paint, and stars tumbling from the ceiling down her room’s walls.

  Being in Teddy’s room was almost like being under a rural night sky.

  Miri heard David telling the kids that he couldn’t take them to the museum today because he had to work.

  Imagine, thought Miri, having the luxury to work. To tell your own children that their needs come second to your work.

  He and his editor were putting the finishing touches on his new (third) film; she knew the process. She knew it was a little of this, a little of that, and mostly fighting off the fatigue and perfectionism that come with being done with something yet unable to concede the end of the project. They would talk, laugh, eat a leisurely lunch, and enjoy that perfect moment that comes between finishing your project and showing it to an audience. The pleasure in that time space was one she knew well, relief and anticipation colliding. When had she last felt that? When had raising kids and tending a home—even on its best day—ever replicated that fine exhaustion?

  Love—for her children, for her husband, for her photography—had that way of opening and closing her life; the possibilities evident, and elusive. Her window exhibition was wonderful, but it was more like an interlude than a life-changing event, or so she believed.

  When David came home, during the shooting of the second movie, he always shared his day with Miri. “Today we shot at St. John the Divine.” Then he would relate some funny story about the actors (they were playing a photographer and his assistant specializing in weddings), followed by some filming foul-up. There were shots at the photographer’s studio (shooting children); a street fair in Little Italy; a cemetery on Long Island. The Bronx Zoo, Playland, and Brooklyn. All accompanied by David’s anecdotes, funny and frustrating, and all of them sounding like heaven to the woman who once had a career taking pictures and made a film that someone said was like a series of moving art shots.

  Miri liked being a part of David’s work even if it was secondhand. “Could you help me with this dialogue?” he would ask, and she would say, “Just let me get the kids to bed first.” Or he would ask about a shot that had him undecided: “What would you do?” And she would say, “Let me look at it after I put the dishes away.” He didn’t notice her domestic life because he wasn’t raised to notice it. Miri, on the other hand, who was not raised for this life, knew that someone had to stay home and someone had to be the breadwinner. As a couple, they didn’t really fit into anyone’s idea of “arty,” so they used to joke, “We’re closet bohemians,” as a way of explaining the ordinary appearance of their lives. They laughed that the kids were just one more way of disguising their hidden bohemian selves, you know, on a good day.

  A postcard from Daisy: You’ll never guess where I am—Rome. The cats still follow. Made me miss you, American girl. Love and kisses and wish you were here.

  Miri placed the postcard of the Colosseum in her desk drawer before taking the kids to the Penguin House in the park.

  It began with
burning the roast. Smoke billowing out of the oven as Elizabeth called “Mommy!” with Teddy echoing in imitation of her sister’s tone of alarm, “Mommy!” causing her sister to turn to her and say, “You don’t even know what’s going on.”

  “Do, too!” cried Teddy, prompting a shove from Elizabeth, a matching shove from Teddy, then tears all around, Miri immediately feeling guilty that she’d gotten distracted by a cloud formation outside her window. She set the camera on the table, not knowing whether to attend to the kids or the fire first.

  There was the damp underwear in everyone’s dresser drawers. The toothpaste no longer found its cap, oozing out on the inside shelf of the medicine cabinet. Dry cleaning was hooked onto the open closet door. Toys seemed to always be underfoot, or under sofa cushions, and sticky fingers had left little smears of jelly in unexpected places. It’s nearly impossible to keep a home neat with two young children, but this was something new in the Marx-Rose house.

  “I don’t expect much” was the way David began his complaint about the untended state of their home, with Miri responding with a mirthless little laugh. David, annoyed, said, “If you don’t care then—”

  “Then what?” asked Miri, genuinely curious.

  “Then I don’t know!”

  “Is that your idea of a threat?” said Miri, and they both began laughing, the kids running in and tumbling around them.

  • • •

  After the incident with the burning roast, Miri couldn’t say for certain what happened, but she knew that it started when she took her large camera bag from where it hung on the bedroom door, noticing that it was the size of a travel satchel. Against the background sounds of her family in the other room, she dropped a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, hand lotion, and a lipstick into the bag. She heard David promise Elizabeth that they could go to the observatory this weekend as Miri stuffed underwear, a pair of slacks, two shirts, and a sweater into the bag. She imagined telling David and the kids that she was dropping off some laundry (should they ask), but when she picked up her keys as she went out the front door, no one asked.

  As she cut into the edge of the park, she wondered if there was someone like her watching from her window, envying her the luxury of free time. Walking along the paths to the east side, she tried not to think about anything. To live without a plan. As she considered where she’d go once she left the park, she realized how long it had been since she thought only about what she wanted, not what someone else wanted. She almost didn’t know what to do with this realization.

  It had been a long time since she walked at street level with a camera, and all the sights, and smells, and people rushing around her seemed chaotic; even if she had had her camera, she would have been unable to concentrate enough to find a picture. She stopped in the park, people and dogs running around her, and thought how isolated she still felt; the perspective on all this activity was wrong, a distant memory of another life. At one point in her life she’d thought, How lucky, how grand, to have the chance to place your art at the center of your life, for it to be your profession. This feeling of good fortune was never commonplace for Miri; it was always extraordinary. Now she wondered if those riches were meant to be hers for only a short while, whereas she had misunderstood and thought they would last a lifetime.

  • • •

  She stood below her building looking up at her apartment and, for a moment, thought she saw someone moving in her family’s window, before deciding that it was her imagination.

  • • •

  Somehow she found herself uptown at the photography center. Her name was painted in large white letters on the window, framing a reproduction of one of her park vistas. The show had gotten a couple of notices—good ones—and she had the fleeting thought that she didn’t want her window pictures to be thought to be good because she didn’t want them used as a justification for keeping a woman artist at home. There should be no possibility that women would be thought to do their “best work” in the “domestic sphere” and not in the larger world. It wasn’t as if, living in New York City, Miri was unaware of the avalanche of criticism piled on women painters who “neglected” their children because they chose to divide their time between family and work, while their male counterparts (artist-fathers) could be as absentee as they liked, almost romantically so.

  Mostly what she thought, as she entered the gallery and studied her own pictures, was that they may have represented her family (she could remember the exact circumstance of each shot—the whereabouts of Teddy, the involvement of Elizabeth, the warmth of David’s voice as he stood behind her, telling her she had a “good eye”), but they were also documents of her conflicted love. She thought about when she’d walked out the door that morning with her packed bag and how no one had said anything, not because they didn’t care but because they trusted her. And that sometimes their trust just killed her because she trusted them too. Even with conflicted love the operative word is love.

  • • •

  That night she quietly let herself back into the apartment. It was very late. She placed her camera bag on the floor, next to the front door and the little table that held the keys and mail and the occasional toy. In the darkness, she saw David, with his back to her, sitting and smoking in the chair pushed up to the dining room window, only now it faced the park.

  “You forgot your cameras,” he said without turning around.

  She crossed over to him, took the cigarette from his fingers, and placed it in an ashtray. She climbed into his lap, her arms around his neck as she kissed him on the mouth, a very long, deep kiss, before pulling back and nestling her head in the spot beneath his chin. His embrace tightened around her, and she felt how afraid he had been; all the worry and love and loss of the day was conveyed in the muscle tension of that embrace.

  JESSIE BERLIN OR PHOENIX ON HER SIDE

  Jessie Berlin checked and rechecked her watch as she waited on the sidewalk, cursing her imagination (so easily accessed and advantageous when making art, so wretched when applied to other areas of her life). No one belongs to anyone in this scenario, she reminded herself, that was part of the deal. Emile had a way of getting her to agree to nearly every proposal, convincing her that what he wanted was also what she wanted. This manner of persuasion had the added benefit of making her believe that their mirrored desires were proof that they were meant for each other. It was only later when she felt forgotten, or taken for granted or that she could be any other girl to him, that she realized she didn’t want what Emile wanted—she only wanted Emile.

  But everything became complicated when they decided to do this photography series called the BelleFemme Project, born out of a dinner party that went too late into the night with too much talk, too much wine, too much smoke. The women at the table turned strident (how she’d come to hate that word!) as the men argued in favor of the difference between the sexes, with the women countering that there was no provable difference and claiming this “difference” was just more rationalizing for men to do as they pleased.

  The debate moved on to gender-influenced worldviews, making a philosophical stop at art and professionalism before arriving at infidelity; because all conversations, debates, and fights these days seemed to find their way to who was fucking whom and what it all meant. Really, thought Jessie, wasn’t it really all about who was left crying, and who felt guilty, and who was and was not sorry?

  It seemed that if the 1960s had been about political and cultural idealism, then the early 1970s were shaping up to be about sex. And on the subject of fucking, where the fuck was Emile?

  She yanked open an oversize satchel holding her Nikon, wallet, house keys, a sterling silver brooch that she kept on hand in case she lost a button, a roll of Scotch tape in case her hem came loose, duct tape, three pens, a pad, film, a light meter, and the thing she was searching for: a lollipop. Suckers were her way of trying to quit smoking. Tearing the wrapper was slightly similar to ripping the cellophane off a package of cigarettes, and the th
in, rolled white paper stick was, if she used her imagination, a distant cousin to a Marlboro. Maybe she should have waited until she and Emile were truly over before giving up the one legal thing that could calm her down when she felt this irritated and anxious.

  She stepped off the curb as far as she dared during a pause in traffic, taking one final visual sweep of the well-traveled San Francisco street that fronted Cymbeline Kelley’s 1920s cottage, searching for Emile’s BMW. He had the Rolleiflex, the tripod, the strobes, the Polaroid, and the umbrellas. She was certain she’d told him 9:30.

  When Jessie turned her attention back to the cottage, she noticed the front door standing wide open. A very small, rather old woman was staring out from the doorway, her eyes magnified by the lenses of her clear plastic eyeglass frames, which dominated her face. As Jessie waited on the street side of the gate, Cymbeline Kelley said in a surprisingly strong voice, “Oh, don’t make me come to you.”

  “I thought I might be early,” said Jessie, knowing it was an unbelievable excuse for not coming to the door sooner.

  The elderly woman’s cloud of white hair was partially secured by a wide blue scarf, her bangs grazing the top of the invisible-framed eyeglasses. Though the day was warm, Cymbeline seemed dressed for much cooler climes in her black, long-sleeved dress, belted at the waist and falling below her knees. As if in concession to the bright heat of the day, her legs were bare, her feet in short socks and leather sandals. She also had a length of fabric, imprinted with peace signs, wrapped multiple times around her wrist. Her activism was becoming well-known, as she was one of the first photographers to attend peace rallies, snapping away as she protested the war. In 1971, protesters were many, except in Cymbeline’s age-group, where they were nearly nonexistent. A sharp divide had occurred in the country over this Southeast Asian war, and, more often than not, the fissure ran along generational lines.