The house is quiet. The cat is sitting on the windowsill, looking down at me in the bathtub as I pull myself back.
The cat stays perched on the windowsill by the sink, staring out at the weak sky. I go downstairs. The smell of the house is different. The darkroom door is open, the light is off again, the back door in the kitchen is propped open, and the two bodies of the painters are looking around, pulling tape off the cabinets and the walls.
I stand among them, hands on the hips of the dress I found hanging in the armoire, looking around the walls of the kitchen like it’s a gallery filled with pieces of art instead of just a newly skinned room.
Moonstone.
I remember walking to the liquor store just across Portage, on Burnell, with Mother when I was little, my hand burrowed in hers while we crossed the busy streets. First, she’d pick out a bottle of wine, always red. We’d walk through them all, quiet, until she found what she wanted. Once she had the bottle, she would grab a free, empty liquor box to carry home. Sometimes she’d carry it, but usually she gave it to me. I would drag it by the handle across the linoleum floors and stand behind her at the till while she paid.
As soon as we got outside I’d wear the box on my head, looking out through the hole for a handle on our walk home, hands clasping both the cardboard and her hand. As I got older, when I was still going with her, I grew more embarrassed, so I walked beside her, or a little behind, box under my arm, wondering why we didn’t just take the car, wondering why the previous box wasn’t good enough for her anymore. What was the point of keeping all those things, anyway?
But I never asked her anything about it, and she never told me.
When we got home, Mother would always go into the kitchen, open the wine, and carry the empty box up to her studio. She would sit on the yoga mat in the middle of the room and move things from the old box to the new one. She did this with the door closed, so I’d climb up to the loft bed and watch her through the vent.
I knew the ricketiness of the bed by heart. I knew how to climb it in a way that it made the least amount of noise. In my head, when I see Mother in the studio, there is always the knowledge that if I budge, my invisibility will be lost and our intimacy—which has almost always taken the form of surveillance—will shatter.
Through the vent I’d watch as she’d take each piece from the box, read along in quiet wisps, then place it in the new box, and drink. Mother didn’t drink very often, not even when she was in a deeply depressive episode, but she always drank then. Whatever was at the top of one box would end up on the bottom of the other, such that she’d reacquaint herself each time with the contents—photos and documents—back to front. It was always the same. She did it slowly—as if she could only handle reliving it all at a certain speed without breaking.
Every time, I’d watch Mother take the empty box to the remains of the old coal barbecue near the corner of the fence, left over from the last owner. She’d put the old box in and burn it. By then it was always night. We were far enough downtown that the stars were invisible because of the city’s upstretched radiance, but from that brief fire, smoke would billow up, obscuring the space between us, which had always been uncertain, bound only by blood and a sideways, everunspoken kind of love, wherein we both knew that we would never comprehend each other fully: Mother would never understand how I could swing between myself and myself and never get to firm ground, how there were so many dysphoric, duplicitous facets of myself that could never be fully known, even by me. And I would never understand whatever it was that she was—is.
After that last fire, after Mother was taken to the Misery—the closest hospital—with second-and third-degree burns, any paper that was left untouched was annihilated when Dorothea threw a soaked towel from the bathroom onto the box. Dorothea told me that while Mother was moaning at her hands in the hall, she stood in the middle of the studio, lancing the last cinders of the fire on the wall with the mop she had been using to clean the kitchen floor.
The ink of the pages ran. Dorothea, naturally, threw the box away.
After I show the painters the studio they’re going to repaper, after they wow at the ashy burn that splits the room like a widening grin, after they leave and I close the front door behind them, I turn on the red light in the darkroom—it is a bathroom, now—and start to take the photographs.
I start in the living room, with the phone, which I unplug and set aside, so that all that is left on the tiny phone table is the untethered cable, a little lamp, and the list of emergency numbers. I turn the chair so that someone could be sitting at the table and frame up the shot, and as I do I realize I didn’t bring a tripod, or the Leica’s self-timer. And then I remember that this photo doesn’t have any reason to have me in it. That it was never supposed to.
So I put my finger on the shutter, and so I push it down, and so the shot is made in one-thirtieth of a second. And that’s it.
1. The Phone
I don’t put the phone back. Instead, I put Mother’s camera on the table and take the bulb from the lamp and drag the chair to the darkroom and open the door. I slip the sundress over my head and climb up the chair and use the dress to protect my hand from the heat of the bulb. I unscrew it as fast as I can and screw in the bulb from the lamp, and suddenly the room is lit up in incandescent yellow. I climb down, nearly naked, with a hot bulb cradled like an egg in the dress in my hand. I go and screw the red safety light into the lamp.
I leave the dress off, go to the bright darkroom-bathroom, pull out the chair, and take a photo of the room.
2. The Darkroom
Suddenly, my head is filled with newspapers, Mother’s hands running along them. So once I’ve put the dress back on, I use my phone to see if there’s an archive of the paper she worked with online. I can feel the house closing in on me a little—coming after my edges—and look up to see the grey faces floating around in the corners of the room, watching me. I try to ignore them, look back to the phone, which is telling me that the archives for the dates I want are not available online, but there are archives downtown. I open Google and it tells me that the 10 bus will take me right there.
I pick up Mother’s camera and go upstairs for my wallet, my purse—where I put the list of all the things in the house, as well as my previously soaked transit tickets. The faces pop up throughout the house as I do, drag alongside me like bones against sandpaper, watching me, looking so much like me. But I don’t let them slow me down, even though, yes, I’m afraid of them.
They know too much.
I walk across the street from the bus stop and into the Manitoba Archives Building. I head to the guard at the table to sign in, tell them I’m here to look into some personal history.
“My mother used to work for the paper,” I say, writing down my own name, looking down at Mother’s camera around my neck. “She was a photographer.”
The guard hands me a sticker to wear. “That’s interesting. We close up in forty minutes, you know?”
“Of course,” I say, and head straight for the desk and ask the archivist if they can help me search the newspaper’s database, from around 1980 to 1984, the years when Mother did the most work for them, when I was still here.
The archives are empty but for us, it seems, and an old man hunched over a microfiche machine. The archivist takes me to a computer that might have been brand-new five years ago, logs me in to the database on a browser, and shows me the search.
“Here’s how you can look up by date, and the text of the papers should mostly be searchable,” the archivist says, pointing.
“Thank you,” my voice says, and as they leave, my fingers go mad with typing: her name first, and I find nothing, of course. Because she didn’t get credit for most of the shots she took; that wasn’t how things worked.
So the words that come out of my hands are “Assiniboia Downs,” because that’s the only newspaper job I remember going with her.
Pages with horses come up, pages of jockeys looking down and a horse runn
ing a nose ahead of a few others, bodies of beast and jockey trapped eternal in the motion of a few hundredths of a second. I realize as I flip through horse picture after horse picture, through sports sections from so many decades ago, that there’s no telling them apart. I don’t know which could even be hers.
But then there is a photo of a jockey on a horse, wreathed, the owner holding its reins, while the jockey looks candid down at a little kid at the horse’s side, a kid who is feeling the wet, shivering flesh of the horse’s hip and looking directly into the camera. Their hair is short, their body in an overlong shirt. Happy.
Me.
I hit print, bring it to the archivist, and ask if there’s a way to get a better version. The archivist helps me figure out how to download it as a pdf. I thank them and log in to my email, ignore all my unread messages, and email the pdf to myself. I check the time and, with the twelve minutes I’ve got left, go back to scrounging, page after page, year after year.
1982. 1983. 1984.
And then it’s there—a small story squashed beside an almost fullpage ad for a spring sale at Eaton’s department store, the headline, the words I searched for highlighted:
Psychotic Woman Stopped as She Tries to Climb Fence at the Assiniboia Downs, Stops Races for Half Hour.
There is no picture, just a few short columns, which I start to read and then stop. I don’t need to know any more about that. I know everything that matters. I was there for all the parts that did.
I mash the back button on the browser before I can change my mind, mash it until I’m at the home page, until it can’t go back any further. I sit here, eyes closed, shaking a little and wanting not to be here. So I go to the memory palace, but I just stand outside and don’t open the door. I decide to turn and give my back to the palace. I sit on the stoop and look down at my hands, and all that’s there is the photo, of me and the horse that won the race. Yesterday—that’s what the caption says is the horse’s name.
Someone taps my shoulder.
“We’re closing,” the archivist says, ages away, it seems.
And then I am out the door and at the bus stop. And I can barely see to fish out another ticket to slip into the slot on the bus.
“Hello again,” the driver says. And I zoom back into my body. “Did you try the microwave?” It’s the same route.
“Of course,” I lie. “The tickets only barely lit on fire.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” he says, smiling.
The door closes behind me.
I didn’t leave Germany as soon as I first started talking to Genny again because I wanted to help Erwin finish his project.
The middle of the days—as well as the entirety of our cloudy days—were little use for shooting, because of either the lack of light or the uninviting harshness of the shadows, so during those days and hours we took to separate darkrooms. During a block of rainy days, I got around to finally printing some old shots from rolls the girl who runs had brought with us from Minneapolis. Before talking to Genny, I’d refused to look at them, out of fear of deciding to destroy them.
Whenever I look back at these photos, photos of moments I remember so vividly, I find them bizarrely more comforting in their negative state. One is of Genny sitting on the hood of her car in the suburb of Minneapolis where we broke down, mercifully, at the end of our drive down from Winnipeg. Genny is doused in film grain and fatigue, leaning against the negative-black hood of the white car, the bright grass of the lawns a grey smudge across the frame. In another, of me and Genny in front of Spoonbridge and Cherry in the sculpture garden—shot in colour—the negative of the cherry on the end of the spoon is a strange blue orb looming in the bright orange sky above our heads. Then there’s a photo of Genny and me, taken from a tripod, probably at her place, which was taken a week or two before I found the letter and ran away to Germany. In the negative of that photo we are sitting naked on the bed, bound up in each other, wrapped up in brilliant dark bodies, clutching each other in the folded bright. My back is to the camera, my face in Genny’s neck, but she is looking straight into the lens, her pupils burning like little suns, one grey nipple peeking out from around the side of my binder and a cablerelease in her hand to fire the shutter. Each of those shots in the negative feels so honest, while others look so lifeless until their print comes out of the bath.
I sometimes wonder if Erwin was ever comforted by photographs, either printed or in their negative. During those last weeks, I got the sense that he was deep in a well of remembering. The photos in his series were harshly felt, and sometimes he was so overwhelmed that we had to take breaks. It would be anywhere from ten minutes to an hour before he’d restart the process of posing us and framing the shot. Sometimes when he stopped I would stay sitting where he’d directed me to sit. There was something about occupying that space in the composition that felt both fragile and freeing. There was something about wearing the skin of an important stranger that was so entrapping.
For a few minutes at least, I would try to disappear into the abstraction I was pretending to be. I would just try to be beloved.
I get back to Mother’s house, her old Leica uncapped, the photo of me and the horse rolled up in my purse. I come in, look down, and see the ratty welcome mat that has been in that space for years, that I never put in the memory palace and I don’t really know that I’ve noticed until now.
I grab the welcome mat and throw it out onto the lawn. I raise Mother’s camera to my eye, stand where the welcome mat was, and point it down at my feet. I focus, widen the aperture, and take the shot of my feet on bare floor.
3. Standing on the Welcome Mat
I start looking for more things I can photograph, small things, things I can carry. At the end of the hall, the darkroom’s door is open and light is bathing out. I notice the Ansel Adams print hanging in the hallway, a landscape with a river oxbowing under the shadow of a mountain range. I pull it off its hook and there is the faintest outline of the frame on the wall. The empty hook stares out.
4. Print of Ansel Adams’s Tetons and Snake River on the Hallway Wall
I take the print out to the lawn, to join the welcome mat.
I climb up the stairs to the bathroom, find the dusty, warped wood owl carving, and pull it off the windowsill. I take a picture of the dirty, fog-glassed window.
5. Wooden Owl Carving against the Bathroom Window
I wrap the carving in a dry old towel from the bathroom and carry it downstairs, add the telephone to it, grab my purse, take it all out to the yard, and unroll it for the Ansel Adams print, for the ratty welcome mat.
Before I roll the towel back up, I see the junk mail sticking out of the little old metal mailbox on the other side of the fence. I yank the mailbox from the deteriorating wood, put it down at my feet, raise Mother’s camera, and take the photo as wide open as I can, to force the house to be blurred out behind the fence. When I hit the shutter, I make a point to blink.
6. The Mailbox
I put the mailbox on the pile—the tiniest yard sale. I roll the towel over it all, go around the house to my car, put it all on the passenger seat, and back out.
None of these things will ever go back into the house.
I make it to the home and it’s an hour before they are going to feed Mother dinner. I nod to the nurse with my arms full of the artifacts wrapped in the towel and carry them down the hall to her room.
Mother is sitting, locked into her bed, looking straight at the doorway when I come in.
“Hello,” I say. I put the towel down on the bed and pull up a chair.
I want nothing more than to tell her what has happened in my life since I left her all those years ago. I want nothing but to tell her about why I’ve lived the exact way that I have, about which parts I blame her for and which I don’t. But I can’t say any of that because that information is so important to me, because I don’t want to think of it disappearing as soon as it’s written in her head. I don’t want to torture her with any informa
tion she can’t hold on to.
I hand Mother the owl carving. She holds it, looks at it, then puts it down. I decide to reintroduce the items to her. I say, “Here’s your welcome mat,” “Here’s your mailbox,” “Here’s your Ansel Adams print from the hallway.”
She rubs her hands on them, looks at them. When I give her the phone I put her hand on it, take the phone from its cradle so that she can grasp it, hold on to it longer. So that it might drag some noise out from the dark.
Then I remember the photo in my purse, from the archives, and take it out and unroll it. I look down into my happy face, then over at Mother, who is watching me.
As I roll the paper back up, without showing it to Mother, the nurse knocks on the open door and comes in.
“Sorry to barge in,” she says, with a meal on a tray. “It’s time for dinner.”
“Oh, sorry,” I say, standing up and putting everything back in the towel.
“Are those your mother’s things?”
“Yes,” I say, not wanting to look at the food.
“You know,” the nurse says, setting the tray beside the bed and pulling up another chair. “You could also bring Hedwig back to the house if you like. We can arrange a visit for you, if you think it would help. You could just show her around all the old things.”
I slip the page into my purse. “I didn’t know that was an option,” I say, forgetting that I pay for her to be here, that Mother pays to be here, that the door is open if I want to carry her out.
“Just give us a day’s notice and we can probably arrange it,” the nurse says, picking up a bowl of something from the tray and a spoon.
I make for the door, trying to imagine what it must be like to know what you’re going to do that far in advance, to see a future worth making.
Driving back to the house, I remember Hamburg. A day before Erwin was to drive me to the airport I asked if he could take me out of the city. I had something to do.
Vanishing Monuments Page 23
