“Easy, there.”
“All right,” she said. “Okay.” But she just sat there, looking down at the album in her lap.
“Want to do this another time?”
“No, it’s fine. I just haven’t, you know, it’s been a while. Since I looked.” She took another, longer pull. This time it seemed to go down more easily. “The funny thing is, she didn’t really have any photos. To put in the album. I mean, she had four. That was page one.”
I tried to imagine how I would feel about the only four pictures to survive from the entire photographic record of my life to date—more or less the age of my grandmother when she arrived in the U.S. They might be four that I had chosen for their personal value, true likenesses, moments I could not bear to lose. They might be random shots: a portrait of my acne and my orthodontia, a grinning blur that was my father’s face as he turned to laugh at something out of the frame. I knew that either way they would be precious to me, but having endured what my grandmother had endured did not mean I would be able to bring myself to look at them.
“At first I didn’t understand. If you only have four pictures, why buy a whole album? Then I thought, Well, probably she meant to fill it with pictures of her new life here. And then maybe she forgot. Or got another album, I don’t know. We had plenty of other albums, you’ve seen them.”
“Sure.”
“So I decided I would take it. Fill in the rest of the pages myself.”
“The rest of it was blank when you found it?”
She nodded and let out a long breath. Its turbulence wove a paisley of dust motes in the slant of lamplight.
“We can skip that page.”
“No.” She undid the clasp and opened the old-fashioned album to its first black page. It was the kind of album where the photos had to be fixed to the pages by means of self-adhesive mounts like little corners of black crown molding. There were sixteen corners pasted to the page, neat and true. Four labels, tan rectangles with indented corners, each bearing a legend written with a fountain pen in the continental hand I remembered from birthday cards enclosing twenty-dollar checks. Mère, vingt ans. Père. Toi. Toi et moi. Above each label, inside a rectangular space delimited by the photo corners, was a region of black paper. The pictures themselves were all missing.
“What?” my mother said to the photo album. She lifted it from her lap to look pointlessly underneath. She set it back down. “Oh no,” she said.
She started flipping pages, and we flashed through the world in which her childhood had come to an end, recorded in grids of black-and-white squares, pictures unmistakably taken with a Kodak Brownie. She flipped them faster and as she went, she was breathing through her nostrils like someone trying to hold her temper or her worst fears in check. The pages creaked as she turned them. I glimpsed a row of motel cabins, a motel swimming pool shaped like an arrowhead, a motel sign with a neon thunderbird. A beach at low tide, a beach awash in umbrellas, my mother with a bare-chested lifeguard. My mother in a poodle skirt nervously passing a hot dog on a bun to a bear on a chain. Uncle Ray looking sporting in a double-breasted suit and an open-shirt collar with a clocked foulard. My mother in short shorts and a halter top, posing beside the wooden Indian of a cigar shop. My mother, too young to drive, behind the wheel of a parked Alfa convertible. Another print of the picture my grandfather had brought with him from Florida, the one that showed my mother riding bareback in a bathing suit, holding a bow and arrow. A jockey in silks posing with a glossy thoroughbred, squinting at a man in a snap-brim hat. Other shots of horses and the fences and grandstands of racetracks. Shots that featured my mother or Uncle Ray with a zaftig little woman who had smoldering, even angry, eyes. Shots of my mother or her uncle posed beside other women with lipstick-dark mouths. My mother and Uncle Ray in front of a billiard parlor. My mother in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the gates of Pimlico racetrack, some historical palisaded fort. My mother astride an artillery cannon, like Kipling’s Kim.
The world before my birth, a world of infinite degrees of gray. Gray ocean, gray blondes, gray ketchup, gray pines. Apart from the horseback shot, I had never seen any of these pictures. I had heard only the dimmest rumors of the period they recorded. I wanted to stop her hand from turning the pages and sink, like the pearl in the shampoo bottle, into this gray prehistory, this evidence of the years my mother had spent running wild. The pictures flicked past. The pages flapped.
On the last page there was no photograph. A sheet of paper had been glued in with a streak of mucilage. The mucilage had crystalized into sugary brown grains. The paper had been turned on its side and glued horizontally to fit it in the album. It was a mimeographed page torn from some kind of typed newsletter, yellow as the filter cotton of a cigarette butt. Rusty vampire bite of a stapler. Ink deepened to a bruise-black shade of purple. Before my mother slammed the album shut, I had time to glimpse the words Lunch Menu, crabapple garnish, Poet’s Corner, and my grandmother’s name, all typed in the refined-looking twelve-pitch size they used to call elite.
“Well, shit,” said my mother.
“Did they fall out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were they in there before? When did you see them last?”
“I don’t know.”
My mother clutched the album to her chest. I could see that she was running through the recent history of the album’s whereabouts and movements, trying to work her way back to the last time she had seen it intact. She looked stricken. I was surprised. Anyone would have been upset by such a loss, naturally. I just would have expected my mother to try to hide her distress.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. She put down the album, got up from the couch, and went downstairs to the sewing room, where I was staying. In the closet by the daybed where I slept, she kept the few old things—souvenirs—that she had held on to. She had always been the kind of woman who kept her balloon aloft and sailing by cutting away sandbags and throwing nonessentials over the side. Her years spent among the karmic adventurers of the East Bay lent an aura of liberation from the chains of maya to her habit of discarding the evidence of her passage through the world. But it was not that. Sometimes, if she had an extra glass of wine, she might tell her current boyfriend or whomever she was living with that during her years “on the loose” with Uncle Ray, she had learned to travel light, so that when it was time to make a dash for it, there would be nothing to trip you up or hold you down. At this point the current boyfriend was likely to sense a metaphorical drift in the conversation and consider himself warned. But it was not that, either. My mother’s lack of attachment to the past and its material embodiments went deeper than principle, training, or metaphor. It was an unbreakable habit of loss.
“Nope,” she said. “God damn it.”
She had been crouching in the closet’s doorway, searching the shelves of a wire rack that also held her box of 45s and an old Carmen Miranda doll whose fruit hat said havana. She had searched the floor underneath the rack, lifted the lids on her boxes of buttons and rickrack, rifled the banker’s box that held all her patterns from Butterick and Simplicity. Now she sank down and sat on the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest. She covered her face with her hands.
“I guess they’re still at Daddy’s,” she theorized in a calm tone of voice from behind her hands. “In the storage space. The album was just in a box, the pictures were probably at the bottom. I should have checked. I should have dug around.”