It’s a slim book covered in marbleized paper—lavender, pink, purple; pale mauve lined sheets, faded watery blue ink in the large sprawling hand I had then, not so long ago was it? Twenty-odd years. Twenty years! How I filled those pages, dozens of them at a clip!
I remember. I had gone to the film lab in Chelsea, the first time, to pick up film for my first assignment. And across the street was an office-supply store, long since gone, narrow aisles, metal shelves piled with pads, folders, envelopes, everything covered with dust. The floor creaked as you walked through the aisles. And I saw these books, they were dusty, I had to blow the dust off them. It was hard to find pretty blank books in those days, and I bought this one, on impulse, delighted with not having to watch every penny for the first time in my life….
You can’t see much at this altitude. Sometimes the clouds break and you can see earth the color of clay, it looks close unless there’s a building, and then you can tell how high we are, the building’s only a spot. You can’t tell from this land that it’s January. Around New York there was snow, patches of it broken by dark soil. For a while we flew through a huge valley of clouds: we were at the bottom, the clouds were all around us, we were drowning in them. Like a picture in a children’s book, cute, round little tots tumbling in a featherbed of clouds, screaming in joy as they careen in whipped cream, float in egg white.
Nature uses the same forms, the same materials over and over, clouds like islands, sky like sea. Mozart too reused themes, stole from himself. Now the clouds are hazecolor, white shot through with rainbow pastels. Ahead a wash of deep pink, we keep flying into sunset, it’s dark behind us, we go west, young woman.
I hope people can’t tell I am not cool and assured. There is no one sitting beside me in the middle seat. A man sleeps in the end seat. Every once in a while he snores. But maybe someone else is looking at me, the way I stare at them, surreptitiously. A World photographer should be cool and assured. I try to remind myself that I am a person not entirely without importance.
I’m glad I bought this book: writing in it makes me look professional, busy. I’ve never really been busy that way—it isn’t considered busyness when the kids are in the tub splashing water all over the bathroom floor, the phone rings, and the pot on the stove decides at that moment to boil over. Now I look busy in the other way, the important way. But it’s also helpful to have this book to write in so people can’t see that I am terrified this plane is going to crash just so I won’t be able to have a career. Funny I never realized before how utterly self-centered phobias are….
Career. Is that what I’m having? Eighty rolls of film they issued me, eighty rolls! Short rolls, twenty shots apiece, half black-and-white, half color. Do they really expect me to use it all? So wasteful. They must not care, they have money to burn. If we crashed we would burn….
We won’t crash. Pretend you’re in a boat. The clouds bump and rock the plane just as waves rock a boat, up down up down. All of nature is similitudes, people knew that once, the Middle Ages, all things connected, interlocked, significant. That’s the rub, significant. God, my mind is racing, I feel as if I’ve been given an injection of something, all my pores are open and everything is crowding into them…. The world seems new, as if my eyes had been washed and I can finally see.
The truth is I haven’t seen very much of the world: where have I been? I’ve had to imagine the world, or see it in photographs. The camera never lies. But of course it does, who knows that better than a photographer? The angle, the selection, the isolation—the camera shows what the photographer wants it to tell, children’s game, show-and-tell. I don’t know why I keep thinking about children’s things….
Like that Indian woman at the airport. I thought I knew all about her: hadn’t I read about women like her, seen pictures of them? I recognized the slender body, the meek posture, she’ll have a dowager’s hump when she’s old, those large dark eyes. All those bundles and two children, one just a baby. She sat there bent over, listening to the man, her husband probably, give her orders over and over. She nodded, showed no impatience. The truth is he’s nervous sending her off alone, and so he scolds her, peremptory as if she were a child or an idiot. Then he looks at his watch, he gets up, he picks up the little boy, hugs, kisses him, puts him down. He ignores the baby, he leaves. I look at her with all those bundles, those little children, I think—she needs help, maybe I can help her. But when the call comes to queue up, she gathers everything together swiftly, you can see she is used to doing that, and rises, she doesn’t trip on the folds of the crimson sari, she almost runs. She charges the people in her way, elbows them, elbows me hard, she reaches the head of the line first.
Of course, she should have been first, it is only right, but she warred her way, she was prepared to fight the world, and I’ll bet she never fights like that with her husband. From a distance she looks so graceful, the sari outlining her body in an S, emphasizing its flexibility, the softness and submissiveness of the woman. Lie. She’s a fury with a ring in her nose. Doesn’t a ring in the nose betoken subjection? On the other hand, there’s not much difference between a ring in your nose and one in your ear, is there. Still, she is meek, too.
I can still feel it where she elbowed me. I’ll bet I have a bruise. I’d like to look, but I can’t do it here.
I am drinking. I am having a Bloody Mary, I figured I could spend 75 cents of the expense money World gave me. But I am getting a little drunk on it and my excitement. And now they are wheeling the foodcart through and handing people dinner trays covered with foil, there is a smell of food. Isn’t this neat? It comes all by itself, you don’t have to cook it. Such a neat little tray! How wonderful, how ingenious, oh I love it all!
It is embarrassing to have evidence—for I certainly don’t recall feeling this—of once being excited by airline food. This whole account is embarrassing. What a naif I was! It’s humiliating. I can’t believe I was so horribly bubbly, that I could be excited by such stupid things.
Still, that girl sounds happier than I am. I was just a girl, even if I was thirty. God, ignorant. Did I really sound that way? Did I see life as a great adventure waiting to be discovered? Expected Elysian fields I suppose. Got the Slough of Despond instead. The question is: Does everyone? Are there people who do find Elysian fields?
Well, it wasn’t very good, but it was fast.
Before I left, I tried to give myself a cool assured appearance. First, I cut my hair. It used to hang down to the middle of my back, usually in one thick braid, but now it ends where my ears end and flies out sharply when I turn my head quickly. Delilah liked it and so did Mother. But the kids were horrified. They said they liked my hair long—but they never said that when it was long. They say the short hair makes me look like their sister.
But then they’ve been rotten about everything. They were not even nice about my getting this job. Not that it’s a real job, I’m not on staff, I’m a stringer, but god I was happy, I couldn’t contain myself, it meant so much to me. But I don’t really have words for what it meant to me and besides, if I tried to tell them, it would have sounded as if they were not enough for me, as if they weren’t my whole life. Well, they aren’t. But they expect to be, that’s what they think children are to mothers. I couldn’t tell them that I felt I’d suddenly been recognized as a person, as a human being and not just a woman, a mother, which is to say, nobody at all, a cipher….
I can’t concentrate, my mind refuses to stay in one place.
They dashed my happiness. There I was dancing around the damned ironing board I’d pressed my blouse on that morning, to wear into the city, and they stood leaning against the sink, both of them, staring at me with eyes so hard you’d think they were Puritan judges about to sentence an adulteress. I tried to think of what they’d get out of this, and told them we’d have more money now. They showed no interest whatever.
“You said you’d have to travel. Who’s going to take care of us?”
“Pani. You love Pani,??
? I pleaded.
They glanced at each other, their faces expressionless. They were out to punish me, and I felt guilty enough to let them.
“You’re going to go away?” Billy asked, incredulously. “You’re going to leave us alone?”
“You won’t be alone. Pani will be with you.”
“Will she sleep up here? Or downstairs?”
I hadn’t thought that one through. “Up here,” I decided swiftly.
He turned away from me as if I had already abandoned him: martyred, tragic, little boy blue. Selfish monster is more like it. Arden crossed her arms and began to question me like a drillmaster about whether Pani knew she was allowed to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons, and have a soda afterward, and to do her homework in the afternoons with Joyce on the living room floor. Miserable creeps. Not in the least concerned about me, or what this job meant to me. Their little privileges and rights, their well-being, that’s all they cared about. Monsters!
I started to fold the ironing board up, to put it away. I slammed the legs down and caught my finger between a leg and the board and cried out in pain. Neither child did more than glance at me. Little bastards. Horrible brats! They acted as if I’d done something wicked to them when I cut my hair. What do they want me to look like, for god-sake? Good god, I’m only thirty! They want me in a rocker with a shawl over my shoulders and an amplifying horn held up to my ear. Damn them!
The trouble was I needed them to be happy for me. They were all I had. I decided to call my mother, but not in front of them. I waited until they were in bed. And my good mommy was as excited as I, she was really proud of me, impressed. She’d given up on me, I knew that, and here I’d gone and done something after all. My face had a smile plastered on it when I hung up the phone, it didn’t fade even after I’d lain back against the bed pillows and started to imagine my exciting future.
Well, partly I was laughing, too, because Mother sounded so tense at first, worried about who would take care of the kids when I traveled. As soon as I said Pani she breathed out, “Oh that’s wonderful, Anastasia! How wonderful! And she’s right there, it’s so convenient for her, she doesn’t have to get in her car and drive there, and she can go downstairs into her own house any time she wants to.”
So, I’m just like my kids, I expect my mother to live for me, don’t I. And the night before I left, last night was it last night?—they gave me a party. They invited Pani Nowak and they served pizzas made on English muffins, and they gave me a present. They chipped in to buy it, but they must have used their Christmas money, or else Pani gave them a lot, no, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t afford to. Because it was expensive. They both held the box as they handed it to me, and stood so close to me when I opened it that I could hardly move my arms. It was a camera case—a snappy leather one big enough to hold several cameras, lots of film, lenses, and all the small paraphernalia. I have to carry only the one case and my tripod. It has a shoulder strap and when it is filled, it weighs enough to give me bursitis. I love it.
Tears came into my eyes when I saw it. And they both hugged me at once. Oh god. No one has ever given me a gift like that before, something for me, not something I needed or asked for, but something they thought about, that would please me. They are good kids. They’re adorable. I love them, my sweet babies.
Everyone else is either watching the movie or sleeping. I’m going to get up and get myself another Bloody Mary. Anastasia, you’re being corrupted!
My babies. They were pink from excitement and the hot kitchen, opening the broiler door every few seconds to check on the pizzas. So proud of themselves, grown-ups, buying a present with their own money, preparing a meal. Making those little pizzas was a major achievement for them. I understand that firsthand. First they had to decide what to serve. I can imagine the tentative suggestions, scorned proposals, arguments, the irritated voices rising, then Arden taking charge, deciding. Then they had to find the recipe and make a list of what to buy, and go to the market and find it all. They had to make tomato sauce, something they’ve never done before. And lay all the ingredients out on those little muffins, and broil them. They forgot to toast the muffins first, but I didn’t point that out. There was brownish tomato sauce under Billy’s fingernails, and melted cheese on the end of some strands of Arden’s hair. They got into it, body and soul. So sweet, so dear. Oh god I hope they’re not unhappy.
I had no shame in those days. I should have worked for a greeting card company photographing fat-cheeked tots in pink and blue, madonna-calendar girl mumsie with divine light in her eyes. Mumsie never guessed her little darlings would grow up to become…what? Bruises on a heart, pinched nerves.
Pani Nowak was overjoyed when I asked her to stay upstairs and take care of them while I was away. She said, “Oh, yes, what I make? They like my stuffed cabbage, no? Or potato soup?” Maybe she thinks I don’t feed them properly. And maybe she’s like my mother: food is love. Is that inherent in a peasant culture?
She’s lonely, poor soul. Sad that she’s alone after raising five kids. She says it’s because she had no daughters: a son is supposed to go away, she doesn’t blame them. A daughter would have stayed near her in her old age, live next door or across the street. Mrs. D’Antonio’s daughter lives down the block from her mother, and Mrs. Schneider’s is next door. Law of nature. She never asks, but I can see she wonders why I don’t live near my mother. She wouldn’t understand if I said my mother doesn’t want me next door, doesn’t want my kids running in and out of her house, doesn’t want to sit with them while I have my hair done—if I had my hair done—or go to the A&P. I think she misses Joy, but she’s always far away, three-year tours, trouble with marrying an Army man. In the Philippines now. I stop in to see Mom one afternoon a week and have coffee with her, or iced tea. She’s happy I come alone, without the kids. She has her own life now, finally, as she should. Pani doesn’t understand any of that.
She comes from a different era, or a different culture. She’s a saint, like my grandmother. There are no more women like Pani. Terrible loss to the human race. But who’d want to be one? Still, these days children with mothers like Pani tend to flee to the other end of the continent. I wonder why that is. All of her sons live far away. Antoni lives in Ohio, Jan in Detroit, and Paul lives in California. I had a hard time keeping her from calling him when she heard where I was going. She never makes long-distance calls, she can’t afford them. Paul’s an engineer and makes good money from what she says, but he only calls her on Christmas and Mother’s Day.
Her sons never call on her birthday. Funny. They don’t seem to realize she has one. They probably think she has existed since creation like an eternal verity. My kids are like that too. They were surprised to discover a couple years ago that I have a birthday just as they do, that I was actually born. But once they realized it they were darling—Billy lugged a big leafy plant home from Woolworth’s in his little red wagon, and Arden painted a beautiful card for me, of a mother with two children.
Last year, I gave Pani a birthday party. I invited her two friends, nobody Polish, there are no Poles around here except us, and I baked a cake. I made it from scratch because I know how she feels about packaged cake. It was a little gluey, and tasted of baking powder. Pani is like my grandmother, mother, too, she makes only yeast cakes. But she liked the party, she was happy, she kept hugging me. We had balloons and sweet wine.
She was convinced that Paul would be deeply hurt if I went to California and didn’t stay at his house. She said that when someone comes to Poland on a visit, a relative or a friend of a relative, the whole village comes to meet them, bringing food and staying to drink vodka and to talk about the ones who went away and dance to Pan Zborowski’s accordion. I wonder if they still do that. What would that be like, to be there? I wish I could see that, be part of that. Oh, I have such longings, I know they will never be filled….
I’ll never experience that kind of world, the kind that made Pani Nowak what she is. I wonder if they are all like
her, so kind, so giving, so sweet, a different kind of people. No meanness in her face. Like my grandmother’s face. Watery pale blue eyes, like my grandmother’s. But Pani’s eyes are still bright, she hasn’t wept the light out of them as Grandma did. She can still feel pleasure, she loves the kids, she really gets a kick out of them, out of me too. And she asks nothing. She’s overjoyed if you just pay attention to her. She’ll spend half a day making stuffed cabbage for us, and all she wants, her only reward, is your liking it.
Oh, I’m stupid to worry, they’ll be fine and here I am headed for Los Angeles, I’ve never been there, well, I won’t be there this time either, but still, LA! I have to find Coast Air, I hope it’s not too far from the American terminal, where will it be will there be a bus will I have to walk miles carrying this equipment? I’ll ask the stewardess. Coast Air to Fresno, then a little plane some funny name to the Sierra Nevada. Sierra Nevada! Just the name is exciting! What can it be like? A new hydroelectric plant, I wonder why World thinks that’s important enough for such an expensive plane trip, eighty rolls of film, $100 a day for me….I wonder why they gave me this assignment. It sounds more like a man’s thing. Will I know how to shoot it? hydroelectric plant, I don’t even know exactly what that is… .
And then I bought some New Clothes. I haven’t had New Clothes since long before Brad and I…Three pairs of khaki pants, I bought them in the men’s department, the salesman was really irritable with me when he realized I was shopping for myself, as if my trying them on would defile the clothes. I couldn’t help giggling. And a khaki jacket, and some cotton shirts, women’s, because they have more flair, but in a large size, I love to look as if I’m wearing my father’s clothes. And a wool skirt and a sweater and some hiking shoes and loafers. I have a hat too, a cap with a visor. Men’s department. It looks cute on me though. I think.