Pictures of You: Sara Lippmann

“My Compliance,” by Sara Lippmann

That summer, we went to The Sagamore in Lake George. It was the first and only time my family, paternal grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, took a vacation together outside of a mandatory, claustrophobic Passover hotel. Mostly, we saw each other on High Holidays. My father had a fraught relationship with his younger brother; my mother didn’t click with her in-laws, who shrank from the word “lobster” as if it were cancer while she couldn’t get enough. But there we were.

Here I am: on the left beside my first cousin. There is no date on the back of the photograph. I’m guessing August 1979. August 1980.

35 years. How reliable is my memory, how good? A few isolated details break through the fog, but questions loom. New information passed along later has penetrated my consciousness, become subsumed as fact. Secrets persist.

How does one stitch together a narrative from fragments from wisps, from disparate snippets of life real and imagined; flesh out a full picture when so much is either unknown or unknowable? It is inevitable, to fall prey to revisionism, tossing scraps into the pot of nostalgia for a comforting stew, even if the initial moment is anything but. One funnels an event through a rose-colored lens while another witness recasts the same moment through shadows, which is both subjective and prerogative: to reconstruct a past to forge a story, one that resonates with consistency, threads to a particular present. We choose our filters. Memory is fluid, not fixed. There is no absolute truth, only ever-shifting points of view.

The photo, however, is tangible. A form of proof. If nothing else, it’s a start.

What I Remember (or What the Picture Tells)

1. My hair. Note the up-do; rather, the closest thing I’ll ever have to an up-do. This is no small feat. My hair is a veritable mess, hacked at the chin, raggedy, un-brushed. I don’t do braids or ponytails or headbands or ribbons or curls. My bangs fall into my eyes, neglected, overgrown. Hair is not my mother’s priority, nor is it mine. Other than insist on keeping it short (i.e. manageable) she lets me do what I want, which usually is nothing. I am lazy. But my Aunt is glamorous. She wears frosty makeup and form-fitting clothes. Tonight she dolls us up for dinner, my blonde baby cousin and me, two buns on the top of our heads like Princess Leah, like teddy bear ears.

2. My dress. This, too, is a novelty. I wear stretchy polyester pants; in summer, I wear t-shirts and cut-up shins. Dresses, paired with wretched knee socks, are reserved for synagogue. But my Aunt lives in New York City. She shops. My cousin – three years younger – gives me hand-me-downs. At 2, she has an affinity for satin cloud appliques and rhinestones and all things “jazzy.” My dress has a Peter Pan collar and smocking across the front and is decidedly not “jazzy.” My grandparents must have gotten it, which is why I’m wearing it, paired with patent leather shoes too tight or too loose in the toes, depending on who they first belonged to, my cousin or my older sister. My dress pulls at the armpits. I can’t wait to get it off.

3. I remember the grounds, sprawling, mowed, and the hotel tiered and white like a wedding cake. The room is less distinct. I picture coral walls, cracked paint, but could be mistaken. The Sagamore is swanky. Anything that is not the Super 8 is swanky. We have never been to a more opulent place, which begs the question: How are we here?

4. The food. Specifically, the bread. Every night we are served a hot basket of bread, rolls of every grain tucked together like a clutch of eggs, and every night my cousin eats the basket. My grandmother calls her matzo ball, she calls her names in German like der nudel and fett. One night my cousin stuffs herself so much she pukes all over the room, onto her plate, down the tablecloth, into her party shoes. It’s like John Cleese in The Meaning of Life although my memory predates the movie.

5. So bread. And chocolates. Wrapped like golden prizes and left on our pillows. (Or was that Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget, another hotel, another year, another all-expenses-paid trip?) Tables in a grand ballroom set with melon ball butters and endless spoons. I remember waiters and silver pitchers of ice water and a sparkly chandelier on the ceiling. I remember my napkin in the lap but I don’t remember what we eat other than bread. My grandparents are religious. Is it kosher? Do we have special meals, wrapped and heated in foil like airplane food? Are we restricted to dairy fare? What are we doing here anyway?

6. My grandparents do not wear summer clothes, even in the summer. They do not own sneakers. They tuck and press. They are old world European and punctual and adhere to a strict code of Jewish law. My grandfather wears gray slacks and a button-down of checks or windowpane. He takes me for a walk on the golf course, the club as a cane, gives a swing, and we leave. My grandmother smells like 4711. After she dies we find a picture of her in shorts, bona fide culottes from the 1940s, in an album around the year my father was born. But while she is I alive I never see her knees except when she is dying they slip out from the slit the in her gown, cartilage bloated and pale, like sponges left on the counter to dry.

7. My grandfather tells everyone we are related to Walter Lippmann, and we go along with it long after we figure out this is a lie.

8. The black-bottomed pool. I remember this because it frightens me, because it feels like swimming in an abyss. I remember its salt water and swallowing an indistinguishable blend of fear and tears. What I don’t remember: a drowning in the pool that summer. My sister tells me this later, when she finds this photograph and frames it for me. I have no recollection. But she is older. She says, I swear. Someone died on the second day of our stay and the pool shut down for the duration, relegating the guests to the waterfront: lake wading, sun bathing, rowboats, lily pads.

After that, things get blurry. Questions resurface. What are we doing? Who’s footing the bill? We don’t have this kind of money. Besides, this is not the Borscht Belt. Does my grandfather, a traveling salesman, know a guy who knows a guy who owes him a favor?

How many sweaters has he sold?

And where the hell is my father? Why does he send us away with his parents, his brother, his niece without him? What is the emergency? Thing is, I don’t even remember his absence until my mother informs me recently. Family fun typically involves yelling and tears, intensified and compressed when packed in one room. Still. In my mind my father is right there in the pool, yanking my legs, a shark stunt that fills me with terror. His face the color of a pomegranate because he never wears sunscreen. But that’s the trick of memory, isn’t it? Bend, distort, conflate.

That night, we clop downstairs, heels on marble, and run around the air-conditioned cellar beneath the dining hall. We are killing time before dinner, all dressed up with no place to go, trying not to get ourselves messy. Our stomachs rumble for bread. My sister is there too (there is a photo of her reflected in a hall mirror) and my aunt and uncle, an aspiring photographer, who takes the shots. I don’t know where my mother is. My grandparents –I’m assuming– are playing cards. Banquet bathrooms, the kind with hairspray and creams, span one wall, and along the other sits a lounge with glass ashtrays and a row of house phones.

All week I watch my uncle and aunt and cousin, shiny and sun-kissed and color-coordinated, how they laugh and play, hold hands. My cousin swings one two three in the air like a jump rope. They have something the rest of us lack and I want it desperately, their affection, their love.

My uncle gives direction: Pretend you are talking to someone important. I scoot close but I am tired of sharing, I want to grab that phone out of my cousin’s little hand and have it all for myself. I can be difficult and moody. I resist staging, fear the flash, cameras burn my skin, which is why there are so few photos of me period. Maybe I have been crying or maybe the crying is still to come but what’s clear to me looking back now is my compliance.

Act natural, my uncle says, and rubs his reddish beard. He makes a face or stretches his nose like the masks of the Mummenschanz, trying to coax some life out of my eyes, elicit a laugh or a smile but I don’t give these things easily. Lean in, my uncle says. Hold steady. Don’t let your cousin eat the phone. My face is hot. I am itchy and stiff in my dress and hair; I feel like a stray dragged in from the street, I want to run but I want to stay, I am torn by the hope of adoption.

So I behave. Even as the dinner bell rings. People file in. No one picks up on the other end. I do as I’m told, chin on shoulder, that’s right, play freeze, holding my whole body good and still as if to say – Is this what you want?

 

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Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collection, Doll Palace. For more, visit saralippmann.com.