Pictures of You: Jordan E. Rosenfeld

“The Children Aren’t Smiling,” by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

My 8th birthday. No one means to tell the truth in this photograph but it can’t be stopped, its slow seepage rises up like flood waters. First glance offers happiness: all smiles, such good times.

You’ll find me bottom left, crouched in a pout. The full effect of my costume can’t be seen: not the Flamenco skirt and my mother’s brown boots, the lacy shirt and the veil atop my birthday hat. I marched out back, stuck hands on hips, but nobody even turned a head.

Perhaps this can best be explained through a line up:

Only the adults are smiling. Back row, two-drink minimum, side of cocaine? Left to right, “Elvira” is really Cheryl, with her room full of healing crystals, a pal to score a hit of heroin with. Next to her, Larry, since deceased, the most reliable pot-dealer in town, famously loud, a man you didn’t want to sit beside for the intensity of his lipsmacking while eating. Still, he was loyal to a fault—my father’s best friend until his death, a good heart buried beneath all that bluster.

And then my mother, bless her, hand clutching tit, her version of the two fingers behind your head, the lewd look, not sure who it’s meant for, the photographer? Or the man whose neck she clutches—“Tony the bummer” as we’ve since come to refer to him—a plumber with a love of amphetamines, famous for pissing on my bookshelf once in the middle of a high.

Beside them, a woman leans against my father. I don’t remember her, not at all, not even the glimmer of a name, not someone who made an impact or left an impression. I’m the seed spit out from the flower torn at its stem—parents divorced when I was two, remained friends, party buddies. There are more, people whose names flutter in and out of remembering, who come attached with different swatches of shame.

The Ric Ocasik look-alike and his wife lived downstairs. Their daughter Cinnamon, a brooding teen sat me, if that’s what you could call her constant refrain to “get over it” when my crying wouldn’t cease. Their good friend, a grown man, once tried to talk dirty to me, but I ran upstairs and turned him in.

The children, you’ll notice–not a single one, not even the babies–aren’t smiling. Not now. Not for years to come.

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Jordan is author of five books (two forthcoming). Her work has appeared in: Brain, Child, Coachella Review, Full Grown People, Ozy, The Nervous Breakdown, the New York Times, The Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot and more. www.jordanrosenfeld.net