Pictures of You

Pictures of You: Michelle Bailat-Jones

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 “we counted the birds off instead,” by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Fullscreen capture 3162015 84731 PMDeviled eggs, our mothers told us, that is what the men would want on a day like today. We woke at dawn, for there were cousins coming and neighbors and children. Our dresses grew limp from all the boiling. Some of us took the time to change before the cars started rolling up the back field—tires crunching, horns squawking—some of us ran outside anyway, grateful for the cool air on our faces.

Over at the creek, tree branches tssked their fingers at us in the eleven o’clock wind. You said there would be ants, swatting already at your skirt, smoothing and pulling at the darts, and I wished I’d chosen a floral print, too.

The men carried their bottles and blankets and footballs and jackets. Their hair was combed, their shirts open at the collar. They were forgetting the children already, shouting only half-hearted rules and reminders. Watching them dash and tumble in the grass and the weeds, then vanish at the wood in a line of bright heads. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Ellen Parker

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“See Here,” by Ellen Parker

Fullscreen capture 3162015 82811 PMThis little boy is my dad. Someone gave me this photo of him shortly after he died. I’d never seen it before then. After someone dies, after the person is no longer available to be looked at, how come people relinquish all these pictures they’ve been stockpiling?

Maybe the mindset is: Now that this person is gone, you might want some clues as to who he was.

In fact, yes. I’ve been looking for clues. I’ve been looking all my life.

Notice his hands. They don’t look like little-kid hands. When he was 74 years old and in the hospital, dying—actually, dead; a machine was doing his breathing, but we were still hoping—I watched his hands rest against the sheets. They didn’t look like old-guy hands. They were the same hands you see in the photo. A little chubbier, though. Fleshier. A little younger. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Alia Yunis

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“Two” by Alia Yunis

 

Fullscreen capture 3132015 21822 PMBaghdad, Circa 1958

This is a photo of my mom and her fellow teachers on the train in Baghdad, which my mom used to say was their weekend escape to the big city.  My mom and her friends were Palestinians and Egyptians who at 18 years old were sent by their families to help out with finances by teaching newly oil-rich Kuwaiti girls Arabic, English and math.  It reminds me that  Baghdad once meant hope, sophistication and fun, not tragedy and terror. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Holly Robinson

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“Why Are the Men in Your Novels So Nice?” by Holly Robinson

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Recently, I was talking to a book club about my latest novel when a woman demanded, “Why are the men in your novels so nice?”

The woman said the word “nice” like it was a deadly contagious disease, or maybe a tricky tax question. I stumbled through an answer about writing emotional family mysteries with dark secrets, and how I try to give readers a beacon of hope by the end of each novel.

However, the real answer is simpler, I realized later: the men in my novels are nice because I have a great brother. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jordan E. Rosenfeld

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

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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. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Victoria Barrett

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“First Apartment, Spring 1996,” by Victoria Barrett

 

Fullscreen capture 352015 85722 AMIn the fall of 1995 I was twenty-one years old, living with my mother in an apartment in my hometown. I had flunked out of college that spring and slunk home with my head hanging, vacillating between deep, deep shame and panic. I was a Smart Kid. My smartness had, growing up, been the only thing about me that mattered. What I wanted once I was on my own at school was to be loved, smart or no: loved by family, loved by a boy, loved by friends. Failing that, I would have liked to be admired. Failing that, well, I didn’t know what I wanted. That summer and fall I worked a day job dispatching truck drivers and waited tables at night, convinced I was the kind of loser who had already done at age twenty-one every worthwhile thing she’d ever do. I wanted to go back to school—I was determined that I would—but more immediately, I needed to live somewhere else. The fights were getting nastier and more severe. My mother had been hitting me, throwing at me whatever came to hand, telling me she wished I hadn’t been born since I was twelve. By this time there was nothing left but the fighting. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Asha Rajan

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Fullscreen capture 352015 84900 AM“Ammamma,” by Asha Rajan

I met my maternal grandmother when I was six months old. It was my first trip to our ancestral home, the youngest of her grandchildren, the last of the matrilineal line. Every Summer holiday after that was spent there.

I wish I could have known her as an adult. I wish I had had the foresight to ask all the questions that come to me now, to niggle out the details of her life, her ambitions, her desires, her disappointments. But that’s not to be. Thirty years ago, on the 9th of February, when I was 15 and she was 85, my Ammamma, my Mothermother, died. Hers was not an easy death, not a slow waning with time for goodbyes, not a death she had been prepared for in any way. I know this because I was with her in those last gasping moments. I was the only one of her family with her, and at 15, I was inadequately equipped to deal with all I experienced. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jim Tomlinson

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” Seven Things I Know to be True,” by Jim Tomlinson

1. Red is the color my brother doesn’t see. If he were to look at this old photo, he’d think your blouse was a faded grey-green. When we were young, he’d insist on swapping golf tees with me, his reds for my whites or yellows. For years he didn’t say why.

2. Hammersmith Farm was the family cottage to which young Jackie Bouvier often came in summer. In a nearby Newport church, in fact, she married Jack Kennedy. His presidential helicopter sometimes landed on Hammersmith’s long west lawn, and the couple’s young daughter, arms outstretched, would race down that long grassy slope to greet her arriving father, the image captured by ready photographers.

3. It was fifteen years before the day you cartwheeled across Hammersmith’s sunlit lawn that I first met your mother, this at a Newport dance. We’d stay married thirteen years more.

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Pictures of You: Sara Lippmann

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“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.Fullscreen capture 352015 82925 AM

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. Continue reading →