Animal Dreams
Page 102
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I remembered her arms when they were thinner; a younger Uda. And I remembered standing at a kitchen counter, on a stool, patting out my own handprints in floured dough while she wove strips of piecrust, pale and thin as flayed skin, over and under to make a perfect pie top. I was experiencing a flash flood of memories. I feared I might drown in them. My skull was so crowded with images it hurt.
"He raised you to be good girls," she said again. She reached over and squeezed my upper arm before returning the shoe to its box.
I didn't know what to tell her we were looking for, for the historical project-anything documenting the age of the house would be helpful, and more generally, old photographs of any kind. Uda seemed content to poke into boxes at random, but I tried to ground myself by reading labels: "CROCKERY AND FLATWARE." "GARDEN RECORDS." One bore the mystic title "ELECTRICITY." I looked inside: socket hardware, lamp cord, the reflector from a heat lamp, a pair of rubber gloves.
I couldn't resist getting sidetracked by one marked, "ARTWORK, H., AGE 3-6." The subjects of Hallie's crayon drawings were mainly the two of us, stick sisters holding hands, or else just me, my orangeish hair radiating from my head like a storm of solar flares. There was not one figure anywhere representing Doc Homer. I wondered if he'd noticed. But he must have. He was the one who'd picked up each drawing, rescued it from destruction, and finally labeled the box. The invisible archivist of our lives.
Out of curiosity I tracked down the corresponding box called "ARTWORK, C." As I'd expected, it was full of family portraits. Big sister, little sister, father, mother, a cockeyed roof over our heads and above that an omnipresent yellow sun. It didn't resemble anyone's reality but mine, but there it was. Or maybe it wasn't so much a matter of reality as of expectation-what I felt the world owed me. I held two of our drawings side by side and concluded that there was no puzzle as to why we were different. Hallie and I had grown up in different families.
"Here's pictures," Uda reported suddenly. There was a whole aisle of boxes marked "PHOTOGRAPHS," with inscrutable suffixes. I picked up one marked "PHOTOGRAPHS, AM JOUR GEN" and found it surprisingly light, so I carried it over to the east window and sat down on a steamer trunk, settling the box on my lap before opening it. Inside were stacks of ancient eight-by-tens, their brown edges curled like autumn leaves. Each one was a photograph of a newborn baby with a startled-looking face and marble-white eyes. I leafed through them, one after another, awestruck by the oddity of these children. Of course I knew about the eyes, an anomaly of pigmentation that was genetic proof of Gracela heritage on both sides. But I'd never seen them. They tended to darken just hours after birth, and in modern times a person can easily go through life, in Grace or anywhere, without seeing a newborn.
On top of the stack of photos was a handwritten page with the heading: "Notes on Methodology." The ink had faded to brown. This would all be for his genetics paper: Doc Homer's careful notations on how he'd set up the camera, the distance, the amount of light. Apparently he'd rigged some set-up that used powerful flashbulbs, the old-fashioned kind that popped once and then were used up. It was before the days of modern electronics.
All those babies. How they must have screamed, one second after he shot them in the name of science. Or in the name of his own desire to set himself apart. What could be more arrogant than to come back and do a scientific study of your own townspeople, like so many natives in Borneo? I looked through the photos again and kept coming back to one that had an arresting familiarity. The eyes looked back as if they knew me. I stared at the baby for a long time.
It was me.
"You were a doll baby," Uda said. She was looking down over my shoulder.
"That's me? Are you sure?"
She took the stack and shuffled through it like a card trick. She produced another photo. "There's Hallie. You didn't look a thing alike when you were born." To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see. To me, we looked identical.
I held the two photographs up to the light, mystified. The eyes were unearthly. We were two babies not of this world. Just like every other one in the stack of photos; two more babies of Grace. He was doing exactly the opposite of setting himself apart. He was proving we belonged here, were as pure as anybody in Grace. Both sides. Our mother's name was Althea. Her family despised him.
"We're puro," I said out loud. And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind. I heard myself make an odd little whimper.
"He raised you to be good girls," she said again. She reached over and squeezed my upper arm before returning the shoe to its box.
I didn't know what to tell her we were looking for, for the historical project-anything documenting the age of the house would be helpful, and more generally, old photographs of any kind. Uda seemed content to poke into boxes at random, but I tried to ground myself by reading labels: "CROCKERY AND FLATWARE." "GARDEN RECORDS." One bore the mystic title "ELECTRICITY." I looked inside: socket hardware, lamp cord, the reflector from a heat lamp, a pair of rubber gloves.
I couldn't resist getting sidetracked by one marked, "ARTWORK, H., AGE 3-6." The subjects of Hallie's crayon drawings were mainly the two of us, stick sisters holding hands, or else just me, my orangeish hair radiating from my head like a storm of solar flares. There was not one figure anywhere representing Doc Homer. I wondered if he'd noticed. But he must have. He was the one who'd picked up each drawing, rescued it from destruction, and finally labeled the box. The invisible archivist of our lives.
Out of curiosity I tracked down the corresponding box called "ARTWORK, C." As I'd expected, it was full of family portraits. Big sister, little sister, father, mother, a cockeyed roof over our heads and above that an omnipresent yellow sun. It didn't resemble anyone's reality but mine, but there it was. Or maybe it wasn't so much a matter of reality as of expectation-what I felt the world owed me. I held two of our drawings side by side and concluded that there was no puzzle as to why we were different. Hallie and I had grown up in different families.
"Here's pictures," Uda reported suddenly. There was a whole aisle of boxes marked "PHOTOGRAPHS," with inscrutable suffixes. I picked up one marked "PHOTOGRAPHS, AM JOUR GEN" and found it surprisingly light, so I carried it over to the east window and sat down on a steamer trunk, settling the box on my lap before opening it. Inside were stacks of ancient eight-by-tens, their brown edges curled like autumn leaves. Each one was a photograph of a newborn baby with a startled-looking face and marble-white eyes. I leafed through them, one after another, awestruck by the oddity of these children. Of course I knew about the eyes, an anomaly of pigmentation that was genetic proof of Gracela heritage on both sides. But I'd never seen them. They tended to darken just hours after birth, and in modern times a person can easily go through life, in Grace or anywhere, without seeing a newborn.
On top of the stack of photos was a handwritten page with the heading: "Notes on Methodology." The ink had faded to brown. This would all be for his genetics paper: Doc Homer's careful notations on how he'd set up the camera, the distance, the amount of light. Apparently he'd rigged some set-up that used powerful flashbulbs, the old-fashioned kind that popped once and then were used up. It was before the days of modern electronics.
All those babies. How they must have screamed, one second after he shot them in the name of science. Or in the name of his own desire to set himself apart. What could be more arrogant than to come back and do a scientific study of your own townspeople, like so many natives in Borneo? I looked through the photos again and kept coming back to one that had an arresting familiarity. The eyes looked back as if they knew me. I stared at the baby for a long time.
It was me.
"You were a doll baby," Uda said. She was looking down over my shoulder.
"That's me? Are you sure?"
She took the stack and shuffled through it like a card trick. She produced another photo. "There's Hallie. You didn't look a thing alike when you were born." To her the eyes were commonplace, not a feature to connect us, but they were the only feature I could see. To me, we looked identical.
I held the two photographs up to the light, mystified. The eyes were unearthly. We were two babies not of this world. Just like every other one in the stack of photos; two more babies of Grace. He was doing exactly the opposite of setting himself apart. He was proving we belonged here, were as pure as anybody in Grace. Both sides. Our mother's name was Althea. Her family despised him.
"We're puro," I said out loud. And then I dropped the photographs because I heard the broken-glass pop of the flash and went blind. I heard myself make an odd little whimper.
