"Look at my hair," Eric laughs. "I look like Dorothy Hamill."
"No, I look like Dorothy Hamill. You look like a portobello
mushroom."
In the next two albums I pick up, I am older. There are fewer
pictures of us as a trio, and more of Eric and me, with Fitz sprinkled in. Our
senior prom picture: Eric and I, and then Fitz in his own snapshot with a girl
whose name I can't recall.
One night when we were fifteen we told our parents we were going
on a school-sponsored overnight and instead climbed to the top of Dartmouth's
Baker Library bell tower to watch a meteor shower. We drank peach schnapps
stolen from Eric's parents' liquor cabinet and watched the stars play tag with
the moon. Fitz fell asleep holding the bottle and Eric and I waited for the
cursive of comets. Did you see that one? Eric asked. When I couldn't find the
falling star, he took my hand and guided my finger. And then he just kept
holding on.
By the time we climbed down at 4:30 a.m., I had had my first
kiss, and it wasn't the three of us anymore. .
Just then my father comes into the room. "I'm headed upstairs to
watch Leno," he says. "Lock up, okay?"
I glance up. "Where are my baby pictures?"
"In the albums."
"No . . . these only go back to when I'm four or five." I sit
up. "It would be nice to have your wedding picture, too, for the video."
I have the only photo of my mother that is on display in this
house. She is on the cusp of smiling, and you cannot look at it without
wondering who made her happy just then, and how.
My father looks down at the ground, and shakes his head a
little. "Well, I knew it was going to happen sometime. Come on, then."
Eric and I follow him to his bedroom and sit down on the double
bed, on the side where he doesn't sleep. From the closet, my father takes down a
tin with a Pepsi-Cola logo stamped onto the front. He dumps the contents onto
the covers between Eric and me—dozens of photographs of my mother, draped in
peasant skirts and gauze blouses, her black hair hanging down her back like a
river. A wedding portrait: my mother in a belled white dress; my father trussed
in his tuxedo, looking like he might bolt at any second. Photos of me, wrapped
tight as a croissant, awkwardly balanced in my mother's arms. And one of my
mother and father on an ugly green couch with me between them, a bridge made of
dimpled flesh, of blended blood.
It is like visiting another planet when you only have one roll
of film to record it, like coming to a banquet after a hunger strike—there is so
much here that I have to consciously keep myself from racing through, before it
all disappears. My face gets hot, as if I've been slapped. "Why were you hiding
these?"
He takes one photograph out of my hand and stares at it long
enough for me to believe he has completely forgotten that Eric and I are in the
room. "I tried keeping a few of the pictures out," my father explains, "but you
kept asking when she was coming home. And I'd pass them, and stop, and lose ten
minutes or a half hour or a half day. I didn't hide them because I didn't want
to look at them, Delia. I hid them because that was all I wanted to do." He puts
the wedding picture back in the tin and scatters the rest on top. "You can have
them," my father tells me. "You can have them all."
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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