No sign of that grimace I captured in the later hours.
I move on to the “real” pictures and linger over one of our neighbor Janet, a loud and plain-faced divorcée who’s buxom and wears enough bright lipstick to muster a dull suburban glamour. I’ve caught her with a wide-open mouth, roaring with laughter. She looks ready to eat the trio of men who lean in as if offering themselves up for consumption. Like Saturn, about to devour his child—though hers is a careless and sensual devouring.Will Paul like it?I wonder, which makes me realize:I will show these to Paul. The hesitation I’ve felt these past few days has vanished. Iwillshow him. Will I share the one of Tom, too? It turned out so well, so brutally revealing. My stomach sinks to think of Paul seeing my husband this way, but if I don’t tell him who Tom is, and if Tom himself never knows, the harm is practically nonexistent, isn’t it?
I can’t answer my own question so I leave the party pictures behindfor the prints I took of myself in the toy store window. I study the first image with a hitch in my breath, remembering the odd sensation that passed through me. Will I see some phantom version of myself? But it’s me. I see my solid, unsmiling face, the familiar shape of my body. The sky around me, and the sad teddy bear inside the dark outline of my reflected skirt. There’s something odd in the background, though, reflected faintly behind me: a human-shaped smudge or shadow near the top right-hand corner of the print. I bring it closer to try to make it out. An imperfection, or a person? It’s hard to tell. If someone was standing behind me, watching, I didn’t notice at the time, but they would have been so far away—across the street, in a space between two houses—I could have easily missed them.
Missedhim.
The more I look, the more certain I am that it’s a man. I can’t see any details of his heavily shadowed body or face, but I can tell he’s looking toward my reflection in the window.
It’s him. It must be him.Cold spreads through my body like liquid.
It can’t be him, but the sudden spike of pain in my side says otherwise.
Before last night, I rarely thought of him, about thefactof my long-ago attacker. The long, placid surface of my adult life had made the past seem implausible—madehimseem implausible. But now, this hellish jolt: a sign of his existence in every version of my toy store self-portrait. It doesn’t appear in the party pictures taken with the same roll of film, so I’m fairly certain it isn’t an impurity—though the party backgrounds are darker, less visible. Maybe it’s there, and I’ve missed it? I feel a slight surge of hope that fades quickly.
I return to the pictures I took in town. It can’t be him; it simply can’t. They never caught him, but even if he were still alive, why and how would he find menow, halfway across the country, over thirty years later? The figure was more likely a random passerby, someone who paused to watch me taking photographs.
I tell myself this, but my body rejects it.
Staring at that ominous shape, I think of Grandmother readingaloud from the news article about the search for my attacker over dinner one night, as nonchalantly as if it had nothing to do with me. I sat there shaking violently until the fork in my hand clattered to my plate, which earned me a scolding.
Soon after, my father disappeared. Or—he took a job in Montana and never returned. Grandmother blamed me—for his leaving, for getting attacked. For not recalling the man’s face, which led to the police department’s long, futile search. For becoming strange and withdrawn, an object of both pity and curiosity in our town.
Around this time, I found my father’s Kodak 35, bought on a whim and abandoned in a desk drawer with rolls of unused film. Nearly housebound, except for school—which was a torment after the attack—I started taking pictures: of gleaming doorknobs, sunlit windows, the gloomy staircase leading to the attic. I loved the heft of the camera in my hands, the sound it made when I advanced the film, and the neat click of the button. I loved how the camera rendered everything I saw precise and comprehensible. It made me feel safe, warming to my hand and showing me wonders in the world—even in my own tainted corner of it.
The more I used the camera, the more nuanced my photographs became. I felt intense anticipation and delight whenever I went to pick up my prints from the shop. I’d keep the pictures hidden away in old shoeboxes on the top shelf of my closet and sit cross-legged on the floor of my room to flip through them, seeing how I’d captured and remade the world in each small rectangle, how I’d controlled the wild edges of things. It flooded me with relief: proof of this small power I had.
Soon enough, I finished high school and was able to move far away. After Tom and I met at a cousin’s wedding, we married and settled in Harrington, New Jersey, and for many years I used the camera the way a good wife and mother should: to capture birthdays, school plays, graduations, vacations. I felt proud of myself, living the way Grandmother would have liked, leaving the past in the past, moving forward, always forward.People forget all kinds of things. People live by forgetting, Ionce read in a book. It soothed and consoled me, told me I was doing well. I was fine. When I touched my scars, the past would bubble up, but I’d smother it quickly, move on.
Maybe that’s why I hear Grandmother now, sense her disgust like hot breath on the back of my neck.What are you doing, Judith? Awake in the night, worrying over this nothing, this smudge?I quickly gather the prints into a neat pile, store them in a kitchen drawer, and pour myself a cup of cold water.
Drinking it clears my head but when I look down I expect to see Rosie, her little tail wagging. I choke back a sob, hold it in with a hand pressed to my mouth. Grandmother’s voice tells me togo back upstairs, and I will, I will. If only I believed that sleep would change what I’veseen.
8.
When Paul ends class, the students around me pack up their belongings and leave—except for three young women I call “the fangirls” who spend the lecture tossing their hair or smoothing it in place, crossing and uncrossing their long, stockinged legs. They turn their heads in unison to track Paul’s movements as he walks and talks. I envy them their fresh young beauty, but none of it has earned them anything near the attention Paul has gladly given me.
When the fangirls leave, they hardly look at me, so focused are they on swaying their hips as they climb the steps, casting looks over their shoulders at a seemingly oblivious Paul. At the last moment, I see his eyes flick up, take in the sight of their retreating backsides. But then he spots me, seated and waiting.
“Judith,” he says, and it sounds perfunctory. “Sorry, but did you have pictures to show me?” He’s smiling but I can tell he’s distracted and tired. Drained from teaching, and it’s after nine o’clock. I’ve been foolish to wait. I thrust my envelope of photographs back into my bag and pack the rest of my things.
“I can show you another time,” I say, rising to go.
“No, I’d love to see them now.” He sounds suddenly brighter, a little revived. I hesitate before walking down with my envelope, but of course I do. It’s what I’ve come here to do; it’s what I thought about at the party and what I’ve thought about ever since:sharing my pictures withPaul. As I stand beside him, trying to see them through his eyes, I notice how I’ve emphasized the shadowy corners of Samantha’s living room, the shadows beneath Janet’s eyes, her wide-open, shadowy mouth—the shadows everywhere on this so-called joyous occasion.
Shadows in the bedroom, too. That ugly coupling.I fight to bring my focus back to Paul and the pictures in his hand. Not the pictures I didn’t, couldn’t, take that night. The ones I can’t erase from my mind. If I’d managed to capture the man and woman on film, maybe I’d be able to move on and forget them. But they linger, indelible and grossly alive.
“Man, Judith, these are fantastic,” Paul says. He says it quietly, but it startles me from my dark reverie. His eyes are glued to the photograph of Janet with her head thrown back, mouth gaping. I’m so pleased by his comment that I start to babble.
“She looks like Saturn, doesn’t she? The one who ate his children. Or child. His son. But obviously those are—men.”
Paul nods absent-mindedly. His eyes are roving over every last detail.
“The mundane made ominous and mythical, right?” he says without looking up. I love the way he’s phrased it and long to write it down.
Paul runs his hand through his thick, nearly shoulder-length hair—something he does often during class—and keeps flipping through the pictures. He praises the one of Hal grimacing at Samantha’s kiss, and pauses at the photograph of Tom, too. I stop breathing for a moment.
“This one—he looks like the guy who makes jokes at parties to please everyone.” I cringe inwardly at the delight in Paul’s eyes but nod along, smiling, having earned my ounce of approval at Tom’s expense.
