Читать книгу Quick Kills - Lynn Lurie - Страница 13

A mucus-like patch more brown than red and now I cannot keep my favorite pair of underpants. I carry them to school and stop in the alleyway behind the five-and-dime where I plan to toss them into the Dumpster. What if someone sees me or finds them and knows they belong to me? Then he or she will know what happened.

Instead, I will need to take a bus to a nearby town where I don’t know anyone and find a quiet backstreet with a trash bin. When I’m sure I’m alone, I’ll take the underpants, stuffed between American history and algebra, out of my school bag. When they are in the trash I will cover them with the garbage already there, the browned apple cores, the leftover spaghetti, and the wad of paper towels stained with rot and rain, and wait at the nearest corner to make sure no one has seen me.

After all the planning, I go to the Dumpster in the alleyway and fling the stained underpants over the side. They catch on the metal rim and hang there, the pattern of lilacs laced together with purple ribbons.

Mother calls upstairs. Dinnertime.

I already ate, I call back. Which could have been true, because the first time I went to the Photographer’s house he made me dinner.

My pajamas are striped in red and white like the twine used to close a bakery box. Grandmother embroidered my name and Helen’s on the shirt pockets to distinguish us. They insist on dressing us the same. I don’t mind but Helen hates it and lets them know. Had Helen been home that night maybe I would have told her. I do not know if I would have said it was good or bad, or if I would have told her I had agreed.

I wake up gagging and run to the toilet, throwing up slippery water, and even when there is nothing left I do not feel better.

If Mother had asked to see the photographs the Photographer took I could not have shown her, not even one, as in almost every shot I am naked, and if I am clothed, I am either posed or making an expression that is inappropriate.

You said things to me, all sorts of things about my talent for photography. I now know it isn’t a talent. But this was not your crime. You were nearly the same age as Father.

Young girls, you said, fill canvasses, and gave me a book of photographs of paintings by Renoir and Gauguin. I liked the one by Renoir where the girls, I imagined them to be sisters, maybe even twins in identical party dresses, are draped alongside a grand piano. They are awkward in their bodies and it shows in the way their shoulders are positioned. Still, they know how to be watched.

Helen preferred a photograph of a painting by Gauguin. A bare-breasted woman looks directly at the painter without shame, but without joy either.

You catalogue the pictures of me and file the negatives in a locked metal cabinet, occasionally offering me a print if there is one you are especially proud of. Anything you gave me is gone now, as are mostly all of the photographs I took then. I never took one of your face and I always had my camera with me.