Another Part of the Essay

Another beginning of an installment in my photo essay thingy. Definitely rough. I welcome any thoughts or comments as to how to shape it and how it interacts with its other parts.

The photograph is of J. She is three, maybe four, years old. It is important that I have forgotten her age. A few days before this photograph was taken, her father hanged himself in her great-grandmother's house. In the photograph there is a billowing sheet around her head. She was dressing up as a bride, I think. A small bouquet of plastic flowers, like part of a LEGO set, is in one of her hands. October, in Tennessee, is still warm enough that you don't necessarily need a jacket but not quite warm enough that you don't need a little layering. Under J's dress, the color of which I cannot recall, was a long sleeved shirt incongruous to the rest of her ensemble. J. is now 14. Her father loved her and she loved him. He picked her up and spun her around. One time, in a grocery store, he threw her little 18 month old body way up into the air and I knew, though it was scary to watch, that he would catch her. Though not, by any stretch, a perfect husband he was a good father. Though she couldn't possibly understand that her father was really and truly dead and gone, J's eyes and face radiate the fact of it. Her eyes, to me, look defiant and wise.

The sheer number of people trying to touch her, pet her, speak to her and tell her what to do; the sheer absence of her father and all these strangers, including myself, trying to stand in for her mother while she dealt with funeral arrangements and phone calls. In retrospect it seems like some of us clambered a little too enthusiastically to be the comfort for the daughter. How could we not? A beautiful child fundamentally changed by something way beyond her control. I'm not sure if I include myself in this number but for the sake of propriety I probably should. I was fifteen.

I went to boarding school and didn't always call my mother back when she called me. So when I received a fax from my mother (a first) insisting that I return her calls, I did. Right before that, though, I went to the cafeteria and had a bite to eat. I sat at a round table with a few other friends, which ones I couldn't tell you. I remember being nonchalant about the fax, a bit curious about my mother's determination to get in contact with me. I remember not, even for a second, being worried that the phone call would be a bad one. I walked up the one flight of stairs to my hall and called home. On the phone she told me M. had killed himself. The conversation itself, its words and duration, is lost to me now. I know that I hung up the phone, went to my room and wept while loud, aggressive music (or as aggressive as my musical tendencies at the time would allow) played in the background. I'm thinking Temple of the Dog or Alice in Chains. By that point M. and I did not have much of a relationship and so I was not crying because of his absence from my life, no, I wept at the gaping hole his leaving left in his daughter's life.

There is a difference between the story of a photograph and the story that came before or after it. It is not a monument to M. as much as it is a marker and reminder of the consequences of his final action. It is a photograph of a stunning little girl. If I never gave a back-story to the photograph then it would simply look like a Sally Mann rip-off. I know I thought it was important to take photographs of J. That she would be glad, somehow, to see proof of that time. I don't think this is true now. Why would she want to see photographs of herself as a young child during the days immediately following her father's death? But, nonetheless, I felt it was important at the time. It also, of course, allowed me some distance, some remove. I was documenting something instead of participating in it. C. and I recently spoke about her memories of me during that visit. I think she said I looked scared or lost or that I was comforting. It's a shame that I didn't just write down her words at that very moment, but I didn't. There is nothing you can do or say to someone during times of tragedy. I think I learned that then. I was quiet. A shadow. I sat in C.'s office with her while she spoke on the phone to a friend not yet in town and listened to her grief and rage, saying nothing, touching nothing except the cigarette offered to me.
Do you ever have those childhood memories of when you did a bad thing or were in a negative mood? You can't remember from the memory exactly what you did or why you would have done it? I have a memory like that in terms of M. As a kid I loved C. (J's mother/M's wife/my godmother/cousin) for her polka dot high heels, indoor trampoline, upside down boots and willingness to let me mash her face into strange expressions with my grubby little fingers. When she and M. moved away (they had lived down the street from my parents and me since I was born) I was seven and I was not happy about it.

M. came to visit some time after their departure, without C. I assume he was in town for a performance (he was a rather totally engaging performer). I remember him making blackened shrimp in our kitchen and the smoke detector going off and a terrible smell filling the dining room and rolling black smoke hovering above me. I remember being mad at him. Or, actually, I don't remember being mad at him. I just can't explain my behavior unless it was due to anger on my part. I may have thought that he was the reason that C. moved away though, in actuality, he was not. On that same visit M. took me to a performance of a friend of his. It was in the equivalent of a school gym or cafeteria and it was a show geared towards elementary students. After the show M. left me sitting in the chairs while all the rest of the audience left. He went 'back stage' and spoke with his friend. It felt like, to me at age 8-10?, hours. I was definitely peeved and wanted to go home. Then we drove somewhere other than home. It was a house. He was going to get his hair braided. He left me in the car and went into the house alone. Maybe it was only ten minutes. It felt like at least twenty. I was in his truck. I don't remember the color of its interior. I also cannot remember what I did or thought. I simply remember the waiting Then he came back and I can't remember if his hair was braided or not. There was something cold about M. then. There was a silence in those drives. I don't know which came first: my anger towards him or his aloofness from me.

That same visit I must have put something gross on an article of M's clothing. A blue sweatshirt, I think. And the something gross? Well, I don't know what it was. Maybe a weird potion of hand lotion, shampoo and Neosporin? I don't know. I remember being asked if I did such a thing and vehemently denying it, knowing full well that I was guilty, guilty, guilty. Part of my memory of M is totally tainted by that visit. By my bad behavior and refusal to own up to it and his leaving me alone in unfamiliar places, making my house smell like burning and (as far as I was concerned…maybe??) for taking C. away from me.

I have more positive memories of M. somewhere in my brain. He did an excellent airplane: knew how to firmly center his feet into my wibble wobbly belly and get me airborne. He may have been the last human being I ever felt comfortable pressing my full weight against.

I recently spoke with C. about the photograph and that time period and it was straight up fascinating, the difference in our interpretations. C. saw J. as looking lost and looking at me, the photographer, to make sense of all that was going on around her. Her eyes are looking straight into the lens in a way that, to me, suggests defiance. Her gaze is strong and stubborn, two traits the young adult J. has in abundance. Two traits she would have had, regardless of her father's death. Can C. and my conflicting readings of the photograph jibe? Is it possible that she could be lost, looking for guidance, defiant, stubborn and strong?