You couldn’t stand cat dander, Grannam says. You sneezed and sneezed. I thought your brains were going to fly out your nose.
That was mom, says Andi. Mom couldn’t tolerate cat dander.
The nights I stayed up with you…
I don’t have any allergies, Grannam. I love cats.
Why do you live in the middle of nowhere? she asks. There’s nothing there, sweetheart.
It doesn’t feel that way, Andi says. When you’re here, it doesn’t feel like nowhere at all. You look and then go away and come back and you still can’t believe your eyes, it’s so stunning.
There’s so much sky, you say. I didn’t think there could be so much sky in one place.
Does Anita need new clothes?
What?
Does she need new clothes?
Gen? No. She’s fine. She’s good.
What does she need?
That’s really nice of you, you say. Thanks for asking, but she’s good. She is. We’d tell you if there was something she could use. We promise.
You’re sure?
A hundred and ten percent, says Andi.
You can count on us, you say. Really. Don’t worry about a thing, okay?
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
THIS PHOTOGRAPH ARRIVES from the future.
It tells you what Gen will look like when she is four or five.
It tells you what she will not look like.
It tells you her hair will or will not darken from yours into Andi’s.
How she will or will not pose for you one day in front of her great-grandmother’s white-sided ranch home, all rectangles and horizontal lines, just like you and Andi posed for Jack Pederson in front of your cabin.
This photograph also arrives from the past.
It tells you about Andi’s relationship with the person behind the camera: her sense of anticipation, her eagerness to please, her hungriness to be daddy’s good little girl.
Look into her eyes and you can see it.
Listen and you can hear her father say Now don’t move as he steadies her in his viewfinder.
You can make out the quick fluster in the driveway on a sunny Easter Sunday before church, her pink costume against the holly-green hedge.
The bone-white house.
The diluted blue sky.
Hold it. That’s it…
A starter home.
The bland understatement of the plants, the bare treeless stretch of siding.
How the driveway on which Andi waits marches right up to the foundation.
In 1637 Descartes placed a dissected ox eye in the blind of a window.
Looking outside.
The membrane scraped from the back until it was thin enough to be translucent without ripping.
Hold it…
The camera aiming off-center as if Andi’s father were expecting someone else to step into the frame at the last second.
The room darkening.
The room darkening and the world turning upside down on the back of the ox eye.
What was left of the ox eye.
Perhaps he is distracted by the family dog, a manic dachshund named Dewey with a tail sharp as a spike.
Dark cousin Karla throwing a mangy gray tennis ball at Dewey in the yard.
Karla being a three-foot-tall egg with pudgy appendages today.
Dioptrics.
Maybe someone is speaking to Andi’s father while he is trying to take the shot.
The name of Descartes’ book in which he described the experiment is called Dioptrics, you suddenly remember.
Andi’s mother, say, near the black Packard grumble-chugging in the driveway.
One of Karla’s parents dressed elegantly beside her, restless to get this thing over, feigning interest in their daughter and niece while talking about pruning the new rose bushes or whacking golf balls down the fairway at the local country club.
A Packard or a Chevy station wagon.
Plato’s cave being an anachronistic metaphor for the shadows projected on the interior wall of a camera obscura.
On the interior wall of a camera obscura or on the interior wall of an ox eye.
One of them asking a question.
He answering as he sights and clicks.
It is difficult to tell without more information.
It is always difficult to tell.
But still.
The effect of the crop being to foreground Andi’s solitude, is the point.
The pathos of her pride juxtaposed against these visual badlands.
Three minutes (Andi narrates the rest of the story sitting next to you on the living room couch one evening, photo album winged open in her lap) — three minutes, and Karla and she take off after yipping Dewey in a fit of childhood.
Tearing across clipped grass.
Mothers yelling Stop, yelling It’s time to leave, You’re going to get your costumes all dirty, You’re going to be late for church.
But everything feels so sunny, so green, it only makes Andi race faster.
Race faster and reach out for no particular reason and plunge forward and grab Dewey’s spiky tail in her fist and yank him to a yappy struggling standstill.
Laughing on her stomach.
Laughing on her stomach, then laughing on her back.
Gazing up into that once-in-a-season sky and feeling so good.
Laughing and feeling so good until the shadow of her father’s hand swoops down just like that and she is a rag doll spinning in wide circles, her father the fulcrum.
Swats landing on her fanny each time she completes a full rotation.
The world polished through a tear-shine fish-eye lens.
The world polished through a tear-shine fish-eye lens and someone having unexpectedly flipped off the audio portion of this film.
The silent footage.
The silent footage, looping.
Look at her furry bracelets.
Her out-of-focus feet.
Look at her bunnied hands in their carpal curl, the L of her ears, the vulnerable bunching at her crotch, the slight bulge of her belly.
You can feel every muscle in her body prepare to accommodate the photographer, strive to remain the person she believes she is, become the one she wants others to believe she is, the one the man behind the camera wants her to be.
To be photographed, you spot her intuiting, means always wearing an expression.
To be photographed means always being an impostor.
Where your ideas end and other people’s ideas begin is impossible to tell, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.
Somebody may have said that before as well.
Somebody probably did.
You spot Andi hovering between being a person and being a picture.
You can spot her dissipating into the sister of that other rag dolclass="underline" the eyepatched specter bracing herself for who knows what.
The latent photographic image waiting to be developed.
Strolling through the front door one afternoon, sorting mail, you come across your wife lying on the couch.
Eyes closed, rubbing her jaw.
What? you ask.
I haven’t had a toothache since I was… I’ve never had a toothache, come to think of it, she says, and look at this: a toothache.
I didn’t know people got toothaches anymore.
People don’t get leprosy anymore. Toothaches, I think, they still get. Any good mail?
Shouldn’t you have that looked at?
She rises, drops her hand. Hair falling around her face. The late morning sun through the front windows bringing out all the colors: café noir, dark red, flaxen traces, even the first suggestions of zinc at the temples.