Violet's eyes narrowed. "I read," she said in a fierce voice. "First I put on Bill's work clothes and then I read. I read all day. I read from nine in the morning until six at night. I read and read and read until I can't see the page anymore."
The first images on the screen were of newborns—tiny beings with distorted heads and frail, squirming limbs. Bill's camera never left the infants. Adults were present as arms, chests, shoulders, knees, thighs, voices, and occasionally a large face that intruded into the lens and came close to the baby. The first child was asleep in a woman's arms. The little creature had a large head, thin blue-red arms and legs, and was dressed in a checkered suit and an absurd little white bonnet that tied under its chin. That infant was followed by another strapped to a man's chest. His dark hair stuck straight up like Lazlo's, and his black eyes turned toward the camera in dumbfounded amazement Bill followed along as the children rode in carriages, slept in Snuglis, lolled on a parental arm, or had seizures of desperate weeping on a shoulder. Sometimes the mostly unseen parents or nannies delivered monologues on sleeping habits, nursing, breast pumps, or spitting up as the traffic rumbled and screeched behind them, but the talk and noise were incidental to the moving pictures of the small strangers—the one who turned his bald head away from his mother's breast, leaking milk from the sides of his mouth; the dark-skinned beauty who sucked an invisible breast in her sleep and then appeared to smile; the alert baby whose blue eyes moved up toward its mother's face and gazed at her with what looked like profound concentration.
As far as I could tell, the only principle that guided Bill was age. Every day he must have gone out and looked for children a little older than the day before. Gradually his camera left infants and turned to older babies, who sat up, chirped, squealed, grunted, and put every loose object they could reach into their mouths. A big baby girl sucked on her bottle as she twined her mother's hair around her fingers in a swoon of contentment. A little boy howled as his father dislodged a rubber ball from between his gums. A baby sitting on a woman's lap reached toward an older girl sitting inches away from him and began swatting her knees. An adult hand appeared and smacked the baby's arms. It couldn't have been very hard, because the baby reached out and did it again, only to be smacked again. The camera moved back for a moment and showed the woman's tired, vacant face before it zoomed in on a third child sleeping in her stroller and held for a few seconds on her dirty cheeks and the two translucent ribbons of snot that ran from her nose to her mouth.
Bill filmed children crawling at high speed in the park and other children walking and falling and then pulling themselves up to walk again, tottering forward like old drunks in a bar. He recorded a little boy standing somewhat unsteadily beside a large, panting terrier. The child's whole body shuddered with excitement as he held his hand near the dog's snout and let out small joyous ejaculations—Eh! Eh! Eh! Another child, with fat knees and a protruding belly, was seen standing in a bakery. She looked upward and uttered a few incomprehensible syllables, which were then answered by an invisible woman, "It's a fan, sweetheart." With her neck craned and her lips moving, the child stared fixedly at the ceiling and began to chant the word "fan," repeating it over and over in a high, awestruck voice. An apoplectic two-year-old kicked and screamed on the sidewalk beside her squatting mother, who was holding an orange. "But darling," the woman said over the howls, "this orange is exactly like the one Julie got. There's no difference."
When the children he was filming reached the ages of three and four, I heard Bill's voice for the first time. Speaking over the image of an unsmiling little boy, he said, "Do you know what your heart does?" The child looked straight into the camera, put his hand on his chest, and said gravely, "It puts blood inside. It can bleed and live." Another boy held up a juice box, shook it, and turned to the woman sitting beside him on a park bench. "Mommy," he said, "my drink lost its gravity." A blond child with nearly white pigtails ran in circles, jumped up and down, stopped suddenly, turned her flushed face to the camera, and said in a clear, precocious voice, "Happy tears is sweating." A little girl in a filthy tutu and crooked tiara bent close to a friend who was wearing a pink skirt on her head. "Don't worry," she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. "It checked out. I called the man and we can be wedding girls." "What's your doll's name?" Bill asked a neatly dressed little girl with cornrows in her hair. "Go ahead," said a woman's voice. "You can tell him." The little girl scratched her arm and held the doll toward the camera by one leg. "Shower," she said.
The anonymous children came and went, aging by increments as Bill watched them, his camera lingering on their faces as they explained to him how things worked and what they were made of. One girl told Bill that caterpillars turned into raccoons, another that her brain was made of metal with eyedrops in it, a third that the world started with a "big, big egg." After a while, some of his subjects seemed to forget he was there. One boy stuck his finger into his nose and dug happily, retrieving a couple of crusts, which he promptly ate. Another, his hand deep in his pants, scratched his balls and sighed with pleasure. A small girl was seen bending down beside a stroller. She began to make cooing noises and then she grabbed the cheeks of the baby who was strapped into the seat. "I love you, you little dumpling," she said, pinching and shaking the cheeks. "You honeybun," she added fiercely as the baby began to sob from the pressure of her fingers. "Stop that, Sarah," said a woman. "Be nice." "I was nice," Sarah replied, her eyes narrowed and her jaw locked.
Another girl, slightly older, about five, stood beside her mother on a sidewalk somewhere in mid town. The two were seen from behind as they looked into a store window. After a few seconds, it was clear that Bill was most interested in the girl's hand. The camera followed it as it roved her mother's back, moving north toward the shoulder blades, then south toward the buttocks. Up and down, up and down, that small hand idly caressed the maternal back. He also filmed a boy stopped on the sidewalk, his small face screwed up in tight belligerence, a sparkle of tears showing in the corners of his eyes. A woman seen from the neck down stood beside him, her body tensed with rage. "I'm fed up!" she bellowed at him. "I've had it with you. You're acting like a little shit and I want you to stop!" She leaned over, grabbed the boy by the shoulders, and began to shake him. "Stop! Stop!" The tears fell down his cheeks, but the boy's expression remained stiff and unyielding.
There was a resolute, pitiless quality to the tapes, a dogged desire to look and look hard. The camera's focus remained close and tight as the children grew taller and more articulate. A boy named Ramon, who told Bill that he was seven, explained that his uncle collected chickens— "Anything with a chicken on it, he buys it. His whole basement is chickens." A plump boy, probably eight or nine, in wide jean shorts glowered at a taller boy in a baseball cap who was holding a box of candy. In a sudden fit of anger, the shorter boy said, "Shit on you," and pushed his adversary violently to the ground. Pieces of candy flew as the boy on the ground started crowing in triumph, "He said the S word! He said the S word!" A pair of adult legs ran into the frame. Two little girls in plaid uniforms sat on cement steps and whispered to each other. A foot away, a third girl in the same uniform turned her head to look at them. Bill caught the child's profile. As she watched the others, she swallowed hard several times. The camera moved through the crowd of schoolchildren and recorded a boy, with a mouthful of gleaming braces, as he removed his backpack and slammed it against the shoulder of the kid next to him.
The longer I watched, the more mysterious I found the pictures in front of me. What had started as ordinary images of children in the city became over time a remarkable document of human particularity and sameness. There were so many different children—fat, thin, light, dark, beautiful children and plain children, healthy children and children who were crippled or deformed. Bill had filmed a group of kids in wheelchairs who were lowered from a bus that had been designed with a lift to bring the chairs to street level. As she rolled her chair off the mechanism, a chubby girl of about eight straightened herself up and gave Bill a mocking royal wave. He filmed a boy with a scar on his upper lip who first smiled crookedly and then made a farting noise with his mouth. He followed another boy whose indeterminable illness or birth defect had left him with ballooning cheeks and a missing chin. He wore a respirator of some kind as he chugged along on his short legs beside his mother. The differences among the children were startling, and yet, in the end, their faces mingled. Above all, the tapes revealed the furious animation of children, the fact that when conscious they rarely stop moving. A simple walk down the block included waving, hopping, skipping, twirling, and multiple pauses to examine a piece of litter, pet a dog, or jump up and walk along a cement barrier or low fence. In a schoolyard or playground, they jostled, punched, elbowed, kicked, poked, patted, hugged, pinched, tugged, yelled, laughed, chanted, and sang, and while I watched them, I said to myself that growing up really means slowing down.