Face Read Free Page A

channel changed. You move in anytime.”
    Anytime was the following day. I brought a bunch of lilies and daisies and spoke on Marge’s behalf a made-up blessing that
     was a combination thank-you, memorial, and housewarming. I considered it a necessary gesture, like leaving the lights on at
     night, and for the first
few
days I actually felt safe and welcome in my new home.

    I’d been here less than a week, was applying for work as a commercial photographer’s assistant, and was just beginning to
     doubt the wisdom of quitting my job in the sky when a box arrived, addressed without name to my apartment. Postmarked in Pensacola,
it
contained a set of plastic coasters with interchangeable pictures of game birds, a combination sifter, grater, and dicer,
     five patterns of personalized embossers, and a spec sheet with the size and quantity of negatives and prints the catalogue
     required for each product. According to these numbers, the Hans Noble Company had paid Marge Gramercy about half the going
     commercial rate.
    Four days later I sent the requested photographs to Pensacola along with the merchandise and an invoice informing Mr. Noble
     that I, Maibelle Chung, had taken over Ms. Gramercy’s studio upon her death. The following week my payment arrived with a
     new set of merchandise and instructions on which someone had scrawled: “We pay by the job, no contracts. Fee is nonnegotiable,
     but you can have that photo credit you asked for. Sorry to hear about Marge.”
    That night was the first time my screams woke Harriet.
    “It’s a man, isn’t it?” she demanded, wedging one foot in the doorway.
    “There’s no one else here.”
    Under her blue satin robe Harriet wore a flannel nightgown printed with elves. Her face was puffy and her hair looked as if
     someone had sat on it. I could hear her mother faintly whining downstairs. But Harriet was still more or less on my side back
     then and she didn’t insist on searching my apartment.
    “Men are shits, kid. They’d rather screw you than look at you. Never forget that.”
    I thanked her for this piece of advice and shut the door quickly before she could offer any more. There was no man that night,
     but there would be. I knew, inevitably there would be.
    I used to think I could escape my nightmares by going away. The day I graduated from college, I was packing my car to drive
     across country, and my brother, Henry, said I’d never find what I was looking for that way. I told him whatever I found would
     be more than what I was looking for. He said no, anything would be less. Philosophy and insight not being two of my brother’s
     strong points, I chose to laugh at him, but it turned out he was right.
    Instead of driving off into oblivion that summer, I met a rich, fiftyish man in a Howard Johnson’s in Nappanee, Indiana. He
     owned a shopping mall in Muncie where there was a consignment gallery run by an acerbic bleached blonde named Roxy who liked
     to talk about men who’d abused her. Though we would never claim each other as friends, I enjoyed listening to Roxy. I admired
     her certainty and her candor. She knew what she felt, what she thought, and why. Whatever men did to me was not something
     I could discuss.
    The rich mall-owner lost interest when I refused to sleep with him, but Roxy said she could use more of what I had, which
     at that point was my student portfolio—photographs of fire hydrants lit to resemble cathedrals, and steeples that looked like
     knives cutting ornate cloud formations. I progressed to vintage cars, using strobes to turn theirheadlights to eyes, and shot landscapes in which the tops of trees became oceans and sandbars.
    For half a year I traveled the Midwest, camping in Motel Sixes and photographing nature in ways that made it seem like something
     else. People who saw my work in the gallery called it “neat,” and bought the prints as puzzles to see if their friends and
     neighbors could figure out what was what.
    When I