Face Read Free Page B

wasn’t using tricks of light and angle to subvert the universal order, I grazed crops of men in truck stops and watched
     families loading and unloading cars in motel parking lots. In Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, I slept with a park ranger who fit
     the description of all my men—boiled gold hair, deep freckles, and eyes that seemed to have dropped from the sky. We spent
     twelve hours together, no hope, no expectations, and hardly more than a physical longing in common, then he went home to his
     wife and four children. A month later I came back to New York and my parents, but before I worked up the nerve to tell them
     my news, much less decide what to do about it, nature replaced my choice with an outpouring of blood, cramps, and unexpected
     sorrow.
    Henry, the only member of the family who knew, said I probably wasn’t pregnant at all.
    “Wishful thinking. You know how that goes.”
    I told him he didn’t know shit.
    When I got back to my nomadic life, the fields were buried under two feet of snow. I stood on a hilltop in Illinois and stared
     through my circle of glass at endless miles of skeletal plants, hardened waterways, wildlife preparing to hide from the great
     thermal plunge into winter. Before my pregnancy I’d turned the cold into collages of lace or candy or intricately blown glass
     patterns. (More trick shots, most of them sold. Roxy said they’d make great postcards. She threatened to send them to art
     magazines and, if Tommy Wah told the truth, she eventually must have done just that because I certainly never submitted my
     work for publication.) But that first day back, on that bleak, frozen hill,the seasonal death defied me. I had no more tricks. I’d lost them racing toward some kind of freedom I didn’t begin to understand.
    I lowered the Pentax and took another look at the world unframed, let it pull itself over and around me like a vast gray paper
     bag. Only a fool would try to capture such immensity through a mechanical eye. Or believe the cure for terror lay in photographic
     alchemy. I weighed the camera briefly in one hand—metal, plastic, glass cold as ice surrounding a compartment of darkness.
     I let the weight of that darkness pull me to my feet, lift my arm high and wide. I felt the power, the ease of release, watched
     my instrument cut an arc through the frozen air and drop, clattering to the gorge below. Though I could no longer see it,
     I knew it was lying in shards and bent pieces all over the granite’s smooth face.
    That Pentax was my first camera. My mother had given it to me for my fourteenth birthday. After cracking it up I checked out
     of my motel room, sent what prints I had to Roxy, and traveled to Chicago. I’d heard from a coffee shop waitress that United
     was hiring flight attendants for openings out of Los Angeles. If I proved I could fly without falling, I thought, my nightmares
     would have to release me.

    It’s nearly the end of May now, and warm enough for kids to roller-skate in the schoolyard. From my fire escape I watch them
     doing backward twirls and scissor steps to boom-box rock and roll. Behind and above, the sky is the incandescent blue of a
     stage flat, roofs against it black. Up and down Greenwich Avenue shoppers scurry on pre-dinner errands past the dry cleaner
     where I take my sweaters, the grocery where I buy coffee, the record store that supplies me with the Motown greats brother
     Henry taught me to love. Past the photo lab where I take my color work and buy film when I don’t have time to get it at discount
     uptown.
    My upstairs neighbors, Betty and Sandra, are running a bath—probably for their new baby, Hope. Above the rush of pipes Larraine
     Moseley is practicing her electric guitar, and through this mesh of soundscome the smells of sautéing onions, butter, roasting meat. These sensations comfort me with their normalcy.
    So does the elderly woman who lives on the ground floor of the brownstone next door. Since the weather