What My Mother Gave Me Read Free Page B

capturing his life in pictures and videos, I began to think about that missing photo again. It became a missing link in this whole chain of glorious family. I couldn’t go home to see my family without asking where it was.
    â€œWhat does it matter?” my mother said. “It’s just an old photo.”
    By the time my son was twelve, almost all of my mother’s family had died. Th en my aunt Jean passed on, and my mother called, not just to tell me about her sister’s death, but to say, her voice strained, “I found the photo in Jean’s basement.” I imagined her voice sounded funny because of her sister’s death, because of her grief. I told myself that when I got home, I would make her feel better. Imagine that, I thought, a whole family, except for my mother, gone, but the photo has suddenly appeared.
    My sister and I traveled back to Boston for my aunt Jean’s funeral and to see my grieving mother and the photo. We sat in our living room, all three of us on the floral couch, our bare feet sinking into our mother’s blue wall-to-wall carpeting. “Ready?” our mother said. She had a box on her lap and she opened it, slowly taking the photo out and handing it to us, almost shyly. I gasped but my sister was silent, as transfixed as I was. Th e photo was bigger than I thought it would be—eight by twelve—and it was sepia toned. Everyone was standing: my Russian grandmother, who always terrified me, was in a floor-length velvet dress, one hand balanced on my Orthodox rabbi grandfather’s shoulder as if she were pressing him into his chair. My aunts, in flapper dresses and boyish bobs, were so young and happy beside my three preening uncles, one even wearing thick, tweedy knickers. Which one was my mother? Surely not the small girl, like a brown wren, hidden in the corner like an afterthought. I looked again. Th is girl was younger than all the others, in a misshapen dress, in dirty knee socks, her hair raggedly cut, looking as if she would smile if she wasn’t about to burst into tears.
    My mother, sitting between us, tapped the girl who was so out of place she might belong to another family. “ Th ere I am,” she said. Her voice slowed. “Don’t I look so homely.” She said it as if it were a fact.
    Shocked, I stared at the photograph. Surely that couldn’t be her. I felt a flash of shame for her, and then guilt that I had badgered her about this photograph for so many years, and all I had to do was look at that little girl to know why she hadn’t wanted me to see it. I looked closer, and suddenly I couldn’t take my eyes off her as a child.
    â€œYou look like the most interesting one there,” I decided, and it was true. Th e others looked like they’d be happy-go-lucky guests at a party, but this stormy-eyed little girl—well, she’d have a story to tell and you’d have to listen to it.
    â€œReally? You think so?” my mother said. She looked at me doubtfully. “No one else in my family thought so.”
    â€œBut I thought your family life was so wonderful,” my sister said, and my mother sighed.
    â€œIt wasn’t,” she said abruptly, and it was as if a closed door had swung open.
    â€œTell us,” I said. She hesitated and slowly began. It was like a movie reel unspooling in front of us, with a plot and characters we always thought we knew.
    She was a twin—which she had never told us—and one night, when she was eight, her mother had presented her and her brother to company. “Isn’t the boy handsome!” my grandmother said. “And smart, too!” My mother stood, rocking from foot to foot, waiting, but no praise or attention came her way. “Oh, and here’s the girl,” my grandmother said offhandedly, and then she dismissed the twins to attend to her guests.
    â€œBut that’s awful!” my sister said.
    â€œI was the runt of the