Sources of Light (3 page)

This I got. This I liked.

"What should I take pictures of?"

He said the word
photography
came from two Greek words that meant "light drawing." Drawing with light. "I know," he said, looking at the expression on my face. "I sound like a pinhead, don't I? But this stuff is cool. Light makes photography possible. Photographers have their own reality. Sometimes the ideas are more important than the subject. We can be like painters. Maybe even better."

"So?" I said. I hated when grownups didn't just answer a question. "What should I take pictures of?"

He looked at me. "Anything you would paint. Anything you look at or wonder about or want to know more about." He closed the camera, wound the film, then lifted it to his right eye and snapped a picture of my mother.

For dessert, we had some of the jarred peaches Tine and I canned with my grandmother, and I took a few pictures of my mother and Perry eating them.

***

At school, instead of having gym class, we made white roses out of Kleenex, tying them with green pipe cleaners for parent-teacher night. Then, the following night, on parent-teacher night, Mary Alice made fun of Miss Jenkins outside in the hall while her little brother, Jeffy, made off with half the cookies. Through the closed door, I could hear Mary Alice's mother paying Miss Jenkins compliments, making up nice things Mary Alice had never said about her.

When her turn came that night, my mother just crossed her legs and listened. I overheard Miss Jenkins tell my mother how sorry she was to hear about my father, how highly she regarded him, how it seemed too that I was having a tough time making friends. It turned out that Miss Jenkins knew my father from way back in Franklin, back when he was in high school and she was starting out in her teaching career. That's how old Miss Jenkins was. Then I overheard my mother tell Miss Jenkins that she wasn't much of a cookies-and-milk mom, but she was very good when it came to course work.
Course work.
Those were her words. That and
curriculum.
I couldn't see the expression on Miss Jenkins's face, but I could only imagine. Did Kleenex roses count as course work? I think I even heard my mother tell Miss Jenkins that she believed that an ordinary life wasn't good enough, that it was supposed to be special.

My mother left parent-teacher night without eating one cookie, whispering to me, "I see we're going to have to supplement."

***

Two weeks later, Miss Jenkins told us it was time we all started thinking seriously about our state reports. She didn't tell us exactly how we should do this. I considered my options, thinking mostly about the camera Perry had loaned me and loaded for me. What
did
I wonder about?

I usually got up early most mornings, but now I went out with a camera. There was something about walking around up and down the street in our subdivision while everyone else was asleep—something secretive and special. Some mornings, it felt as though I were still dreaming, and I snapped fuzzy close-ups of bugs, bird's nests, rocks, a patch of lawn, or my own dewy, grass-covered feet.

One morning, I climbed on top of a cinder block to get to the high shelf in our carport where my mother kept my dad's old army coat and his scratchy moss green army blanket. He had used these in Korea, and when he came back, he said he really didn't want to give them away but he didn't want to look at them either. After he died, my mother felt the same—she couldn't give them away, but she couldn't look at them either. I spread the coat out on the carport cement, bending the right sleeve in a salute. I took its picture.

***

In science we read about monkeys and someone in class asked if it was really possible that we came from monkeys. Miss Jenkins listened and nodded, then told us not to think too hard on such things.

I wondered about people. I thought about Willa Mae's days. When I sat and talked with her she was at the kitchen sink or standing over the ironing board. I thought about how much of her time, how much of her day was spent staring into a kitchen sink. I took a picture of the kitchen sink, just as she left it, the soap bubbles still there, popping. I climbed up on a stool and took a picture of her dark, dry hands smoothing the wrinkles flat over my mother's pleated gray teaching skirt. I took a picture of her pinning our sheets on the clothesline, then of her throwing them up like parachutes as she made our beds. She didn't smile for the camera. She wasn't like that. But we laughed some.

At school, after a month had passed, we all came to realize that Mary Alice had a pair of knee socks to match every different colored skirt she owned. And most days she told the class of new ways her little brother, Jeffy, pulled a practical joke on their maid. He especially enjoyed spraying shaving cream into his pillowcase on sheet-changing day.

Next in science we began to study the earth, the solar system, and the other planets. In the classroom, Miss Jenkins used new satellite photos, and it all looked so different from the way it had in seventh or eighth grade. Less perfect. Our moon was pockmarked with craters. There weren't any of the black lines that divided our states or made up our country's borders as we'd learned from our one-dimensional maps.

***

Perry was coming over all the time now. He taught me how to develop my pictures. He had two darkrooms, one at his home and one at the college. We used the one at the college because he said it was big enough for the two of us. His processing trays were lined up in a neat row. Holding his print tongs, he showed me how to wash and dry prints. He taught me how to make contact sheets and proof sheets. He told me about resin-coated prints, resolutions, and photo composites. While he talked about different exposures and their effects, he showed me how to mix the chemicals, how to soak, wash, and then dry the paper.

"It's magic, isn't it?" he said.

Seeing the pictures appear, the images coming out of the blank paper soaking in the neat rows of trays filled with clear liquid, went beyond magic.

The first pictures we developed were the pictures I'd taken of things I wondered about: my dad's army coat, the kitchen sink after Willa Mae had been there.

"Your mom told me about your dad," Perry said, looking at the picture of the coat. "I bet you miss him."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. It didn't feel right telling this man about my dad. My throat choked at the thought. He'd always held my hand when I was scared, even when I shouldn't have been. He read to me at night. He could cook and hunt and farm and do just about anything. His helicopter crashed. He stayed with his men. And now? Now I was beginning to forget what he smelled like.

A
T SCHOOL
M
ISS
J
ENKINS TALKED ON AND ON
about The War, which was The War Between the States, which was The Civil War, which I thought I'd left behind in middle school. It seemed as though everyone in my class had great-grandfathers or great-uncles who either fought or survived during Civil War times. Everybody took turns telling her own version about what happened at the battle of Chancellorsville or at Brice's Crossroads.

"So you see, the Civil War wasn't only about slavery at all," Miss Jenkins finally said, looking over the top rim of her glasses, daring us. We were nearing the end of the section. "It was about states' rights."

"The South should have won," Jimmy Ray said. "We had more reason to win. We just ran out of food and money. The North sure didn't win because they were better'n us, that's for sure."

People in my class who usually didn't say anything were talking. They were saying things that sounded a lot like what their parents probably told them. People had done this at my old school in Pittsburgh last year too.

"Many scholars have written a great deal on this very subject," Miss Jenkins said.

Mary Alice raised her hand. She said her mother was in the Junior League and was applying for membership to the Daughters of the American Revolution. "My family is very involved in states' rights."

Miss Jenkins smiled. "Sam, your mother teaches college. What does she have to say about the reasons the South lost the war?" I could tell Miss Jenkins was used to judging her students quickly, and that she had marked me as a no-good, and too big for my britches. I wasn't cute enough for her to like either.

"My mom teaches art history," I said. Everyone was looking at me and I wanted to run and hide. "She's never said anything about the war." And that was true. She told me about the Spanish Civil War, and how that violence affected what Picasso and Miro painted, but nothing about the American Civil War. My mother tended to be more interested in what was happening outside of Mississippi.

***

That afternoon my mother and I were standing in the frozen food aisle of the Jitney when I saw Mary Alice with her mother. They had on matching outfits—blue shorts suits with red gingham piping with red front pockets and red sandals. Mary Alice was holding her pink ballet shoes. My mother couldn't afford the ballet lessons that Mary Alice and her friends attended across town.

I was still wearing last summer's shorts, which fit too tightly. I checked to make sure that my top still covered the waistband, which I had safety-pinned closed.

Our mothers introduced themselves. Mary Alice's mother said she knew we were new in town, that she'd heard about my father and all and she was real sorry about what happened.

"You're very kind," my mother said, all serious, touching her arm. "Thank you."

"Can you believe how fast they grow up nowadays?" Mary Alice's mother said, anxious to change the subject, looking at Mary Alice and me as though we weren't listening.

My mother smiled and nodded.

"Regular little ladies."

"Sam still likes roller skating and climbing trees though."

At least she didn't say
and playing with her dolls
too.

"So I bet you're looking forward to Mary Alice's birthday party tonight," Mary Alice's mother asked me. I caught the look Mary Alice gave her mother, but I didn't say anything.

"You remember," Mary Alice said. "I told you about it at school. It's tonight. The slumber party? You remember. You're supposed to come dressed as your mother." Mary Alice looked my mother and me both up and down. I could smell her dislike for us the same way I could smell the air right before it rained. "But you might have forgotten and already made other plans." She said this hopefully.

"Oh, Sam doesn't have any plans," my mother said. "This will be hilarious, Sam. You can go dressed like me. What a riot!" Nobody said
hilarious
or
riot.
My mother picked up new ways of saying things from her students. Her enthusiasm embarrassed me. Why couldn't she just talk like everyone else? Sometimes I thought she tried her hardest
not
to sound like everybody else.

I could feel Mary Alice and her mother staring at us. They looked so perfect in their matching clothes. At least my mother wasn't wearing her dungarees. Unlike in Pittsburgh, women didn't wear pants in Mississippi—only pedal pushers with gingham cuffs matched with gingham shirts. But ever since my father died, my mother took to wearing dungarees, my father's old loose shirts, and flat shoes after work and on the weekends.

"Well, good," Mary Alice's mother said to my mother. "Maybe you can go kick up your heels while Sam's with us. I know some wonderful bachelors if you're ever up for a blind date."

"They'd have to be really blind," my mother said, attempting a joke. "In both eyes."

***

At home, while my mother sat at her desk, typing, I looked through her closet for an outfit to wear to Mary Alice's dress-like-your-mom slumber party. My mother bought only teaching clothes—cardigan sweater sets and A-line skirts with kick pleats in the back. My mother's closet held five of these skirts in various shades of gray, three dresses, one dark blue, one gray, one black, three pairs of shoes, my dad's old work shirts, his army uniform, and the perfectly folded flag the army had given my mother. After the legionnaires fired the shots at my dad's military funeral, they presented my mother with the flag and the gun shells too, telling her that her husband had not died in vain. I wondered if that helped.

He had joined the army in Mississippi, then he was stationed in Virginia, where he met my mother. After they married and when I was two, he was shipped off to Korea. He came back a lieutenant. I was four. For years, it was just the three of us moving around from state to state. We were happy. In North Carolina we camped in the mountains. When we lived in Florida we went to the beach when we could. When I was nine, we moved to Pittsburgh, and it was perfect. We visited the libraries and museums at Carnegie Mellon and we took long walks along the Ohio, the Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers, all of us together. My dad had a steady income, and my mother worked on her graduate degree in art history. That was before he left for Vietnam. Then when his helicopter went down, it was as if
we
went down too. Boom. Simple as that—the happy
we
of our family was over.

My mother kept the stack of letters from his war years and my dad's Purple Heart medal on the top shelf, even though everybody said she should have the medal mounted, framed, and hanging in some main room of our house. She kept my dad's army picture there on that top shelf too. It was framed in wood. In it he's almost too handsome, with his dark flattop, his Elvis half-smile, his ears sticking out from his army beret making him more real and more like a dad. I knew him only for a little while really, given his whole lifetime. I remember when he and my mom swung me between them on the beach we liked visiting when we lived in Tallahassee. We caught crabs there to boil and eat at night. My mother put the water on and my father and I put in the crabs. He taught me how to eat them. He taught me about other things too: helping out around the house, respecting my grandparents, being nice to my cousin Tine, helping others fit in. The summer before he left for the last time, we were cracking and eating crabs when he talked to me about honor and respect, duty and discipline. He told me I should always do what I said I was going to do and that I should always do the right thing.