[Final Draft]
CHAPTER FOUR – TAKEN BY A PHOTOGRAPH [Cheryl]
When I moved from my apartment on Breeze into the house on Wavecrest, I’d put the box on the shelf in the closet of our bedroom. Way over to the side, out of the way, where I could forget about it. It shouldn’t have been so scary; it was only a bunch of photographs I’d taken in Isla Vista, the year after graduation. And a journal, in a velvet pouch I’d sewn together.
One Thursday evening, when Al was on call and I was off the next day – we were hoping to use our long weekend to cross the border into Ensenada – I grabbed a chair and retrieved the box. Sitting on the narrow edge of the waterbed, I tugged at the packing tape wrapped multiple times around the cardboard. Once I got it open, I went into the kitchen, took a glass of wine to the klunky table Al insisted on putting in the middle of our “living room”, and brought the box in.
I pulled out the batch of photos first. Each one was stiff and wrinkled, the white borders already turning yellow. I handled each as if it were a precious gem. I found myself back in the bathroom in the little house near the cliffs overlooking the beach in Isla Vista, the bathroom where I had developed the film, enlarging each onto paper which I then developed, fixed, and rinsed in a makeshift basin.
The work was repetitive, soothing. In the dull glow of the red light, music from the college radio station playing on a tinny radio set atop the toilet, I escaped from the crazy post-college life I found myself in. The life I’d written about in jagged, searing diary entries I’d sewn shut in that velvet bag.
I spread them out across the table. Mostly of young women, some my friends and others I’d approached at random. Those days were free for so many of us: free from parents, free from school, free to explore who we were or might become. Several showed a belly dancer, others a new mom. One depicted a long-haired blonde lounging in deep contemplation.
In a flash, I realized these photos, these young women, were some of the paths I might have taken. A circle of possibilities, spreading out in all directions. Over the past four years, I had narrowed down that circle, and now found myself moving more carefully, more thoughtfully, towards a specific goal. I would become a midwife, and I would not go back to the unfocused rambles hidden away in that diary.
My eyes fluttered closed from the wine and the peace I found leaving the memories of those days I saw in the portraits. The next thing I knew, I woke up to the morning sun dimpling my face, and a whisper in my ear.
“Cheryl…Cheryl…should I carry you to bed?”
“Wha…? No, I guess I slept out here..”
“At the table, all night?” Al sat down and lifted up one of the prints. “Who are these people?” he asked.
Two naked bodies, one male, one female, stood hip-to-hip, their blond hair cascading half way down each of their blacks. The girl’s arm circled his waist, his covered her shoulder. They stared ahead across the cliffs to the surf below.
“Wait…”,I said, grabbing it away. “That’s not…”
He picked up another one. “This is you?”
I saw myself, squatting, face replaced by my father’s Exacta SLR 35 mm, long sun-streaked blond hair swirling on each side of it. I nodded. “I don’t know if I’m ready…”
“Ready for what?”
“I took all these back in Santa Barbara. You know, when I told you I went a little crazy for a year. When I did…things.” I looked at the velvet bag.
“That’s OK, we don’t have to talk about our past, do we?” he answered.
I picked up another one of my pictures, of a trim mother in a loose-fitting flowered ankle-length dress. In her left arm she held a toddler, bright blonde hair cut short. Her right arm wrapped around the baby’s father, shirtless with a mustache, his own hair longer than his daughter’s. I frowned and wondered if I could ever find myself in such a photo, all three of us smiling at the camera.
I grabbed Al, and told him, “I want to go down to the beach, OK?”
“Now?” he said. “I’ve been up all night, and there was a crash, it took forever to get past Robertson on the freeway.
“Just a short walk, to clear my head.” I wanted to tell him about the future I saw, but didn’t know how to do that without exposing my past, the year I took those photos. I’d used my camera to ground myself, to build a stable center in the idle of all the chaos I had put myself through. How could I tell him about my dream of a safe future without him knowing me when I didn’t feel safe. How could he know what to give me unless he knew what I needed?
Al quickly changed out of his work clothes into floppy white linen pants and a baggy sweater. Eschewing shoes, he headed for the door. Before his hand reached the knob, our two dogs started barking and scratching, knowing they would get to run on the sand, and maybe chase a stick into the surf.
We turned left down Wavecrest. I marveled as usual at living not on a street, but a sidewalk heading directly to the shore. I put both arms around him and buried my head for a moment underneath his shoulder. He hugged back.
“You know those photos?” I started.
“Uh-huh…Where’d you find them?”
“I’ve had them a long time.”
“Who are all those people?”
“Friends I had then, mostly. A few I just stopped on the street and asked if I could take their picture.” I hesitated, wondering how to go on, how to talk about those times. “This was after I graduated. I was still in a house I shared with other people.” I remembered Jimmy and Shelly, and what happened between us, what I did to them and to myself. I thought back further to Ian, how hard it had been to leave him. I looked up at Al, and asked, “What were you doing after you broke up with … what was her name…?”
“Susie,” he said in a subdued monotone. “Or did you mean Carol?”
“Whichever, I don’t care. I just want to know more about you.”
He pulled away, and called, “Sean! Tasha! Wait!” The two dogs stopped their dance down the sidewalk, alert to his rumbling baritone. They knew better than to get ahead of us before we hit the sand. He shivered. “It’s still cool out here…I should have brought a jacket. All the fog, you know?”
I was learning about his skills at deflection. Whenever he didn’t want to talk about something, he wouldn’t clam up, he wouldn’t turn sullen. No, he would pick up on something else which caught his attention and try to turn mine to it as well.We stepped off the bike path onto the sand and jogged through an opening in the “sand fence”. I sighed and put my arm around his waist. He hugged back.