The message was this: If reality disappointed my mother, and photographs pleased her, then I needed to make myself as two-dimensional, flat, and picture perfect as I could. Don't frown, darling. Your face might freeze that way. When I went off to college, I might have finally been able to cast off this way of being like a second skin. I might have become a serious student, found a passion, and stuck with it. Instead, I sought the comfort of what I already knew-and what I had been told I was good at. I started auditioning for television commercials during my freshman year.
Auditions led to advertising work-York Peppermint Patties, Coca-Cola, Scrabble-which led to my dropping out of school. I didn't have any great desire to be an actress, and in fact had no talent beyond a certain photogenic quality-but I didn't know what else to do. I was so accustomed to my mother's idea of me as a glamorous girl, lit up by flashbulbs, it had become the only way I could imagine my future.
A photograph remains of that time. It's large, poster-size, and it now hangs on a long wall in my house along with other family photos: my husband's extended family gathered around his grandparents. Distant relatives of mine in their Lithuanian village, with their long beards and peasant garb. And then there is me: I am in my early 20s. It's the eighties, and it shows. My hair is big, my earrings are enormous, white dangling stars, and I am gazing over my shoulder at the camera. I keep that photograph around because I'm fascinated and disturbed by the blankness in my own eyes. My husband calls it my Star 80 photo. Who is she, that scary, pretty, empty girl?
Another photo of me, a Polaroid, was taken a few months later. This one I keep in a box in my closet. I am leaning over my mother, who is in a hospital bed. Her face is black-and-blue, very thin. Her legs are in casts from her ankles to her thighs, dangling from traction pulleys. I'm trying to smile for the camera, as is my mother-but there is nothing happy about this picture. I've been crying; this much is clear from my swollen eyes. My father has recently been killed in the same car accident that broke 80 of my mother's bones. My mother and I are surrounded by what remains of our family-uncles, aunts, a cousin-as we conduct a makeshift Passover seder at her bedside. This is perhaps the first picture of me and my mother that is not an attempt to be anything other than exactly what it is: horrible and painful and unavoidably real.
It is a strange and uncomfortable fact that my parents' accident turned me into a writer. It was as if there had always existed a parallel track-an alternate universe in which I hadn't been the Beech-Nut baby or the Kodak Christmas poster child or my mother's muse. Begin again, they say in meditation class, the idea being that in each moment we are given an opportunity to start over. Begin again. I turned my gaze inward as if my life depended on it-which, in fact, it did. I spent the next several years caring for my mother as she recovered. I finished college and then went to graduate school, where I wrote my first novel-in which a car accident on a snowy highway figured prominently.
I would have given anything for the publication of my first book to have made my mother proud, but my writing life caused her a great deal of pain. It wasn't what she had wanted for me. It was what she had wanted for herself. You be the pretty one, she used to tell me, referring to my romantic choices-her wisdom in this regard being that I should always choose men less attractive than myself. You be the pretty one, as if pretty were my only ticket.
My writing flew in the face of pretty; I wanted to examine the difficult, the secret, the unsaid with all the energy of someone who had avoided such matters her whole life. Paradoxically, as I did so, I began to feel lighter, easier in my own skin. It turned out that my natural habitat was a solitary one-that I was most content spending my days alone in a room, exploring ideas in my head. The man I fell in love with and married was as compelled by a quiet, internal life as I was.
The further I distanced myself from my mother's ideas about me, the more frightened and angry she became. She lashed out at me at every opportunity. She didn't like my hair, my furniture, my friends, my outfits. She was threatened by the bond I had with my husband. She couldn't decide whether to brag about my career or demean it, and did each whenever it suited her. (She once called the 92nd Street Y to suggest that she was particularly qualified to spearhead a lecture series on mothers and daughters in literature.) Finally-before my husband and I decided to leave New York City for the countryside, another decision she deplored-I persuaded her to see a therapist with me. She lasted six sessions-unable to bear the scrutiny of a neutral witness. Irene, he said. Irene, you aren't seeing Dani. During what turned out to be our final session, she arrived with a large manila envelope tucked beneath her arm. I later found out that the envelope contained another kind of photograph entirely: X-rays of her lungs, which showed evidence of metastatic lung cancer.
My mother spent her last days in her bedroom, surrounded by pictures of the two of us: a professionally done photograph of herself as a young mother, head tilted back just so, glossy hair swinging as she held me-an infant-high up in the air; another baby picture of me from the Beech-Nut era. There were photographs of the two of us in coordinated outfits, smiling our careful, camera-ready smiles. And one more-a portrait of me taken for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz. In it, I am smiling widely, grinning really-a genuinely delighted, unself-conscious, ear-to-ear grin.
As I sat with my mother, who drifted in and out of consciousness, her meticulous sense of her own physical presence gone forever, my gaze kept returning to the photographs hanging on her wall. These lovely images-these were her memories, now receding to nothing more than flickers behind her closed eyes. When I had given my mother the Krementz portrait, years earlier, she had cocked her head and let out a small uncomfortable laugh. She'd stared at it for a long moment, as if looking at a stranger. I've never seen this expression on your face, she said.
As I held my mother's hand, I wanted to tell her that I was happy in that picture. I had forgotten all about the camera, and I was free. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry she had never seen me that way.
