The study smelled of paper and lemon polish. A small cardboard box sat on the desk beneath the lamp, tied with a faded blue ribbon that someone had retied many times.
Arthur looked at it the way a man looks at a letter he has been hoping would never be opened.
Helen lifted the lid. Inside were yellowed envelopes, newspaper clippings, and a few photographs in clear sleeves.
She drew one out and held it for a moment against her chest, as if she were sorry. Then she put it in my hands.
It was a black-and-white photograph of a teenage girl seated beneath a harsh lamp. Her hair was pinned back, her hands clasped tight in her lap, her eyes fixed on something just beyond the camera.
I recognized the dress before I recognized the face.
The girl was me at seventeen.
For illustration purposes only
Part 3: The Girl Under the Lamp
I sat down in the nearest chair without deciding to. The photograph’s edges were soft with handling, as if many thumbs had worn them down.
I did not need anyone to tell me where it was taken. The memory rose up whole, the way a smell can.
It was a Saturday in the spring of 1965. My mother had taken me on the train into Chicago, to a department store with brass elevators and a perfume counter that made my eyes water.
She had saved for months. A woman in a white smock had promised a “beauty consultation” that would help me, as she put it, “look more like a young lady.”
I knew what she meant. Even at seventeen, I knew.
They sat me under a lamp so bright it felt like an interrogation. They powdered my face and tilted my chin. Behind them stood a young man with a camera on a stand, and he never once met my eyes.
The women talked about me as if I were a chair they were thinking of reupholstering.
“That much hair will be difficult to conceal.”
“She’ll need regular treatments, poor thing.”
“Girls are so sensitive at this age.”
I stared at my hands until the appointment ended. Then I locked myself in a restroom stall and cried so quietly that nobody ever knew.
I had spent sixty-one years trying not to remember that afternoon.
I looked up. Arthur sat across from me, hands pressed between his knees like a boy outside the principal’s office.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“I worked for the company that took those photographs.” His voice was rough. “I was nineteen. It was my first real job.”
I looked at the photograph again, past the girl, to the edge of the frame where a shadow of a camera stood. The young man behind it. The one who wouldn’t look at me.
“You were there.”
“Yes.”
“I asked you whether I looked terrible.” The words came out of some old locked room in me. “I looked right at you. I asked.”
Arthur closed his eyes. “And I didn’t answer.”
“No. You didn’t.”
I remembered his silence perfectly. The consultant had laughed and said, “Well, dear, that’s why you’re here,” and I had wanted someone, anyone, to tell her to stop.
Nobody had.
Helen stood by the door with her arms wrapped around herself. Arthur’s face was gray.
“Why do you still have it?” I asked. “After sixty-one years?”
