York School of Fine Arts with a series of photographs she’d taken of abandoned buildings around town. She’d dabbed the prints with a damp cloth and, while the emulsion was wet, used the tip of a needle to scrape away the image, leaving a pin-thin white line. The results were a kind of reverse scrimshaw: a spectral worker slumped on the steps outside a shuttered factory; the outline of a sedan atop the empty hydraulic lift of Jamison’s Auto Repair; a pair of phantom children scrambling hand in hand up a hill of slag. At the sight of those children, Warren had squinted and peered closer. The two children could have been anyone, but they weren’t anyone: there was the little cowlick at the crown of Warren’s head, there was the knotted silk scarf around Mia’s neck, the weight of the camera pulling her slightly askew. There were no pictures of the two of them doing such a thing but it seemed to them they’d spent their childhoods playing on the slag heaps that butted up against the park, and looking at his sister’s photograph, Warren felt as if Mia had taken a photo of the ghosts of their past selves, about to fade into the ether. “When you get it back, can I have it?” he’d asked.
To her parents, the photos—and Mia’s work in general—were less enchanting. They did not even call what she did “work,” or “art,” which in their minds would have been just as bad. They were middle-class people, had lived all their married lives in a butter-colored middle-class ranch house in a stolid, middle-class town. To them, work was fixing something or making something useful; if it didn’t have a use, they couldn’t quite make out why you’d do it. “Art” was something that people with too much time and money on their hands did. And could you blame them? Her father was a handyman, founder and sole proprietor of Wright’s Repair, one day working at the church repairing the eaves where a board had broken and a family of squirrels had wriggled their way into the nave, another day at a neighbor’s house snaking the drains or replacing a U-bend under the sink that had rusted away. Her mother was a nurse at the hospital, counting pills, drawing blood, changing bedpans, no stranger to night and double shifts. They worked with their hands, they worked long hours, they saved all they could and put it into a paid-off house and two Buicks and their two children, whom they were proud to say—accurately—lacked for nothing but were never spoiled.
But there was Mia, sprawled on the floor for hours, taking a perfectly good picture of Warren and cutting him out like a paper doll, setting up her cutout brother in a diorama of leaves in an old shoebox—all for one photograph, in which Warren looked like an elf surrounded by giant acorns: clever, but it hardly seemed worth the time she’d put in. There was Mia the second her father got home, his shoes barely off and the grease not yet washed from his hands, begging for two dollars for more film, promising I’ll pay it back, I promise, though truth be told, she seldom did. There was Mia who, when her mother gave her money for new school clothes, patched the holes in her old jeans instead and spent the money on yet more film, running around in skirts that were inches too short, shirts that were faded and worn, taking yet more pictures. There was Mia who, when she went out and got a job as a waitress at the Eat’n Park, instead of using her earnings to buy her own clothes or a used car, saved them and spent everything on a camera, of all things. It wasn’t even a camera the rest of them could use—she’d tried to explain to them once about movement and lens distance and they’d all lost interest almost at once—though she did take a family portrait of the four of them, her senior year of high school, that her mother had framed and hung on the living room wall. The camera folded down into a valise the size of a briefcase and somehow this made it even more disappointing to her parents: all that money packed away into such a small space.
How could you blame Mia’s parents for not understanding? They had been born in the wartime years; they’d been raised by parents who’d come of age