in the Depression, who threw nothing out, not even moldy food. They were old enough to remember when rags became felt for the war effort, when cans and scrap metal could become bullets and cans of grease explosives. Practicality was baked into their bones. They wasted nothing, especially not time.
So when it came to college, they had assumed she would go somewhere practical, like Pitt or perhaps Penn State, to study something like business or hotel management. They had assumed this photography thing was an adolescent phase, like boy chasing, or vegetarianism. What else had they worked so hard for all these years? For Mia to throw their money away on art school? No, if she wanted art school so badly, she would have to pay her own way. It wasn’t mean, they insisted. It was sensible. They weren’t forbidding her from going. They were not angry, they assured her; certainly not, definitely not. But they’d sat her down in the living room and put it bluntly: this art thing was a waste of time. They were disappointed in her. And they certainly wouldn’t pay for it. “I thought we raised you to be smarter,” her mother said, her voice laced with disapproval.
Mia had listened sadly, but it was what she’d expected. She had known all along her parents would not approve; all this time they had indulged her hobby but now that she was eighteen, she knew, things would be different. She was supposed to be an adult, when childish indulgences were supposed to be set aside, not dived into headfirst. She had already done a series of calculations, and if her parents had agreed to contribute at all she would have been taken aback. The school had been so impressed by her portfolio that they’d offered her a tuition scholarship. Her room and board and supplies, she estimated, she would pay for with a part-time job. Her parents glanced at each other, as if they’d known all along their threat wouldn’t work, and absorbed this news in silence.
The week before Mia was to leave, Warren appeared in the doorway of her room.
“Mi, I’ve been thinking,” he said, so seriously she almost giggled until he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded stack of bills. “I think you should take this. It won’t pay for all the rest, but it’ll be most of it.”
“And the car, Wren?” she asked. Warren had been saving up to buy a car, had even, after much research, picked out the very car he planned to buy: a Volkswagen Rabbit. It was not the car she’d have expected from him: she’d have guessed a Trans Am, or a Thunderbird, something flashy and fun. But gas was running $1.10 a gallon, and not only was the Rabbit one of the few cars he could afford, the ads promised it would get 38 miles per gallon as well, and she was amused to see this practical side of Warren emerging here, of all places.
She folded his hand over the bills and pushed it gently away. “Go get that car, Wren,” she said. “Get it and promise to pick me up at the bus station whenever I come home.”
Mia had boarded a Greyhound to Philly, then New York, with one suitcase of clothing and one of cameras. From a bulletin board, she’d found an apartment in the Village, not far from campus, with two other girls. She’d gotten a job as a waitress at a little diner near Grand Central and another at the Dick Blick in SoHo. With the last of her savings she’d headed over to the photography store on West 17th, where a young man sold her film and paper as she tried not to stare at his yarmulke. Thus equipped, she’d begun her classes: Figure Drawing I, Light and Color I, Survey of Art I, Introduction to Critical Studies, and—with the most excitement—Introduction to Photography, taught by the renowned Pauline Hawthorne.
It turned out that despite their best intentions, her parents had prepared her exceptionally well for art school.
Each morning she got up at four thirty and went to work pouring coffee for businessmen about to catch their trains. The hot plates she carried from the kitchen seared the insides of her forearms with arc-shaped scars. Her mother had always managed, even on her double shifts, to make each patient more than a body in a bed—chatting with them about their daughter’s dance recital or their brother’s recent car trouble, asking