He held a stack of clippings. Then one by one he laid them on the bedspread. They were photographs, no story attached, no caption. Here and there, the newspaper name was printed on a clipping’s border: the Ithaca Journal, the Cortland Standard, the Elmira Star-Gazette, the Finger Lakes Times, the Olean Times-Herald. Some clippings were white, some faded, some yellowed—Paul had clearly been collecting these for years. We were very best friends; why hadn’t he shown these to me before?
Horrible, isn’t it? Paul said.
I don’t—
What happens to people when they grow up.
Now I saw it: an adult and child in each picture, the child remarkably like the adult who was clearly the parent. Uncanny resemblances. Faces captured at two distant moments in time.
Amazing, I said.
Keep looking, said Paul.
For what?
Here. Look what happens to a dimple.
It was a picture of a cute little boy of about five. His happy, dimpled face relaxed on his father’s shoulder. The father, too, had dimples, but the formerly endearing little dots had deepened, were now surrounded by desiccated skin, hanging sacs of flesh.
And look what happens to that adorable pudgy cheek, said Paul.
A sagging jowl, I saw.
And look at that little girl’s pretty fair hair.
Her mother’s was thinned, dyed, dry.
And this one, he said.
A holiday picnic. A mother holding a little girl on her lap. Beside her, the grandmother, holding a little boy. Three generations, one face. The curve of a tender cheek, softened, then sunken. Wrinkles slowly etching themselves into the skin above the mouth. The girl’s round little eye, hopeful; the mother’s eye, drooping at the edges; the grandmother’s, disappearing into a sea of folds.
And on it went: A little roly-poly boy sat upon his father’s fat gut of a lap. A girl with twinkling eyes looked into the crow-marked eyes of her mother. A beanpole of a boy in the embrace of a father whose wrinkled skin hung from bony arms. A tiny puff in a cheek become a sorry fold. Small lips now a mean line. Cute buck teeth grown into embarrassments. Tiny flaws, invisible in the freshness of youth, now magnified, exaggerated, dominant in the parent: the terrible work of time that awaited the child.
Paul picked up this first set of clippings and replaced it with another—another catalogue of the decay, desiccation, bloating, wrinkling, graying, fading, and shrinking that awaited the poor innocent spawn of his parents’ blood.
How can anyone stand it? said Paul. I mean, how can you look into the face of your parent and know you’re going to turn into that?
I leapt away from the bed and went to the window, where I drew back the blind and stood squinting into the brilliance of the yard. I watched birds peck at the grass, leaves ruffle in the breeze, a cat dive into a patch of underbush, as I tried not to think about my mother, who just two months before had tried to “do some harm to herself,” as my aunt had put it. While at the hospital, sitting among my relatives and listening to their talk, I had learned things about my grandmother—that she had locked herself in a running car in a closed garage. And about my great-uncle on my father’s side, who had jumped off a roof; about my mother’s grandfather, who had given away all his money one day in a manic fit; about another great-aunt, who had thrown herself in front of a car. While waiting to hear about my mother’s condition, my aunts and uncles and adult cousins had gone on describing manias, depressions, obsessions, compulsions—it seemed our family had long bloodlines of mad people stretching back in time, suicides running in our veins the way blue eyes were passed down in saner clans. Throughout, my father sat there without speaking, closed, withdrawn, as he had been for the past year. I looked around this circle of my relatives. I saw my eyes here, my chin there, my cowlick rising from the crown of Uncle John’s head. My aunt Selma once said I had the temperament of Uncle Harry: Did this include whatever bad thing he had done with his gun?
I said to Paul: Everyone says I look exactly like my mother.
He started, sat back on the bed, put down his clippings. He knew—he had to have known—how I longed to be like him, how dearly I wished not to know that what had happened to my family—to my mother, to my unspeaking father—could also happen