“C’mon,” he said. “I won’t tell if you don’t.” And he got down another jumbo wineglass and poured enough red wine in it that a goldfish could have comfortably swum around in there. I felt ridiculous, though I accepted the glass. I had no intention of drinking any of it, but I did not wish to be rude. “That’ll put hair on your chest,” he said. Before I could think about it, I said, “What I’ve always wanted—chest hair.”
I was worried this would offend him, but instead he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.
He led me to his office, that wonderful wood-paneled room that no one ever seemed to spend time in, and pulled down from the shelf two fat black leather-bound photo albums. We sat, he on the big brown tufted chair, I on the ottoman, and he opened up what seemed to me another world. No one my age had printed photos, our childhoods were on memory cards, but Ray Lampert must have been a man who liked real cameras and developing film. The pictures were of an overexposed, brightly sunny, ’90s world I could hardly recognize. He skipped hurriedly past the photos that interested me most, which were the wedding photos and early pictures of Bunny’s mother before Bunny was born.
There was one large photo of Bunny and her mother that hung in the upstairs hallway, a posed portrait with a black background that must have seemed modern at the time. The woman I saw there was a pretty ice bitch: small features, pearly skin, glossy brown hair, an oatmeal-colored sweater. Bunny was dressed in a white T-shirt, both of them were wearing jeans, and they stared at the camera with a certain smugness, like they were members of a select club. But these more candid photos showed Bunny’s mother, her name was Allison, to be silly, goofy even, mugging for the camera, making the west side sign with her fingers. She had a tattoo on her upper arm, though he flipped by too fast for me to properly see what it was; I thought a flower, something delicate and faded. In their wedding photo she was wearing a simple white cotton dress and holding a bouquet of Technicolor daisies, so happy she seemed delirious, and I had the overwhelming impression that she was some kind of white witch.
And then there was Bunny: a large, fat, potato-y baby, so big it looked like her mom was holding a Christmas turkey. She was often dressed in weirdly Victorian clothes, and even as a baby they had put black patent-leather Mary Janes on her tuberous little feet.
“She was such a funny little girl,” he said. “You might think she was a tomboy, but no, it was princess princess princess.” There was Bunny in a pink swimsuit and clacking plastic Minnie Mouse high heels dripping water all over the foyer. There was Bunny frustratedly peeling an orange at some kind of picnic table. There were Bunny and her mother, safe and rocking in a big white hammock, some beautiful, exotic-looking locale in the background. I saw that her mother had been a gardener, and their yard, assuming it was the same house, which perhaps it was not, had been a wonderland of plants before the pool was put in. I saw Bunny, perhaps five, pulling a carrot from the ground. On her head was a hastily twined crown of wildflowers that clashed with her red T-shirt.
The older Bunny got in the photos, the less interested I became. By the time she was in middle school the only photos of her were taken before, during, or after games. There were no images of her not in some uniform or another. But those early photos of her fascinated me, and I wished I could go back and really look at the divide in her life: before her mother’s death, and then after. When she ceased to be part of a scene that her father was documenting and began to be posed artificially, always on her own. Was I imagining the sadness I saw in her smile? Or was it an effect of the camera flash, the glossy way the photos had been printed, that made her seem trapped in those images, sealed in and suffocating behind the plastic sheeting of the photo album?
“Thank you for showing these to me,” I said.
“Aw, thank you for looking at them! I don’t have many