own a camera.
At first the shots were candid, but now he wanted us to pose. Click click click. I could feel my smile hardening.
In his interactions with me and my mother he often insisted too much—my mother said he “went too far”—as if only by extreme repetition would he be noticed.
I knew Ron was kind. He’d bought us matching gold necklaces, hers wider and thicker than mine, made of two rows of jointed segments that met like herringbone. It was only because he went on too long and didn’t listen that we became infuriated and pushed him away. Now, in the kitchen, it was my mother and me against his frantic urgency. We gave him insolent looks. He turned on the flash.
“Ron, enough,” my mother said. “We’re done, okay?”
My mother ran into the bathroom; I ducked behind the wall.
“Guys, come back,” he said. “Let me take just a few more.”
When Ron didn’t stay over, I slept with my mother in her bed, which I preferred to sleeping alone.
“Why don’t you leave him?” I asked her the next day.
“I just might,” she said.
Ron brought over the developed photographs in a paper envelope. As soon as he stepped inside, my mother grabbed the envelope out of his hand and ran to the couch and started looking through the stack. I tried to get at the pictures, and so did he, but her back was curved against us as she flipped through them, yanking out the photos she didn’t like and hiding them in a pile beneath her leg.
She had long believed that the essential perspective of the photographer was captured in his or her photographs; flattering or interesting pictures would mean that Ron noticed her beauty and even her soul; ugly pictures would reveal that he did not see, appreciate, or love her.
“Let me see,” I said, reaching around her, trying to grab them, but it was too late: she ripped the photographs beneath her leg in half.
She turned and shrugged, tilted her head, lifted her eyebrows—acknowledging our anger and frustration, but smug, the way she always was when she ripped up photographs of herself.
It enraged me when she did this. I became more critical of her. I noticed the way she walked with her toes pointing in, and how her pinkie toes formed yellow calluses sharp as blades that ran vertically along the bottom pad where the toes had been flattened in shoes. She added flakes of brewer’s yeast to her salads and they smelled of dusty rooms. Her cakes collapsed with fault lines because she was too impatient to let them cool. Once, I had loved the way the tip of her nose bobbed up and down when she chewed, and sat in her lap to be closer to the sound, like a blade through tall grasses, but now both her nose and her chewing seemed strange and wrong. All these factors, I believed, were why she was only able to date someone like Ron, not my father. I came to believe it was her fault: she wasn’t beautiful enough, and was therefore unloved, unloveable—and might make me so, too.
At my new school, the buildings were single-story and Spanish-style with dirty stucco walls, arches, and courtyards. The hallways between classrooms were open to the elements, covered by porticoes, and paved with shiny cement squares. On rainy days, the water poured into the courtyards and over the fenced field at the back of the school. My teacher, Miss Johnson, was young—it was her first year teaching. Her hair fell in a perfect blonde curtain around her face, and her bangs were curled in toward her forehead. When she smiled, cushioned circles formed in her lower cheeks, as if she were holding something delicious in her mouth.
I didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance; the first time the class stood to recite it, I tried to mouth the words. Only one girl stayed seated. She sat as if she meant to sit, not as if she’d forgotten to stand.
“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said.
After that, I stayed seated too.
“Why aren’t you standing for the Pledge?” Miss Johnson asked.
“I’m a Buddhist,” I said. That was the religion my mother said she and my father had practiced.
“Oh,” she said, and didn’t ask me about it again.
“It’s not just parents who decide to have children,” my mother said. I was pretty sure this came from Buddhism. “Some say children choose the parents too. Before they’re born.” I tried to take stock of what I’d chosen: my