could hold a pen. She had, on her diminished right breast, the white scar of a lumpectomy—breast cancer at fifty-eight—but it was barely noticeable, really. Her breasts were Tiresian withered dugs, like the breasts of native women in my history classes, breasts so far from either the erotic or the maternal that they could barely be called breasts, were more like near-empty sacks appended to her rib cage. Her skeleton was everywhere visible, almost protruding: her breastbone shimmered beneath the skin’s surface, like the shadow of mortality; her ribs; the odd, jaunty poke of her uneven hips; the knobbling of her knees … And this in spite of her amazing freckling: her skin was everywhere so mottled that you couldn’t tell foreground from background. Not the gentle smattering of moles that sprayed the young woman’s neck like kisses—Rose had a Jackson Pollock for a body, a human casing as marked as any canvas, so intense that she almost seemed dressed in her nudity. I loved that in all this, her fingernails and toenails were carefully painted, not garishly but deliberately, shell pink, an old lady’s vanity.
But ah, to see her face! After the faceless bodies of the others, to be given the gift of her face all but brought tears to my eyes. And such a face. As freckled as, or more so than, the rest of her, her pigment a mask, her wrinkles almost folds, but here, here, the spirit shone. Her pale blue eyes glittered clear, and fierce, and resoundingly joyous. Her strong, compact nose broke the ocean of her face like a ship’s prow. Her teeth, so white, reassuringly crooked. And her pure white hair, oiled and straight, impeccably parted and pulled back from her face, glowed.
In one of the two images Sirena had chosen, Rose was dancing, half a twirl, in an almost-echo of Sana’s dervish spin. In the other, the most beautiful of all the photographs, she held out both her arms to the camera, as if to a child, with a smile at once welcoming and conspiratorial, as if saying, “Come, come, and I will show you all the wonders that I know.”
You couldn’t look at Rose in her nakedness with envy, or contempt, or even sorrow: I looked at her with awe, and I thought, “Let me come with you.”
And then I thought, in spite of my fury at Sirena just then, that if she did nothing else at all for her installation, if Wonderland were only that photograph, she would have made a beautiful and inspiring thing. I thought that Marlene had been right, this would be the making of her. She hadn’t needed me to sew together the canopy of Alice dresses; she didn’t need the aspirin flowers or the broken mirrors—all of it, ultimately, otiose, however clever or beautiful. This was the real moment: this was her Wonderland.
“These are fantastic” is all I said. And she laid her hand on my arm, that way, and really looked at me, and said, “Thank you.”
11
The next week, Sirena went to New York, although not before we’d confirmed our Appleton adventure for the Monday almost two weeks hence, in the afternoon. We’d bring all the kids, but she’d film only the ones whose parents agreed it was okay. For the others, I’d provide an art project, at my end of the studio. I prepared the permission forms with two sections, and sent them home to all the parents.
In the end, Sirena would choose Anna Z as her gallerist, in what seemed at the time a bold, even risky choice—would the gallery even survive? Who knew?—but over the past years, even through the difficult times, they’ve both thrived, and the success of each has fed the other, so that now Anna is credited with having “found” Sirena, and Sirena, perhaps more accurately, with having “made” Anna.
But that was for later. Sirena was gone. Obviously, I’d known she would be. I hadn’t been at my boxes for over a week, although it felt much longer. I’d been so firmly put in my place during those days. I’d barely resisted the impulse to tear up my Polaroids—who had I thought I was? How could I have borne for anyone else to see?—but still I couldn’t look at them. I’d stuffed them in the back of my underwear drawer, as if they were racy porn, instead of sad and tame. Not only did I feel ashamed, I felt ashamed of being ashamed. Neither Alice nor Edie would