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Show how or where, they didn't talk about babies left at hospitals or nurses who harm or why I wouldn't stay at school. My father wore a suit, his nails clean from months of not having to work on the house or car. His hands bore no scratches, his eyes no strain, and he never once mentioned how expensive the menu was or what a rip-off it was to make you pay to take the elevator. Instead we talked about what activities the Brownie troop should undertake. Between bites of burger, I weighed in on sit-upons and lanyards, homemade soap, and no-bake cookies. As we left the restaurant, we passed an instant photo booth. Uncharacteristically, my father suggested we have our picture taken. Perhaps the novelty appealed to him. We had never posed in a booth before. Maybe he felt the night should be marked, the night we threaded the needle, the first and last time I went out for dinner with my parents, the eve of the nuclear race, months before he became a senior officer. You first, he said. And he sat me by myself in front of the empty white screen. I am smiling under a row of bangs curled tight for the evening, having just eaten a meal as I spun through the sky. Get in, Cynde, he calls to my mother, quick before the next one. And then my mother slides beside mine, the two of us laughing, there and gone, caught only by the camera lens, a glimmer, a glimpse, and then on to something else. Now you, she laughs and pushes my father in, his newly-grown mustache tickles against me face, and then, he too, is laughing, just as the camera snaps, no room left inside the booth, the whole world me and my father. The plan had been for the final picture to be the three of us. But the pictures came 110 |