Black & White Read Online Free PDF Page B

understand? As a little girl, Clara thought she knew what the critic meant: Ruth’s photographs were like a privet hedge—rising tall and green and dense, standing between her and her own memory. She struggled to remember things. At night, lying in bed, she would try to pry the branches apart, to glimpse a single moment, a sight, a sound. But it was impossible. So, instead, she kept a portfolio of Ruth’s work by her bedside. Sometimes, when she couldn’t fall asleep, she would rest the heavy portfolio on her chest and study the images of herself, searching for clues as to who she really was.
    The first image is almost a memory. Clara is three. She is naked, splashing in the warm water of her bath, deep inside the claw-footed tub on the top floor of their first house in the country. The house is an early Victorian with a big front porch, the rooms painted in pastel sherbet-colored shades by its previous owners. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is hitting the old glass windowpanes, a liquid orange light setting the room aglow. Plastic toys float all around her: a sailboat, a rubber duck, a foot-long green lizard. Clara’s hair is long and wavy. It has never been cut. When she holds her breath and goes underwater, she keeps her eyes open and watches her hair move across her face like seaweed on the surface of the ocean.
    Robin is sitting on the bathroom floor, flipping slowly through the pages of Green Eggs and Ham. She’s five years old and can already read. She’s asking questions in her high little-girl’s voice: Why is the train underwater? Why is that guy purple? Wait a minute, he can’t fly! Clara can tell that the questions are driving her mother crazy. Ruth’s forehead is knotted, her mouth turned tightly down as she kneels on the bath mat, soaping Clara’s back.
    “It’s a story, Robin,” Ruth says. “Can’t you just accept that it’s a story? You’re such a literalist.”
    “What does ‘literalist’ mean, Mommy?”
    Ruth sighs. Robin is not a believer in make-believe. She wants an answer for everything. Robin knows that Santa can’t possibly squeeze down the chimney, he’s too old and fat. And she knows that the tooth fairy is just an invention. Fairies don’t really exist. Her daughters are opposite in nearly every possible way. Robin is olive-skinned and tough, with short Buster Brown hair, and has frown lines at the age of five. And Clara—Clara is a frail little firefly, a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, with long Botticelli waves and amber eyes that seem to accept whatever they see.
    “‘Literalist’ means,” Ruth begins slowly, each word seeming like an effort, “someone who thinks that everything has to make sense.” Her hands move smoothly over Clara’s buttocks, efficiently soaping her private parts. But then something changes. The moment freezes, and Clara would swear, when she thought of it years later, that she could hear a shutter snap. Clara has put the foot-long green lizard in her mouth as she leans back in the tub, her hair floating all around her like a halo.
    “Wait.” Ruth’s voice catches. “Hold on.” She stands quickly, backing out of the room, still looking at Clara in the tub. “Robin, watch your sister.”
    “But what am I supposed to do?” Robin calls. “Mommy—I can’t swim!” But Ruth has already run down the two creaky flights of stairs to the kitchen, where her camera bag is by the back door. Then her feet pound back up the stairs, two at a time, and into the bathroom. She snaps a lens into her Polaroid, crouches down.
    Clara takes the lizard out of her mouth.
    “Honey, could you put that back in there—the lizard? Keep doing what you were doing before.”
    “Why, Mommy?” The lizard has the chemical-sweet taste of plastic. Besides, the bathwater is getting cold.
    “Just for a second, Clara.” Ruth is poised, one knee on the bathroom tile, the other ready to pivot. She pushes her long hair behind her ears and squints through the