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behind sunglasses maybe. When he was alive, he gave me these tight, close hugs each time before he left, and then again when he came home. I could always count on those two tight moments with him.
    I went and put the framed picture of my dad on my nightstand, then came back to my mother's room.
    "How's the dressing-up-like-me coming along?"
    I held up one of her gray skirts.
    "You'll need something on top."
    My mother had drawers full of sweaters mostly dark blue, gray, and black. She owned one girdle, but she never wore it. When she thought to, my mother wore slips. As usual, my options were limited, to say the least.
    "That reminds me," I said. I told my mother about the dance coming up at our high school, and even though no one had asked me to it yet, I asked her if I could please please please get a brassiere. I could feel my face turn red and hot when I said the word out loud. "All the other girls are wearing them."
    She said she didn't see why I couldn't just wear a slip, but
okay, okay, okay.
    Meanwhile, my mother was telling me about some princess in Italy who was being taught to paint by Kokoschka. "Can you imagine?" my mother said. "I bet she has no idea how lucky she is."
    I thought for a minute, then said, "Who's Kokoschka, and why do you even care?" I had just asked her for my first brassiere and she was talking about some painter with a weird name. Sometimes my mother's talk made my head hurt.
    I put on the gray skirt and a white shirt, and bobby socks and loafers. I looked at myself in the mirror, shifting to a forward-tilting hunch I had seen a magazine model do. My mother and I were almost the same height, but even in grays she was more beautiful. I just looked like a boy. I pushed my hair away from my forehead. I took my ponytail out, then put it in again. It had looked better before I bothered with it. At least she let me wear lipstick to Mary Alice's party. And soon, soon I would have a bra.
    ***
    Early that evening, Perry came over and set up his tripod outside, and he lit up all the rooms in the house even though he said he preferred daylight and didn't like using artificial lights. He wanted my mother to walk back and forth in the living room while he stood outside taking pictures. He said he was going for a kind of effect that would make my mother look like a ghost. It had something to do with the shutter in the camera being open longer that would make the walking blur. He was staying for dinner too. They were celebrating because one of his photographs had appeared in a book and someone had called him and asked if he could put together a whole collection of pictures for his own book.
    My mother announced that this was the beginning of something.
    Before my mother drove me, dressed as her, to the party, Perry insisted on taking my picture.
    "Say gumbo," Perry said.
    "Cheese," I said.
    When I put my hands on my hips, he told me to quit posing. "We have enough grinning automatons in this world." He started snapping pictures. "And the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play," he said, his eye still pressed in to his camera, his finger still snapping pictures. He kept his left eye closed. I rolled my eyes. This dude was crazy.
    "What's that from?" my mother asked, standing near him. She was holding his drink.
    "Exodus."
    It made me feel weird knowing that my mother was going to be alone that night with Perry Walker. Usually it was the
three
of us. Why couldn't she just sit home by herself, eat some gingersnaps, look through her box of glass slides, and work on her lecture notes like she always did on Friday nights? When she wasn't teaching, my mother sat at her desk, typing on her big black Underwood typewriter. She wore my dad's old flannel work shirt and a pair of men's dungarees held up by an old belt buckled to the last hole. That's when she seemed most herself.
    "Now the two of you together," Perry said, getting his camera ready.
    My mother and I stood next to each other, my mother