Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

she pushed her boss aside and took over while he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. He had not been particularly interested in the photographs, or the show, but when he read the reviews and heard the reactions he’d said, quietly, “I think you may be onto something here.” She’d had a lucky break when the dean of the arts program at a university described the photographs as “housewife imagery,” and the head of the women’s studies program responded by calling him a misogynist, and a student kerfuffle that followed got a good deal of publicity, with the female students wearing T-shirts with the photograph on the front. Within six months Rebecca Winter had become a female icon, her Kitchen Counter series described by art critics and essayists as both an elevation and an indictment of women’s lives and women’s work. Imitators produced photographs of chicken bones, colanders, even pacifiers and diapers, but it was Rebecca’s photographs that held pride of place for years, turning up on magazine covers, postcards, T-shirts, even an ironic Mother’s Day advertisement. The posterhad been Stephen’s idea, a simple thing: the image, her name, the title.
    Once Rebecca had read an essay in which a feminist theorist posited that the word
still
was obviously a way of suggesting how empty the existence of the average American woman was, that the bread crumbs were an allusion to Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail so someone could find you, rescue you, keep you from being eaten alive. Rebecca had been amazed at how much could be divined from a photograph she had snapped unthinkingly in a haze of fatigue overlaid with unacknowledged anger, and a title she had come up with haphazardly when the gallery had decided that simply numbering the photographs wouldn’t do. She wondered what the theorist would think if she knew that Rebecca had finished working that morning when Ben started yelling “Juice!” from his bedroom, that she had parked him in front of the television to watch
Sesame Street
while she cleaned the kitchen and started a load of towels.
    And all while her husband slept before waking for his seminar Images of Attraction in Renaissance Art. “Coffee?” he’d said as he knotted his tie carefully and pushed up against her while she stood at the sink, not in a romantic or even a seductive fashion but as though they were in a subway car and other passengers had gotten on behind, jamming them accidentally together. It was his very carelessness that she had initially found so attractive, as though to snag his attention for even a moment was a sign of worth.
    Funny, that no one had ever asked what had happened to the dishes, the scraps, the crumbs in the photographs, on the poster. For a while afterward she had continued to use that same dish towel with its blackened edge, until one of the wives at dinner had lifted it as though it were the Shroud of Turin and said, “Oh my God.”
    For a time the poster was everywhere. You could see it in the windows of framing shops, on the walls in coffeehouses, inthe offices of nonprofit groups for women, above the beds in college dorm rooms slept in by girls who had never made a meal or washed a dish.
    Rebecca had followed the Kitchen Counter series with a series of photographs of Ben, but so close in that they were geographic, the valley of a chubby bent arm, the hill of a rounded shoulder, all captured while he was sleeping, naked. (She had also incidentally potty-trained him in the process; with his diaper off he clearly felt disinclined to relieve himself.) It was said that those photographs, the Baby Boy series, did for motherhood what the Kitchen Counter series had done for housework, although what that was depended on who you read. One mothers’ group called for a boycott of her work because Rebecca Winter objectified children. The boycott was unsuccessful. The Baby Boy series sold. Reproductions of the Baby Boy photos sold. Reproductions of the Kitchen