It couldn’t last much longer, the van, but she didn’t want to imagine living with another car, a newer one, this one spoke so eloquently to her of the past, of her happiness then, of her hopes for herself. Of her youth.
In her youth—relative youth: her mid- to late thirties—Annie had seemed on the path to a notable career. She’d had a New York gallery then, and the two solo shows they mounted early on in her professional life were both well received, which had perhaps misled her about how the rest of that life was going to go.
The first show, called Emergency, consisted of shots she’d taken over about a year and a half in the ER at Boston City Hospital. Closeups of the hands of doctors as they worked, shots of their faces in concentration, alone with whatever they were doing. Shots of nurses, one standing exhausted at the station between patients, clutching some kind of stained linens, her eyes half shut, another mysteriously running down a long, empty hallway. A picture of a cluster of doctors and nurses working over a patient with an open, bleeding abdominal wound, their bodies forming a kind of human triangle around him, the apex an IV bag held aloft by a nurse kneeling on the bed. A doctor in the hallway, laughing with someone, his scrubs sprinkled lightly with blood. These photographs had resulted in her only book, beautifully produced by a small press in Boston.
The second New York show was a series of photographs Annie had taken of her mother over several years, beginning even before the first show was up, photographs that recorded the shifts in her face and carriage as she descended into Alzheimer’s disease: the slow withdrawal of alertness, the visible draining of physical energy, the seeping away from her eyes of some sense of vitality and focus, so that in the last few pictures her body seemed stilled, her face devoid of personality or intelligence—a mask. For one of the last shots Annie had set her own infant daughter, Sarah, across her mother’s lap. She lay there, unsupported, frowning in what looked like surprise as she stared up at the old woman, whose hands were set uselessly at her sides, whose eyes showed no sign that she even registered the baby’s presence.
There were fine reviews of this show, though several, while praising the pictures themselves, were disapproving of the enterprise—“voyeuristic,” one critic called it. The Museum of Fine Arts had purchased one of the photographs for its permanent collection, and it was this material that won Annie grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
But her oldest sister got wind of it at some point, and there was a stink in the family, a taking of sides that ended in what seemed a permanent estrangement for Annie from everyone but the younger of her two brothers. It wasn’t a great loss for her—she hadn’t been close to any of them, even in childhood—but she did feel some of the shame her sister called down on her. In the last painful telephone call they had, she had said Annie was “cold.” It was as though no time at all had passed since their adolescence together, Audrey’s voice was so full of assured and easy contempt. “You always thought you were so much better than anyone else,” she said. “But you’re not. What you are is cold. You’re a cold little bitch.”
Annie was proud afterward to have managed some of that coldness in her response: “It’s so good to have your diagnosis, Audrey.”
But in fact it had been hard to hear Audrey’s judgment, partly because it was so close to what she often thought about herself—the coldness part, anyway. Not, she thought, the bitch part—whatever that really meant. The coldness, though, that cut deeper. But it was something she’d learned over the years to make excuses about to herself. She’d connected it to her being a photographer, to the distance required to do that work, to the need to develop a certain way of looking at people for what could be used, what would be good in a picture, even if it was rooted in a moment of pain, or in what should have been a private joy.
Her sister’s comment made her begin to wonder: maybe instead of her work fostering in her a certain tendency toward remoteness—or even creating that sense of remoteness—maybe she’d been remote from the start. Maybe she’d become a photographer to find a way of living with that. She recalled that at various times in her life she’d felt she married Graham because he was warm, because her life with him made her more generous than she actually was, connected her to people in a way that would have been impossible if she’d still been on her own.
All of this pushed at her, and it slowly brought her to what she understood afterward was a kind of failure of nerve. Sarah was a toddler by then, and Annie took that as reason enough to slow down for six or seven years, grateful for the permission that being a mother seemed to give her.
“But this is just the moment when you don’t slow down,” Frieda had counseled earnestly—Frieda, Graham’s first wife.
Annie hadn’t paid attention to that. What did Frieda know about Annie’s world? She was, after all, a schoolteacher, a safe job if ever there was one.
She should have listened. By the time she started to try to come back, things seemed to have changed in the world of photography, and her work wasn’t as hot, as transgressive, as the work getting noticed then, the work of newer artists—Goldin, Mapplethorpe, Mann. The New York gallery that had done her first shows wasn’t interested in what she offered them now, a series of shots of friends—artists, writers, photographers—in their work spaces. This made her doubt herself in a way she hadn’t earlier. When she looked at these photographs after they’d been turned down, they seemed to her banal, they had no reason to exist. Why had she even taken them?
It made her feel, as she said to Graham one night after dinner, “Just done. Done in. Done for. Done over. Fucked.” She made her voice tough, she didn’t cry, and he poured her another glass of wine in commiseration.
In response to all this, she had turned to a different kind of project, an easy book Graham suggested to her. A book that would make use of images she and a photographer friend, Natalie Schumer, had taken over the years of parties at the house and events at the bookstore. They supplemented these with new pictures, mostly by Annie. Graham did the text around the images. He’d called it Memoir with Bookshop.
Mike Hodges, who’d published Annie’s Emergency book, published this one too—mostly, Annie thought, out of friendship. It sold some copies at the store, but never took off beyond that. But she got a local solo show out of some of the pictures at a small museum in Framingham, a show called Friends—and many of them were included in group shows here and there.
It went like this for a decade or so. Annie kept at it—that was the way she felt about her work during this period. She had about a show a year, most of them group exhibitions in small, mostly local venues—she had stopped even trying the New York galleries.
But she had tried again with a show she called Couples—shots of odd pairings that intrigued her. One of two old ladies—sisters, Annie guessed, though not twins: one was taller and larger than the other. But they looked very like, and they were wearing matching shapeless old-fashioned raincoats and wide-brimmed rain hats tied neatly under their chins. She caught them on a stormy day just as they stepped, arm in arm, off a curb on Linnaean Street into the rain-slicked street, each looking for traffic in the opposite direction from the other, as synchronous as dancers—as Rockettes! Annie had thought, loving the sense of incongruity.