“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me,” Helen said. “I’m telling you because I know what it’s like. To have somebody look at you and see what they want to fix.” She shook her head. “Arthur’s a good man, mostly. He’s kind to me. He pays me fair. He’s never once said a word about my weight. But he’s been sitting in that study with that box for two years. Ever since Mrs. Margaret passed. I think it got all mixed up in his head. His guilt and his grief and you.”
The car pulled up at the curb.
Helen squeezed my arm.
“You take care of yourself, ma’am,” she said.
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sat up in bed with the lamp on and thought about that room on the eighth floor of Marshall Field’s. The bright lamp. The pink smock. My mother twisting her handkerchief by the door.
I thought about Arthur at nineteen, behind his camera, red-faced and silent.
I thought about Arthur at eighty, with his kind gray eyes, bringing me lemon cookies. You don’t have to do that around me, Holly.
I thought about the printouts of my face in his box, next to the old photograph. Side by side. Held up to the light.
I didn’t know what to feel. I felt everything.
Maddie came over the next morning. Sunday. She took one look at me and put down her bag.
“Grandma,” she said. “What happened? Did he do something?”
So I told her.
All of it. Marshall Field’s. The boy behind the camera. The box in Arthur’s study. The printouts.
When I finished, Maddie was quiet for a long time. Then she stood up and walked to the window and stood there with her arms crossed.
“I signed you up for that app,” she said finally. Her voice was tight. “This is my fault.”
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“I made you put that picture up. You told me not to. You said ‘not that one.’ And I did it anyway.” She turned around. Her eyes were wet. “And some guy saw it and recognized you from a box in his garage.”
“Maddie.” I got up and went over to her. I took her hands. “Listen to me. You signed me up because you wanted me to be happy. That’s all. And I was happy. For six weeks, I was happier than I’ve been since your grandfather died. That part was real.”
“But it was a lie.”
“Some of it was a lie,” I said. “Not all of it.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Are you going to see him again?” she said.
“I don’t know, baby,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”
Arthur’s letter came four days later.
It came in a thick cream-colored envelope, with my address written in careful, old-fashioned handwriting. I recognized it from the cards he’d brought with the flowers.
I sat down at my kitchen table and opened it.
It was four pages long. Handwritten. In fountain pen.
He apologized. For Marshall Field’s. For not answering me under that lamp. For the work he’d done for forty years, all those smooth, feminine, flawless photographs. For the pictures he’d asked me for. For hiding our history. For letting me believe something that was only half true.
I told myself I was finding you to make things right, he wrote. But I think I was finding you to make myself feel better. Those aren’t the same thing, and you deserved to know the difference. I’m sorry I didn’t give you that.
He didn’t ask for forgiveness. Not once in four pages.
At the end, he wrote: I’ve destroyed the photographs you sent me. All of them. They were yours, and I had no right to keep them. I’ve enclosed the two things that were always yours, which I should have returned to you the first day.
I looked inside the envelope.
There was the old black-and-white photograph. The one I’d left on his desk.
And the faded index card with my mother’s name on it. Mrs. Dorothy Brennan. April 17, 1965.
I took the photograph out of its plastic sleeve and held it under the kitchen light.
I stared at it for a long time.
And then I noticed something I’d forgotten. Something I’d never let myself see, all these years. Because I’d never once looked at that girl long enough to see anything but her upper lip.
The girl under that lamp wasn’t ugly.
She was frightened.
Her shoulders were up by her ears. Her hands were clenched so tight in her lap that her knuckles were white. Her eyes were cast down at the floor, and you could tell, even in an old black-and-white photo, that she was trying very hard not to cry.
She was a scared seventeen-year-old girl in a room full of adults talking about her like she was a problem to fix.
And nobody had comforted her.
Not her mother. Not the woman in the pink smock. Not the boy behind the camera.
Nobody had put a hand on her shoulder and said, You’re fine, sweetheart. You look just fine.
That’s how Maddie found me when she came by on her lunch break. Sitting at the kitchen table, holding that photograph, crying.
“Grandma?”
I handed her the photograph without saying anything.
She looked at it for a long time.
“That’s me,” I said. “At seventeen. In Chicago.”
Maddie sat down next to me. She studied the photograph carefully. She turned it toward the window.
“You had beautiful eyes,” she said.
I wiped my cheek with my sleeve.
“That’s what your grandfather always said.”
Maddie put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed.
“Well,” she said, “Grandpa was always right about everything except the Cubs.”
I laughed through my tears.
Then I looked at the photograph again.
And for once in my life, I didn’t turn it over.
A week later, I called Arthur.
I’d thought about it every day. I’d picked up the phone four times and put it down again.
He answered on the second ring.
“Holly.” He sounded surprised. And careful. “Thank you for calling.”
“I got your letter,” I said.
“I’m glad.”
There was a long silence.
“Arthur,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Did you ever wonder,” I said, “what happened to me? After that appointment? After I walked out of that room?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Not until years later,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. That’s the truth. I was nineteen. I took pictures of six or seven girls a day. I went home and didn’t think about any of them. It wasn’t until Stanley called me about the boxes that I really thought about you.” He paused. “About what that afternoon might have done to you.”
“Do you want to know?” I said.
“Only if you want to tell me.”
So I told him.
I told him about the bleach that burned my skin. The wax that made it bleed. The electrolysis that made me cry in parking lots. The razor every morning in the bathroom with the door locked, even after I was married.
I told him about the napkin I held over my mouth at the church picnic for two hours, until Walter told me I could put it down.
I told him about the little boy in the grocery store. Why does that lady have a mustache like Grandpa?
I told him about the wedding I almost didn’t go to. And the six times I checked my compact during the ceremony.
“I spent decades,” I said, “trying to fix something that wasn’t wrong. Sixty-one years. Because a woman in a pink smock told me it was severe. And a boy behind a camera didn’t say anything.”
There was a long silence on the line.
When Arthur spoke, his voice was thick.
“I’m sorry, Holly,” he said. “I’m so sorry. For every single one of those years.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I really do.”
I took a breath.
“But I don’t know whether I can trust you again.”
“I understand,” he said quietly.
We agreed to leave things there. For now.
That spring, I did something I hadn’t done in more than fifty years.
I stopped shaving every morning.
Not all at once. I’m seventy-eight. I don’t do anything all at once. The first week, I only skipped Tuesday. Then Tuesday and Thursday. Then most days.
The first Sunday I went to church without shaving, I sat in the back pew and held my hymnal up near my face for the whole service. Afterward, at coffee hour, Mrs. Abernathy from the altar guild came over and asked me about my Peace roses for ten minutes and never once looked at my upper lip.
Or if she did, she didn’t say anything.
Maybe she’d never cared. Maybe nobody had ever cared as much as I did.
In May, Maddie took me out to lunch for my birthday.
We sat on the patio of a little café by the river. It was warm and sunny. The trees were green. Maddie’s husband, Josh, told a story about their new puppy eating an entire box of tissues, and I laughed so hard I had to put my fork down.
I didn’t cover my mouth.
Maddie took a picture with her phone.
“Let me see,” I said.
She showed me.
There I was, laughing, with my head tipped back, in my lavender cardigan, in the sunshine. My eyes were squeezed shut. My mustache was right there, plain as anything, dark against my lip.
I looked at that picture for a long time.
“Send me that one,” I said.
In June, I met Arthur for coffee.
I chose the place. Not The Daily Grind. A bench in the rose garden at the botanical garden, the same rose garden where he’d taken my picture in April next to a bush with no flowers on it.
This time, everything was blooming.
He was already there when I arrived, sitting on the bench with his cane across his knees. He stood up when he saw me. He didn’t try to hug me. He didn’t try to hold my hand.
He just said, “Hello, Holly.”
“Hello, Arthur.”
We sat down on the bench. Not too close.
He’d brought a small white bakery box.
“Lemon cookies,” he said. “From Hoffman’s. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
We talked for an hour. About ordinary things, mostly. Roses. His terrible garden. Helen, who’d threatened to quit if he didn’t start eating more vegetables. Maddie’s puppy and the tissues.
Then, near the end, he said, “I’d like to see you again. If you’ll let me. Not the way it was before. However you want.”
I looked out at the roses. A Peace rose was blooming right in front of us, yellow edged in pink.
“I’d like to be friends, Arthur,” I said. “I think I can do that. I think I’d like that.”
He nodded slowly.
“Friends,” he said.
“For now,” I said. “And no more photographs. Not unless I offer.”
He smiled. It was a sad smile, but a real one.
“No more photographs,” he said.
Before I left, he reached into his coat pocket and took out a small envelope.
“This is the last thing,” he said. “I promise. Then the box is empty.”
I opened it.
Inside was a newspaper clipping, yellowed and brittle. It was a small advertisement from the Chicago Tribune, April 1965. BELLE VISAGE CONSULTATIONS — Let Us Help Your Daughter Blossom! Marshall Field’s, 8th Floor, This Saturday Only.
“Stanley found it in the boxes,” Arthur said. “With your card. I thought you should have it. So you’d know it was a real place. A real day. That you didn’t make it up.”
I folded the clipping in half and put it back in the envelope.
“I never thought I made it up,” I said.
Then I stood up, picked up my bakery box, and walked home through the roses.
That evening, I went into the living room and took down a small silver frame from the shelf above the television.
It held a photograph of Walter, the summer before he died, standing in his garden among his tomato plants. I moved it over a few inches to make room.
Then I put the old black-and-white photograph from Marshall Field’s into a frame of its own. A plain wooden one I’d bought at the drugstore.
I set it on the shelf.
Right beside it, I put the picture Maddie had taken on my birthday. Me on the patio by the river, laughing with my head tipped back in the sunshine, my mustache plain as day.
I stood back and looked at them. Walter in his tomatoes. The girl under the lamp. The old woman laughing.
I looked from one face to the other. Seventeen and seventy-eight. Sixty-one years apart.
The girl under the lamp was looking down at her hands, trying not to cry.
The woman on the patio wasn’t covering her mouth.
I didn’t reach for my makeup. I didn’t reach for my compact.
Instead, I straightened both frames on the shelf so they stood side by side, close enough to touch.
Then I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea.
