Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg

Author:Myla Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

69. Loose tooth, Brooklyn, 1961

Not a Ro-Ro shot, as you might think. True, the other end of the string attached to my tooth is tied to a door beyond the photo’s left edge, which is being closed by an unseen person; but that person is Kaja, not Lillian. And there I am, just left of center, caught mid-flinch: the string leading out of my mouth is taut as a tightrope as the door slams shut.

Once again, my mother went for the wide shot in order to get the doll dangling off the edge of my bed and the clothes dangling off the chair. Everything here is hanging by a thread.

As with Ice and Bath, people accused my mother of staging my performance, but the slamming-door technique was Kaja’s. Kaja had slammed that door at least twice before Lillian discovered us, and after the picture was taken, Kaja slammed many more times before my tooth’s liberation. The truth is that I was deeply proud of this picture. At the Lacuna I spent most of my time standing next to it, so there would be no doubt who that brave girl was.

JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: There was nothing to do. We’d been given no pens, no paper, no books. Some women talked. Others cried. Some stared blankly at the wall. A few went into drug withdrawal, and their pain was terrible to see. The guards watched and did nothing. Some women kissed and groped each other. One woman sat down next to me and tried me with her hand. “No!” I yelled very loudly, and she stopped.

The bunks were hard and dirty, with no sheets or pillows. My cot had a cotton blanket, but it smelled and was stained, so I didn’t use it. Roaches crawled the area around the toilet and sink. The food was some kind of thin oatmeal or soup and was often cold. By the third day I kept forgetting I wasn’t guilty of anything, that I was still waiting to see the judge. When I did remember, I didn’t know what to do with the information and fell back into forgetting. My hairpins had been taken away, so my hair hung in tangles. This sounds like a small thing, but it is not.

At some point my hands began to frame things: the lined face of a young addict; the marred skin of her inner arm; the cracked light fixture on the ceiling; the light cast by the sun through the high window on the wall. When one of the women asked me what I was doing, I told her I was taking pictures. “Where your camera at?” she asked, and I tapped my forehead. “Oh, it be like that, huh?” she said and drew circles in the air with her finger while pointing at her head. I smiled. “Would you like me to take your picture?” I asked. “Go ahead, crazy white lady,” she said. “I’m feelin’ generous today.”

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