She had a lot of mysterious beige foundation garments that were utterly inexplicable, and a little box of jewelry that I liked to taste, because the real gold tasted really rich when I sucked on it, and a stack of old cigarette tins full of frayed photos.
The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they’d been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if you squinted at them and cocked your head, you could kind of see her features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and sober.
The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as though they’d put their heads through a black curtain.
But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of the old pictures.
The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on Auntie’s armchair in the living room, which had whorls of paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.
And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently sketched. I’d seen a Polka Dot Door episode where the hosts showed how you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.
That’s what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture, using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the surface of the photo.
And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was, where it wasn’t. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the photos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing the shape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.
Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve, using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and long before I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. I drew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I had drawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretching out of the shot.