What Grandma Maryann said made me feel worse, and yet more curious. After all, what was it about Dad that made him so quiet about his life as a kid? I hadn’t really thought that his life could have possibly been more complicated than mine.
I wandered through my house that afternoon, while Mom napped to recover from grandma’s visit. I felt like a detective in my own home, looking for clues. I was sneaking through the hallway when I came upon the linen closet. It had always been there, but it had never occurred to me to look inside it during my little search. It wasn’t the old sheets and towels that were interesting. It was what else was in the linen closet—“the family archives.”
That’s what Max always called the large plastic crate on the top shelf. It was crammed with photo albums, scrapbooks, and shoebox after shoebox filled with snapshots patiently waiting to be put into their proper place in the albums.
My parents had been trying to get me to help them put the pictures into some kind of order, and I had, but only my pictures. All the black and white and faded color photos of a bunch of people I really didn’t know were boring to me. Until today.
I dragged my little red stepstool from the kitchen, hoping I wouldn’t wake my mother in the process. Even with the stepstool, I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach the crate. I grabbed onto its plastic handles and pulled it out of the closet, almost losing my balance.
My muscles wanted to drop the heavy box, but the fear of my mother hearing a loud crash and rushing out of her bedroom to find her only daughter lying on the floor, unconscious, with precious family mementos surrounding her, was all the inspiration I needed to keep my arms strong and my feet steady. I lugged the thing into my bedroom, even though it would have been much easier to drag it, but also much noisier.
I pulled out my photo album first. The first two pages were filled with twenty snapshots of me at the hospital when I was born. I put that album aside, as well as my brother’s. Mom’s was next, and then my parents’ wedding album. I stacked all these familiar albums, one right after the other on top of my bed. My father’s album was the last. I had gone through it before. Almost all of the pictures were from college and when he first started dating my mother.
Under all of these heavy books were what I was looking for: the shoeboxes. They contained all the unorganized photos. The first box I opened was almost all family shots, with all four of us. Well, except for the oldest ones, which had Max in them but not me, because I hadn’t been born yet.
We still hadn’t bought an album to place all these group pictures in. There were tons of them, for every holiday and family gathering we had apparently ever been to.
I found another box with just pictures of Max. That’s when I figured out that these boxes were organized by the person, or by the people in the pictures. I searched through the boxes until I recognized Dad’s by the picture that was on top of the others. I knew it was Dad because we had the same picture hanging up in our hallway, except bigger. He was in high school and wearing a letterman’s jacket. Although the picture was in black and white, I knew the jacket was red because Dad still had it in his closet.
There were quite a few pictures of Dad in high school. Some with him in a football uniform, others with my aunts, a couple with him standing next to a car wearing a T-shirt and jeans. One of the pictures was an exact copy of the one Grandma Maryann had in her apartment. The pictures started to get older, and Dad started to get younger the further I looked.
Finally, I ran across a bunch of pictures of Dad as a kid. He was with his two sisters standing next to a tree, or a car, or in front of a young woman, who was probably Nana. There were class pictures, too. That was when I started to notice something weird.
The class pictures were a lot like the ones my class took: a bunch of kids standing together next to their teacher, with a little sign at their feet explaining what class they were in and who their teacher was. But that’s where the similarities ended.
These kids were not smiling. Neither was their teacher. And they were standing outside in front of what looked like a stone wall, instead of the auditorium curtain that I was used to. The ground beneath their feet was dirt and rocks, and there was not a tennis shoe on any kid. They were all wearing what looked like dark leather boots or shoes with laces. And the lack of smiles wasn’t the only thing that was strange about the children’s faces. They were mostly white. None of them were black, or Asian, and there were only a few brown faces. One of them I recognized as Dad’s. All of the class pictures were like this, the kids were different ages, and the teachers were different, but there always seemed to be the same number of brown faces (three or four). The rest of the class was white.
My class was a lot more mixed up than that. There were so many different kinds of kids in our class that one of the usual lunchtime conversation topics was what nationality we were. I wondered what it must have been like for Dad as a kid in a class like that. I had no idea if he could’ve been happy or even if he had any friends.
I sifted past the class pictures and into the younger ones when I heard Dad call from the living room, “Hey, where is everybody?”