1977

JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET

My mother the summer before she begins her senior year of high school: this girl is sitting for her graduation photos, just having removed the cap and gown—not the real ones yet, just the prop ones the studio owns. The photographer has asked her to slip her bra straps off her shoulders and wrap this fuzzy faux-fur thing around herself. Velcro keeps it closed. He promises her it won’t look as cheesy in the finished photos as it does in real life.

She’d plucked her eyebrows clean away so as to be able to draw them in as she pleased. She says it was the style then, in the late 1970s. Less the style, more just her: she’d cut her hair this short for the first time the week before the scheduled photo shoot, an act of rebellion and the only one afforded her, as she’d yet to leave her home on a date without a chaperone despite being, in this photo, less than a year away from not just graduation but also her wedding. On the day of this photo, she’d already been engaged for two years.

Her mother wanted to kill her for cutting her hair so short right before school pictures.

But this girl would go on to do the exact same thing the week before her wedding day. That cut—even shorter—was an attempt to dodge the antiquated skullcap her mother had picked out to hold her veil. This girl wanted a crown of flowers instead, but her mother had said no. With days to go, she cut her hair so short that she was sure pinning in the skullcap would prove impossible.

She was wrong, though. They found a way to secure it. So it’s only in this picture, this graduation one, that she exudes pure triumph. I always thought of it as her movie star picture; as a little girl, I’d look at it and pretend she’d been on her way to becoming someone famous—because this was also her mother’s story; Abuela had been a singer in Cuba before the Revolution. This framed eight-by-ten hung in my abuela’s house until, my abuela gone and the house sold, I took it down to hang it in mine.