Anonymity Read Online Free Page B

on her face.
    For a while, she'd been absorbed by the documentary photography of women like Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus. Their gritty shots made her want to wipe away the dirt. She loved how they made her feel uncomfortable for the humanity of their subjects.
    This interest in strange photography had started with a job at a photo booth in the mall. She had liked the quiet routine. Feed the machines and they spit out images. Simple. And fascinating. For hours upon hours she looked at snapshots of other people's lives—their parties, their vacations, their secrets.
    One day, while she was dumping a disposable camera onto a disc, the fragile face of a dead infant appeared. She couldn't stop looking. Eventually, the dead baby photos moved from the regular file to the late file. When she called, the number had been disconnected. The shots moved to the abandoned file and a month later Emily stole them. That packet of dead baby images was still in the back of her desk drawer.
    Her mother was suddenly at her side, pulling the black-and-white portrait from the pile. She studied it.
    “You look so much like me when I was younger,” she said. “So pretty.”
    “You're still pretty.”
    “Oh, with this gray hair.” She touched her temple.
    “Geez, you've got the body of a yoga instructor. I wouldn't worry about a couple of gray hairs.”
    This made her smile. “Take those with you,” her mother said, waving a hand over the portfolio mess. She reached into the top of the closet and came out with Emily's camera bag. “This too.”
    From the bottom of the portfolio, Emily pulled images of neighbors with their kids at the pool. People jogging. Dogs. There were close-ups of the jumpy anoles that clung to the sides of their house. None of these had ever satisfied her in an artistic sense. They were vanilla, just mundane snapshots of suburbia.
    Barbara perused Emily's display.
    “You should organize them. Put them in a form you can show somebody.”
    “I was never happy with most of them.”
    “They're nice.”
    “Nice?” This lukewarm endorsement showed her mother's lack of insight into art. Barbara was a practical thinker. Art for art's sake had never made sense to her.
    “I don't know,” Emily said. “I always felt that my work lacked that elusive element that makes you feel something when you look at it.”
    “Feel what?”
    “An emotional response. Art should make you laugh or make you sad or disgusted or horny or angry or…whatever. It should make you feel something. Anything. Everything. Indifference is the worst response to art.”
    “These look perfectly fine to me. They show you mastered the basic skills of photography. I never was sure exactly what you were trying to accomplish.”
    Still don't , Emily thought. In Barbara's world, art matched the couch.
    Her mother could not grasp why Emily liked the frayed edges of life, a little dirt in the cracks. Barbara felt life should be pretty and clean and efficient. She would only be happy when Emily was weighed down with a career, a husband, a baby and an enormous handbag with hardware.
    “I've got to go,” Emily said as she zipped the photos back inside the case. “I work tonight.”
    Her mother followed her downstairs and out to her car. The MINI, a sixteenth birthday gift, still got her where she needed to go.
    Emily flung her portfolio in the back and got in. The windows were down, so her mother came to stand next to the driver's door.
    Emily reached for the key, then she paused and looked down the street past her mother. “You know, when I was really young, I noticed that every house on this street is the same brick, that every front yard light pole is a replica. Every fourth house has identical dormers and shutters, every third house has stockade fencing around the backyard.”
    “So?”
    “Everyone's grass is the same height because Mexicans mow on Mondays.”
    “Ah, your powers of observation astound me. Guess it's the artist in you. Drive safe. Love