See You in the Dark: Poems

Sarah and Jack Dancing in 1959

87 SARAH AND JACK DANCING IN 1959 I used to get a flush of sentiment, glancing at my parents in this ritualized pose, but now the more I study the photo, the more opaque, the more distant they become. My father is not even really offering himself to the camera. His selfsatisfied smile—I’m pretty sure that’s a smile and not clamped-teeth submission— is quite private, maybe a smile of complacency at possessing the satin-swathed woman in his arms, maybe a wisp of amusement long since gone to nothingness like the smoke of the cigar between his fingers that makes it impossible for my mother to clasp his hand, though I wouldn’t rush to assign this any symbolic meaning. She has to rest her fingers against his open palm, leaving him free to hold the moss-green cigar which, dead as it appears, would have had a sharp, rank smell, like burning metal. In contrast to his opacity, his refusal to be caught out, my mother’s smile is public, generic: she’s pleased to be dancing in his arms, to have her pleasure witnessed and recorded. The harsh light smacking against her dress makes her body, pillowlike, seem encased in metal, the trailing ribbons standing out stiffly like an ornament on a 1950s car. Enough! I wish I hadn’t looked so closely; I want to stop before I lose them entirely, before they become as remote and anonymous as the children in the background, whose patent leather shoes and white socks dangle above the floor, or the balding man on the right, whose raised hand hides his face in a gesture of . . . what? Horror, mortification, shock? Suddenly it’s he who seems most authentic, who piques my curiosity. What has he glimpsed, outside the safety of the frame, that makes him hide his face? ...