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Back Feast Your Eyes
Chapters (16)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Introduction
  4. CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION
  5. Greenwich Village, 1953–54
  6. Lower East Side, 1954–56
  7. Brooklyn Heights, 1956–1961
  8. Park Slope, 1961–63
  9. “The Samantha Series”
  10. Park Slope, 1963–70
  11. Cleveland, 1970–76
  12. The Last Self-Portraits
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Reading Group Guide
  15. About the Author
  16. Copyright

I’m guessing Lillian snapped Halloween after Kaja and I were already back at Grete’s place, negotiating candy swaps across the living room floor. The scariest thing about that picture isn’t the thin-legged ghost or the cockeyed jack-o’-lantern but the little girl in makeup, fake pearls, and high heels who looks like the understudy for the rundown woman in the faux-leopard coat grimly gripping her small gloved hand.

JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1963: Because I’d already taken off work for my court hearing—hours of waiting for a fifteen-minute transaction in which my lawyer submitted my guilty plea, received my fine, and sent me home—I knew better than to ask for all three days of Nina’s trial and resigned myself to attending only the last. Both Nina and Marcus had warned me to be prepared for any outcome, but that didn’t stop me from gasping when the judge found her guilty. Nina must have heard me, because she turned and winked. From her face, you would have thought she’d just won. That face should have comforted me: Nina loves a good fight. She’d already told me, guilty or not guilty, that she, Marcus, and I would be going out afterward for celebratory cheesecake at Junior’s; but her reaction had no effect on my own anger or shame. The anger I didn’t mind, as there was plenty to be angry about, but the shame was a vestige of the Cleveland girl who dogged me despite all my efforts to leave her behind. This bred more shame, in a ridiculous cycle that ended only when I remembered that I would now have to break the news of Nina’s verdict to you, which brought me back to my anger.

74. Newsstand, Brooklyn, 1963

There it is: the defining event of that year, smeared across every front page of every newspaper on every rack. A mother is pulling her little boy away by the hand, her face blank as they walk past, as if ignoring all those different versions of PRESIDENT SLAIN will make them disappear. But the kid is looking at the newsstand, and the news vendor is looking at the kid, and in their faces you see everything that kid’s mom is trying to wish away.