Deb, you must be wondering if I even received your last letter, but I saved this for last: I’m coming to San Francisco. I wish I could be there for the birth this spring, but by summer I’ll have saved enough vacation days for the bus trip there and back, plus four days with you and the baby. I’m happy for you because you sound happy, but as your friend, I must tell you that no matter the circumstances, it is wrong for you to have involved a married man with a family of his own. I know what you’re thinking: I didn’t know what to make of you and Judy at first, and I ran back downstairs the first time I came to a Tuesday night. But Deb, it doesn’t matter how “free” or “open” you say your community is; what you’re doing has nothing to do with either of those things! I’m sure my reaction doesn’t surprise you. In fact, I bet it’s why you waited so long to let me know. But maybe what does surprise you is how none of that changes my love for you, or for the child growing inside you, or how happy I will be to see you both.

90. Woman, Brooklyn, 1967

At first glance, it looks like this woman—bent at the waist in what almost seems like a runner’s starting crouch—was cut from another picture and collaged onto this sidewalk so that her back half is emerging from the hedge bordering this apartment building. Except that Lillian didn’t go in for collage, and a fashionably hatted, wool-skirted woman in sling-back heels isn’t exactly dressed for the fifty-yard dash. All I can figure is that she must have dropped something in that bush—a glove? her inherited notions of femininity?—but with her arms and the lower half of her profile lost to the shrubbery, we’ll never know.

It’s weird what gets left unsaid. One Sunday in April, a few weeks before the MoMA show, Grandma called like usual, but until I asked to talk to Grandpa, she didn’t mention that he was in the hospital. My face must have changed because before I could reply, Lillian grabbed the phone to ask What? and When? and How? and How long? Grandpa had a heart attack, my mother informed me. Then she handed me back the phone so Grandma could describe the white-breasted nuthatch at the feeder that, she said, was looking forward to my visit that summer because it preferred having a young lady to sing to.

The night of the opening I slept over at Kaja’s where, after Jim was asleep, she and I liberated one of his beers and two of Grete’s cigarettes and took turns reading aloud from some dirty paperbacks Kaja had found in a shoebox on the floor of her mother’s closet. We couldn’t understand why Lillian hadn’t taken me. Didn’t I deserve to go? Eventually, we decided that this was the punishment my mother had fitted to my crime: since I wouldn’t let her photograph me anymore, Grete was her date. I prided myself on giving back as good as I got, so if this was Lillian’s best attempt at payback, I’d give her my best twelve-year-old rendition of pretending not to care.