LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1967: Somehow it didn’t surprise me that San Francisco was like one big Tuesday potluck. I felt giddy, walking down a street of people dressing and behaving as they pleased, unworried about being judged. I think I’d always feel like a tourist there, even if I stayed four months instead of four days, but it was a pleasure to be there with two people who belong so wholly to that place as you and Yuma. What a beautiful name for a beautiful boy.

Now that I’m back home and August has arrived, I still don’t know what to show with Mr. Wythe. I want to balance old work and new, but I’m not sure what that balance is. Once upon a time, I trusted my instincts; but now, every time I look over a contact sheet or appraise a print, I feel the eyes of the world appraising it with me. I wish I were eighteen again. Unlike other women who yearn for their younger selves, it’s not that woman’s body I’m after: it’s her state of mind!

92. Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn, 1967

Lillian prided herself on grabbing pictures of people who didn’t know she was there, so I’m surprised she included this one in The Box. Two of these three people are looking straight at her: one half of the teenage couple making out in the doorway at the left-hand edge, and the beefy girl standing sentry in the middle of the sidewalk, eyeballing the camera like it’s a bug and she’s a shoe. I almost wonder if my mother was trying to prepare herself for adolescent rage, armed with nothing but a camera for the storm she knew was coming.

After three years of folk songs, hands-on learning, and Quaker meetings, nothing short of electroshock therapy could have prepared me for public junior high. My first day of school, I arrived in the two-tone oxfords and matching purse I’d picked out with Grandma at Higbee’s. I knew the outfit was a stupid idea. At JHS 23, new shoes meant hand-me-downs with soles that were still good, and the only people with matching purses were the hookers on Prospect Park West. But ever since my summer shopping trip, I’d been looking forward to walking into seventh grade wearing the shoe-purse combo, and I wasn’t about to let the minor detail of a different school spoil that plan. By lunch, I’d lost track of how many times my feet had been stomped, turning the white part of the oxfords a blackish gray, plus my purse had become the property of a girl named Lina who had sharp nails and a dead tooth. I divided my time between looking out classroom windows while wishing myself back to Kaja at Prospect Friends and testing different versions of cool in the bathroom mirror, trying for a face tough enough to keep away the girl members of the Stone Foxes without scaring off everyone else. It only took me a couple weeks to realize the best way to do that was to start smoking.