Developing film was the first thing I learned. It was straightforward enough that, after Lillian loaded the film onto the metal reel and put it in the tank in the dark, I could hold up my end of a conversation while pouring out developer or adding in stop bath. While the film went between stages, Lillian and I would talk about changes in the neighborhood; or while we were in the kitchen rinsing negatives, she would tell me what it had been like when she first came to New York. Making a test strip, I’d talk about school or Kaja. Naturally, I never mentioned my smoking—which, true to my vow never to hurt my mother for hurt’s sake, I now hid—but the darkroom let us be as much of ourselves with each other as we were willing or able to be.

After my mother decided on the best overall exposure for a print, she identified the areas that needed to be darker or lighter. Then she listed which portions of the image she needed to keep covered or uncovered during the exposure and for how long. We kept quiet during this part: Lillian had to concentrate on timing the various sections of the print that needed to be dodged or burned and on the delicate choreography such timing required. If a particular area was in the center of an image, she’d use a piece of cardboard with a hole cut in it, or a cardboard shape attached to a wire that she could wave over the right spot, but mostly she used her hands. As the enlarger projected the negative onto the paper, she gently waved her hands or fingers or cardboard over each designated portion of the image for each preset time. Constant movement kept the outline of whatever she was using—cardboard, fingers—from appearing on the developing print. Watching my mother work in the dim red glow of the darkroom’s safe light was like watching a bird that had been awkwardly waddling around on shore finally take to the water and realizing: Oh, that’s a swan! The choreography of her hands as she heightened lights and deepened darks was graceful in a way I’d never seen before. As I witnessed that, it wasn’t like I stopped being thirteen or her daughter, but those things somehow mattered less. And because they mattered less, there was less to get in the way.