JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1969: Squirrel, I’ve never gone through your backpack or purse or rummaged your drawers. I’ll never know if you keep a diary under your pillow. Somehow respect for your privacy, along with your modesty after you became Jane, stopped me from asking questions. After forcing you to face so much, so young, the least I could do was not rush you into discussing something before you felt ready. And so I—who defied generations of prudish Methodists by explaining to you at a young age where babies came from, and why Mama bled once a month—told myself that when your time came, you would come to me.

This afternoon I looked out the window and saw a young woman carrying groceries. A few minutes later, when you arrived from your cashier shift with your Bohack bags (and smelling of the cigarettes you think I don’t notice), I realized that the woman I’d just seen was you. At that moment, my mind’s outdated images of you were cleared like sleep from the corners of my eyes. I launched into all the motherly questions I’d been saving, even as your face—along with the woman’s body I’d somehow managed not to see until now—told me I was too late. You explained that everything had been “taken care of” in the embarrassed voice of a waiter who has spilled the soup, and I realized that I had failed us both.

Do you remember when I’d strap you into your stroller to explore the world? That was what I called it, and when you turned two, “expordewhirl” was one of your first words. I’m not usually nostalgic, but when I close my eyes, I picture you in your green sweater holding Lomo as if the stuffed monkey is your own fuzzy Leica, and I feel like I’m fighting a swift current.

97. Untitled [View from the apartment window], Brooklyn, 1970

From a vantage point of four floors up, it’s impossible to tell if these three boys are playing or fighting: all we get are their bodies running down the middle of the street, as viewed from above. The one carrying the leafless sapling twice his size might be making off with a prize or improvising a weapon from what was at hand; the other two could just as easily be his advance guard or targets fleeing his attack. Traditionally, when winter hit, and all the good light came and went while Lillian was stuck behind a Wall Street typewriter, she became even more vigilant about weekend camera time. Hence my surprise one Saturday, when I woke up at my usual late hour to find her sitting on the couch and taking pictures through the window. Lillian asked if I wanted to go over contact sheets with her—like this wasn’t something I’d quit months ago, after she’d told me about needing to give her work a chance to breathe—but I was meeting friends at the ice skating rink in the park. Who was I meeting? she wanted to know. Angie, I said, and a few girls from the store. My list was accurate, as far as it went, but left out Danny McAlister. Not because he was a boy, which I didn’t think my mother would mind, but because he’d already graduated from high school, which I guessed that she would.