I’m thinking the whole naked thing also influenced Lillian’s decision not to bring the photo to class. After sorting through Box Two, I spent a lot of time looking at this picture of Deb (at her face, anyway), waiting for it to spark memories of someone who apparently knew me from birth through my first fourteen months of life, but nothing caught. When I called to interview her, I used the same fake name I used with everyone: a stab at anonymity that had mixed success, but was a sure bet with Deb, who had last known me when my spoken vocabulary was limited to “hi” and “ball.” After the interview, when I came clean about who I was, Deb laughed in a way I’d only ever heard in cartoons. Then she sang “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” into the phone in a cracked, atonal voice that sent shivers of recognition down my spine.

This is the first nude picture Lillian took of someone else. What I love about it, which is what I love about all of Lillian’s portraits, is that it’s not posed. I mean, sure, Deb is sitting in a chair in front of a camera, but the whole in-front-of-a-camera thing seems coincidental. Despite the way Deb is sitting—buck naked, feet spread, right arm resting across the chair back, left hand waving a cigarette—you can tell she’s not being provocative. Basically, no pun intended, she’s just hanging out. I’m sure that part of Deb’s comfort has to do with Deb being Deb, but I can vouch for the fact that Lillian really did make you forget you were in front of a camera. Sometimes she did it by talking to you, but other times she did it by fading away, leaving you to do whatever you would have been doing if she hadn’t been there. Despite years of being the one she did it to, I’m still not sure how she pulled it off. Rather than it being something she learned, I think it was just part of who she was.

If the nineteen-year-old Deb in this picture seems like a slightly seedy wood sprite, the fifty-four-year-old Deb who invited me to visit her in Arizona was more like a friendly bear. She wears her hair long now, in a messy bun. Her freckled face is lined with over thirty years of bright desert sun and all the things she’s done under it. In the portrait, she’s looking off to the side, and because of that it’s hard to appreciate her eyes, but when I saw them for myself, I knew how she and my mother had stayed friends. Deb Brodsky has the eyes of a loyal hound.