Without the title, you wouldn’t know she’s pregnant. She just looks like a strangely fierce naked person, someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. But because I know what’s coming, I also connect that face with a sense of preparation. At this point, my mother had written home. She had no telephone. If Grandpa Walt wanted to talk to her, there was only one way for him to do it.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: At first I was the only one who didn’t think Lilly was crazy, but that was because I’d seen her leaving that hallway. No one I knew had ever been pregnant. Knocked up, sure; but then came the phone calls, and trips to the Viennese gynecologist or to Canarsie. Cass was more or less back to herself in a few days. Marjory—a sometimes actress, sometimes dancer, and Tuesday regular—had bled for nine days and ended up at the Bellevue emergency room, but eventually she’d come back, too. Only a girl named Dianne had disappeared. Not died, but one Tuesday a few weeks after her abortion, she told me that she hadn’t stopped spotting. The week after that, her skin had a greenish look, and her boyfriend was practically hand-feeding her with a spoon. After that, she didn’t come around anymore, and I heard she’d gone back to her parents in Morningside Heights.

But Lilly, because she wasn’t going anywhere, was going somewhere new. Tuesdays, she still sat on the edge of things with her camera; except now, instead of being invisible, she was more like a two-headed calf. I half expected her to start skipping Tuesdays because of it, but she didn’t. Eventually the people who mattered most came around to accepting her decision. It might have been the first time in Lilly’s life that she stood out. I could tell it was hard on her, sitting through all those Tuesdays, waiting for people to get used to her big belly, but I think she knew this was something she couldn’t do alone.

31. Asleep, New York, 1954

Anyone who isn’t Lillian will see this as an obvious time for kids to start showing up in her photos, though technically this is a picture of a large goldfish (party favor? carnival prize?) in a small bowl on a park bench. It seems to be eyeing the sleeping girl on its right with skepticism. Without that sliver of adult along the left-hand edge of the frame, we’d feel afraid, but that bit of full-grown leg means someone’s looking out for the small drooling mouth and the dangling arm, those five little fingers hanging just inches above the dirt.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: I was at my desk wrestling with a poem when I heard voices. It was an old building, so I heard voices all the time—through the walls, through the ceiling, through the door—but these were coming up from the floor. Lilly wasn’t into hosting, so when I heard a man say, You must, and then, You don’t have any choice, followed by the sound of something being knocked over, I was out my door and down those stairs like the place was on fire.