KENNETH LOWELL: Around the end of that summer, Lil brought home the ugliest camera I had ever seen. It was like something Dr. Frankenstein would have thrown together if Frankenstein had been a photography buff. Lil’s pal at the camera shop had grafted bulk-film loaders onto either side of a 35-millimeter camera body, which let Lil shoot a hundred feet of film at a time. Attached to the bottom of the thing was a modified spring-motor drive that could automatically advance the film at four preset intervals. This meant that once Lil got the camera going, it could take a picture every one, two, five, or ten seconds until it ran out of film. With a hundred feet of film, that meant 680 exposures, taken over anywhere between ten minutes to an hour depending on how she set it. It was a pretty expensive way to take pictures, but I figured the money Lil was spending didn’t come to much more than what a run-of-the-mill glamour-puss would lay out for clothes, shoes, perfume, and makeup. The important thing was, it made her happy again.

If you look at the contact sheets leading up to this shot, it’s pages and pages of Lillian staring at me while I stare at the camera. This goes on for ten contact sheets, thirty-five shots per page. Post-Kenneth, when it was a choice between film or food, Lillian would skip meals. This shot didn’t happen until the camera had been going long enough for me to forget about it and start making spit bubbles. Of all the spit-bubble photos, this is the only one that catches a bubble on the verge of popping as it stretches from my open mouth toward Lillian’s face like a see-through tongue.

I called the camera Ro-Ro, short for Robot. The tripod was Ro-Ro’s legs and the camera lens was its eye, but mostly it wasn’t a good name; or maybe it was a good name when I was three, but it didn’t age well. As time passed, I suppose it could have become “the indoor camera” or “the winter camera,” but it is hard, once something is named, to unname it. A name makes something part of a family. Brothers and sisters and fathers have names. Until the day I told Lillian never to take my picture again, I’d enjoyed being photographed by this camera, but even so, I did not want it to have the status of a brother or sister or father. Lillian, of course, loved Ro-Ro. And because of that, the couch-or refrigerator-type relationship that I would have preferred to have with it was out of the question. This meant that whenever I saw the camera beside the coffee table or standing in a corner, I would think, There’s Ro-Ro, reminding me of the father and brother and sister I didn’t have.