Every Ro-Ro picture my mother ever exhibited came with the credit, “Camera engineered by Joe Kubiak.” Joe earned it. It is a unique and ingenious camera for which he deserves recognition, but really, I’m just as responsible for its creation. If I hadn’t made my mother stay inside, she would have been outside, with no reason to invent a new kind of camera at the only time in her life when there was money to build one. While I don’t know how much it cost to build Ro-Ro, I’m positive it cost more than new clothes, or dance lessons, or health insurance, which are just a few of the many things (breakfast cereal, cookies) we could not afford after we stopped living with Kenneth Lowell. If there had been no Ro-Ro, there would have been no Mommy is sick. Maybe Lillian would have become famous some other way, and maybe that way would have been better. Or maybe she wouldn’t have become famous at all.

51. Repairs While You Wait, Brooklyn, 1959

She is probably waiting for the bus. Probably she has been waiting for a while, and that is why her stare is so blank and her face is so empty. Her children hang and swing and pull at her dress. She has become a jungle gym for them because she’s the only thing around. It’s probably a shoe-repair shop behind her, but the window is only half visible. This turns the REPAIRS WHILE YOU WAIT sign into a more general offer, an impossible offer to someone for whom the bus and repairs represent two of many absences perforating her life.

LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, MARCH 1959: Most of the time being with Ken feels the same as it’s been from the first: each of us happy, if in our own way. But then one of us will say something or flash a certain look, and I’ll wonder if I’ve been fooling myself all along. Do you remember when I told you about the Brooklyn house? Sitting at the table Judy had painted, you pinned me with that painfully direct gaze of yours and asked if this was what I really wanted. I didn’t say it at the time, Deb, but I was disappointed in you that night. I’d wanted you to be happy for me, and instead I got your stare with a question that seemed silly at best. I thought that you, more than anyone, would know the importance of time and space to work and a partner who understood those things. Your reaction was so unexpected, I even wondered if you were jealous! Now I realize you weren’t jealous and that your question wasn’t silly at all.