Album of Photos Taken and Never Taken

Claremont, California, circa 2005 (or anytime between 1955 and 2008): 

My father tells me my mother smiled at something he said today. To mark the occasion, I take this mental snapshot, underexposed, milky black and white. She is silhouetted against the window in front of the herb garden she has let die. Her eyes are fixed on the columns of solitaire cards fanned out on the Formica dining table, a corner of her mouth turned up in a barely perceptible smile. He is walking out of the frame, beaming, pleased with himself. 

Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, circa 1952: 

In a memory borrowed from my mother, I stand in the doorway of the Yahn-Jones Hardware Store, the afternoon light at my back. I look deep into the cool darkness, down the long aisle flanked by wooden display cases. My mother stands behind the counter, making the black and gold cash register jingle. I have never seen her without me. When I cry out, “Mommy, you are so beautiful!” she turns to look at me. Her smile, like the Cheshire Cat’s, is suspended in the dark air above the marble countertop. I love when she reads me the Cheshire Cat story. It’s not the grin that tugs at me; it’s the fading away. 

Wiley Hill, Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, circa 1948: 

My parents stand in front of the GI Bill house, a log cabin covered with tarpaper shingles. I’m in my stroller, the replacement baby. It’s a tiny snapshot, but I can tell that only my father is smiling. Not bothering to pose, my mother wears her housewife frock with resolute indifference. Her hair is tied back carelessly, wisps escaping. I recognize the beginning of resignation and martyrdom.

Washington, DC, April 1947: 

My mother took this picture of my father holding a newly arrived me, his firstborn, swaddled in a receiving blanket. We are on the front steps of their apartment building. She didn’t need to tell him to smile. Somewhere, outside the frame, in this same city, maybe only a few blocks away, there is another first-born. There is another man’s little girl my father doesn’t know about, sixteen months and twenty-seven days older than me, given up for adoption. 

Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, December 1945:

I almost don’t recognize them, The Best Boy Dancer, Class of 1937, and the Prettiest Girl, Class of 1938, side by side in front of a clumsy but earnest, vaudevillian backdrop of a mottled tree trunk and hillside sfumatto. The photographer’s lamp casts a warm light from down low, like footlights, but Best and Prettiest produce their own glow. He has just returned from a four-year tour in the European Theater of Operations. She has just returned from her own tour of duty, the where and why of which she will keep to herself. I almost don’t recognize them because she has her arm draped casually around his shoulder, red lacquered nails against his hound’s-tooth jacket. It’s a gesture missing from six decades of photos, taken and never taken. He is smiling a toothy, besotted grin. He cannot believe his good fortune. After four years in the hedgerows and trenches, he finds her still here, still waiting for him, still the Prettiest Girl. She wears a smart twill jacket and matching sweater (her Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter clothes) and an engagement ring on her right hand. Her blue-black hair falls in soft, effortless waves. She is smiling, the corner of her mouth turned up, confident and secure, perhaps relieved. It’s a smile she might not have recognized sixty years later.

-Ellen Estilai

Ellen Estilai received her B.A. in Art from the University of California, Davis, and her M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran. A former arts administrator, she was executive director of the Riverside Arts Council and the Arts Council for San Bernardino County and educational services manager of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. She has taught English language, literature and writing at universities in Iran and California. Her essay “Front Yard Fruit,” originally published in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, is included in New California Writing 2011 (Heyday) and was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2011. A Pushcart Prize and Orison Prize nominee, she has published poetry and essays in several journals and anthologies, including Phantom Seed; Broad!; Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing; Ink & Letters; Heron Tree; (In)Visible Memoirs, Vol. 2.; Writing from Inlandia; HOME: Tall Grass Writers Guild Anthology; and Shark Reef: A Literary Magazine. Ellen is a board member emerita of the Inlandia Institute, a literary center in Riverside, California.