Just One Look

For Grace Lawson, the unraveling began at the Photomat.

She was about to enter the photo developing shop when she heard a somewhat familiar voice. “Why don’t you get a digital camera, Grace?”

Grace turned toward the woman. “I’m not good with that techno stuff.”

“Oh, come now. Digital technology is a snap.” The woman raised her hand and actually snapped, just in case Grace didn’t know what the word meant. “And digital cameras are sooo much more convenient than conventional cameras. You just erase the photos you don’t want. Like computer files. For our Christmas card? Barry, well, he must have taken a zillion pictures of the kids, you know, snapping away because Blake blinked or Kyle was looking the wrong way, whatever, but when you shoot that many, well, like Barry says, you’re going to get one that’s pretty decent, am I right?”

Grace nodded. She was trying to unearth the woman’s name, but it wouldn’t surface. The woman’s daughter—Blake, was it?—was in Grace’s son’s class in first grade. Or maybe it was last year in kindergarten. Hard to keep track. Grace kept the smile frozen to her face. The woman was nice enough, but she blended in with the others. Grace wondered, not for the first time, if she was blending in too, if her once great individuality had joined the unpleasant swirl of suburban uniformity.

The thought was not a comforting one.

The woman kept describing the wonders of the digital age. Grace’s frozen smile began to ache. She glanced at her watch, hoping Tech Mom would pick up the hint. Two-forty-five. Almost time to pick up Max at school. Emma had swim team practice, but another mom was driving the carpool today. A carpool to the pool, as the too-jolly mother had reminded Grace with a little tee-hee. Yeah, funny stuff.

“We have to get together,” the woman said, winding down. “With Jack and Barry. I think they’d get along.”

“Definitely.”

Grace took advantage of the pause to wave good-bye, pull open the door, and disappear inside the Photomat. The glass door closed with a snap, ringing a little bell. The chemical smell, not unlike model glue, hit her first. She wondered about the long-term effects of working in such an environment and decided the short-term ones were annoying enough.

The kid working—Grace’s use of the term working being overly generous here—behind the counter had a white fuzz pellet under his chin, hair dyed a color that’d intimidate Crayola, and enough piercings to double as a wind instrument. One of those wrap-around-low headphones snaked around the back of his neck. The music was so loud that Grace could feel it in her chest. He had tattoos, lots of them. One read STONE. Another read KILLJOY. Grace thought that a third should read SLACKER.

“Excuse me?”

He did not look up.

“Excuse me?” she said a little louder.

Still nothing.

“Yah, like, dude?”

That got his attention. He snarled up, narrowed his eyes, offended by the interruption. He removed the headphones but grudgingly. “Stub.”

“Pardon me?”

“Stub.”

Ah. Grace handed him the receipt. Fuzz Pellet then asked her for her name. This reminded Grace of those damn customer service phones that ask you to dial in your home phone, and then as soon as you get a real live person, they ask you for the same phone number. Like the first request was just for practice.

Fuzz Pellet—Grace was warming up to this nickname—flipped through a file of photo packets before extracting one. He ripped off the tag and told her an exorbitant price. She handed him a Val-Pak coupon, one dug out of her purse in an excavation that rivaled the search for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and watched the price drop to something closer to reasonable.

He handed her the packet of photographs. Grace thanked him, but he already had the music plugged back into his cerebrum. She waved in his direction. “I come not for the pictures,” Grace said, “but for the sparkling repartee.”

Fuzz Pellet yawned and picked up his magazine. The latest issue of Modern Slacker.

Grace hit the sidewalk. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside with a patented gust. The leaves hadn’t really started turning yet, but the air had that apple-cider quality to it. The shop windows had started up with the Halloween decorations. Emma, her third grader, had convinced Jack to buy an eight-foot blowup Homer-Simpson-as-Frankenstein balloon. It looked, she had to admit, terrific. Her children liked The Simpsons, which meant that maybe, despite their best efforts, she and Jack were raising them right.

Grace wanted to slit open the envelope now. There was always an excitement with a newly developed roll of film, an opening-a-gift expectation, a hurry-to-the-mailbox-even-though-it’s-always-bills rush that digital photography, for all its conveniences, could never duplicate. But there wasn’t time before school let out.

As her Saab climbed up Heights Road, she took a small detour so that she could pass the town’s lookout. From here, the skyline of Manhattan, especially at night, lay spread out like diamonds on black velvet. The longing tugged at her. She loved New York City. Until four years ago, that wonderful island had been their home. They’d had a loft on Charles Street down in the Village. Jack worked on the medical research for a large pharmaceutical company. She painted in her home studio while scoffing at her suburban counterparts and their SUVs and corduroy pants and toddler-referenced dialogues. Now she was one of them.

Grace parked behind the school with the other mothers. She turned the engine off, picked up the Photomat envelope, and ripped it open. The roll was from last week’s annual trip to Chester for apple picking. Jack had snapped away. He liked being the family photographer. He considered it paternal manly work, taking the photos, as if this was a sacrifice a father was supposed to make for his family.

The first image was of Emma, their eight-year-old daughter, and Max, their six-year-old son, on the hayride, shoulders hunched, their cheeks reddened by wind. Grace stopped and stared for a moment. Feelings of, yes, maternal warmth, both primitive and evolutionary, rocked her back. That was the thing with kids. It was the little things that got to you. She’d remembered that it had been cold that day. The orchard, she knew, would be too crowded. She had not wanted to go. Now, looking at this photograph, she wondered about the idiocy of her priorities.

The other mothers were gathering by the school fence, making small talk and planning play-dates. It was, of course, the modern era, post-feminist America, and yet, of the roughly eighty parents waiting for their charges, only two were male. One, she knew, was a father who’d been laid off for more than a year. You could see it in his eyes, his slow shuffle, the missed spots when he shaved. The other guy was a stay-at-home journalist who always seemed a little too anxious to chat up the moms. Lonely maybe. Or something else.