Part IV: Spin (Chapter 67)

Stomachs filled, small talk exhausted, adults and kids mill around the pavilion, looking logy and uncomfortable, the children whiny and red-faced from too much food and sun.

Another snapshot for Uncle Charles’s photograph album and Uncle Joe’s treasure chest. My sweaty uncles run around snapping vignettes, taking care to freeze each detail as it unfolds.

The same old frames replay as Nana, her daughters, and daughters-in-law clatter around coolers, barbecue pits, and crock pots. A few picky eaters finish nibbling their taverns ‒ the Sioux City version of a sloppy joe ‒ doctored barbecued beans, and green bean casserole baked with Campbell’s Mushroom Soup and Durkee’s onion chips.

Cousin Dan holds up a videotape and clangs on a pop bottle with a knife. “ATTENTION, PLEASE!” he booms, raising both arms into the air like a prophet about to make an important announcement about our immortal souls.

But then, he is a priest.

A short lull in the hubbub. A few people look up, but then go back to doing whatever they had been doing before.

“MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, FOLKS?”

No one seems inclined to give Dan the attention he wants or needs ‒ away from the altar and confessional, he’s just another Mallory to be generally ignored and gossiped about.

And people talk a lot when the high school boys, different ones every year, travel from the prep school in St. Louis to visit him at the rectory.

What my family would say about me if they knew about Ian, my new lover?

Shrugging, Dan pops the videotape into the VCR. Rossini’s William Tell Overture blasts through the speaker. Everyone in the pavilion groans as silent home movies fill the 31-inch TV screen.

The first clip, a scratchy black and white vignette, shows me sitting in Uncle Joe’s convertible, at age 10, bawling as Danny (as he was called then) punches me in the arm.

I can read my lips: “Make him stop!” I say to someone off camera.

He doesn’t stop.

Instead, he laughs and punches me harder as I bury my face into the car seat.

Later that day, I suffered a concussion after landing on my head at the trampoline park in South Sioux, but no one remembers that.

Even if they did, they wouldn’t bring it up. There’s nothing funny about a child being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

Just the fat girl with long frizzy hair, bawling like a crybaby.

As the grown-up Dan guffaws at the scene, I can tell that Sheldon’s angry, but he says nothing, and I don’t encourage him.

Besides, in those days, getting punched out by a cousin was no big deal. It went with the familial territory.

Still, I’ve seen enough.

I excuse myself from the table and go to Uncle Joe’s treasure chest where I root through the disorganized pile of letters, cards, and snapshots.

Even though most of the memorabilia has little to do with me, except maybe on a peripheral level, I feel this obsession with Joe’s chest, that maybe I’ll find my answers here, so I search for anything, especially snapshots, that will connect me with my early years.

I don’t hold out much hope; I own most of the few snapshots that have survived my childhood, and those fit comfortably inside a large portfolio, which I usually keep in my studio, but is now in the trunk of the Jetta.

I have only one baby picture of myself that had been taken professionally, and, even there, I’m chubby and cross-eyed.

I shudder: if I had to tell my story with photographs, it would be a barren story, indeed.

When I find an old head-shot photograph of my mother, I feel a familiar stab in my chest, something primordial and dangerous.

The edges of the yellowed snapshot are curled, and the faded scrawl “This one’s for the boys in the back!” on the reverse seems hopelessly dated. The colors have long washed out; I can barely tell that Mother’s sequined dress had once been a bright green.

Until now, I haven’t given much thought to that day when my mother, after I had begged and pleaded, posed wearing the mermaid dress for Daddy Platts’ Kodak.

I’m tempted to show Ruby the picture, but she’s outside the pavilion, chasing down my nephew, her son, who’s trying to catch a large frog that got away from him earlier. Besides, even if she weren’t thus occupied, the picture wouldn’t mean a thing; my sister was only 15 months old at the time, and she doesn’t remember Mother at all, let alone the mermaid dress.

More than thirty years later, I have few illusions about what my mother did for a living, but before that hot August night in 1957, when I was six, my mother and the mermaid dress were the closest things to perfection, together representing beauty, glamour, and stardom.

She looks so young, but then she was young ‒ only 26. Still, the evidence of hard living already shows in the lines around her mouth ‒ probably the booze which eventually killed her and the rough times with the two men who beat her before Daddy Platts came into our lives.

And then there is the platinum hair: a natural redhead, my mother, a Marilyn Monroe fan, bleached her hair until it felt like straw.

Maybe it’s the dress that keeps me staring at the picture, that amazing dress that fit Mother’s hourglass body as if the gown had been especially tailored for her dimensions.

But I know what really draws me in, for even a faded photograph can’t take away the clarity of that long-ago August night in Los Angeles, a few months before I moved to Sioux City for the rest of my childhood with Nana and Pappa.