The Photograph

It is a fearsomely haunted photograph. She detests it when her unwary eye lights upon it. But its removal is simply not possible. Her reaction to the photograph is utterly irrational, she knows that. With her lies the fault, not with the photograph. The photograph is one taken of her only grandchild, early in the school year, one of the many she has acquired over the years, each one representing another grade at elementary school for her now-13-year-old grandchild.

This one is different. From the moment she saw it she felt herself recoil inwardly. Outwardly it was as though nothing was amiss, she accepted it gratefully, found an appropriate frame for it, and set it beside many of the others, sitting on a small oval table. Actually the frame was somewhat inappropriate. It was far too elaborate. It celebrated a photograph that she found frightening. It awakened in her a minuscule worm of fear that wriggled along her intestines. She hoped it would never find its way to her heart.

Her heart had felt utterly broken when she’d seen that very same pose for the first time. But that was a temporary heart-break, unavoidable since most people, she was certain, likely reacted the same way. It was a piteous thing to behold that photograph, of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood with that wistful smile making an effort to appear confident. The girl/woman was not very attractive in the conventional sense; her features were too coarse. And her skin pigment, along with her features betrayed her ancestry. She was a member of a visible minority among whom there were many extraordinarily beautiful men and women.

This girl/woman had not been blessed by her particular DNA, with graceful, delicate features. The manner in which she brushed her long dark hair to a side was unusual. As was her pose, tentative and hopeful, as though she were saying ‘here I am, I trust you, I would so much like you to like me’.

Reading the newspaper accounts of what had befallen this child was painful. Reading of her parents’ anguish was dreadful. The girl had been horribly unhappy, wanting desperately to be accepted by her peers, and prepared to do just about anything for that acceptance. An acceptance that teased and eluded her. Girls can be extraordinarily cruel to one another, so much for the gentler, weaker sex. They form little cliques of privilege and exclusion.

She should know. Although she was now in her 70s, her childhood remained vivid, though tamped down deep in her memory cache. She had been an outsider, aching for acceptance. She knew she was different. She had no wish to be the same as other girls, even those she admired, for the glossy straightness of their hair, for their developed body shape so unlike her own, for their uninhibited and easy manner, also unlike hers. She was content enough with what she was, it was just that she saw no reason why she shouldn’t be accepted as she was.

But that’s the way society is; if someone is ‘different’ in any way, they’re held at arm’s length. Politely, for the most part, but pointedly excluded. But there was never anything ‘polite’ in the manner in which young girls chose to exclude those they found wanting in all the values however shallow, that they held dear. The kind of exclusion they practised was a cutting, hurtful, deliberate one. And the more one attempted to ingratiate themselves into the favour of those who shunned them, the more despised they became.

So she quite understood what had happened to that poor young girl whose photograph appeared again and again on the front pages of the newspapers when that horrible event had occurred. Gradually that same photograph began to appear progressively back into the middle, then the back of the news pages, in smaller columns as the immediate horror of her fate became assimilated into the general public’s mind as yet another misfortune occurring to yet another of society’s unfortunates.

It was only when the investigating police eventually were able to piece together all the events that had led to that girl’s grisly murder, and the principal characters involved in her death were apprehended, charged and held pending trial that the story moved from the back to the front pages again. Always accompanied by that truly pathetic photograph. A young girl with hope for the future in her eyes, belying her timid demeanour. The reader was able, if he or she wished to do so, to look long and deep at that photograph and envision what might have been on that child’s mind.

To complement the anguished story that came tumbling from her bereaved mother’s voice. Of a disturbed child who no longer took pleasure in her extended family, refused to attend family get-togethers. A child who arrived home from school dispirited, desperately unhappy, and unwilling to discuss anything with her frantic mother. A young girl torn between her parents’ heritage and culture and customs, and that which she saw around her every day of her life, in their adopted country.

A young girl alone and confused and pining for a friend to give her the emotional support she so badly needed. If there were other girls in her situation attending the same school, looking themselves for comfort and support as might have been possible, they did not manage to link together. Perhaps to do so in their thoughts might have been to doubly point out their isolation, to encourage the others who rejected them to sneer in their direction as birds of a feather flocking together in their dejected outsider status; deserving of one another.

She was well aware that she was imagining what life was like for the girl. Everything might not have been so awful for her. There might very well have been times and places in her life when she felt happy with and within herself. Not desperately caring about the impression she made on other people, not caring so deeply about what they thought of her, not investing so much of herself in yearning after being what she clearly could not be.

From the reportage, and the story that evolved of a lonely young girl and the girl’s mother’s inability to understand why her daughter was so bereaved over her status at school, this, more or less, was the tale that evolved. A girl unable to change her heritage, her genetic code that presented her as so different from all the other girls, the imprinting on her psyche from exposure to traditions that came so badly in conflict with the social ease she saw all around her, trying to mingle with girls - and with boys - her own age, but whose backgrounds were so polarized from her own.

She was seen as unattractive, clumsy, uninteresting. Simply no one they wanted to have around them. A hanger-on that turned out to be a dreadful nuisance, whom they simply could not rid themselves of. Their snubs and their indiscreet and sometimes too-pointed references to her as a dumb clown, clawed deeply into her heart, but she persevered. She was certain that with enough self-abnegation, enough forgiveness, enough demonstration of her commitment to their agenda, whatever it was, she would be accepted.

She would be content if she were to be accepted even as a fringe member of their groups; the larger one, or any of the smaller ones, the smart cliques of the beautiful, the talented, the ego-driven. Was it not ego that drove her too, to insist that she be recognized as an individual, as someone worthy of notice, as someone whose wit, weak though it seemed at times that they simply ignored her cleverness, could join them? Couldn’t they make an effort to tolerate her presence?

She was even prepared to accept that she was viewed as pathetic; if so, could they not feel some compassion for her, and on the strength of that, allow her to join them? The thought of the girl and her psychically-precarious life flooded her mind sometimes. She had thought of her often with a depth of sadness that surprised her, since she was, after all, a stranger who lived half a continent away.

But then, then came that photograph of her granddaughter. Her beautiful, vivacious, clever and gifted grandchild whose every photograph was a gift to be treasured, carefully placed in family photo albums, and within frames to grace furniture tops and the walls of her home. Each representing a different stage in her growth from babyhood to infant, to young child, then elementary school. And now, preparing to enter high school. She could hardly believe the time that had elapsed between the present and when she was in that delivery room, the obstetrician late, and the nurse refusing to believe that her daughter had already dilated.

Oddly enough her own daughter, the young woman who was then giving birth to her daughter, arrived into the world in roughly the same manner. That doctor too had arrived too late to assist at the birth. She’d been a young woman then, not quite 25, and she hadn’t found giving birth to be horribly difficult; it was a natural process, after all. When the anaesthetist arrived on the coattails of her too-late-in-arriving doctor, the man had actually wanted to administer her anaesthetic. The doctor hemmed and hawed, and examined the afterbirth. And was tight-lipped with the nurse, who had been an experienced midwife in England before emigrating to Canada, who had delivered her little girl.

The almost-too-late obstetrician who had finally arrived to see her granddaughter emerge into daylight and independent breathing had been a woman. Hardly seemed to make a difference, male or female, she thought, they were all the same.

And there was her grandchild, a tiny, skinny baby with seemingly elongated feet and fingers on her delicate hands. She weighed a bare 5.1 pounds, slightly less than her own mother had. They were not large people. The examining hospital paediatrician had accused her daughter of taking drugs, using alcohol while she was pregnant, to account for the baby’s slight weight. Neither of which had ever been used by her daughter.

And now, thirteen years later, there was her grandchild, taller than her mother, towering over her grandmother, with the full contours of an adult woman’s body. Perched on top of that body was a sometimes-child’s mind. Capable at times of surprising her, though by the acuity of her vision, her assessments of situations and peoples’ intentions. She was an emerging adult. Suffering pangs of social uncertainty. She herself was never very good at giving that kind of advice. Advice her granddaughter never sought from her mother, only her grandmother.

All those photographs over the years, of the child in various stages of development. And then that last one. It was the pose. And the hairstyle. Both of which were not typical of the girl. Why on Earth had she been posed in that manner? These photographs were all taken by professional photographers who had contracts with the school board. These photographers schooled the children in how they should pose. Never before had she been anything but proud and pleased with the result of those photographs.

Until this one. That very same pose. And so oddly, the face in the photograph, though that of her grandchild, has assumed the look of that horribly murdered girl; yet a child morphing into adulthood. She has tried, time and again, to shake sensible thoughts into her head over that photograph. She has done her best to avoid looking at it directly. Of course she could simply take the photograph away, discard it, but there is a sensibility she cannot quite identify that stops her from doing this simple act that would give her relief from her unwanted thoughts.

All the more unwanted since for the last few months she has been regaled on an almost daily basis with a litany of grievances that her grandchild reveals to her. It began with the revelations that her formerly firm bond of friendship with a young girl and fellow classmate whom she herself was fully acquainted with, had somehow gone awry. Her friend, she moaned, was behaving oddly, uncharacteristically and she couldn’t understand why.

“Well, just ask her!” was her emphatic response. It seemed reasonable enough under the circumstances; they were best friends, had been almost inseparable for years; her granddaughter had even brought her friend with her to stay over at her grandmother’s house during the summer months where she had observed the tenor of their friendship at close hand.

“I can’t!” she wailed. “She’ll just deny everything! She’ll tell me there’s nothing at all wrong. And then she’ll ask me what’s wrong with me. She does that. If I ever ask her anything she always does that. She implies that it’s all in my mind, but I know better. She’s different, kind of standoffish, I can’t understand it.”

“Friends, you know, feel comfortable in confiding in one another. If something seems to be wrong, they feel they can rely on one another. That’s what friendship is, close friendship. You have to feel confident that whatever you say to your friend will be taken seriously. You’ve got to confront her, carefully, about your observations and weigh what she says.”

“Grandma! You’re not listening to me. I might as well be talking to my mother!”

“I am listening to you. I just don’t understand how you can be such close friends for years and then suddenly claim you can’t communicate!”

“Well, that’s just it, don’t you understand? I can’t figure out why all of a sudden she’s clammed up, closed herself down, shut herself away from me.”

There was nothing she could say that helped really, because it appeared her granddaughter had already tried everything she suggested. And then, over the course of the next several months, a rapprochement appeared to have occurred; their former friendship resumed. To her questioning, her granddaughter said it just wasn’t the same. There was still something wrong, something unspoken, a quiet reserve, despite her normally ebullient friend’s welcome reversion to her previously known personality, there were times when her friend lapsed into quiet, sullen moods and then they quarrelled when she asked what was wrong, and her friend snapped back “Nothing! Leave me alone!”

Months later the brooding persona gained a victory over the normal carefree one, and once again the two girls became distant from one another. The pain in her grandchild’s voice about this reversal struck her as though she was herself experiencing the misery described to her, vibrating in the girl’s voice. Her imagination took her down the road of her granddaughter becoming depressed to the point of danger. Could she be exhibiting symptoms of mental disease brought along by this dire disappointment? Could the loss of her good friend drive her toward a dangerous loss of mental equilibrium?

She chided herself for overreacting. She knew as well as anyone how teen-age girls revelled in drama, enjoyed feeling downcast and depressed as they coped with the changes in their hormones. When she expressed her misgivings to her daughter she was rewarded with a look of disbelief flooding her daughter’s face. “I’ve told you, Mother, she’s a drama queen. She wants attention. She knows she’ll get it from you. You’ve always supported her irregardless of her behaviour. She’s selfish, thinks only of herself. I’m trying to get her to manage her emotions, to channel them into a realization that others have needs too. She has to be more empathetic toward others. She’s manipulating you, can’t you see that?”

No, she couldn’t see it. She could hear the genuine misery in her granddaughter’s voice. Heard the complaints of the confusion that the re-emergence of distance between herself and her friend had caused, and it worried her immensely. Even while she could recognize her daughter’s perspective, and admitted to herself she was likely more intelligently diagnosing the situation.

In the months that followed the emotional schism between the two girls became irreconcilable. They spoke curtly to one another, the veneer of civility barely concealing their new aversion to one another. It was clear to her, however, from the way her grandchild described their daily encounters at school, and the recounting of the cellphone text messages they sent back and forth to one another, that the other girl was also suffering.

She did her best to encourage her grandchild to be more generous to her friend, try to understand what she had suffered, in the hope that reconciliation might be possible. And her granddaughter, in a huff of self-righteousness reiterated all the times she had made the attempt, apologized, hoped that their relationship would be restored, only in the end, to be rebuffed by her friend.

“Wasn’t my fault she was raped by a family friend”, she finally said. The first time her grandchild had voiced that dreadful word, she thought her head was in a spin she might never recover from. She gagged at the very thought that her grandchild even knew what the word connoted. And that it had happened to her friend, another 13-year-old; simply untenable.

She tried to reason with her granddaughter, telling her that a horrible event like that would simply destroy a girl’s self-esteem, her very soul, alter her for life, make her incapable of having any kind of normal relationships in the future, and that she should have more compassion, be less concerned about how her friend’s coping mechanisms were impacting on her personally.

The girl was adamant. She didn’t care about the rape. It was a horrible thing to have happened to her friend, yes. But she had to get over it. She could have informed her right away, when it had happened, and she would have tried to help her. But she hadn't, she had told others first. And she refused to feel sorry for her girlfriend, that wasn’t the right thing to do, she insisted. It would only encourage her to keep feeling sorry for herself. She had to get over it, get on with life. She wanted to help her pick up the pieces, but not at the cost of helping her friend dissolve into a jelly of self-pity. She was seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis now, and that kind of professional treatment would help. So why was she continuing to be so horrible?

“Horrible? How’s she being horrible?”

“She’s rude to me. Behaving like an absolute bitch. One minute she’s my friend. And the next she’s a nasty, mean-tempered bitch. I’ve told her that I want her to stop that. She’s just not listening to me. One minute she’s saying awful things about me in class right in front of other people and embarrassing me and next thing I know she’s asking me to go out with her to help deliver papers on her route. I just don’t get it.”

And she revealed to her grandmother that she had begun writing a diary. At least that’s how it started. The entries, however, expanded, and she incorporated into those entries other peoples’ perspectives and attitudes. She ended up writing a novel, she explained. Adding to it on a daily basis. Her grandmother felt relieved. Her granddaughter, an avid reader and sometimes-writer, was engaging in a creative, cathartic act of self-discovery and self-help. She was pleased, and praised the girl.

She said how much she was interested in what she was writing, and that caused a withdrawal. What she was writing was for no one’s perusal, it was only for herself.

“Does it help?” her grandmother asked. Does it give you satisfaction to write like that?”

“Well, yes, it does. And it’s kind of interesting. I’ve been adding characters, and using their voices to give a fuller meaning, a depth to what’s happening.”

That really impressed her grandmother. She was delighted that her grandchild had chosen this kind of creative way to deal with her unhappiness over the loss of her friend. Trying, through this method of introspection and altered perspective with the use of other ‘voices’ to gain a degree of understanding of how what was occurring would represent how others felt. She felt confident that through this method, and time elapsing, her granddaughter would manage to weather this emotional storm.

Day after day the grandchild filled her grandmother in with her restive, unhappy recounting of the misery that her school day represented. Everyone in the class, including the teacher by then, knew about her friend’s dreadful misfortune and they wanted to know why the former two best friends were no longer inseparable. The questions came thick and fast: “what’s wrong between you two?” and “why aren’t you being supportively of her?” and “what’s going on, anyway, don’t you feel badly for her?” To all of which queries, her granddaughter responded simply, telling her questioners that it was a private matter.

Eventually, the grandchild asked her grandmother if she’d like to hear a few passages of what she’d written and the grandmother leapt at the opportunity to discover how her grandchild was handling her problems. There were some passages from time to time over the course of the weeks that followed that pleased the grandmother mightily. She praised her grandchild for her growing literary abilities, for her discerning mind, for her ability to grasp the issues and make sense of them.

And then, finally, came the day when her granddaughter read out to her grandmother the beginning of another chapter that read something like this: “She prepared herself for school, remembering to put together her lunch, stuck her binder with the notes she had compiled the night before, studying for a geography test into her backpack. And then, last thing, she went into her father’s cupboard, felt around on one of the top shelves for what she knew rested there, and finally the cold, hard steel slipped into her hand, and she removed it and placed it into her school bag, along with her books, her pencils and erasers, her homework from the night before. She shrugged into her winter jacket and ran out to catch her school bus.”

The grandmother felt her blood run cold. There was a silence, and she wracked her brain; what would she say? Come right out and ask why that? Point out that this could be no solution? Ask her what she had been reading of late to bring her to that kind of conclusion?

Reason prevailed. Her grandchild had no father; hers was a single-family household. This was a child for whom physical violence was abhorrent. She had never even seen a firearm in her life, of that she was certain. This was a strictly academic exercise.

“Sounds fine, Dear”, grandmother said to granddaughter. “Good work. You’re refining your creative abilities. I’m proud of you.”