Free Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard Page A

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    This was before people learned to take advantage of the camera, to show it only their best side. The light in our family album was like the glare of truth; there were no shadows in it, just as there are none in the photographs on driver’s licenses. It paled our faces and darkened our eyes, almost gave us wrinkles. My father—for it was he who always took the pictures—caught us red-handed and barefaced. We looked at the camera as if it was to be our last look, now or never. Because these pictures seemed to me to be absolute, artless, and true, I didn’t want Sheri to see them. To see them would be to know too much about me. If she saw me, me as a child, she would molest that child.
    I wanted to take the album away from her, but how could I? I couldn’t even talk to her under the circumstances.God knows what I would have said, and how she would have replied. All I could do was watch her and try to keep her in some kind of bounds. Sitting next to my father on the love seat, I gazed at her pale, heavy, unstockinged legs with a mixture of apprehension and desire.
    My mother was at her worst, almost helpless, in ambiguous situations. She couldn’t improvise. She was a planner; she liked to count. I could see that she was nervous with Sheri on her lap; she was gulping for air. Yet I was afraid to interfere. As long as I let her sit on my mother’s lap, Sheri would behave up to a point.
    My father was, in all things, deliberately different from my mother. He saw himself as a man of great aplomb, equal to any occasion. In the French Quarter, he had been a popular figure, a noted raconteur, a former beau, a crack shot, a dancer, a bit of a boxer. Now he was looking at Sheri with a show of astuteness. He was a builder and he studied her as if she were a blueprint. I had often seen him poring over blueprints, because it was his job to take them from the architect and translate them into practical terms for the carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, and painters. He would bring the blueprints home and make a great show of rescuing the building from the architect, whom he always represented as a mere boy.
    What did he think of Sheri? I wondered. How did he see her? Was she another piece of architectural foolishness, a schoolboy’s idea of a woman? He must have found her flimsy; he would have used more lathes, more plaster, more material. He had once told me that he liked Floradora girls, around 180 pounds.
    The room was filled with examples of my father’staste. It was his hobby to make furniture on the weekends in his workshop in the basement. He was always turning out end tables, side tables, and coffee tables. They were beautifully made, indistinguishable from the better furniture in stores, except that there was something heavy or chunky in their design, as if they were meant to be used by Floradora girls. They were too sturdy-looking, too indestructible. You felt they would last forever, that they would bury you.
    Giving my father’s pieces away was my mother’s hobby. As soon as he made a new table, she gave away one of the old ones. The neighborhood was saturated with his tables; by now my mother was giving them to near strangers.
    Because of the way Sheri talked, my mother assumed that she was a foreigner. She spoke to Sheri slowly and distinctly, without a trace of her strong New Orleans accent. She even began to sound a bit like Sheri. Anatole loved to play, she said. When he was a little boy, he was always playing. Carried away by the family album, she embarked on a history of my childhood.
    I was waiting for my father to speak. I believe that he too took Sheri for a foreigner, and I expected him to come out in French or Spanish. He once told me that he had learned Spanish in Mexico when he was a young man. But he didn’t speak to Sheri at all; he was uncharacteristically silent. His eyes were narrowed and his lips pursed, as if he was meditating or shaping a thought, but he never said what it was. Perhaps it