(Figure number 1.) My Aunt Violanda wrings her hands as I remember from weekends at her house as a kid. Her teenaged son was deaf, and I would watch him talk in his sleep with his hands. Scissor motions, loose fists, and fingerswirls. She slept in her orange pancake makeup and wore a bra under her night gown – a serious support bra that seemed more about armor than underwear. When she walked around the house, she wrung her hands perpetually – as if there were always going to be something she had just forgotten to do. I came to that conclusion about her long before my mother sent me the photo, but sometime after my deaf cousin stood in the kitchen at my parent’s house and whispered (not so quietly) that his mother had burned their house down.
She wrung her hands even then.
(Figure number 2.) My grandmother faces the camera with a look I would never witness. Exhaustion and injustice. I would see that strength in her wizened face fifty years later, but never the sadness. I knew her eyes as turtleskin-wrapped miracles of engagement and animation. I saw her cry often — sudden, surprising tears that had transitioned unexpectedly from hard laughter. She had a long peppery ponytail and a small problem with kleptomania.
(Figure number 3.) My mother seems more in focus than the other figures in the image – perhaps because the whites of her eyes give way to who she is now, in mine. Perhaps because even now she doesn’t quite know what expression is expected of her. Perhaps because even then, she wondered if this particular sister would have been the one to watch her back/take her side/stand her ground/back her up/stand behind her/be there. Her tears never surprise me. They saturate the surface of her eyes, lying in wait for even the faintest opportunity. She has one hand on her hip and a lot on her mind. A short peppery hairdo and a large problem with kleptomania.
(Figure number 4.) Uncle Rocky. Stands closest to the sister who would grow furthest away from him, figure number 3, who, years later, would not come in from her car if figure number 4 was at figure number 2′s house. (Did she break their silence on his death bed? I can’t remember. There are so many relatives “we just don’t talk to.”)
No one looks angry. There are many convoluted tendrils to this story that I will probably never understand, but that is the one, simple, solid question that confuses me the most: Why wasn’t anyone angry? Had they, in the open heart of the difficult days before, settled on forgiveness? Knowing the way our blood runs now, it’s doubtful. Capital D. Doubt. Full. Did they not know the details yet?
(Figure number 5.) Uncle Johnny – married to my mother’s oldest sister, Nancy. (“Whatever his last name was, everyone called him ‘Pork-o.”‘)
Drunk and irate about a washcloth missing from the clothes line, he threatened to confront the neighbors with his nickname and his shotgun. A struggle ensued.
(Figure number 6.) Aunt Nancy — my mother’s oldest and least favorite sister. (Blurry details about mistreatment. I think my mother might have spit at her once. I know that when she lay dying, she asked my mother for forgiveness and was told, “Take it to your grave.”) Married to figure number 5. Pleaded with him not to accuse the neighbors of stealing the missing washcloth. A struggle ensued.
(Figure number 7.) Josephine. My mother’s favorite and a story in herself. (Somehow she seems to be always my age. I call her Onlyjosephine.) Resided with her oldest sister (figure number 6) and her oldest sister’s husband (figure number 5). Annoyed with yet another domestic dispute between the two figures, Onlyjosephine offered to pay the “lousy nineteen cents” for the missing washcloth if Onlyfigures 5 and 6 would “just quit bickering.” (She was the one who “kept the peace.”) A struggle ensued. Onlyjosephine (figure number 7) jumped from second story landing in order to escape the shotgun-wielding figure number 5.
This part is myth and bad memory:
According to my mother, Onlyjosephine was menstruating when she jumped. The shock caused the blood to reenter her system internally and poison her. She died “sometime later.” (When you are five years old, how long is a day when your favorite sister is dying?)
This part is believed to be true: She was buried on the day that she was supposed to have been married.
(Note: wedding veil, dress, bouquet.) Her maiden name forever: La Rosa. Her status in the family forever: saint, virgin bride, martyr, slain savior.
Figures number 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Wearing white anyway, the wouldabeenbridesmaids-turned– pallbearers. (They wear the white ribbons and tight faces of any young girl who giddily agrees to help the bride with her hair, but gets stuck instead flanking the corpse in the casket.)
Traceable trickle-down effect A. Onlyjosephine’s wouldabeenhusband, Mikey (Figure number 17). My mother ran into him years later, at the track. He was sweeping up cigarette butts. She gave him a cable-knit sweater. He had gone into the navy, met and married another nice girl. She and the baby died in childbirth (“or was it appendicitis?”). He died a few years after my mom saw him, “drunk and on Skid Row.” (In my manipulated versions of this photo, I make him into the prince that wakes Snow White from her sleep with a kiss …. )

Traceable trickle-down effect B. Father of the bride (Figure number 18), Guiseppe, my grandfather. Had a falling out with his brother before the funeral (guilt, blame, regret, repeat). They never spoke again. Guiseppe tried to speak to him once, when the mine was about to collapse. He hurried back for his brother and yelled, “C’mon, Jim, the rats are running,” before he ran for safety himself. I never knew him, but all that I know about him (“…he loved rootbeer”) would have provided the foundation for a profound connection. The injuries to his back led to his eventual death when my mother was seven.
Traceable trickle-down effect C. Great Uncle Jim. (“Che what testa a head dura of stone”) Too proud to respond to his brother’s warning in the mine. (It was probably like fighting claustrophobia, or some other primal instinct. His rational mind would have been saying, “Why aren’t I running? This is ridiculous. I should be running. I could seriously die here if I don’t start moving. I can’t even remember why I’m mad at him.” But the impulses that control movement slid down his spinal column with full force and fury into the wall of emotional underdevelopment and misdirected anger that is our gene pool. And he just stood there. Maybe his insides were tingling and he had the feeling of hot liquid filling up around his ears, and his rational mind was shouting now, “Run! You idiot, run!” But the movement impulses were all kinked up and sprawled out and fizzling after the collision at the bad gene wall. His face had already frozen with an expression somewhere between mild disdain and indifference. Potentially precious seconds passed. And he just stood there.) Figure number 19 (not pictured). Died in mine collapse.
Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal