Standing Firm
© Daniel Pearlman


    I heard the screech of tires, the shouts, saw through our front windows people running past streetlamps towards the corner, and so I knew I had to run downstairs and grab my father’s camera.  The year before, with just an ordinary little camera, I’d taken shots of a not-too-serious car crash, mailed the undeveloped roll to the Daily News, and got back the negs plus a check for five bucks even though they were unable to use my pictures.  Five bucks for a kid whose allowance barely covered his school lunches back in 1949 was a windfall, so I scrambled down the basement for my dad’s bulky equipment.
    My father had ceased using his big fancy camera months before.  He was like that.  He’d buy expensive gadgets the family couldn’t afford, quickly lose interest in the hobby they pertained to, then store the stuff away in its original wrapping hardly used.  He had set up a whole basement darkroom, enlarger and all, and since I had independently become an avid shutterbug, he had eventually given me carte-blanche use of all his idle equipment, including his 4x5 Busch-Pressman press camera, whose tricky operation I had quickly mastered.  He was especially impressed by the fact that at age fifteen I had already earned some cash with it—taking pictures of friends in a high-school play—enough money to pay for the film and flashbulbs I used.  (Dreading a loss of face, I never told him about so-called friends who’d reneged on paying me.)
    Down in the basement I checked on my supply of bulbs and film, clipped flash to camera, shouldered my bag and dashed up and out to the corner.  People milled about in the mild late-April night making a wide circle around a car that had come to a stop just past the intersection.  Its dead headlights facing me, they also blindly overlooked a stretch of lamplit pavement that onlookers had practically cordoned off with their bodies.
    I arrived on the scene impressive-looking, camera held at port arms, silvery flash-unit glinting in the streetlight.  People edged aside at my approach.  I could forget for the moment my tall skinny frame, my outbreak of acne, the incipient holes in my sneaker-toes.  Wielding my big instrument—and all eyes were on my instrument—I commanded respect. 
    Just in front of the car a little middle-aged woman lay on her back, legs splayed out, overturned shopping bag at her side, fruit and vegetables and other items dotting the asphalt around her motionless, shapeless body.  I tried not to think that this was an actual dead person.  I steeled my stomach against the thought.  My purely professional problem was to settle on an angle permitting an unobstructed view of both car and body.  People continued obligingly to duck out of my field of view.  I took one shot, the flashbulb crinkling and blistering next to my ear.  Replacing it with another, I took a second shot from a slightly different angle, then heard the approaching sirens—police? ambulance?  Distracted from observing me, people now turned toward the honking and wailing of oncoming officialdom. 
    But in the wavering crowd I saw—looking right at me—that lovely girl Barbara who lived on the next block down and whom all my friends and I secretly worshiped and who never before had given me a second glance (not that I blamed her).  At just fourteen she had a well-developed body, rosy cheeks, saucy eyes—and she lived in a beautiful apartment where see-through plastic guarded fancy fabrics from abuse by rough behinds.  A vigilant, ever-suspicious father ruled over her (an Insurance Agent, she liked to boast)—but Barbara was innocent, never seemed consciously flirtatious, never showed obvious favor toward even the best-looking guy in our group, and so we all idealized her, imagined entering jousts with her scarf tied to our lances. 
    I looked away, as though the unwavering glance she gave me outshone even the brightest flashbulb, and when I dared check back she had already vanished into the crowd.  The police, the ambulance, the cries of someone who had just arrived on the scene, the nauseating image of that sprawled-out accident victim—suddenly all of that no longer mattered.  I had intended to stick around to get the name of the victim, the name of the driver.  If I’d lied to the cops that I was a reporter for the Canarsie Courier, they’d probably have told me what I needed to know.  But when Barbara lost interest in observing me, there was nothing left to keep me there, not even the thought of another five-dollar check from the Daily News.  What stuck with me as I bagged my equipment and ambled back home was the snapshot fixed forever in my brain of Barbara staring at me mesmerized, as if seeing me—the me I truly was—for the very first time. 
    I developed the negatives the same night and made 8x10 prints from them.  The exposures were perfect, the focus precise, but a few seconds of viewing my handiwork was all I could take for the moment.  
    As to what to do with the pictures I had, the answer came by divine messenger the following afternoon.  Angels are all right when they visit you in dreams, but when they show up unannounced on your doorstep—on your creaking, dingy doorstep—they can cause you the deepest embarrassment. 
    My mother alerted me.  “Who’s the pretty young girl coming up to the house?”
    There was a timid knock on the door.  I dashed over to answer and saw her through the glass panes.  Barbara Jacobson visiting me?  My legs turned to jelly.  She gazed at me with a friendly smile, and as I turned the knob to open, knowing I must invite her in—to cross the frayed rug, observe the dented chairs, sit on the worn-out sagging couch—I wished I could magically disappear.  Seeing me last night in an action-hero setting was one thing, but observing me in my native burrow—of which I had never till then felt so ashamed—was quite another. 
    “Can’t stay,” she said even before I could find the words to invite her in. “Some relative of that poor lady asked around if anyone knew the photographer.  I didn’t know your house number, but I said I’d bring you their contact information.”
    She handed me a slip of paper and retreated down the sagging steps as if glad to have made it through a very unpleasant duty.  “Wait,” I said, following her, trembling with relief, thanking heaven for bringing her to me—and for yanking her back before our carpet could soil her sandaled feet. “What is it they want?”
    “To buy your pictures of course.”
    “Buy?  What for?” I said with a shudder.
    “For insurance purposes, dummy!  My father says they’ll offer you next to nothing but you should stand firm.”
    I felt queasy.  “This is strange,” I said. “I don’t know if I can…”
    Barbara gave me a cold, squinty look.  An expression just like her father’s!  “Up to you,” she said. “Just trying to help.”  She hurried away down the sidewalk.


    After discussion with my parents, who widely disagreed on what I should charge, I decided I would ask for ten dollars, firm.  “At least that!” grunted my father, who had himself never made a penny out of his now abandoned hobby.  He made a good point, though, that was hard to deny.  I was no longer a kid peddling film to the Daily News.  I had to stand firm.  No one, like some former friends, was ever going to stiff me again.  This was serious business, adult stuff now.  My mother mumbled in the background, “Those poor people, those poor…”  But my father gave her a look that shut her up.
    Working up my courage, I rang up the number written on the paper and spoke to a Dolores Soto.  When she told me who she was, daughter of the deceased, for a moment I was unable to say a word and wished I hadn’t called.  She was brisk and business-like, and I tried being the same.  I wasn’t going to be intimidated just because she was an adult.  All we did was arrange the time I could come over with the pictures—to her mother’s house, of all places, but I dismissed that thought from my mind.  I agreed to see her that very evening at eight. 
    The address was located at the “ass-end” of Canarsie, south of Remsen Avenue, somewhere between the cemetery and the inlet called Paerdegat Basin—“Paerdegat” being the Dutch for “horse’s ass.”  In those years the streets back there were still mostly unpaved—dustbowls in the summer, mud-bogs in winter and spring.  I used to earn a dime now and then making deliveries in that area for our local liquor store.     
    It didn’t occur to me to change out of my everyday clothes, so I strode along, envelope firmly in hand, in my scuzzy dungarees, along streets a lot darker than the ones where I lived because half the streetlamps here were shot out. 
    I was not going to change my mind.  Ten bucks firm! I said to myself.  They’ll be making a heap of dough from the insurance.
    I arrived at a one-story house of faded brown shingles, some of which were missing.  A woman came to the door whose face I didn’t clearly see until we sat beside each other at the kitchen table.  On the table some rotting bananas lay inside a chipped ceramic bowl.  A few other people, all much older than she was, sat across from me too, but if she introduced me to them I doubt I paid attention.  Everyone and everything around Dolores Soto—the peeling walls, the uncovered overhead bulb—retreated to a twilight zone of grayness fading to black. 
    She was neatly and simply dressed in black pants and a silky white blouse that illuminated the smooth curve of her neck.  She was older than me, in her twenties probably, but not so old that my heart didn’t race at sight of her.  All I could do, as she bluntly asked to see the photos, was to nod . . . and stare at her lightly freckled golden skin, her tumbling jet-black hair, her dark, glistening eyes that watched my awkward hands as I slid the pictures out.  She was a beautiful painting inside a shabby frame.  A sunflower sprouting out of a garbage heap. 
    I watched her wince and heard her stifle a cry.  The others didn’t want to look. 
    “How much do you want for these?” she asked, not even looking at me.
    “Ten dollars for both,” I said, my voice cracking.  I didn’t want to be there.  I wished I could grab those pictures back and simply run out.
    “That’s extortion!” she replied. “Do we look that rich to you?” 
    Her eyes now met mine directly.  Pools of black fire, they darted scorn at me, forcing me to blink away a sudden surge of tears.  They punctured my self-confidence, made me feel like a grubby greedy sleaze.
    “I think it’s only fair,” I persisted as the heat of shame spread up from my neck to my ears.
    “You are heartless!” she said.
    I didn’t budge.  I was standing firm.  I already felt so inwardly crushed that I refused to lose face as well.
    “Anyway,” she added, pushing the photos back to me, “they are no good for legal purposes.  You can’t get any clear measurements from them.  Take them and go.”
    I retreated to the door beneath her scowl.  Once outside, I hurried away as if propelled by the heat of her contempt.  A trembling started in my guts and rippled through my whole body.  I felt shrunken, skinny, pimply, ugly.  I felt ashamed of my grimy jeans.  I could really form no clear thought of what so profoundly disturbed me, but I knew then and there that it was a lot more than shame of how I looked or what I wore.  Tightening my jaw against an emotion I had never felt before, thinking of that golden skin, those freckles, those eyes shooting arrows right through me, I stumbled my way home. 



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