She had a lot of mysterious beige foundation garments that were utterly
inexplicable, and a little box of jewelry that I liked to taste, because
the real gold tasted really rich when I sucked on it, and a stack of old
cigarette tins full of frayed photos.
The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless
black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm
girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they'd
been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if
you squinted at them and cocked your head, you could kind of see her
features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but
young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and
clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and
sober.
The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of
them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that
fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black
dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as
though they'd put their heads through a black curtain.
But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I
noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked
for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos.
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