Little Fires Everywhere(8)

Sometimes Mia went out with her camera, but more often she might spend days, or even weeks, preparing something to photograph, with the actual taking of the photographs lasting only a few hours. For Mia, Moody learned, did not consider herself a photographer. Photography, at its heart, was about documentation, and he soon understood that for Mia photography was simply a tool, which she used as a painter might use a brush or a knife.

A plain photograph might be doctored later: with embroidered carnival masks obscuring the faces of the people within, or the figures themselves might be clipped out, paper-doll style, and dressed in clothes cut from fashion magazines. In one set of photos, Mia rinsed the negatives before making prints that were oddly distorted—a photo of a clean kitchen speckled with spots from lemonade; a photo of laundry on the clothesline rendered ghostlike and warped by bleach. In another set, she carefully double-exposed each frame—layering a far-off skyscraper over the middle finger of her hand; superimposing a dead bird, wings akimbo on the pavement, over a blue sky, so that except for the closed eyes, it looked as if it were flying.

She worked unconventionally, keeping only photos she liked and tossing the rest. When the idea was exhausted, she kept a single print of each shot and destroyed the negatives. “I’m not interested in syndication,” she said to Moody rather airily, when he asked why she didn’t make multiples. She seldom photographed people—occasionally, she would take a picture of Pearl, as with the bed on the lawn, but she never used them in her work. She never used herself either: once, Pearl told Moody, she had done a series of self-portraits, wearing different objects as masks—a piece of black lace, five-fingered horse-chestnut leaves, a damp and pliant starfish—had spent a month on these photos, narrowing them down to a set of eight. They’d been beautiful and eerie, and even now Pearl could see them exactly: her mother’s bright eye like a pearl peeking out between the legs of the starfish. But at the last moment Mia had burned the prints and negatives, for reasons even Pearl could not fathom. “You spent all that time,” she’d said, “and just pfft”—she snapped her fingers—“like that?”

“They weren’t working” was all Mia would say.

But the pictures she did keep, and sold, were startling.

In their luxurious sublet in Ann Arbor, Mia had taken various pieces of her hosts’ furniture apart and arranged the components—bolts as thick as her finger, unvarnished crossbeams, disembodied feet—into animals. A bulky secretary desk from the nineteenth century transformed into a bull, the sides of the disassembled drawers forming muscled legs, the cast-iron knobs of its drawer pulls serving as the bull’s nose and eyes and glinting balls, a handful of pens from inside the desk fanned out into the crescents of horns. With Pearl’s help, she had laid the pieces out on the cream-colored Persian carpet, which as a backdrop looked like a field fogged with steam, and then she had climbed on top of a table to photograph it from above before they picked it back apart and reassembled it into a desk. An old Chinese birdcage, broken down into a web of arched wires, had become an eagle, its brassy skeletal wings spread as if about to take flight. An overstuffed sofa had become an elephant, trunk raised in trumpet song. The series of photos that emerged from this project were both intriguing and unsettling, the animals incredibly intricate and lifelike, and then you looked closer and realized what they had been made of. She had sold quite a few of these, through her friend Anita, a gallery owner in New York—a person Pearl had never met in a place she’d never been. Mia hated New York, would never go even to promote her own work. “Anita,” Mia had said into the phone once, “I love you dearly but I cannot come to New York for a show. No, not even if it meant I’d sell a hundred pieces.” A pause. “I know it does, but you know I can’t. All right. You do what you can, and that’s good enough for me.” Still, Anita had managed to sell a half dozen of the series, which meant instead of cleaning houses Mia had been able to spend the next six months working on a new project.

That was how her mother worked: one project for four or six months, then on to the next. She’d work and work and come up with a group of photos and Anita would usually be able to sell at least a few of them in her gallery. At first the prices had been so modest—a few hundred dollars per piece—that Mia sometimes had to take on two jobs, or even three. But as time went on, her work became regarded well enough in the art world that Anita could sell more pieces, for more money: enough to pay for what Mia and Pearl needed—food, rent, gas for the Rabbit—even after Anita’s fifty-percent cut. “Two or three thousand dollars, sometimes,” Pearl told him with pride, and Moody did quick mental math: if Mia sold ten pictures a year . . .

Sometimes the photos did not sell—a project Mia did with skeletal leaves sold only one, and for several months she took up a series of odd jobs: housecleaning, flower arranging, cake decorating. She was good at anything that involved her hands, and she preferred the jobs where she did not have to work with customers, where she could be alone and thinking, to waitressing, secretarying, salesclerking. “I was a salesgirl once, before you were born,” she told Pearl. “I lasted one day. One. The manager kept telling me how to put the dresses on hangers. Customers would pull the beads off clothes and demand discounts. I’d rather mop a floor, alone in the house, than deal with that.”

But other projects did sell, and got attention. One series—which Mia began after she’d been doing some seamstress work—supported them for nearly a year. She would go to thrift stores and buy old stuffed animals—faded teddy bears, ratty plush dogs, threadbare rabbits—the cheaper the better. At home, she took them apart at the seams, washed their pelts, fluffed their filling, repolished their eyes. Then she stitched them back together, inside out, and the results were eerily beautiful. The ragged fur, in reverse, took on the look of shorn velvet. The whole animal, resewn and restuffed, had the same shape but a different bearing, the backs and necks straighter, the ears perkier; the eyes shone now with a knowing glint. It was as if the animal had been reincarnated, older and bolder and wiser. Pearl had loved watching her mother at work, bent over the kitchen table, laboring with the precision of a surgeon—scalpel, needle, pins—to transform these toys into art. Anita had sold every photo in this series; one had even, she reported, made its way to MoMA. She’d begged Mia to take another round, or to reprint the series, but Mia had refused. “The idea is done,” she said. “I’m working on something else now.” And she always was, always something a bit different, always something that had struck her fancy. She would be famous someday, Pearl was certain; someday her adored mother would be one of those artists, like de Kooning or Warhol or O’Keeffe, whose name everyone knew. It was why part of her, at least, didn’t mind the life they’d always lived, their thrift-store clothes, their salvaged beds and chairs, the shifting precariousness of it all. One day everyone would see her mother’s brilliance.