Jane Smiley - Golden Age

California did what it always did in January, get greener and sunnier and more eerie as she drove through the Central Valley and over the Tejon Pass. The Audi was sprightly and quick, and in no way drawn to precipices. It felt safe to be without a horse trailer.

But Emily was not at Fiona’s. She was at a gallery a block over from Fair Oaks Avenue, where she, Tina, and the owner had just installed Tina’s show, which was running from January 18 until March 12, three rooms of works, including the main hall. When Janet came in the door, Emily ran up to her, hugged her, kissed her, and said, “I am so glad you came! You represent the victims!”

Tina was behind her. She was thin, like her dad, Uncle Arthur, and her thick gray hair hung in a kind of waterfall down her back, but she looked not five years younger than Debbie, more like fifteen. She kissed Janet on the cheek and said, “Thanks for coming.”

“You have to see,” said Emily.

The main gallery was full of Tina-ish objects — etched glass, sticks bound together in the shapes of animals, musical instruments that looked playable but were made of papier-mâché. Emily hurried her past them to the last room, long, narrow, brightly lit. The installation was called Autobiography . Emily said, “No, start here. Right beside the door.”

Right beside the door was Tina’s birth certificate, “Christina Eloise Manning, January 19, 1953.” To all of the letters, glitter had been carefully added, and tiny designs had been scattered all over the paper — stars, moon, sun. The art pieces ran away from it in a long row down one side of the room, across the far wall, and back up the other side. Janet began.

She had seen some of the childhood pictures — in fact, she was in one of them — but she remembered them as snapshots. These versions had been blown up and manipulated, painted on, pasted on, torn, layered. The sixth image, especially, did give her an uncanny feeling. It was a picture of Aunt Lillian and Uncle Arthur’s house in McLean, Virginia, from the front and slightly below, as it might have appeared in a real-estate ad. Tina must have reprinted it hundreds of times and then cut apart the images — house, front door, windows, tree, mailbox, bits of lawn, shingles on the roof — then piled them on top of one another. How she did it, Janet could not figure out, but it had a 3D/memory effect, a place appearing in your mind, not as it really was, but as you wished it to be, in this case far more mysterious and alluring than a real house could be. The colors made it look both heavenly and unattainable. No one could have gotten into that house, either, because the door was locked — Tina had padlocked it. Janet shivered and moved on.

Across the shorter wall was a series called Y Chromosome . The title and all of the frames had been chrome-plated, and glinted in sunlight that came through a skylight in the roof. The series had seven pictures, each of them three feet by four feet. The first picture was of a man in an old-fashioned army uniform, glancing at the camera, not quite smiling but good-natured. Tina had manipulated his features, too, superimposing pencil marks that emphasized the lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, his forehead — Uncle Arthur’s father. Uncle Arthur, Tim, and Charlie were interspersed with three other faces, which Tina somehow manipulated so that the real images seemed to mutate through the intermediate image into the next one. Janet remembered Tim’s picture quite clearly: it was his senior photo from high school, his hair ragged and plentiful, daring for 1964. When Janet left the East Coast for California, she had made a special trip into Aunt Lillian’s living room to kiss it goodbye, to kiss, as she thought, her entire past goodbye. Tina had done something to each of the images. Tim’s she had aged somehow, maybe with pencil, too, but over that, charcoal? It was hard to tell. But he did not look eighteen — he looked fifty. Janet turned and smiled at Tina, who was not far away, watching her, and she realized that she had made Tim look like herself, aged fifty — but also like himself, aged eighteen. She looked again. It was eerie. Under the picture was the title, Missed . Janet nodded. The image that morphed into Charlie’s was one of Tim’s childhood pictures, in which he was wielding toy six guns; Janet remembered that every kid had done that. But the face had not Tim’s characteristic intent look, but Charlie’s cheerful grin. In the last picture, Charlie’s face was superimposed on that of Uncle Arthur’s father, and crusted with some sort of paste that made it almost 3D. The title was Pentagon , and there was a five-cornered shape in the lower right corner.

Along the third wall were twenty-one pictures, also three feet by four feet, but Janet had never seen any of them before. The underlying images were photographs that appeared to have been taken over the last ten or fifteen years, always from a distance. A striking one was of Charlie around the time he first showed up, running in Central Park. A lake glinted in one corner, and there were buildings above the tree line. The third picture was of Richie and Leo, standing on the steps of their old place in Brooklyn, framed by the white banisters. Leo was screaming, his mouth wide open, and Richie was looking quizzically downward. It was entitled Nanny State . There was one of Michael getting into a limo, actually surveying the neighborhood with a masters-of-the-universe air. The sunlight reflected in the roof of the limo had been enhanced so that it appeared to block out the surrounding landscape. Another was of Debbie and Uncle Arthur in a supermarket. They were wearing heavy winter coats. Debbie was looking at lettuce, and Uncle Arthur was hunched, but looking over his shoulder at images Tina had painted and pasted of toys from their childhoods — Tiny Tears, a teddy bear, a game of Clue. The aisle they were standing in was a yellow brick road. And then there was a picture of herself, outside of Jonah’s school, with Mary Kircher and Eileen Chen. Their clothes had been painted in bright colors, and their faces, though recognizable, had extra lines — on Janet’s face were worry lines. Behind them, the double doors to the school had swung open, and the kids were emerging — glittered, the way Tina’s birth certificate had been.

Every third picture was of Uncle Arthur, and in each he looked uncomfortable and suspicious. One of the last pictures was of her mom, through a window of her house in Far Hills, the one everybody called “the Hut” now. The wall of the house was dark, and the window was yellow; through it, you could see the edge of the refrigerator and a magazine on the kitchen table. Of all the subjects, her mom, gaunt-cheeked, her eyebrows lifted, was the only one turned toward the camera. This made her look not as oblivious as the rest of them. The only thing Tina had done to enhance that image was to outline each of the boards of the exterior siding in gold. Janet looked at that one for a long minute, then went all the way down the line, feeling, she knew, what she was supposed to feel, that someone was watching her. The name of this group of images was I-Thou . When she came to the end, Emily jumped in front of her and grabbed her shoulders. She said, “Aren’t they great? I so love them.”

Janet kissed her, appreciating her appreciation, and said, “They are very powerful.” She wondered what people outside the family would think; the images impressed her, but they also made her anxious.

They ate dinner at Celestino, and Janet could not help thinking that it was appropriate that Tina was having the risotto with squid ink, as black as any food Janet had ever laid eyes on. But she made herself act friendly and affectionate, because Emily, as she had with Mrs. Herman when she was learning to ride, seemed to have adopted Tina as a goddess. Janet had always viewed her as you did younger relatives — interesting in their way, but not important. Okay, she admitted it: her entire childhood had revolved around Tim. Yes, Tina was good-looking; yes, she was successful (but her success had taken place so far away); yes, she was adept — she had always been adept. But she had never said much, or made much eye contact, and she didn’t talk about clothes or cooking or children, she talked about “media” and “blowtorches” and the thickness of glass. Finally, sipping her wine, Janet sat back and said, “Those are some amazing images. I mean, especially in the last row. Emily must have taken that one of me waiting for Jonah. What was he, about five?”