Page 143 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 137

childhood is most definitely lived through, when analyzed or discussed, it
is again almost invariably from a distance, from the vantage of adults who
must rely on fragmented recollections and observations. 33

Bringing the dresses out of the closet was a way for Slavick to touch the child
that had died, that she had left behind—not only the death of her own child-
body, but also that of the little brother who drowned. On a small silken slip that
once rubbed against small silken girls, Slavick stitches the following:

I ATE FOOD IN THE BASEMENT.
I SUCKED LILACS.
I KICKED MY SISTER’S SHINS.
I PICKED DANDELIONS AND SOLD THEM FOR A QUARTER.
I WANTED UGLY THINGS AND COULDN’T SWIM.
A BROTHER HAD DROWNED.
SICK EVERY SWIMMING DAY, HANDS UNDER MY DRY THIGHS, BROTHER,
YOU HELD ME OVER THE WATERS.

Reading Slavick’s dress pulls me into the closet of the family album of my
mind’s eye. Childhood images flash before me. Though I had no brother who
drowned, I had a little cousin who left this world. I hid behind my bed. And even
though he did not drown and even though I could swim, I hid in the bushes on
swimming day. I did not sell dandelions, but I sold things that I made, really
dumb things, door to door. Ugly things were really beautiful to me too…like my
favourite toys made of brightly coloured plastic on various themes of grotesque
cuteness. But like most of us, I have no photographs of such things, and maybe it
is just as well.
But Sally Mann has taken pictures of such things. She has published her own
family album, Immediate Family (1992). Pictures like that of (her son) Emmett
sporting a shockingly bloody nose (Emmett’s Bloody Nose, 1985), or Emmett
with a back speckled by frightening chicken pox (Pox, 1986), or daughter Jessie
with an eye painfully swollen and saddened by what I hope is only a bug bite
(Damaged Child, 1984), mar the perfection of childhood that we all try to invent,
not only for ourselves but for our own children. With each smiling photograph of
the combed and primmed child that we dutifully place in the album, the box, the
frame, the note to Grandma, we image childhood as prettied-up, overdressed,
untouched, undamaged, undamaging and so unreal as to remain, always, far
away from death. We preserve our children in an emulsion of Neverland, an
imaginary place of tiny first teeth that never pop out. Yet, Jessie bites (Jessie
Bites, 1985) and Slavick kicked her sister’s shins.
Jenny’s mom, Barbara, showed me where my boys were to sleep for the night.
The two beds were covered with beautiful ageing quilts made of hundreds of tiny
squares, the very size of old photographs, like those taken and printed and pasted
in my father’s album. Caressing one of the old quilts, Barbara explained to me
that each square was from an old dress worn by her and her sisters. Each square,