Take What You Can Carry

men with him laughed.
There were only a few female reporters, and they worked hard and kept to themselves. Passing through the hall once, Olivia heard one of their names thrown out from behind a door left ajar. You want to send in Holliday? It’s a financial piece—and you’re gonna send in a skirt? The moment was made worse by the fact that Beth Holliday was actually walking from the other direction in the hall and heard it as well. There was a falter in her step, and her hand went to the wall beside her where she paused. An internal countdown perhaps. When she met Olivia’s eyes, there was understanding and anger and commiseration and embarrassment, and, sure enough, the eventual byline of the piece was that of a man, and Beth Holliday avoided Olivia whenever she could.
But what did it, what really charted the course, was that Olivia found herself drawn to the photo department and watching the photo editor, a man named Peter Darrow, whose face was all but lost to his ever-expanding beard and whose love of hockey kept him pacing with a stick. There were no women on his staff, but his eyes stayed level in the hall, and once she’d seen him making coffee. When she could, she paused at his door, listening to debates: No, no, not this one. Look how it’s organized—everything competing with everything. Shit, who did this? I’m getting hives looking at it. No, really, look. On my arm right here. There was a kind gruffness to him, like Santa in a bear suit. He cared little for decorum and his office was a mess and frequently there was a stain on his shirt from the food he tended to eat while walking, but his words about photography hooked her. She listened and looked at the secret collection of photographs she found inspiring, a collection she had hidden in a green Trapper Keeper in her drawer, and tried to see if they fell in line with his parameters, with what he thought made a photo stand out. She hoped they did.
And then, a bit over two years ago, it hit her that she didn’t just want to appreciate good photos but to take them. That perhaps she could do it. That perhaps it wasn’t too late. That night, she told her father she was interested in photography and pictured him pacing as he did when he got to thinking, his corduroy pants swishing. “It’s only too late when you believe you can’t do it,” he finally said. “So do it. Do whatever you want. Just do it big and bold and brave.”
From Washington State, he made a call and bought her a professional camera. Instructed her to go to the bookstore a few blocks away, where he had two books set aside and paid for: Andreas Feininger’s Principles of Composition in Photography and The Complete Photographer. The fact that he did this, purchased these gifts even from more than a thousand miles away, meant he’d have to set the heat in his small house at sixty-two and walk with a blanket around his shoulders. Meant that he’d buy cans of beans—cheap nutrition, always have some for when rent is due—for months and leave the car parked unless he had no other choice. She knew this, and his generosity meant she had to act, and that same day she registered for night classes at the community college.
Mornings before work, evenings after work, weekends, and holidays. As often as she could, she studied and saw the world through her viewfinder, developing an obsession with texture and a need to seek it out. Tree bark, cracks in dry soil, the craters in an orange rind. For days she’d play with capturing mood in one location, turning a luxurious and inviting pool when seen in early-morning sunlight into a place that was solemn, cold, and haunting through the blue light of dusk. Playing with high- or low-key printing, distorting perspective or using color filters, her tests turned her view of the world into a series of potential photos.
With this turn, she had hope. Suddenly her slog of a job was made palatable by the proximity to her desire. Just down the hall. She was there but not there, and she learned to repeat the phrase This doesn’t matter in her mind when the noose around her days seemed to tighten. Sometimes she took a ruler to measure her handwriting, determined to keep it straight and small, fearing the day when it might shoot up or down in loose script, the moment she let the job defeat her. On mornings when the editors were behind closed doors and everyone was to be quiet, she felt a rising scream itch in her throat and had to hurry away.
But classes, supplies, lenses, film, even the considerable number of batteries needed for her MD-2 motor drive and flash, all of it was expensive, and each time she knew she needed to print just one more negative, or perhaps a dozen more in order to bring out a quality or effect, she felt her wallet tighten. Taking photos of anything in motion demanded a need to snap image after image, and one couldn’t be afraid of wasting film, since with a dynamic subject, each shot would be different—and a missed shot could have been the one—but her budget made her fearful. Even using an acquaintance’s darkroom—for those photos Fotomat could never do justice to, for the ones she wanted to put in her portfolio—even that sapped her checks. And her portfolio itself, all printed on glossy double-weight white paper, the cost was adding up. When she asked her boss about a raise, he looked at her hard and said he’d see what he could do but then added, I thought you had someone; isn’t this money for fun?
A raise did not come through. And so an ad in the paper was answered. She was to meet a man at a