Gia is Reading

It’s really a terrible picture of all of us. I knew that even before I posted it, but I wanted something to mark the first time we were all together in the new house.  It was our first family photo–me, Johnny, Steph, and her twins.

The commenters noticed my bangs were too long and that my eyebrows were uneven, that my earrings didn’t match. They asked what kind of lipstick I was wearing (Bobbi Brown), where I got the couch we were sitting on (Wayfair), how old I was (at the time, forty-five), and why I wasn’t smiling (I assumed I had poppy seeds in my teeth from the bagel I had just eaten).

In the picture, I am sitting on the couch with Johnny, my then eighteen-year-old son, his thick brown hair mussed with pomade. His smile–all teeth and gums–making him look younger than he was and, with his half-closed eyes, he seemed stoned, which he wasn’t, although the commenters were certain he was. Johnny may have been hungover from either a graduation party or a pop-country concert–he was doing a lot of both of those things that summer, so I really don’t know. In the photo, my head is resting on his shoulder, and one of the commenters pointed out that I was giving his knee “an adorable little squeeze.” They also noticed that Johnny’s teeth looked “pee stained,” that he needed to wax his unibrow,  and that he didn’t look anything like me, which were all pretty much true. Johnny looked just his dad.

Steph is standing behind the couch with Theo and Tessa, each of them holding one of the clear plastic bins she used to pack up their apartment in Cambridge, the blue painter’s tape indicating its contents. Liz is wearing the NYU sweatshirt we shared when were roommates over twenty five years ago and she’s got her orange “Maura!” hat on–she is one of the lead strategists on Maura Sullivan’s presidential campaign. The hat alone garnered its own share of comments, including the repetition of Maura’s campaign slogan: “Bitches get shit done!” as well as the usual threats of eviscerating, raping, and/or murdering Steph and Maura and women in general. You know, the typical political discourse you’d see the summer before a presidential election.

Tessa is almost a foot taller than Theo in the photo (the twins had just turned thirteen); she was long in every way–her glittery blond hair, her torso–part of which was exposed in her cropped t-shirt–her legs in frayed denim cut-offs. Tessa told me later that she was relieved that her feet, which were big (size 10, ladies) and which she was very self-conscious about, were out of view. Theo’s feet somehow weren’t and, while many commenters thought it was “cute” that he was up on his tiptoes and still so much shorter than Tess, it was the last thing he wanted people to notice. Theo, poor gentle Theo, got the worst of it. His half man, half child body barely making sense to itself, let alone to the camera and the over one million sets of eyes that eventually saw it by the end of that summer. Theo with that soft, desultory shadow spreading outward from just below his nose, braces on teeth that seemed too big for his mouth, slouchy yet bony shoulders, bones poking from elbows and knees, and his hair, waxy and dark, both too long and too short for his round face. Theo is the only one not looking at the camera; his eyes are on his mother.

We posted the photo on Facebook that afternoon, the hashtag #repaired was an afterthought, really. The kids told me it needed one. I liked it though because Steph and I had been a pair since we met freshman year in the dorm, we had each, in the last year, paired off from our husbands, and we were now, by moving in together to raise our children as friends, repairing a broken part of their lives.

It was our friend Carol, a features writer at the Times , who had already heard about our plan and who, after seeing the photos on Facebook, decided to tweet her support of it, and by the time we woke up the next day, we were all famous.