The picture is black and white, made before color could be taken for granted. 

There are two girl children, very brown, flanking an elderly couple, tanned but obviously white. The old woman is much smaller than the man to her left. On her right is the younger of the two dark girls. Her curly hair, sun-bleached, is lifted slightly in an errant breeze, her teeth – so white in her brown face – displayed in a wide smile. Her eyes are humorous and understanding. She wears a plaid dress slightly too large for her. It's meant to be worn with a stiff petticoat and hangs limply without one.

On the far side, her older sister wears another dress meant for a petticoat and going without. It looks some shade of white in the photo, but it a pale, faded blue with a criss-cross pattern of tiny white flowers across a bodice meant to fit a girl with narrower shoulders. The hem has been let out as far as it will go and the waist is somewhere near her ribcage. She smiles too, but her eyes are troubled.

All of them are looking at the camera on what was obviously a hot day. Though not faced into the sun, all four have nearly closed eyes and light has painted a corona around each of their heads while reflecting off the old man’s white shirt, removing much of its detail.

They are standing in front a long, low row of apartments. Each apartment has its own narrow concrete walkway bisecting a field of green grass. At one end, the walkways meet concrete stoops decorated with welcome mats or arrangements of potted plants. The other ends of the walkways, nearer to the camera's subjects, cannot be seen and so it is unknown to where they lead.

I am the older girl in the picture. It was Miami in November of 1963 and I was eleven. I had achieved nearly my full height of 5 foot 7, and movie theatres no longer allowed me to purchase a child’s ticket, though I was still a child. My mother is having a hard time finding children’s clothes to fit me and will buy me nothing new. She says, “Even if we had the money, you’d just grow out of it in a couple of weeks, and it would have to go to April Susan.”

April Susan has not really hit her growing spurt, yet. When forced to wear my clothes, they hang on her, bag on her, balloon or sag. She skips school as often as she can to avoid the arch looks of the girls in her class.

I also skip school as often as possible. I dislike the kids who think that because I was born in L.A., I must know Jerry Lewis, and I hate the school. It's all confusion with huge numbers of Cuban exiles. The Miami-Dade school system is struggling with a bursting population; the teachers are all tired looking and irritable. They try to teach us something they call "new math." I don’t do any better with new math than I did with old math at Manchester Elementary in L.A. 

I'm not any fonder of the streets than the school. There seem to be a lot of men standing in groups on the street corners and when I go to the laundry or to the grocery, they whistle and smack their lips and say things to me in Spanish and  their eyes make my skin crawl and my face burn. Momma tells me I don’t look so much like a child but like a thin young woman. A thin, flat-chested young woman in funny clothes and a too-tight perm. I don't understand their interest. When April Susan is with me, she yells at them in English to leave me alone, but they just laugh at her.

April Susan is my protector. She's fifteen months younger, but she's fierce and motherly towards me. I don’t like that she isn't next to me for this photograph. Neither of us ever goes anywhere without the other.

My mother is making us take this picture. “A family portrait,” she said. But Grady and Lula Mae are not family to me or April Susan, however much Momma wants us to act as though they are.

Lula Mae is our stepfather’s mother. We have been told by Momma to call Lula Mae “grandma,” and we do, so as not to hurt her feelings. The expression on her face is tentative. She is willing for this to be a family picture, but there is some worry or confusion in her light eyes. She’s nice enough; she makes us lemonade from the lemons in her yard, but I don’t think we are any more real to her than she is to us. Momma may want this family to last, but we all know it is only temporary. Except for Grady, perhaps, but he probably has not even thought of it.

Our stepfather is not in the picture. Or taking the picture. I don’t know where he was. Working, perhaps. Momma must have held the camera, took the picture, but I don’t remember that, either.

Grady is our stepfather’s stepfather. He’s very tall and bald with a fringe of very white hair. He has a big, bulbous nose dotted with big round bumps that make it look like a pickle. His eyes are summer blue and always happy, welcoming, a little vacant. His hands are on his hips in this picture, his expression satisfied. He’s over 80, Momma says, and he speaks with a thick, syrupy southern accent, calling us “baby” or “honey,” and asking us for “sugar.”

When I first met him, I tried to oblige him when he asked for a kiss. I thought it would be nice to have a grandfather again. I had never met my father’s father, and seldom seen my mother’s father. But when I sat on Grady’s lap and tried to peck him on the cheek, he kissed my mouth and tried to slip his tongue between my lips. Meanwhile, one of his hands held me close while the other went under my skirt and into my panties to finger me.

I broke loose and jumped away from him. He continued to sit on the chair and grin at me as though I had never been near him. I ran to tell my mother.

When I was five, Momma took me to New York City where the drunken husband of a tenement neighbor tried to get me to kiss his penis. When I told my mother, she went right to the man’s apartment and told his wife and she and my mother beat the man and chased him out of the building.

But this the husband of my stepfather's mother. When I told my mother, she only said, “Let's not upset your grandmother. Now that you know what he is, don’t give him an opportunity to get you alone.” As though it was that easy.

Every time we go to Lula Mae’s house, Grady asks me for a hug, or a little “sugar.” Because Lula Mae is there, or my mother is there, I am forced to put my arms around him. Forced to kiss him and pit my strength against his to keep his tongue away from me. I wear boys pants or pedal pushers as often as I can, but I don’t have much of a wardrobe and most of what I have is dresses. Even when I wear pants, his hands manage to dig into the cleft in my backside, whenever he gets a chance. I hate him. April Susan hates him. She says there is a cop who spends his lunch hour every day at the house of the prostitute on the corner. If Grady gets me alone, she will run for the cop. We have only to make sure that we don’t go near him except at noon.

My mother knows all this, yet she is making us pose for this picture and she told me to stand next to Grady. Her expression clearly said, "It's only a minute - it won't kill you."

Far away, on my right, April Susan has her left arm around Lula Mae and Lula Mae has her right around April Susan while her left circles Grady’s waist, holding onto his belt in the back. Grady’s hands are on his hips and he's relaxed. On his left, I am twisting my body so as not to let him touch me. My right arm is raised behind him as though resting on his back, but when the shutter opens and closes, my arm is resting on the empty, hot air.