Why Two Electric Hair Clippers Appeared on the Dance Floor at Our Reception
“She wants to cancel the individual family portraits altogether now,” Mason said. He rubbed his collarbone with his right hand, his thumb digging into the skin right above his collar. “She told me it would save forty minutes on the schedule, but we both know what she is actually doing. She is trying to make sure there is no single photograph of Maribel in that cream dress.”
“She thinks if there are no single portraits, then nobody will ask why your grandmother is wearing that scarf in the group shots,” I said.
“It is a lesson in erasure,” Mason said, his voice tightening as he used his high school history teacher terms. “If you do not document the part that does not fit, you can pretend the context was perfect all along. That is how she wants to write the day.”
He reached up and ran his fingers through his thick, wavy brown hair, pulling it back from his forehead as if he were trying to see the shape of his own skull.
“What if I changed the context?” he asked.
“The context?”
