Still Life with Sisters

Kat Moore

At the Guggenheim in June of 2018, on what would become my penultimate visit to my sister, Lanie and I walk the curve of the building until we find the luminous face of Candy Darling. We’ve come to see Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of her.

Standing next to the row of Polaroids on the wall, me a little taller as always, I ask Lanie if she thinks our brother, Bob, may have been transgender like Candy, or if he just had a feminine side that he liked to express. We know that some of his friends called him Barbara or Babs. 

“Possibly,” she says. “But we have no one to ask.” 

Like our brother, most of his friends are long gone. Like our brother, they had the brutal experience of contracting AIDS in the ’80s, when President Reagan refused to address the crisis, refused to allocate funds for medical research. Candy is long gone, too. She passed in 1974, from cancer likely caused by hormone treatments, which were then unregulated and illegal. 

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin argues that at the root of visual art is a need to defeat death. I have this need. I want to undo the deaths of my brother, my father, and, most recently, my mother and Lanie, in a car crash in 2022, while Lanie was in Memphis visiting our mother. I want to stop my own death from coming.

While still standing with my sister in the museum in New York, near the photos of Candy, Lanie asks if I remember the photo of us in a Howard Johnson’s motel right before we dropped her off at college. She tells me it was her favorite.

I remember that photo clearly: Lanie leaning across the open suitcase on the bed, her strawberry-blond curls cascading, her hand tugging playfully on my ponytail. My hair is brown and my braces glimmer. I am all smiles, while Lanie’s lips curve upward as if she noticed the camera a split second later. Time stands still, no longer moving forward to its corruption of aging and death.

It was late summer in 1991, and I was thirteen. Dad had driven us the whole way from Memphis to Philly, Mom in the front passenger seat smoking cigarettes that she would give up for good a year later, and Lanie and I in the back under blankets, headphones on our ears. After the photo was taken, we dropped off Lanie at the University of Pennsylvania. I watched her skip toward her dorm. She was so happy to get away, out of the South, out of the Bible Belt. She was free. 

Bob died the following summer. He was thirty-two, much older than Lanie and me, from our father’s first marriage, though we never once thought of each other as half-siblings. Lanie had planned to stay in Philadelphia over her first summer break, but she ended up taking the bus home for his funeral.

We see the self-portrait of Mapplethorpe: a pitch-black background, his white face hovering, hand in the foreground wrapped around a cane with a skull carved into the top, death looming. Death was always around us. Lanie and I understood this, believing we had escaped early deaths, unlike our brother. 

Inside the Guggenheim, Lanie is alive. We stand side-by-side gazing at images of people who are likely all gone now, by a photographer long dead from AIDS. My heart beats inside my chest as I lean slightly forward and breathe in Lanie’s scent: the dry shampoo she uses because she is allergic to the regular stuff, the hint of mint from her sugar-free gum, the petals from her rosewater toner. 

In 1994, two years after Bob died, I visit Lanie in Philadelphia. She’s a senior and near graduation. I’m sixteen and it’s the first time I’ve ever flown. Memphis was in the sixties when I left, but in Philly the February air feels like ice, and snow covers the ground. I’m surprised my mother let me miss a week of classes in the middle of high school. I’m not excelling; in fact, I do the bare minimum to pass. I don’t like school—girls whisper mean things and boys shout homophobic slurs at each other in the hallways. Perhaps my mother, in an act of kindness, understood that I needed my sister, and decided to allow me this life experience with Lanie. Or maybe she was convinced by Lanie—the trusted daughter, the one who excels in academics, the one who makes rational decisions. As I walk through the airport, I can’t stop smiling. I feel like an adult. I feel free.

The movie Philadelphia is playing while I’m in town. Lanie and I go to the theater to watch Tom Hanks die of AIDS. Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas were not gay, but we are moved by their performances because there are so many aspects of truth—Hanks shrinking to bone, the splotches on his skin, echoes of what we witnessed Bob go through. We hold hands and weep over the montage at the end, footage made to appear grainy like home videos. 

My parents had one VHS tape with Bob on it. There is no sound, but Bob, around twenty, smiles into the silence, and I, a preschooler, hover next to him until he finally picks me up and kisses my head. 

Our family hardly talked about how Bob died. Only during my father’s drunken binges would he cry and clutch Bob’s high school portrait. A month after the funeral, I sat with Dad on a curb where the swath of grass began in front of our apartment. He placed his hand over his heart and said simply, “It hurts, it hurts.” When my father was sober, he and my mother made up funny lyrics and danced around the house. But the sober days disappeared.

The year before I visited Lanie in Philadelphia, Mom moved us to another apartment, leaving my father behind. Dad eventually bought a house one street away from the cemetery where Bob was laid to rest. Ten years later, Dad died from a heart attack and was buried one row up from Bob. I was twenty-five at the time, struggling with my own drinking, which I would eventually give up for good two years later. 

Lanie takes me to see Mask and Wig, Penn’s all-male theater troupe. It’s at a small theater in South Philly. We walk down the streets through slushy melted snow, me strutting in a babydoll dress with black tights and boots, Lanie gliding along in bell-bottoms and a baggy black sweater. I think we look hip, that I look older, that I look like I belong in a major city. In Mask and Wig, the men dress as women and perform comedy sketches. Looking back now, the punchlines relied too heavily on cross-dressing. 

When I was eleven, I noticed the edge of a Polaroid picture sticking out from under a pile of mail on the kitchen table. It caught my eye and I pulled it out. There was Bob, wearing a red wig with short, glamorous curls. His face is long and slender—the same shape as mine. Brown eyes with black eyeliner and smoky eyeshadow, the classic Hollywood look of red lips slightly opened. In his hands, a half-rolled joint. A red feather boa around his neck. 

When the photo was taken, Lanie was still at home and Bob was alive. I showed it to my father, who claimed it was a joke for Halloween, pointing to people in the background. I have a photo of the Polaroid saved on my computer. I took it with my phone when I visited a friend of Bob’s years ago, the picture tucked inside one of Bob’s photo albums that his friend had inherited. 

In Philly, Lanie and I sit on her bed in the apartment she shares with two roommates, plotting ways for me to stay. Lanie suggests I enroll in a high school there or take the GED. But we both know it would be too much responsibility for her. Lanie works all the time, juggling work-study and other jobs because our family doesn’t have the money to pay for her education. And we know Mom won’t allow me to move to Philly.

On this trip, we never pause for photos. We are so young. Death is still far away, and old age is a place we assume we will both be one day.

In the summer of 1996, just before I turn nineteen, I visit Lanie again, this time in New York. After graduation and a short stay on the West Coast, she’d moved there for the indie film and theater scene, and because Bob had lived there briefly, in the ’80s, perhaps a last hurrah before the symptoms started and he needed to move back home. 

At the time, I’m heavily into ’90s punk rock. My hair is dyed black with random splotches of bright red, a home bleach-and-dye job that didn’t go well, but it doesn’t matter because that just makes it more punk. 

Lanie takes a photo of me atop a rock in Central Park. I’m wearing my blue-jean shorts, the ones my mother hates, the ones held together by safety pins and patches with logos of punk bands. I’m eating a Bomb Pop, the red, white, and blue popsicle, but I don’t feel patriotic. My hair is short, and the red splotches look like off-color roots. My armpits and legs are a mess of wild curly hair. I’m wearing a black tank top, and it’s obvious I don’t have a supportive bra. I hate my boobs, which are too large for a girl trying hard not to be feminine. At the time, I don’t feel pretty enough to be feminine. I dress to shield myself from the ’90s gaze that demands waiflike girls with eyebrows plucked thin and body hair waxed off completely. I don’t yet have language for nonbinary, or know that gender, like sexuality, can be fluid.

Lanie doesn’t like to be in photos. I don’t know if it’s because she struggles with seeing her own image, or if she prefers to be the looker and not the looked-upon. Our mother always wants photos of us and my sister always refuses as long as possible, until she can tell that if she doesn’t give in, our mother’s feelings will be hurt. 

Over the years, I visit Lanie in New York frequently. We see plays, movies—some she directed, wrote, or produced—and wander through art museums. Our favorite exhibits are Mapplethorpe at the Guggenheim, and Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum. The only photos I have from these trips are of scenery, like the double rainbow above Coney Island on Lanie’s birthday in 2021, alighting the gray sky with vibrant color. Or of the art, when the gallery allowed it—snapshots of lines from Basquiat’s journals, the self-portrait of Kahlo. 

In April 2015, we walk the High Line overlooking Chelsea and the Hudson River, and the friend we are with snaps a photo of me and Lanie. After Lanie dies, I search for the photo on my phone, on my computer, on social media, and can’t find it. Then, one day, it appears in the memories section on Facebook. Two sisters: Lanie with her hair tucked inside her baseball cap, wearing a light layer of makeup, all a shade of peach. Her eyes squinty from the sun and Benadryl (for her peanut allergy, after sipping a vegan milkshake that tasted a little nutty). Me in a black dress, hair long and loosely braided, skin pale, eyelashes caked with black mascara, bright red on my lips. Our arms around each other; me a little taller, as always. Green shrubs and a concrete walking path behind us, the sides of tall buildings all around. Her skin is warm, her heart still beating. We smile.

The body moves from subject to object when the life it once held is gone. Much as death is a negation of being, a photo is a negation of time. In the days before the digital era, images were captured on film through negatives: the movement of time negated onto film, and then turned into an object called a photograph. One day, we will be expelled from our bodies, out of time. Is a photo also an expulsion? Bazin claims it preserves an image in the way that mummification preserves the body. Sontag referred to photos as memento mori, objects that remind us of the inevitable fact of death. But I want to see photos not as a reminder of the death of the person in the photo—or of my own mortality—but as a reminder of being alive. 

In the weeks following the fatal wreck, I post photos of Lanie and our mother to my Facebook page constantly. Photos of the two of them in Paris to see the French Open in 2004. Photos of Lanie on a payphone in the West Village. Photos of the three of us on an Easter Sunday in the 1980s. Photos from 2019, Christmas in Key West. Photos of us on vacation in Clearwater, Florida, a month before the wreck—the last picture of the three of us together, the sun setting in the background. The photos stop the grief from swallowing me. Even years later, I have bursts of reposting these photos, my attempt, perhaps, at resurrection.

Mapplethorpe died in 1989, at the age of forty-three. The portrait of him with the skull-tipped cane, taken a year earlier, presents him as a ghastly figure peering out of the black void; however he is very much alive. As a viewer, I can see that he is sickly thin, but still possesses a flair for art. He still has a desire to depict his living self, even when close to death. 

The reality, though, is that we are always close to death. If not disease, if not old age, a car could crash into us and break our bodies. Mapplethorpe’s photo is about what it means to be alive. 

Peter Hujar photographed Candy Darling on her deathbed. She was fully made up, with white powder on her cheeks, Revlon Fire & Ice on her lips, arm stretched over her head, a red rose against the white sheet. It may have been her deathbed, but Candy was alive. So was Bob in his red wig with his red lips, his hands rolling a joint in the middle of some fabulous party. 

Later in life, I too will dare to be pretty. I will don dresses and bright red lipstick, even try out Candy Darling’s Fire & Ice, and realize who I am. I wonder if Bob felt the same way.

Three months after the wreck, I find the motel photo in a drawer in my mother’s bedroom as I pack up her house. In this photo, Lanie’s hair will always be cascading down over her shoulders, curls wild and thick. I will always be thirteen, braces glinting from the camera flash. Lanie will always be at the start of a smile, the corner of her lips sloping upward, a glimpse of front teeth, college waiting for her. She will always tug on my ponytail, her fingers wrapped around my sleek brown hair. In this photo, Lanie will always be alive. In this photo, we will always be together, unmoving, but full of life.