Part 1: The Summer I Posed Nude in a Pawtucket Warehouse
I’d never mistaken how deftly their hands could destroy.
This three-part essay was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Witness, a magazine by the Black Mountain Institute. Thank you to Monica Macansantos for choosing this essay as the runner-up in the Witness literary awards!
The summer I posed nude in a Pawtucket warehouse was the same summer I didn’t have a bedroom.
I met The Photographer, the man who would eventually take my picture, on a cool night in Providence, the small river city where my older sister lived. She and I took the rickety wood staircase up to The Photographer’s apartment door, which he opened before we had a chance to knock.
“You’re right on time, ladies. We were just about to look at my photos.” He wore his sandy curls slicked back into a low ponytail and an expectant grin, inviting us inside.
In his living room, my sister and I kneeled on the floor at a coffee table across from two women in their late twenties: Claire, a flawless model type, and Jenny, my sister’s housemate.
They were all graduates of Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, known among creative types as the Harvard of art schools. RISD kids were an entirely different level of cool—apathy blended with ego and zeal, a concoction buttressed by unabashed nepotism but varying amounts of actual skill.
My sister was an outlier among them. Having grown up without wealth, she’d earned her place there via talent alone and remained a better judge of artistic merit than most of them hoped to be.
The Photographer pulled out a few oversized albums, the kind families used before iPhones. But instead of featuring overexposed beach snaps and smiley birthday shots, his photo albums were full of naked women.
Mostly, there were pictures of Claire. The nudes were shot in tintype, a method from the 1800s that gave the swaths of uncovered skin a silvery sheen, her eyes so ghostly I almost forgot she hadn’t long since died of consumption and in fact sat right there in the room.
The Photographer pointed to a snap of Claire’s perfectly hard nipple casting a shadow on the curve of her breast. “This lighting is impeccable.”
“I love that one, too.” Claire beamed.
She was skinnier than me, all ribs and hips, and I could tell she found pride in the hard angles her body made in the photos. She sat upright with perfect posture while maintaining an aura of ease, her body reflecting an assuredness about being admired so closely.
I wondered if she’d been this confident before posing nude, or if becoming an artistic subject helped her see herself in a different, more valuable light.
The first weekend I started crashing with my sister and her housemates in Providence, they invited a bunch of RISD alums over for a party and Jenny cornered me in the bathroom with merlot-stained teeth.
“I can’t stand Claire,” she hissed. “Yes, she slept with my boyfriend years ago, but like, she slept with my boyfriend. Do I like that they’re friends? Out there flirting in the yard like this is some kind of trip down memory lane? No. No, I do not.”
I’d set my hand over my heart to show solidarity with Jenny’s pain, understanding I was expected to take her side in the matter considering I was sleeping on her couch rent-free for the summer. “I’m sorry, Jenny, that must be…hard.”
Now, Jenny placed a lacquered nail over the image of Claire’s breasts. “She looks a little stiff there to me.”
I was just twenty, but no stranger to the ways women cut one another down to compensate for their own insecurities. Watching her friends ogle over Claire’s cellulite-free body in monochrome, Jenny couldn’t help but imagine her own boyfriend long ago doing the same.
I found myself in Rhode Island that summer after junior year because, unlike the other college kids I knew, I couldn’t live with my parents. But it’s not like I didn’t try. My dad drove all of our furniture away after we lost our home in New York State to foreclosure my senior year of high school, and Mom followed while I went to college.
Three years later, they were living separate, yet parallel lives in a town situated at the forgotten nub where North Carolina meets Georgia and Tennessee. Both were living in uncomfortable housing arrangements where neither paid rent, both indebted to wealthy people in ways I wanted no part of.
Dad, always drunk and high, found himself a pretty little girlfriend at the bar, which drove Mom to buying giant bottles of Barefoot wine. I helped her finish them off in the kitchen of a house where she was cat sitting for a person on sabbatical, a word that, until then, wasn’t in our vocabulary.
I was sick of their dysfunction, but too poor to build a life on my own.
I escaped, dawn and dusk, by running up and down back roads in the Blue Ridge mountains, hoping my sneakers on the soft earth would tell me what to do. The woods did bring me solace, but they were also filled with decaying leaves from fall and ridden with false summits that meant you always had to keep climbing, striving, to find a decent view.
So I did what I always did. I called my sister. “Live with me,” she said, because we both wanted a life better than what our parents could give. She knew she was my only option.
Those first weeks in Providence, I’d slept on the lumpy blue couch in my sister’s living room. The first light of day, always a pale purple, spilled through the bay windows of her three-story New England rental house.
I rose only when I knew everyone left for work, sure I had the place to myself. To keep busy I walked to the library downtown and read in its great rooms.
I stuck two fingers into the slats between the blinds so I could spy on the actor Mark Ruffalo, who was filming a movie about a manic-depressive dad on the street just outside the front door.
I thought of the scene in 13 Going on 30, where he holds the doll house he made for Jennifer Garner’s character. I wondered if some guy would love me enough to give me a house, if that was the only way I’d get my own bedroom.
I looked for jobs I could do with no degree and no experience and came across a cheese sampler gig that took place in various Whole Foods stores around Rhode Island. My role involved handing out samples, wearing the company-provided uniform, and writing down each cheese I sold. It paid $20 an hour. If I sold enough cheese, I’d get a bonus.
Easy, I thought. I emailed them a current headshot and full-length photo of myself, my waist and shirt sizes, and my available hours, which were anytime. Someone wrote back and said I was hired.
A box containing my uniform arrived in the mail. Opening it with a kitchen knife, I pictured the Costco samplers with their collared shirts and black aprons. Worst case scenario, I’d have to wear a hair net. I prepared for all of this, if it meant getting to live with my sister.
Inside, I was perplexed to see a pile of lime green fabric. I pulled it up into the air until it unfurled into the shape of a dress, a German-style dirndl worn by busty beer maids at Oktoberfests in mid-sized cities. White lacy trim adorned the neckline, the hem.
As the dress revealed itself, the truth of the gig did, too. This was not just a job selling cheese—this was a job selling my body.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when The Photographer approached me at Scurvy Dog, a windowless dive bar I easily sneaked into because they didn’t ID.
I sat alone sipping a two-dollar Narragansett tall boy while my sister and the other girls flirted with townies, everyone clinging to the fast-fading night.
The Photographer slid into the booth across from me. “So, you want to shoot sometime?”
I took a sip of beer, wondering how I matched up to the other women in his photos. With Claire, he could ask to photograph her butthole and she’d happily bend over, shame easily sidelined for the sake of artmaking.
Me? I spent my entire existence carefully architecting what people thought of me. I wanted to be one of those RISD artists, not the little sister cramping their style.
I also knew, from having a sister who was an artist—and a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, at that—how dedicating one’s life to artmaking requires a certain degree of façade-building.
I could never be an artist, not even one’s muse, if I did not first consider myself as such.
The Photographer’s shirt, unbuttoned, revealed chest hairs matted with sweat. He gave me that particular look women know well—some say it’s like being undressed, but since nudity was already on the table, he dug deeper than that, more like his eyes unzipped my very skin, hunting the webs of fascia beneath for something to put in his portfolio.
“For what it’s worth,” he shrugged. “I think you’d do great. What do you say?”
Posing for The Photographer would be uncomfortable—that much I knew. But maybe if I could see my body through the eyes of a man, I could find self-worth at a time when I had nothing but myself to give. “Okay,” I nodded. “Let’s shoot.”
The following weekend, I stood in my bra and underwear, soles of my feet on a gritty concrete floor, white hot lights illuminating all my imperfections. Stretch marks on my breasts, belly button neither innie nor outie, scoliotic curve that offset my hips and made it impossible to stand straight.
A lens fixed on me, the eye that would forever capture my nakedness.
Behind it stood The Photographer. “Are you going to, you know, take the rest off?”
I looked at the camera, then at him, then back at the camera, wishing I could say no.
What did he do to deserve this intimacy?
Our vulnerability was not shared. He wore clothes. He served the role of director, the owner of the car which took me to his studio.
Saying no would make him mad, and I had been in that position enough times to know how a man’s anger could endanger me.
But what other parts of myself did I risk, staying in the studio, letting him take, take, take, asking nothing in return?
The Photographer crossed his arms, sighed. “I don’t have all day.”
I nodded, gulped, unhooked my bra and tossed it to the ground. I stepped out of my underwear, hoping he didn’t see that it looked dirty, even though that signaled my body’s ability to stay clean, to protect itself.
“Okay, good.” The Photographer became engaged, focused. “Turn to the right, hand up, not that hand, good. Don’t move.”
My body stayed still as it was told, but my mind wandered. I thought of my sister and me, ages nine and twelve, at a motor lodge pool in the Adirondacks.
Inside, Dad watching cartoons from the motel bed with our baby brother.
Outside, us diving down toward yolk-yellow lights.
Water, warmer than the night air. Breath became bubbles.
Around the motel property ran a chainlink fence, and beyond that, a stand of black spruce trees kept their arms outstretched, shielding us from danger lurking in the mountains beyond our child’s-eye view.
Back then we feared black bears, bobcats, big brown bats.
We didn’t know yet what the egos of men were capable of, were too young to see that we were ensnared, by blood, with the villain of our lives. That he lay inside, watching cartoons from the motel bed with our baby brother.
We didn’t know yet what men could do, and our naïveté kept us safe.
My sister wore green goggles and a purple Speedo.
She jumped in, always experiencing first what life had in store for me next. Your turn, she shouted, because she loved me.
The world tucked us in.
The next time I saw The Photographer, he carried a silver vat of freshly cooked lobsters out to the porch.
We were at his parent’s vacation home near Gloucester, Massachusetts, a house held up on stilts above a private stretch of sand that non-residents had to pay to use. He plopped down the bucket on the deck, where I sat, ravenous, alongside my sister and the other RISD kids.
“Get ‘em while they’re hot!”
I peered down into the metal basin and didn’t see anything edible. Instead, I saw a creature with eyes and antennae and a suit of crimson armor. In high school, we learned that lobsters used to be seen as a dirty meal, bugs from the sea that only the poor would eat.
My global studies teacher said this like it should be hard to believe. “And today it’s the opposite, a delicacy!”
I didn’t know if lobster tasted like a delicacy because I’d never tried it. My Florida-raised parents hated seafood—a tick I sensed had something to do with growing up on those marshy coastal rivers, their childhoods of fried conch and red tide exhausting their capacity for the ocean’s creatures.
The closest I’d gotten to a lobster was at Price Chopper, our outdated local grocery in my withering blue collar hometown. The seafood counter always had an overhead light out, and the darkness gave a sad, gray tinge to the would-be pink filets in their mausoleums of ice.
On shopping trips with my mother, I often wandered away from her to watch the lobsters.
Stacked three layers deep in a round tank, claws bound, only their whiskers able to search the polluted waters for a kernel of freedom, I understood the animals were doomed.
But in the same way that the light was always dim, there was never anybody behind the counter, nobody to kiss the lobsters goodbye and prepare them for their fate.
I assumed the duty myself, fingertips on the cold glass, whispering, “Someone is going to eat you soon. I’m sorry.”
I saw lobsters less as food, more like unfortunate, stubbled fellows I sang dirges with before they got sent off to war.
The Photographer started on his second. He grabbed a singed carcass from the pot and ripped it in half. Meat hung from the cavities in mangled shreds. He reached into each end, fingering the wet guts. I turned away.
Around the wooden porch, the artists worked. Their hands, trained by pottery wheels and soldering irons and the heft of analog cameras, were strong and dexterous. Juice ran down their forearms like rain from a roof. Hunks of yellow sludge dropped to the deck, wetting its worn planks. Eating lobster was an activity that necessitated the slipping off of gold rings, the unstrapping of a nice watch.
The Photographer drizzled a ramekin of melted butter straight onto the meat in his hands.
He slurped up the mess from his palm and groaned. “Mmmm. Delicious.”
He noticed me watching him, lips smeared with butter, and pushed the bucket toward me.
“Get in there. One left.”
I considered the last, lonely lobster flopped in the bucket. Unlike other fish, which are swept out of the ocean in great nets, lobsters must be lured into cages. They smell the bait inside, then voluntarily swim into the trap, seeking the nourishment they need to survive.
Only after they’ve had their fill do they realize they cannot, will not, escape. I should’ve been surprised that a food considered fancy by modern society used to be relegated to the lower classes, but to me, it was inevitable that a food requiring so much violence would become proprietary to the upper class.
I’d never mistaken how deftly their hands could destroy.
Part 2 coming next week.
You are captivating to read. Thank you for sharing your observations and life.
Looking forward to part 2. I know Gloucester well.