Before My Eyes (6 page)

“They are all my favorites,” she says, laying out each one on her floor, studying them. “Which one did I wear last time?”

“Green with frogs. That's my favorite.”

“That's my favorite, too!”

Sometimes I wish my life were like Izzy's again. That the biggest choice I had to make was like hers, over a bathing suit: pink with stars or green with frogs? I have to help her into the bathing suit, which is perfect on her. Her build is the exact opposite of mine and my mother's. She's wispy, delicate, and fair. I brush her hair into a ponytail, and she insists on a pink rubber band—as she reminds me, her absolutely favorite color.

But I'm fine. I can handle all this. It's a mantra I've repeated to myself the past three months.

I yank on my dark blue Speedo. Unlike Izzy, I have three bathing suits: light blue, dark blue, and orange. I have no favorite color. I hate to shop for myself. Nothing ever fits right. Even at six years old, Izzy is a better shopper than I am.

I hurry into the kitchen. No one has done the dishes in a week. My mother would make us French toast or scrambled eggs with bits of green pepper and tomato for breakfast. She would know how to get the laundry washed before it piled up in baskets like used-clothing donations nobody wants. She would be able to get Izzy into her bathing suit, brush her hair, spray her with sunscreen—and get the dishes done—before noon. Before we go, I'll push the vacuum through the house and make sure all the windows are open wide. I'll dust her tables crowded with knickknacks on lace doilies, and at least the house will smell like my mother's house, of summer breezes and lemon oil.

“Izzy? If you don't come now, I'm leaving you.” I shake some stale cereal into the last clean bowl. Before my mother had her stroke, I never had to think of dishes, or laundry, or the sun burning Izzy, or me.

There is the “before” for everything. Before the stroke, my mother worked as an adolescent psychologist, part-time. My father always kidded her that part-time meant full-time to her. She loved her job, though. She'd run through the day. She did everything fast—her job, her cooking, her talking. I don't ever remember her still, or sitting, until I saw her lying on the bathroom floor, by the toilet, that morning.

One minute
before
she was fine.

Izzy was in her bed. My mother had woken up with another headache. But she hadn't even drunk her morning coffee. The kitchen was full of the scent of fresh coffee.

“I'm taking a cup of coffee,” I said from the kitchen. I had just started drinking coffee in April, on my seventeenth birthday. I liked it fresh-roasted with cream and two sugars, the same as my mother. I had convinced her to spend a little more and buy “organic fair trade” beans.

“I want to blow-dry my hair, so I'm unplugging the coffee pot,” I called out to her. I didn't want a fuse to blow again. This house is old and the rooms boxy and tight, even the electricity seems to be set up for a time and place when everything moved slower. My mother never complained, even though, if anyone asked where we lived, she often conveniently dropped the “South” part from “Lakeshore.”

That late May morning, I hung in the kitchen for a moment or two longer, daydreaming, breathing in the coffee as much as drinking it, running my hands through my tangled hair, thinking about nothing, and everything, a moment when my mind filled up with the enormity of myself. I heard a crash but I thought it was something else—the garbage being collected—roofers on top of someone else's house—I wasn't paying enough attention, not to my mother, not to someone who was always there. She always had everything under control. That morning, I had one of my writer's notebooks out, a black-and-white composition notebook, nothing fancy, and was thinking about a poem, or a string of words, or I don't know what.

“Before” is a strange, curious word—both prior and next—both what preceded and what is about to happen—both memory and what will be. “Before” is the kind of word my English teacher would spend lots of time on as if there were time in the world anymore for one word, any time for anything but what has to be learned now. And the
now
is over and gone in a blink, without a moment to reflect, or to foresee what's coming at you—because there's always something else.

Now, I can't stand the smell of coffee. I can't drink coffee. I can't eat coffee ice cream or fancy desserts like tiramisu. I can't hang out with everybody else in the local coffee shop. One minute, she was fine. I didn't hear her fall. I didn't hear her body hit the floor. The world was all there, too much with me, and I wasn't paying attention at all.

And when I found her, when I finally finished that cup of fair-trade organic fresh-roasted coffee and wanted to blow-dry my hair, I don't even know how many minutes had passed (the ambulance guys asked, and I could only guess: Five? Twenty?). I didn't even know what I was seeing.

My mother was on the floor. Her body was sprawled on the tiles. Her body had hit the floor.

My father would later point out that I had Red Cross first aid training, as if bandages and antiseptic could have fixed her. My mother had made me take those classes so I would be prepared to babysit. I didn't want to babysit; I never babysat for other families. Didn't I have enough of little kids with my own sister? However, to make my mother happy, I took the course.

Yet that morning, I only stared at her. She wasn't supposed to be on the floor. She was supposed to be getting dressed. I had to blow-dry my hair. She was unconscious on the sea green tiles. Her purple toothbrush was next to the sink, and I thought: I have to brush my teeth. My mouth tasted of night, pasty and leaden. I almost reached for the toothpaste first. Instead, I bent down, I'm sure of it, and touched her hand. Her fingers were already stiff. I said, once, softly, “Mom.” She didn't move, and I put my face next to hers as if the problem were that she couldn't see me.

Why didn't I run when I heard her fall? Why did I waste time? Why did I hesitate? If I had helped her sooner, would she be like this?

Later her doctor said to me that she might have had a series of small strokes before the bigger one. He couldn't be sure. He did say that she was at the hospital in plenty of time for new, life-saving medicines, which she received. Her life was saved.

But maybe I could have done more.

I pick up the hairbrush, her hairbrush, and sweep it down through my hair, once, twice, at least twenty-five strokes. I'm facing the mirror, but I don't truly see myself because if I look I'll see her. I hear her deep, smooth voice say my name.
Claire.
She named me Claire, telling me my name meant “clear and bright” in Latin. She's saying my name to me as if I'm her lifeboat in the wide empty sea. I close my eyes and hear my mother telling me to brush the back of my hair:
Make sure you get out all those knots, Claire. Make sure you brush at least twenty-five strokes, angel.
I want to see her. And I do. I see this: Her hair is chopped off at her neck. Her eyes are red-rimmed, naked without makeup, unfocused. She wears glasses instead of contacts. She used to hate wearing glasses, even the violet ones, which she once thought of as “funky” and now just look weird and oversized on her. Her good arm, the one that can still rise and fall, is scabbed, scaly, bruised black and sickly yellow from the intravenous needles, and it reaches for me—

Stop it!
She will get better. She will come home—restored, that's the word she used, like an old piece of furniture. But that doesn't sound right. She'll be home and everything will be back to normal. She promised. That's enough.

I open my eyes and brush, hard.

Max

Friday, 10:00
A.M.

“Vanilla? Chocolate? Or swirl?” I ask the kid, even though it's way too early for ice cream.

“Chocolate?”

I wait him out.

“Vanilla?” He's nine or ten. His swim trunks hang on bony hips. His hair sticks up from sand and sea. In his fist is a crumpled up, sweaty ten-dollar bill, clutched in a way that says: I don't have to care about money. He's North Lakeshore all the way.

“Swirl. How about swirl?” I offer. I remember being his age, being given money, trusted for the first time to return with change, and I remember the lecture afterward about being careless with money. I may be North Lakeshore, too, but my parents, especially my dad, care about the so-called “value of a dollar.”

“I hate swirl,” he shouts at me.

“Vanilla, then?”

“I hate vanilla. Got any other flavors?”

I stare him down. “Vanilla or chocolate or swirl.”

The beach is quickly filling up with more kids like this one, kids who will all run over throwing dollar bills at me like I'm in a cage. My mother used to bring me to this same beach, and it hasn't changed much since then. Every winter, there are warnings about sand erosion, about the ocean reclaiming the shore, about the barrier of land between the rest of the land and the Atlantic sea washing away, and one recent October there was even a major hurricane. Ninety percent of Long Island lost electrical power. The tide rose across Ocean Parkway and upended it. Water surged into houses. Even those that had always been far enough from the ocean or bay were flooded. And yet every summer, we are back.

Of course, the larger state park has more shoreline, more room for everyone to spread out, and it's only a mile or so west of here, past the dunes. Anybody can go there. Some even take buses from I don't know where—Queens or Brooklyn or other parts of the city. I never go there. Nobody goes there, it's too crowded, and of course, we have our beach.

You have to live in the town of Lakeshore to go to this section of the Atlantic Ocean. You have to pay an annual fee and show identification to a group of teens, the ones with the easy jobs, sitting in an air-conditioned tollbooth out front, checking town passes. What everyone loves about this setup is that it feels exclusive. It's the same water, the same sand as a mile to the west. I think some people, my parents, even believe the problems are over there, not here. They believe that there is a line you can draw in the sand—on one side you're from Lakeshore and you're safe, even if you're from South Lakeshore.

I've got to admit that within the boundaries of the town beach the North Lakeshore high school kids don't like to be seen with the South Lakeshore high school kids. An outsider wouldn't know who's who to tell the difference, though of course, we all know.

Some days our town beach is twice as packed as the state park, but it is packed only with people like us.

Trish bustles around me. She's in her usual defiantly striped tank top and shorts, as if saying to the world, “Nobody is going to tell Trish Nelson what to wear, even if she's nearly six feet tall and over three hundred pounds.”

“Excuse me, sweetie,” she says, as if I'm the one in the way.

Trish is the type of girl I'd never talk to in school, would pass in the hall and look through as if someone her size could be invisible, though I don't know if there are any girls in my school who have quite her heft and attitude. She's South Lakeshore all the way. She's not someone who lets you ignore her. But then, I had to spend my entire summer working with her in the twelve-foot-wide Snack Shack at the edge of the town beach.

“I'll get this, sweetie,” she says, saving me, again, from a nine- or ten-year-old boy who can't make up his mind. Not much different from sixteen—nearly seventeen—year-old boys. That's why it's better, sometimes, not to think at all.

I want to tell the kid that it doesn't matter whether he chooses vanilla, chocolate, or swirl. His life doesn't hinge on that decision. But I remember when it seemed like it did. Now, nothing I decide matters. I didn't want to work here, but my father had a friend who was connected and I got the job without even an interview. My father made me take this job.

“Your mother knows you're asking for ice cream at ten in the morning?” asks Trish. “You want to grow up and look like me, sweetie?”

“I won't,” he says.

“You won't?”

“I'm a boy.”

“Yes, you are,” she says, giving him a serious look, making him blush and throw back his thin shoulders. “So what kind of ice cream do you want, big guy? Vanilla or chocolate?”

He is suddenly shy with her size and intensity.

“I like chocolate,” she says.

“I like chocolate, too.”

“Chocolate.” She gives him the biggest chocolate cone the kid's probably had all summer. “Two bucks, sport.”

I squint out to the ocean glistening in the sun, and wish I were anywhere else.

The kid hands Trish the ten and almost forgets to wait for change. She's good, though. She calls him back. Sometimes I just put it in my pocket—as a tip, that's how I think of it. If anyone remembers, or if a mother sends a tearful kid back, I always give up the money, making the kid feel guilty, like it was his fault for being careless and stupid and a kid.

Peter is another “coworker.” Even in my head, I put the word in quotes because I can't reconcile that he and I are both in the same job, being paid the same wages. Of course, he's happy he has the job. He likes the job. This job is a challenge for him—unpacking water bottles, wedging them down into the tubs of ice, making sure that we have enough ice from the ancient ice machine clunking out cubes in the back. The only strange thing about him at first sight is the work boots. Everyone else wears sneakers to the Snack Shack. One of the rules is no flip-flops. But there's no rule against wearing big yellow work boots on summer days. Peter clomps around the Snack Shack in his size-thirteen work boots, ready and willing to lift, carry, or stack.

Barkley usually shows up at some point. He's twenty-one years old and sees himself as the “assistant” manager. That's a title he gave himself. He's the same as me and Trish and Peter, except that he closes up when Phil, the manager, isn't around, and Phil is never around. In fact, Barkley was the assistant manager of the varsity soccer team when I was a freshman. As far as I could tell, he was in charge of water for the team. So maybe it's something about the title. I didn't know him that well, but all summer he's been acting like we were, and still are, friends, and I'm trapped. I've got to admit, today I wouldn't mind him showing up. Not that I need him for the Snack Shack. Any moron could run the Snack Shack. But I'm thinking of taking him up on something else.