Blind Sight (2 page)

The other of my grandmother’s sisters, the one my mother was really close to—Great-Aunt Nora—died the year my sister Pearl was born. It is Sara’s belief that Pearl is actually Great-Aunt Nora reincarnated. (Pearl is totally not into this idea and says that it is “an invasion of her free will” and also “gross.”) According to Sara, her aunt Nora was very spiritual and had these amazing psychic powers and through those powers she always knew that she was not “the one” of her generation to have children.

So Nana was the one. Not that she would ever describe herself
that way. If you ask her about the whole thing she will just say, “Yes, our family has always run to girls.”

The precise geometry—not to mention redundancy—of how our family has run to girls is not especially mysterious to Nana because it falls into the general mystery category of God’s will, which is also something you will see only when you believe it.

How did it work out for my mother and her sisters? Aunt Nancy didn’t really like children. Our aunt Caroline liked children, but she was married to a really old guy, my uncle Louis, who is almost as old as Nana. Not that old men can’t have children, but I knew that Aunt Caroline had to have her ovaries removed because they had cysts in them and that you needed ovaries for babies. Sara studied the human body when she learned massage therapy, and so she had this great
Anatomy Coloring Book
, and she would show us all the pictures and explain stuff. I had seen the ovaries. Sara had made them gold. (The testes, on another page, had been colored blue.) Sara left college after two years to get married when she was really young to a guy named Paul. At that point, neither of her younger sisters was married and everybody’s ovaries were intact, so the playing field was level. But after a couple of years, Sara got pregnant and had my sister Aurora. By the end of the following year she had my sister Pearl, or, if you will, the reincarnation of Great-Aunt Nora.

So that was two girls down, one more to go. Plain sailing for Sara, you would think.

Except that about a year after Pearl was born, Sara’s husband Paul decided to renounce his life in New York City, all his worldly goods (and girls), change his name from Paul to Deepak, and join an ashram in India. Sara, who had met Paul at a yoga retreat in Boulder in 1982, seems to have been generally supportive of all of Paul’s previous renouncements: Judaism, grad school, meat, Paul’s investment-banker brother Barry, shoes with laces. To India, however, I guess she was not prepared to go or not anyway, as the renounced wife of Deepak.

So Sara had no husband and potential father for the third daughter.
If she had never known about the three-daughters thing, would she have decided that two children were enough? She did know, though. And she believed she had a destiny. She’s said that.

The actual facts were vague to me up until just a few months ago, but the basic outline is that my mother met my father one day and they spent a magical night together and she got pregnant. They didn’t get married, though, or keep in contact, because they were on very different paths and my father was more like a comet that blazed through my mother’s sky.

So that is how Sara had her three children: Aurora, Pearl, and me: three children born of (the mystically chosen?) one of three daughters who was herself born of the (randomly selected?) daughter of three daughters and on and on. So it seems like, hey, mystic or random, everything happened just as was expected, just as was planned, just as it had happened before, just as it had always been for twelve, and now thirteen, generations. There’s a kind of flow to the whole thing. Or was, anyway. Because just when Sara thought her ping-pong ball was about to go in the winning slot, it bounced off a nail and went left. What are the odds? When Sara’s third child was born, she got what she least expected.

She got a boy.

That’s me.

As you can see at the top of my personal information sheet, my name is Luke.

It’s not like I didn’t know I was expected to be a girl.

“Your name was going to be Leila,” my sisters liked to tell me.

I just didn’t know the extent to which I was expected to be a girl until that day we all looked at the family Bible. My sisters didn’t know either, I guess.

“So, Luke messes the whole thing up,” Pearl had said after Sara pointed out the patterns.

“It’d be perfect if he was a girl,” Pearl said, frowning at the Bible.

“Pearl,” Sara said. “I’d like to hear more mindful language from you.”

“Luke was sort of a mistake, I guess,” Pearl shrugged. “Too late now.”

Then Sara and Pearl got into it, and by the time Nana came back with tea Sara had sent Pearl to her room to think about the ways in which words can be hurtful and Aurora had told Pearl that her new name was going to be “Insensitive Jerk” so Aurora got sent to the laundry room to fold sheets and think about how you can defend someone without being hurtful yourself. (Aurora and Pearl shared a room and you couldn’t exile them in there together.) Nana put the Bible back into ziplock and went upstairs.

“Pearl likes playing with words,” Sara told me, once she had some tea and calmed down. “She didn’t mean to be hurtful. You know she adores you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t think it means anything,” I said, indicating the spot on the table where the Bible had been.

“Then it doesn’t to you,” Sara said. “And that’s perfectly okay.”

On a side note: I’ve done a little research on Abigail Perkins, accused witch of Salem. She’s listed in all of the books on the trials, usually with a little parenthetical statement after her name: (convicted, but not executed). There’s nothing to indicate whether she confessed or not, although they did let people go if they confessed. I also found out that most of the accused weren’t midwives or healers or anything like that. Mostly they were people in the town that no one else liked because they were troublemakers, or argued with their neighbors, or were involved in lawsuits with the parents of the accusers, stuff like that. I actually just read an interesting article suggesting that the hysterical symptoms of the accusers might have been caused by ergot poisoning from the rye bread that was a staple food of Salem.

I don’t know that any of this will make a good essay, though. I know good writing is supposed to be showing, not telling, but for the essay it’s not really about showing or telling. It’s about selling. Selling myself as the possibly gender-confused descendent of a false confessor and victim of rye bread–munching hysterics isn’t going to get me into a good college.

And with that thought, Luke pushes himself away from the desk where he has been typing.

Luke slides back (the chair he’s sitting on has casters) to the desk, scrolls through what he has written, and makes a few grammatical changes. Luke does not consider himself to be a writer, but he has writers in his family. His Nana wrote a series of books for young adults called
The Mountjoy Girls
. His mother, Sara, is writing a book on alternative healing, and contributes articles to various journals. His aunt Nancy has written a book on Lucrezia de’ Medici. His sister Pearl has had her poetry published. His great-aunt Eileen has written a manual on the proper care and training of Dandie Dinmont terriers.

Luke saves his writing under the title “Notes #1.”

He wonders how accurately he has remembered that evening when they all looked at the Bible. Luke was the star pupil of his AP Biology class and is a subscriber to
Scientific American
, so he understands the basic synaptic principle of memory creation, and that the act of memory retrieval will—to some extent—alter the memory being retrieved. Deprived of the exact stimuli that produced a unique neuronal sequence, cells will reconsolidate in a new way, depending on where and what and who Luke is at the time he remembers. Luke’s brain—presupposing there is a “Luke” separate from his “brain”—can only remember a memory of the memory from the last time he remembered the memory.

Example: Luke did not think of the Plinko game while looking
at the Bible that night. He constructed the analogy two years later, under totally different circumstances, but it so exactly suited the bouncing helplessness of looking at three hundred years’ worth of girls’ names that it seemed as if he had always made that connection: that he must have thought of the Plinko game at that moment, and forgotten about it, and that he was—two years later—remembering it at last.

But he wasn’t.

Also, Luke didn’t point at the names in Nana’s family Bible and tell Sara, “I don’t think it means anything.” What he said was, “Yeah,” and then, “Can I have a small piece of cake?” Luke was both alarmed and angered by the revelation of his family history. Luke knew Sara was worried about how he felt, along with feeling bad about losing her temper and yelling at Pearl. Luke wanted cake and knew that if he asked for a specifically small piece, he would get a larger one than if he had not specified the size. Luke could not stop himself from feeling alarm or anger. He could, however, and did, get dessert.

Luke is on the move now, leaving the bedroom for the kitchen. He does not think of the bedroom as “his” bedroom yet, even though his father introduced it to Luke with: “So this is your room.” For four days, Luke has been moving cautiously about his father’s house, putting anything he uses or touches back very carefully. Luke does not stand in his father’s house and shout, “Who are you? What does this mean? Are we supposed to love each other? Why didn’t you ever want to know me before?” Luke puts magazines down at the same angle he picks them up, flattens them into stacks, and says to himself, “I like keeping things neat too.”

“What’s his house like?” Pearl asked Luke by phone the day after Luke’s arrival in Los Angeles. “Is it really fancy?”

“It’s awesome. But it’s not, like, super huge or anything.” Luke looked around the living room where he was standing.

“Well, describe it,” said Pearl.

“Um … it’s really sort of empty.”

“Empty? Like no furniture?”

“No, there’s furniture. But everything is put away inside it. All the stuff. It’s really organized.”

“So it’s impersonal,” Pearl mused. “Cold.”

“Oh no. It’s really nice. No clutter. I’ll take some pictures,” Luke said.

Luke is in the kitchen now, which has all new appliances. He admires the refrigerator particularly, which is full of food in clear containers. His father told him to help himself to anything at all, and so Luke forks broccoli salad into a green rectangular dish. Even the dishes are cool: Japanese style, he thinks. Luke munches broccoli, thinks briefly about sex, which he has never had, and then his jeans pocket rings. It is the new cell phone his father’s assistant, Kati, gave to him. (Kati, who, three seconds before, Luke was imagining sitting naked on top of the kitchen counter.)

There is a text from Luke’s father:
Done in 1 hr. C U at home. Evrythng ok?
Luke smiles. Mark likes texting. Luke is not used to it because the cell phone plan allotted to him by Sara on his old phone has very limited texting. He likes that Mark texts him about ten times a day, sometimes with information, sometimes with an observation, or a description of what he is doing. Luke types back:
Great! See you then
. After a moment he changes this to:
evrythng cool! C U when
.

Luke puts the now empty dish, the fork, and the glass in the dishwasher, closes the door, thinks, takes everything out and washes them by hand over the sink, dries them with a brown dish towel, restacks them in cupboards and drawers.

Luke sees that somehow, in transferring salad from container to bowl, he has left blobs of salad dressing on the marble countertop. Luke grabs a sponge.

Now that he is examining them more closely, Luke thinks that the tiny blobs of dressing look like cells, and the splattered threads
of dressing spreading out from the blobs look like the dendrites and axons that extend from a neuron.

Luke separates a dressing axon from a neighboring dressing neuron with the tip of his index finger. He knows that the axons of neurons do not actually touch other surrounding neurons. There is a space between them, a synaptic cleft. This space is where information is relayed from neuron to neuron. Neurotransmitter molecules move across the tiny space (five thousand of which would equal the width of a human hair) to neurotransmitter protein receptors. Electrical signals become chemical signals, and are converted back to electrical signals.

Signals, Luke thinks, sponging up the dressing. He thinks of Nana’s family Bible and conceptualizes the names as cells, the lines connecting the names as dendrites, the spaces between the names as synaptic clefts. Signals, he thinks again. Signals being sent. Signals being sent from a mother to a daughter, then another, then another. Electrical signals. Chemical signals. Luke decides now to take his father’s copy of
Fitness
magazine outside and look at it on the patio.

It had taken Luke awhile to think through the ramifications of his ancestral history, but once he did it had seemed pretty obvious to him that Sara had sex with his father for the sole purpose of conceiving a third daughter. A Sara in the grips of a mystical idea made more sense to Luke than a Sara who had a random one-night stand. So what happened? Did an embryonic Luke receive signals to become a girl and then ignore them? Refuse in the womb to obey his mother’s electrical and chemical desires to produce a third daughter? Whatever happened, Luke has spent much of his conscious life attempting to correctly read and interpret the signals being sent from one female in his household to another. He is very, very good at it.

Sitting in the California sun, looking at a photograph of a man who appears nearly crazed by his own outsized musculature, and reading an article debating the merits of various protein powders, Luke appreciates the feel of the sun on the tops of his feet, imprecisely
imagines sex with Kati (now on all fours with the moon-faced serenity of the Kama Sutra), wonders if he should start drinking protein shakes, thinks about sex again, is slightly disgusted with himself, then not. Luke closes his eyes, visualizes the spaces between the neurons in his brain widening and expanding, no longer synaptic clefts but synaptic seas, with room for swimming, floating on his back, letting the water cover his ears, hearing his heartbeat underwater. Drifting quietly, knowing for a quick second himself to be himself, forgetting all his names.