Now I See You (2 page)

“Il Ranocchio!”
she attempted in a whisper. Nonny’s whispers never really pan out; she is permanently set on town crier mode, like she’s got a built-in megaphone in her vocal cords. I shot her a reprimanding look, which triggered her giggling, which blossomed into a guffaw, until that crazy Italian had to take a seat so she didn’t have a heart attack from the exertion of howling with laughter.

“What’d she say?” asked Sam, smiling. Having been raised by psychologists, in a home where respectful communication reigned, it didn’t even occur to him that my grandmother might be openly deriding him.

“Oh, she’s just razzing me, you know, about having a boyfriend.” I ran my fingers through his dark, wavy hair and glared at Nonny.

After that, the big joke in the family was that my boyfriend had lady legs. A few months after our breakup, I was able to see the humor in this, but at the beginning of the summer, when the heartache was still fresh, every mention of Frog Legs had me bawling like a kid whose ice cream fell off the cone. Yes, Sam was my double scoop of ice cream with sprinkles, except that he hadn’t fallen off the cone; he’d jumped.

I’d met Sam in a Shakespeare scene study class required for our theater major and we’d fallen hard for each other while rehearsing the
Romeo and Juliet
balcony scene. Just like those star-crossed lovers, though, our relationship was intense but brief. After four months together, Sam broke up with me at the end of sophomore year. We’d been fighting for a few weeks but the final nail in the coffin was when I sneaked into his email account while he was in the shower. I was shocked to discover an email he’d written to a friend in which my beloved had described me as “high maintenance” and “clingy.” When Sam came out of the shower, I was in tears, begging him for an explanation.

“You read my emails?” he asked, shocked. I guess that was a first for him.

“Just this once,” I sputtered. “Hardly ever.” I saw his face set, like a decision had been made. I started talking fast: “But that’s not the point. Let’s stay on the subject! Which is, I just love you so much! I mean, these have been the best four months of my life!”

“Okay, listen,” he said, sitting next to me on the edge of the bed and putting his hand on my arm. “You’re great—”

“No! I won’t listen to this! I DO NOT ACCEPT THIS!”

“Nicole, come on, let’s—”

“Please!”

“Can you just—”

“Please!”

Because, as everyone knows, men dig batty broads with no self-respect.

When it was clear he would not be caving to my charm, I collapsed on the floor and wailed, full-on blubbered—with drool, so much that I choked on it from time to time, sending me into a heightened paroxysm of agony because I realized full well that Sam seeing me choke on my drool probably ruled out getting back together.

It was a shining moment for womankind.

Back in New York for summer break, I was continuing my meltdown at a low simmer. Every little thing I saw—pumpernickel bagels, Dr. Zizmor ads on the subway—reminded me of Sam. Even the
MEN’S BATHROOM
sign in the doctor’s office triggered a Sam flashback. He used to use public restrooms. God, how I loved him. I fought back tears as I regarded my blurry reflection in the women’s room mirror.

My hair was beyond help; the heat and humidity had wilted my fine, shoulder-length locks until they hung lifelessly off my head like yarn. I fluffed up the hair on the top of my head with my fingertips but it sunk back down instantly, limp and defeated. My mascara was smudged from the inordinate amount of sweating I’d done on the short walk from Victoria’s Secret and there were circles under my eyes that concealer hadn’t concealed. But in between the circles and the mascara, my eyes themselves were resplendent.

The pupils had been dilated so much, the irises were eclipsed; all that remained was a thin ring of hazel around the perimeter. It was just an accent, a border separating the black of my eye from the white. The unbroken black reflected the light so that my eyes shone, as if they were a source of illumination themselves. Big and round and colorless, my eyes were nothing short of hypnotic.

I wish Sam could see me like this,
I mused
, He’d totally take me back.

I’d made it a whole ten seconds without thinking of him: a record. I commended myself as I walked back to my seat in the waiting room to resume staring at the wall.

I should have rescheduled this crap. I’m in no state,
I thought.
Damn Dr. Lee and her extreme thoroughness.

I’d been seeing Dr. Lee for years, ever since I failed the standard high school eye exam when I was thirteen. Dr. Lee was a colleague of my father’s, like all the doctors I’d ever been to, and her office was around the corner from his cardiology practice in Brooklyn Heights, where my mother was office manager/physician assistant/consigliere. The location was convenient considering how fond my mother was of crashing my doctor’s appointments. She claimed that she showed up to secure me VIP treatment (“Or else you’ll waste all goddamned day in the waiting room!”) but I think she was experimenting with how much humiliation a teenager can withstand before requiring psychiatric intervention. I had grown accustomed to her bursting through the door of the exam room when I was at the dermatologist’s, calling him by his first name and telling him to
please
explain to me that if I
just
stopped eating chocolate, I wouldn’t have
any
blackheads at
all
. So it didn’t even register on the embarrassment spectrum when she acted as armchair ophthalmologist during my first eye exam, offering an unending commentary as Dr. Lee wrote out a contact lens prescription.

“It’s just so strange, because everyone in our family has great eyes—none of us wear glasses—although you know what? I told her that if she kept on reading in the dark it would ruin her eyes. This one, with the books! I mean, don’t get me wrong, reading is good, of course, but you can take a good thing too far, for God’s sake! I hate to say it, I really do, but I was right. I mean, was I right, Eleanor?”

“She’s just a little near-sighted.” Dr. Lee smiled. “She’ll pop in contacts and be perfect again.”

Every year, I’d check in with Dr. Lee to keep current with my prescription and eventually, my mom stopped crashing my visits (she had two younger daughters to mortify) and I came to actually enjoy my annual checkup. The office was inviting; a light floral scent lingered in the waiting room and it was always the perfect temperature, even on the most sweltering summer day. I genuinely liked Dr. Lee, who was young, smart, and soft-spoken with a low-key approach and a chin-length black bob that never grew any longer. I was interested in anecdotes about her two little kids and she always wanted to hear about what I was reading. The last time I’d seen her, over spring break, I’d mentioned something I’d been wondering about.

“It was so weird,” I explained at the end of the visit as she updated my chart. “I went to Montauk recently and everybody else was oohing and ahhing over the stars but I couldn’t see anything. It’s no big deal or anything—I just thought I’d mention it because, you know, I was the only one who couldn’t see them.”

I didn’t really care one way or the other about being able to make out the constellations, but the trip to Montauk had reminded me of another trip, when I was ten and my parents had dragged my sisters and I at three a.m. to the southernmost tip of Staten Island to see Halley’s Comet. My dad had been berserk with excitement over what he kept referring to as “
literally
a once-in-a-lifetime event.” He’d even shelled out two hundred dollars for a telescope, causing my mother to mutter “What are we, made of money?” nonstop for two weeks. On the night of the big event, my family stood shivering on the beach for an hour or two before my father finally shouted triumphantly that he’d found it and it looked like a fuzzy snowball. When it was my turn at the telescope, no matter how much I squinted, I couldn’t see jack. Not a hint of a smudge. But I’d oohed and ahhed along with everyone else, secretly hoping the next once-in-a-lifetime event wouldn’t be such a letdown.

Nine years later, it struck me as strange that I couldn’t see comets, or stars either, and I asked Dr. Lee if maybe I needed stronger contacts.

“Your prescription seems pretty good,” she mused, looking through my file. “And everyone’s eyes adjust to the dark differently, so I’m really not concerned. But since you’re here, let’s just dilate your pupils and take a look.”

A half hour later, she was tilting my head back and peering into my eyes with her flashlight. “Hmmm,” she murmured. “Hmmm.”

“What is it?” I asked. “Hmm” is never what you want to hear in a doctor’s office.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she replied, turning her light off. “I mean, I see a little something but I’m ninety percent sure it’s nothing. Just to be safe, I’m going to send you to Dr. Hall so he can check it out.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“It’s nothing.” She smiled. “I just think, better safe than sorry. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” I confirmed.

And it did. As a doctor’s daughter, I was accustomed to following up just to make sure. So I made an appointment with Dr. Hall for the next time I’d be back in the city, in early June, and I’d promptly forgotten all abut it. Then, one morning after I returned home from summer break, as I sobbed while rereading Frog Legs’s love letters, heavily sprinkled with Shakespeare quotes, I got a call from Dr. Hall’s office confirming my appointment for that Monday.

I considered postponing the appointment but “I have to phone-stalk my ex” didn’t seem like an adequate excuse.
Better just to get it over with,
I thought,
check it off my to-do list.

“Yeah sure,” I sniffled to the receptionist, “I’ll be there.”

In an attempt to pull myself back together, fake-it-til-you-make-it style, I’d gotten dressed up the morning of the visit, in a denim miniskirt covered with blue butterflies and a diaphanous white blouse I’d stolen from my little sister’s closet. I’d caught the express train and gotten to midtown in no time, which had left me with a half hour to kill. Convenient, seeing as there was a blowout start-of-summer sale at the Victoria’s Secret around the corner from the doctor’s office. As I hooked on half-price bras in the dressing room, I felt a rush of optimism.

My rack looks huge in this,
I thought.
Screw Sam and his lady legs.

I bought a black lace demi-cup and matching French-cut underwear and rushed over to the doctor’s office, the pink shopping bag swinging on my arm, feeling almost cheerful. By the time I was finally summoned by Dr. Hall into an exam room though, my cheerfulness had entirely dispersed.

Dr. Hall was fat and sweaty and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

Like Dr. Lee before him, he peered into my pupils, but he was quick about it and didn’t make any Sherlock Holmes-y sounds. I took this as a good sign.

Then he pulled up a stool and put his hands together on his lap.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said.

“Ummm, okay,” I replied, my eyebrows furrowing, “Is everything okay?”

“Let’s just get through some questions first, all right?”

First?
I thought.
Before what? Before he clears me?

I nodded, suppressing a sigh. There was such a thing as being too thorough.

“Are you accident-prone?” he began, leaning back in his stool. “Were you considered clumsy as a child, often bumping into things?”

It was such a peculiar question, I didn’t know how to respond for a second. I couldn’t fathom how my childhood grace, or lack thereof, had anything to do with me not being able to see the stars now. Besides, I hadn’t been an especially clumsy child, had never broken a limb, never been to the ER for stitches. I’d been a regular kid. Normal.

“Umm, no, I don’t think I’ve ever been accident-prone, really,” I replied. “I mean, sometimes I bump into things, like everyone. Nothing memorable.”

He nodded.

“Although,” I went on, “last summer, one night I tripped over this massive tree root on the beach and it ripped up my thigh, which was crazy, because I didn’t think a tree root could be so, you know, dangerous. I probably should’ve got stitches but I was with my friends and we just … anyway, it’s okay now. You can hardly even see the scar.”

“Uh-huh,” he grunted, weighing my answer. I instantly regretted having said so much.

“Of course, that’s not being accident-prone,” I added quickly. “I mean, that’s just being human.” Instinctively, I yanked on the hem of my miniskirt, pulling it down to cover the waterfall-shaped scar on the front of my right thigh.

Dr. Hall crossed his arms in front of his chest: “Did you play ball sports as a child?”

Was this a getting-to-know-you game? How much information was I supposed to offer about my childhood interests? Would he be inquiring next about my favorite ice cream flavors?

“I didn’t really like sports,” I replied. “I’ve always been more of a bookworm. I’m an English and theater major.”

It was odd to have him fire off the questions without taking any notes. I mean, the questions were odd to begin with, but without him recording my answers, it felt like he already knew what they would be.

“Why didn’t you like sports?” he pressed on. “Was it hard to excel at them?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what this has to do with anything.” I was starting to feel exasperated.

“Just bear with me please.”

Dr. Hall seemed equally exasperated. I could tell he was anxious to move it along, get this ordeal over with so he could call in the next patient and interrogate them about their T-ball batting average.

“Honestly, I don’t know.” I sighed, tightening the backs on the silver hoops in my earlobes. “I didn’t really like sports and I wasn’t that great at them, either.”

“Uh-huh,” he muttered cryptically, bobbing his head. “Uh-huh.”

My response seemed to be exactly what Dr. Hall was looking for, and this realization made me angry. I felt like I was playing a game I’d never heard of with someone who knew the rules and had seen all my cards. This game sucked. I wanted out.