Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (68 page)

To be her sister is to lie beside your husband as he reads your mother’s memoirs, one daughter
distant, beautiful, mysterious
, the other
dependable, reliable, sure
. “I knew it,” he laughs. “I married the Maytag.” One evening you go with your mother to a restaurant where your sister works part time to make ends meet. Your sister is still married, but barely. She wears the uniform of such places, a white blouse and a short skirt. Even after two children, her legs are smooth and finely muscled, not a vein in sight. The men cannot take their eyes off her. I don’t know where she got those legs, your mother says. Later that night your sister is chilly. You loan her your best green sweater, and
you
cannot takes your eyes off her.

You can’t blame them for chasing her light. Her laughter is liquid, she gathers her bright afghans around her, and the children and the stray cats and dogs. She tosses her beautiful head, and who wouldn’t want to follow? Certainly not that man, or that one — the one who appears at her door days after her divorce is final. Every night he brings flowers and wine and more wine, she glows from with in, and why spoil it for her, but still you must say it. I don’t care, she says, how long it lasts. But his drinking, you say. I’m afraid for you. What if.

In the Al-Anon circle where you gather once a week, you say your name but not the rest. Everyone’s here for the same reason, anyway. Still, they want you to say it aloud. You don’t, and maybe you never will. No one can make you. It feels like a betrayal, it’s no one’s business anyway. Besides, what good would it do, it’s her life not yours, she chose him. Still, when the others stand you stand with them, grabbing hands and circling, closing eyes and asking: the wisdom to know the difference.

To be the sister of a sad and beautiful woman is to be the aunt of beautiful nieces who belong to your sister or to your brothers who married women who look like your sister. You started to write, about your nieces, “each one lovelier than the next,” but why pass on that burden? At the family reunion, the nieces flip through the pictures. They ooh and ah over your hair. They can’t believe it was ever that long, that thick. What happened? they say. You tell them Just Wait. They discover your sister’s portfolio. Wow, she was a knockout, they say. You tell them to stop using the past tense, that you are both still alive, thank you, in the present tense.

Though you’ve moved to a city light years from your sister, at home on your desk are the letters that have begun making their way to you: your sister is afraid for her future, she is raking up the dead leaves of the past. It’s hard work, she writes. Some days it’s all I can do to lift my head. Last week she sent you a picture of a goose-necked woman. You have never been fond of Klimt’s women, but your sister is, and has written beside the picture: The beautiful white neck and shoulders reminded me of you. See what lasts?

When your nieces come to visit, you walk with them on city streets, recalling again how to step aside, to become the pal in the old movie, the one who lifts the bridal train, smoothes down the sheets so that the lovely one can get the beauty sleep she does not need. You now understand why a woman of a certain age chooses to walk alone, or with only a dog, and carefully selects the backdrop against which she will move. Green is good, but it’s winter now, and in a cold city like yours, where sometimes only faces show, the bodies bundled beneath, you learn how to throw a look in someone’s direction, making the kind of contact only eyes can make. And you learn how to carry in your eyes, in your glance, in a toss of your head, something the old ones call experience or character. Okay, all right, you’ll settle for that. At home is a husband, who, after all these years, still kisses your veins. And beside him are your books and the words waiting to be written, your hidden heart still beating.

At a bookstore on the east side of the city, where aging beauties wear rouged cheeks beneath mink hats, you notice a table labeled
Hurt Art
: stacks of Renoir, Michelangelo, Monet, the covers torn or missing, spines broken, the pages water stained or burnt slightly at the edges as if they’d ventured too close to the flame. You want to buy all the books, to remove them from public shame. Someone has drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa — a young girl perhaps, making her own mark? And why not hurt the art that holds a secret beneath its lips, a code you cannot begin to crack. You want to take your beautiful nieces aside and warn them. You want to spin back light years from today, hold your sister on your lap, rock her luminous beauty in your arms until it stops hurting.

Erin McGraw

 

ERIN MCGRAW
is the author of four books of fiction, including
The Good Life
. Her essays have appeared in
The Gettysburg Review
,
The Southern Review
,
The Missouri Review
, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
. She teaches creative writing at Ohio State University.

Seeing less than others can be a great strain.
— Robert Lowell

 

The subject veers almost uncontrollably toward metaphor, but I mean to take it literally: I have unusually poor vision, minus 1300 diopters and still losing ground, ordinary progressive myopia that never stopped progressing. In me, the process by which light is supposed to focus images at the back of the eye has gone berserk, and the point of focus shifts ever closer to the front, like the projection of a movie falling short of its screen.

My eyeballs aren’t round, like marbles or baseballs, but instead are oblongs, little footballs. This awkward shape puts so much strain on the retinas that a rip has developed in my left one, a patch where the tissue gave out like exhausted cloth. Now my ophthalmologist carefully includes a retina evaluation at annual checks, and I have a list of warning signs that indicate a significant rupture: sudden, flashing lights; floaters showering into my vision like rain.

Mostly, though, nothing about my vision is so fraught or dramatic. I’m shortsighted, is all, mope-eyed, gravel-blind, blind-buck and Davy. A squinter, the sort who taps her companions at plays and baseball games. “What just happened? I missed that.” There’s metaphor again, leaning in the doorway and clearing its throat meaningfully. But I’m still being literal, aiming to describe a world in which objects collapse into haze and through which I navigate, beyond the narrow realm that my contact lenses permit me to see clearly, by memory and assumption.

Here are some of the things I can’t see, even with my contacts in: a baseball in play, birds in trees, numbers and subtitles on TV, roads at night, constellations, anything by candlelight, street signs, faces of people in cars, faces of people twenty feet away. One of my consistent embarrassments comes from snubbing friends who stood more than a shadow’s length from me, friends I didn’t even nod to because I couldn’t tell who they were. So I’ve adopted a genial half smile that I wear when I walk around my neighborhood or down the corridors of the department where I work. I have the reputation of being a very friendly person.

Here are some of the things I can find when I narrow my eyes and look: tiny new weeds in the front garden, fleas scurrying across my dog’s belly, gray hairs. My mother, watching me struggle before the bathroom mirror for ten minutes while I spray and brush and bobby-pin to hide the worst of the gray, comments, “I don’t know why you bother. You don’t have much. No one even sees it.”

“I see it every time I look in the mirror.”

“Well, you see what you’re looking for.”

She’s told me this all my life. I roll my eyes and keep working the bobby pins.

The glasses I remember best and loved most arrived when I was eight years old. They were my second pair; the first were brown with wings at the corners, the eyeglass equivalent to orthopedic shoes. I was delighted when the doctor announced that they needed to be replaced.

My parents didn’t share my delight — only a year had passed since we’d gotten that first pair. For six months, unconsciously, I’d been moving books closer to my face and inching nearer the TV. Nothing was said about it. I think my parents assumed that I must have been aware of a development so obvious to them, but I was a dreamy, preoccupied child, and hadn’t noticed that the edges of illustrations in my books were no longer crisp. When I was moved to the front row of my classroom, it never occurred to me to ponder why.

I was pleased to be there, though, and preened in my new glasses. Sleek cat eyes, the white plastic frames featuring jaunty red stripes, they were 1965’s cutting edge. I often took them off to admire them. When my correction needed to be stepped up again, I insisted on using the same frames, even though by then I had to keep the glasses on all the time, and could take pleasure in the candy-cane stripes only if I happened to pass a window. In my school pictures for three years running I wore these same glasses. By the third year they were clearly too small for my face, and my eyes practically disappeared behind the thick glass.

Every six months my mother took me to the eye doctor, and nearly every visit meant a prescription for new, slightly heavier lenses. At first I resented only the hours spent in the waiting room where I was often the only child, but gradually I began to dread the examination itself, the stinging dilation drops and my frustrating attempts to read the eye chart. While I struggled to focus on letters that seemed to slip and buckle on the far wall, fear bloomed in my stomach.

“T,” I would begin rashly, remembering that much from the visit before, but then I strained to make out the next wobbly shape. “U, maybe, or C. It could be O.” Not bothering to comment, the doctor tilted back my chair, pulled around one of the clicking, finicky machines, and began the measurements for the next set of lenses. Both he and I ignored my quick, anxious breathing and dry mouth, but when he was finished I burst out of the office as if I were making a jail break.

Back in the world, panic dropped away, and my worsening vision seemed nothing more than an inconvenience. Perhaps if I’d been an outdoorsy kind of child, a girl who noticed leaves or clouds or insect life, I might have grieved the first time I was unable to detect a distant, sly animal. But I wasn’t especially fond of the offerings of the natural world, which was too hot or too cold and full of things that made me itch. And the steady loss of detail — my inability first to make out the petals of a flower, and before long to discern the flower at all with out glasses to help me — felt unimportant. I jammed on my glasses first thing in the morning, took them off after turning out my light at night, now and then remembered to clean them. Easy enough.

Only occasionally did I get the sense that I was hampered. The sisters at my Catholic school made me take my glasses off before games at recess, a sensible precaution; I was a terrible athlete, who reliably stopped dead in front of any moving object, so I was hit in the face by kickballs, tetherballs, basketballs, and once, memorably, by a softball bat that caught me square on the cheek. The sister blew her whistle and bustled toward me, already scolding. Why hadn’t I gotten out of the way?

I didn’t cry when the bat hit me, although it hurt, but her chiding made my lips start to quiver. I hadn’t
seen
it, I protested. All of a sudden something had hit my face; the blow came out of nowhere.

It came out of the batter’s box, the sister pointed out. I shouldn’t have been standing so close. I knew that I couldn’t see clearly and therefore had all the more reason to be cautious.

She handed me my glasses and let me go to the nurse’s office, where I walked sulkily, coddling my sense of injustice. The nurse, used to seeing me, examined my cheek and pronounced that all I had suffered was a bruise. She had me back on the playground before the end-of-recess bell rang.

Still, I couldn’t easily dismiss the incident. Up to that point, no one had told me,
You are at risk. And it is up to you to take precautions.
Back at home, I took my glasses off and looked at the house across the street. I recognized its shape and details, but that hardly required vision. I saw the house every day and could have drawn from memory its long, flat roof and the row of bunkerlike windows in the bathroom.

So I walked up the street, turned onto a cul-de-sac that I didn’t know well, and took off my glasses again. Instantly, the turquoise stucco bungalow before me smeared into a vague blue box. I could make out windows but couldn’t tell if the curtains were open or closed; could find the front door but not the mail slot, the wrought-iron handrail but not the steps it accompanied.

A shout erupted and I spun around, shoving my glasses back on to find that the shout had nothing to do with me: a couple of boys were playing catch at the top of the street. Nevertheless, my heart was whapping now, hurting me. I was foolish to stand so publicly, blinking and helpless, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Anyone could have sneaked up, knocked me to the ground, and taken my wallet, if I’d had a wallet.

I thought of comic-strip blind beggars on city streets, their canes kicked away, their tin cups stolen. For the first time, my bad eyes took on meaning: They were an invitation to bullies, and the fact that no one had yet taken my glasses and knocked me down was just dumb luck. Pressing my glasses in place, I ran home.

This new notion of myself seized my imagination, and I fell asleep for several nights imagining scenarios in which I was unfairly set upon, a lamb before wolves. I saw myself suffering nobly and remembered reverently. And then I forgot about my experiment in front of the blue house. I continued to play games with out glasses at school, continued to get smacked with kickballs, continued not to be accosted by glasses-snatching bullies. Finally tired of my red and white striped glasses, I zipped through half a dozen new pairs, trying out granny glasses in three different shapes, including ones with octagonal lenses that made me look unnervingly like John Lennon.