Leaving Brooklyn (14 page)

To make the stations move on, I set my mind little goals: the capitals of all the states, the periodic table of the elements, lines of poetry (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both…”), but I had to abandon each one, I couldn't concentrate; and all the while the hand moved around and around and I sneaked looks at the men near me, ashamed to face them directly, as if I were doing something atrocious. I noticed one on my left wearing a light brown fedora with a dark brown band. His little blue eyes seemed made of porcelain, dainty yet hard, and they stared straight ahead. His tight lips and double chin were lines painted on the rosy blob of his face. But maybe I was doing him an injustice. Would the hand never have enough? How long could it make those same circuits? I knew a bit about men now, the tenacity of their wants, the ecstatic monotony of repetition, but all that knowledge was in Manhattan, while right this minute the train was burrowing its way to Brooklyn where I was just a girl, I didn't really know anything, please stop, leave me alone, I'm not what you think, it's all a mistake.

At last the train dragged into a station and I bored my way out. I shot a fierce look at the porcelain-eyed man. His face didn't change a jot. On the platform I smoothed out my dress. Surely the fingers had left tracks on my body, grooves that would
stay for life and that everyone would see, with their vaunted depth perception.

 

AT HOME I FOUND a note, hand-delivered, my mother said, by one of the sorority girls. “We regret to inform you… This is no reflection on… work out for the best, in the long run.” Naturally. I should have known. I had not told the truth at the interview. I had quibbled over words like a Jesuit, to justify a lie, or a rather significant omission. Nor had I been true to myself, and that, I decided, was the real reason I had been rejected. The sorority sisters, with their unflawed binary vision, had seen right through to the depths of me—to my scorn and my secrets—and pronounced judgment.

My mother tried to console me. Don't feel bad. It wasn't important enough to waste my feelings on—as if I had a limited supply. These were ignorant girls who had no right to judge me and anyway could not appreciate me. I was “different.”

I always shrank in my skin on hearing that word, “differ - ent.” Not because I wanted to be like others—I wanted others to be like me. Yet I was grateful for her loyalty. I was swept by a rush of love. I wanted to fall on her neck and sob and tell her what had happened on the subway, and be stroked and soothed and assured this would never happen again, and hear her righteous fury at the bad man. But how could I? What happened on the subway seemed connected to my going into the church and to the eye doctor and the money and the acting class, none of which I could ever tell her about. I saw my oracular mother diminish before my eyes and become useless; I could never tell her anything again because everything was connected to everything else in away only my bad eye could grasp. And even though she might understand if I could bring myself to explain the connections, they were gossamer connections, a web that would fall into shreds if I pressed it too hard for logic and meaning, compressed it into outline form. Besides, I wouldn't know how or where to begin, how to invent a language of connections. There
were barriers, thickets of ignorance and confusion in both of us that I would have to hack my way through to arrive at the clearings of understanding. It was simply too hard to do, the distance to cover was too great. I would have to remain alone in the midst of it. We would never see the same thing or occupy the same landscape. In the end, this longing to have her see through my eyes, just once to feel how the world looked and felt to me, would be forever frustrated.

When she grew old she developed a partial blindness peculiar to the old, though in some cases, her doctor said, it could begin as early as forty. In this ailment, some sadistic metaphor of the gods, the vision dims and blurs at the center, leaving the victims to see a fuzzy sphere of indistinct gray bordered by a brighter, articulated penumbra of reality. They cannot see what is right in front of them, only peripheries; they recognize things by the fluttery outlines. They cock their heads, peer and squint to get around the edge of the central vacuum, catch the bright ring and yank it back to the center by the rays of the eye, but the bright world eludes them, forever on the teasing edge.

I tried to help her. I sought remedies—photographers' lights, jewelers' magnifying glasses, even elaborate machines with lighted screens for reading. Every time I saw her I brought a new toy. See, Mother! You must try to see! But she accepted no help. The remedies were all too difficult to get used to. She accepted the darkening at the center of things. It was an obsession with me to make her see, make her, by any contrivance, want to see. But I failed. Maybe it was wrong to try, as it is wrong to interfere with anyone's vision. And God, how I envied and scorned her vision when she had it—so focused, so suitable, so thoroughly useful. Then it dragged her down into the dark.

She kept on with her soothing words but I interrupted, shouting that the rejection had nothing to do with my eye, either, because I had been wearing the lens at the interview, the lens she wanted me so badly to have, and see? it hadn't served the slightest purpose. I was no more acceptable with it than without.
So there. She looked so pained that I was wretched over my outburst and too ashamed to tell her I had actually been blindfolded at the interview. Perhaps that was a mitigating fact, but I was not sure what it mitigated. My mother would have been appalled to know they had required and I had submitted to the blindfold; she would have said her usual words.

No matter. It served her right to be denied the truth. It was all her fault that I had turned out the way I did. If she had not handed me over so promptly and obediently to the authorities the minute she had me, if she had watched over what they did to me, my eyes would have been ordinary and seen things in the ordinary way. I would have been content to live in Brooklyn and settle.

I ran upstairs to take a shower and collapse on my bed, where I relived the scene with the eye doctor. Those mortifying words about my body, what it did to him … That my humdrum girl's body, the most familiar thing in the world, not me but the thing that contained me, could enthrall him, was outrageous. I had never been outraged about what he did to me, but this was different, full of danger. He had no right to
feel
that way about me. He said he was possessed, but I had no wish to possess him. Children, in Brooklyn mythology, were blank slates, not possessing anything, not responsible for anything. Hadn't my own mother brought me there to have him breathe his hot breath on me and brush his leg on mine?

His words might be banal; their force was not. I sensed where it could lead. It was starting already, a tug behind my ribs. I was on the verge of caving in to it, contracting my body around the central core like a dancer rounding to a passionate crescent, on the verge of feeling something myself for the eye doctor—whether pity or contempt or love or loathing mattered less than that it was feeling. He,
it
, would become part of my real life, and from this moment on, if I wanted to be true to myself,
that
would be part of what I must be true to.

My eye ached; I wasn't ready to keep the lens in for so long. I took it out, standing over the bathroom sink. In the palm of my
hand it became a jellyfish. I flinched from the sting. In the small, windowless bathroom something of the aura of the church returned to me, the space to think a free and true thought: how ugly the lens was and how I hated it. Even more, more than anything else, I wanted never to take that subway ride again.

If I never went back, the eye doctor would cease to exist. My visits would have served their purpose and could be left behind like the improvisations we did in acting class. Weren't my scenes with the eye doctor, self-contained, circumscribed in time, also improvisations in their way? In that light, I had been a very poor actress. I hadn't played them with any energy—“energy ” being a word the spindly acting teacher used often—because I wasn't sure what I wanted. Perhaps I had gotten what I wanted and there was no point in repeating the scene. It “didn't work,” as we said in acting class.

I wrapped the lens in a tissue and flushed it away. As it vanished in the swirl of water my right eye teared with joy.

 

SOMETIMES DURING SPELLS of pain you can wake in the morning drenched with freedom and light and well-being, and this lasts a few glorious seconds while your life waits, like a resplendent party, a gala, for you to make your entrance. Eager to rise and put on your finery, you linger just an instant on the threshold, anticipating—when the pain comes up from behind like a sneak and grabs you. Back in its familiar embrace, you know that all along it was lurking in the folds of the sheets and you were only toying with freedom, allowing yourself to be deceived, and the light and well feeling which a moment ago filled the room evaporates like dew.

The next few mornings were that way. I woke from the sweet, dense sleep of the young, ready to suck the juice of the world as I would an orange, and then the story I had tried to shape closed around me: the man on the subway, the eye doctor and his terrifying words, the lens and what to tell my parents—
for eventually I would have to tell them it was gone, it was all over with perfecting me.

Only my bad eye took no part in my worries. As always, it went its blithe way, following its desires. Light and air stroked it, a forever fresh, unencumbered eye, an explorer.

Days passed. I was swimming three times a week in school—no one graduated without taking the rigorous swimming test, though a number graduated semi-literate—and under the spicy green water, the world far away, I found another kind of haven. Most of the body was water, the chemistry teacher had once said. To be water was to be fluid and elusive, nothing could grab you. I was at one with my water self, safe in my element.

And falling asleep at night, recalling not the eye doctor himself but the things he had done to me, I relaxed and almost convinced myself that my problem would go away. My parents would forget. Especially my father. He had never said much about the lens; probably he was unaware of the stages of my getting used to it, occupied as he was with the things in his department. Except that he paid the bills—the same day he got them, as I knew from watching years ago, sitting on his lap at the little desk. And the eye doctor would stop sending bills: hadn't he said it wouldn't be fair… ?

The days accumulated. A week. Two weeks. Each time my eyes met my mother 's I waited to be called to account, but she never said a word. I looked her straight in the eye on purpose, testing my nerve and testing her too. Did she ever really look at me?

On the Monday of my regular appointment with the eye doctor, I went to the library after school, taking care to arrive home at the time I usually returned from his office. My mother was cleaning the broiler. We had an electric broiler now, and seldom used the one below the oven, which had erupted in flames of grief the day Roosevelt died. I rummaged in the refrigerator for milk, milk that no longer wore little wires around its neck as it had during the war, and that no longer needed to be shaken
up—it was homogenized by machine. Even the milk had settled, or maybe just grown up. We kept shaking, though, out of habit.

My mother turned to me, placing her hands on her hips.

“And where were you this afternoon?”

The tone and the combative stance meant this was a moment for truth telling.

“The library.”

“The library!” As if I had said the pool hall or the opium den. “Well, the eye doctor called,” she announced.

“Mm.”

“He sounded worried. He wanted to know why you didn't show up. He called himself, not his secretary.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What is this mm-hm? Why didn't you go? What's the matter with you?”

“I didn't feel like it.” I spilled some milk as I poured. She rushed over with a damp rag before I could set the bottle down.

“What do you mean, you didn't feel like it? This isn't something you do because you feel like it. If it has to be checked, you go whether you feel like it or not.”

“I don't want to wear it. It hurts. I never wanted it in the first place.”

“Oh, you didn't? Now you tell me! You might have thought of that before we spent all that money. Not to mention the trips I made back and forth.”

“Two trips,” I breathed.

“Whatever. Why didn't you say something then? You don't seem to have too much difficulty opening your mouth.”

“You never gave me a chance. It was just decided. You're the one it bothered, that I wasn't perfect. I never cared. Who needs to be perfect?” She was silent, a silence so magnetic that it pulled out my words: “I 'll never be perfect now anyway.”

The skin around her mouth and eyes tightened—her canny look. I could sense the cells of her brain drawing together with energy.

“Just a minute. Hold everything.” She pulled out a plastic kitchen chair and sat. “Something is fishy here. Sit down and tell me what's going on.”

I backed away towards the door.

“I never said you had to be perfect, Audrey. You know we love you the way you are. We were doing this for your own good. I thought you understood that. We thought, now you were at an age when it could make a difference, when it might be easier when you get to college—”

“Oh, who cares about all that! Boys, dates. Believe me, it's not eyes they're interested in. You don't need twenty-twenty vision to have some creep want to put his hands all over you. And who ever said I wanted to be popular and get married and settle down and play mah jongg?”