The Illusion of Separateness (5 page)

My grandmother Harriet got a telegram and then drove to the diner that his parents owned. They all sipped gin at a table in the back.

After months without any news, men began asking my grandmother out.

They pulled up outside her house in shiny cars.

They wore sweater vests and kept their hair short.

Harriet went dancing but was always glad to come home and go to bed with one of John’s handkerchiefs.

She read his letters over and over.

She looked at his drawings of plants, and looked up their Latin names.

The fighting intensified after landings on the Normandy beaches.

At night, the skies over Europe blazed with fire and metal. People sat up in bed as curtains flashed.

The Allies were advancing. There were heavy casualties. Every day, someone on Harriet’s block lost a son, or a husband, or a brother.

She remembers kissing John outside Lord & Taylor; the way he held her when they danced at Cousin Mabel’s wedding—it was like being held for the first time. Driving to Montauk on Sunrise Highway. The rocks beneath their feet and the sweeping tide. The promise of so much ahead. She knew in her heart that being together would always be enough.

S
he planned to go to Europe when the war was over and search for his remains. She was confident she could find them.

Then one morning someone came to the door with a telegram.

It was stamped Harrington, England.

She opened it, then ran out of the house in her slippers. She was in such a state, it was hard to drive. People thought she was drunk and shook their heads.

When she got to John’s parents’ diner, she didn’t even turn the engine off or close the door.

When she read the letter aloud to a packed restaurant, John’s father collapsed.

He was home before the war ended, but couldn’t stand without help.

T
wo years later, after fully recovering, John was offered an engineering job in England by one of his RAF friends.

Harriet had never left the East Coast of America, but the English welcomed them with open arms. After a few months, John wrote home and asked his parents to wire his life savings so he could invest in a material to make airplanes lighter and stronger.

My grandpa John would have been one of the richest men in Britain today, Mom says, but he gave most of his fortune away—keeping only what they needed to be comfortable.

In some ways, I think Grandpa John has always felt responsible for my blindness, as if it were something he once wished for himself. He was in the hospital for a long time during the war, and nobody really knows what he saw, or what happened to him after being shot down—not even my grandmother.

His explanation never went beyond the letter.

T
he first time I remember visiting them in London, my mother had booked a table for a special lunch with just Grandpa and me, and then arranged an afternoon at the Imperial War Museum to see the tanks and the planes.

We were staying at Claridge’s Hotel—Grandpa John’s treat. I remember waiting on the bed in fancy clothes. My mother was drying her hair. She said it wasn’t like him to be late. Eventually, the telephone rang. It was my grandmother. Grandpa John had locked himself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out.

We made up for it in the years ahead, though. Long walks on the beach, bedtime stories that were so long I fell asleep in the middle, cooking brisket from a family recipe.

He also taught me how to dance. It was something he did with my grandmother, even when there was no music. During the war, American servicemen often took local English girls to dances. A few fell in love, but most did it to pass the time. Grandpa John stayed in his bunk and wrote letters to Harriet. He even kept paper and a pencil under his seat in the aircraft for the long flights back to base.

I was named after a pioneer of flight. The last time I told that story was on a bench in Montauk. It was summer and very hot. We were sitting on Gosman’s Dock. It was busy with summer people. I had been to a birthday brunch. Children were crying, and laughter spilled from the bars.

Philip was shy at first. I think I asked him to look out for a blue SUV. I told him my father’s friend was picking me up.

The summer traffic must have been especially heavy, because we talked for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if Dave wasn’t just sitting in the car watching us.

Philip told me what it was like being a fisherman. He said most of what he catches on the boat is for restaurants in Manhattan. He told me it’s a hard life, but that it’s his life. I asked him if he felt sorry for the fish, and he laughed but gave me a serious answer.

He seemed intelligent. I wondered if he would lie on the beach with me and read poems aloud. I tried to recite a poem from memory about a fish by Elizabeth Bishop, but I only got halfway through.

He asked me if I had ever seen a fish being caught and then quickly apologized. I didn’t mind, and explained how I see things clearly in my own way. I see my parents, my garden, my bedroom, my things on the wall, even Dad’s boat, even the sea, even a fish being caught.

He asked me more about being blind, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then a couple wanted us to take their picture.

I was wearing a summer dress from Nanette Lepore and a pair of sandals. When the couple left, Philip said I had beautiful shoulders. I waited for him to touch them, my heart like a pendulum, swinging between hope and fear.

When Dave arrived, Philip was shy again. We all stood there.

Then Dave and I went to speak at the same time, but I struggled through the embarrassment and told Philip my phone number. Dave offered to write it down, but nobody had a pen.

On the journey back to Amagansett, I couldn’t hide from myself. It’s as though certain parts inside me broke, but instead of being damaged, I was free. Dave had all the windows open. I could hear his watchband on the door as he tapped to the music. I told him he could smoke if he wanted.

B
ut Philip never called, and the next few months were very hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t have someone I really liked—but the realization that I had never had anyone.

I
was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.

In summer, I go sailing on my father’s small yacht. Sometimes I steer while my father looks up from
The
New York Times
calling out, “Leftabit! Rightabit! Leftabit! Now go around the iceberg if you can, Amelia.”

Being blind is not like you would imagine. It’s not like closing your eyes and trying to see. I don’t feel as though I’m lacking. I see people by what they say to others, by how they move and how they breathe.

We have an apartment on the Upper East Side that we seldom use. It’s really Grandpa John’s for when he visits. It’s close to a café on Madison Avenue called Sant Ambroeus—the place we went after learning that my blindness is permanent.

Grandpa John grew up at a diner on Long Island, but finds it hard to leave England now that he’s old.

My mother was raised in England and has an accent. When she was very young, Grandpa John used to wake up screaming. Eventually, Harriet made him go to the village hall once a week for tea with other veterans of World War II. It was a ritual he would keep until he was the only one left. Mom said that whatever they talked about there changed him, and he was suddenly around more, and would dig for potatoes with her in the garden with his suit on, and lie in the mud and make pig noises.

My grandparents really loved each other. I often wonder why they had only one child.

M
y first time was on the beach at my parents’ anniversary party after it got late and people chatted on the terrace in small groups. I was twenty. His name was Julio. He came out with his mother from the city just for the party. I knew him from when we were kids, and his family rented a house year-round a few doors down. Amagansett was so remote then. Our road had only three houses on it.

Back then Julio’s mother used to come over and sit on the deck with my mother and drink wine. Julio and I would play for hours. My parents have always liked to drink and talk.

When I was a teenager, they sat me on the couch between them and dropped their wedding album into my lap. They were married in January sometime in the eighties. They had a honeymoon in Tokyo, but spent most of their time in Kyoto—which my father said also told the story of ancient China. They turned the pages slowly. I could hear their fingers on the plastic.

“There’s your father eating the first slice of wedding cake.”

“She actually fed it to me,” Dad said. “Which embarrassed me then, but later I was glad she did it.”

“Why?” my mother wanted to know.

“Because I realized they are my hands now.”

“Your hands!” My mother laughed. “You’re mad.”

I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment—we are all defined by something we can’t change.

L
osing my virginity to Julio after my parents’ anniversary party was amazing. He had a girlfriend—but sometimes you have to break rules because nothing is perfect.

Y
ears and years before, when Julio lived close by, he taught me how to ride a skateboard. He held my hand as it rolled along. Then, laughing but determined, I walked it to the top of the hill. Julio was frantic, but I wasn’t afraid because I knew the road and would have heard a car. I remember the wheels spitting out small stones. How could I have known the neighbor’s boyfriend was out from the city for Passover and parked on the road?

I spent the night in Southampton hospital.

The doctor said I was very lucky. My father said to him, “You guys always say that,” and the doctor chuckled. Then my mother asked if it was the same emergency room where they brought Marilyn Monroe.

Julio came a bit later with his mother and some flowers. They were like summer in his arms.

I told him he shouldn’t have brought flowers—that I wasn’t dead yet. But he didn’t laugh. Everyone told him to cheer up.

After they’d gone and we were alone, Julio cried and cried. He said his parents were getting a divorce. Three months later they moved out, and Julio went to live in Park Slope. We saw each other from time to time and at my parents’ anniversary party, but our friendship was based on the past.

T
he reason I have a date tonight is because of something that happened on the Jitney last week.

The bus was busy that day. We crawl when there’s traffic. I know where we are by the length of the turns and the bumps of railroad tracks.

When sunlight pours into the bus, I put on sunglasses and get sleepy. I feel my eyes closing. Falling asleep is like walking out on a frozen lake. The ice gets thinner and thinner until suddenly you fall through.

When someone sat down next to me, I woke up.

“Hello,” said a voice.

It was a young woman. By the time we were on the Long Island Expressway, she had explained how she’s going to the airport to meet her father for the very first time.

I smiled and said smartly that I’d never seen my father, either.

She touched my hand without realizing I’m blind.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “He feels you.”

And I suddenly thought of Philip out on the sea.

So long I imagined him, so many days last summer I conjured him on my father’s boat with us.

I could feel him cutting through the swell, a bulk of fish in the hull.

Forklifts humming back at the dock.

From my office that morning I called Dave. At first he didn’t remember who I was talking about. Then I reminded him about picking me up at Gosman’s in Montauk. He asked if I knew Philip’s last name.

On the Jitney home that night, Dave called to say he hadn’t found anything out—but that Janet was going to ask around. I thanked him but felt defeated. Before hanging up, Dave said that if Janet couldn’t find Philip, he’d break up with her.

The next day at work I was summoned from a meeting to take a phone call.

It was an effort for him to talk because there was so much to say.

He said that an Irishwoman was waiting for his boat when they docked that morning—that they had come in early because the lines were freezing.

He said he forgot my number, but had recently been looking for me—admitted he called the Guggenheim Museum by mistake, even hung around Stephen Talkhouse on weekends, watching people dance. Nobody knew who I was, he said.

He said his mother had been very sick when we met last summer on the bench at Gosman’s Dock.

I asked if she was okay. He said she died.

Then a long silence that meant we were going to see each other.

W
hen I went back to the meeting, the interns were looking through hundreds of World War II photographs for a proposed future exhibition. The photographs once belonged to American servicemen who were killed or went missing in Europe. They kept them in their wallets. They looked at them and wrote letters, maybe even held them as they died.