Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (69 page)

By the time I was entering junior high, though, I was tired of wearing glasses. More precisely, I was tired of my bespectacled reflection, how glasses made my eyes look tiny and dim, my nose like a tremendous landmass. So I initiated a campaign to get contact lenses, which were just becoming widely available, although not usually for twelve-year-olds. To my astonishment, my cautious, conservative ophthalmologist immediately agreed.

“Contacts help sometimes, with myopia like this,” he explained to my skeptical mother. “The theory is that the contact flattens the lens of the eye. It can slow down the disease’s progress.” I was so elated that I hardly flinched when he called what I had a “disease,” a word we usually avoided. And so, a month later, we began a regime that I was in no way ready for.

These were the days when the only contact lenses were made of inflexible plastic, thick by today’s standards, hard, immovable foreign bodies that had to be introduced to the protesting eyes at gradual intervals. The first day, the wearer put them in for two hours, then took them out for an hour of recovery, then in again, out, in, out. The second day, three hours.

The optometrist guided my shaking hand, showing me how to slip the lens directly in place. Before I could even look up, I had blinked the contact out; it bounced off the counter beneath us and hit the floor. My mother hissed. The optometrist ordered me not to move; he gently dropped to his knees and patted the linoleum until he found the lens and laboriously cleaned it again.

I blinked the lenses out twice more before he could get them centered on my corneas. Then, tentatively, he stepped back and asked, “How’s that?” I was too stunned to answer. For all the talk about wearing schedules and tolerance, no one had told me that contact lenses would
hurt.
Each eye felt as though a hair had been coiled precisely on top of it, and hot, outraged tears poured out. Although the optometrist kept telling me to look up so that he could take measurements, I couldn’t keep my eyes from snapping shut. Light was like a blade.

“It always takes a little while,” he was telling my mother, “but she’ll get used to them. Just take it easy. Don’t let her overdo.”

No fear of that. I was already frantic to take the lenses back out again, and the remaining hour and forty-five minutes of my first wearing period seemed unimaginable, an hour and forty-five minutes of torment. My mother had to lead me back out to the car by the hand; even with the sunglasses the optometrist had given me, I had to close my eyes. Light bouncing off of car windows and storefronts was searing.

For the next month, all I could think about was my eyes. As the optometrist had promised, they began to accommodate to the contacts, but accommodation wasn’t what anyone could call comfort. My eyes stung, lightly, all the time. Every blink set the lenses shifting, and that slight movement felt as if it were grinding a ridge into the moist corneal tissue. The irritation made me blink again, shifting the contacts some more.

I spent the summer steeped in resentment. I refused invitations to parties and shopping trips because I had to put my contacts in and take them out, in and out, none of which would have happened if I’d had reasonable eyes to begin with. Even after I built up some expertise and didn’t have to spend ten minutes tugging the corners of my eyes raw to dislodge the lenses, the contacts kept falling out on their own, vaulting away from my eyes, forcing me to freeze in mid-step. With slow, scared care I would sink to my knees and begin patting first my clothes, then the ground around me, feeling for the tiny, mean-spirited disk.

For the first year I spent a lot of time apologizing about lost lenses, ones I rinsed down the drain or cracked, one that the dog snuffled up, and ones that simply shot out of my eyes and disappeared. My parents were understandably exasperated, and I became familiar with the dread that curled through me as soon as I felt one of the lenses begin to shimmy, the indicator that it would soon try for a getaway.

But that dread, at least, was practical. Cresting through me like high tide was the other dread, the one I’d forgotten about and put off for years. With the contacts ejecting themselves at malicious whim, I was constantly aware that my next breath might leave me marooned, half blind, vulnerable. The fact that no one ever treated me with anything but solicitude — often strangers got down on their hands and knees with me — did nothing to soften my fear. I started to walk more slowly, to avoid shag carpeting, to sit with my head tilted slightly back, hoping gravity would keep the contacts in place. Outside, I lingered by the sides of buildings.

By now the myopia was at a full gallop, and the world I saw with out any lenses was no longer blurry; it was pure blur. If, for some reason, I had to walk across a room with out glasses or contacts, I shuffled like a blind girl, groping for handholds, batting at the air in case something — a lamp, a shelf, some pot hanging from the ceiling — might be ready to strike. Smudged, bulging shapes crowded against me. I imagined fists or rocks or sudden, steep edges, threats from dreams that seemed probable in this shapeless landscape.

At visits to the ophthalmologist, I strained and fought to see the eye chart, memorizing E F O T Z and F X I O S C before the doctor caught on. I paid closer attention to the toneless way he informed my mother that I needed, again, a stronger correction, and felt my throat clench. My mother said, “I thought the contacts were supposed to slow this down.”

“They might be doing that,” he said. “There’s no way of telling. She might be going downhill even faster with out them.” He bent over to write notes on my chart, which was half an inch thick by now. My eyes were good enough to see that.

I could see other things, of course, too. I could see the expression on my friend’s face when I came to spend the night and unpacked all my cumbersome equipment: cleansing solution, wetting solution, saline solution, and the heat-sterilization unit that had to be plugged in for two hours. I could also see her expression after I emerged from the bathroom wearing my glasses. “Let me try them on,” she said. I handed them over to let her giggle and bang into walls, and tried not to betray how anxious I was to get them back.

In biology class, I saw my teacher’s impatient look when I told her that I couldn’t draw the cells clustered on the microscope’s slide. “Just close one eye and draw what you see,” she said, and so, hopelessly, I did, even though I knew no cell ever had such peculiar zigzags. When I got my lab book back, the teacher had written, “You obviously have trouble seeing enough. Or correctly.”

Maybe it was that prim, striving-for-accuracy last phrase that caught me. Or the clinical tone. Whichever, instead of feeling embarrassed or crushed, I was relieved. In a voice that didn’t whine or tremble, her note offered me an interesting new self-definition. I grabbed it.

With relief, I gave up trying to make out faces across a football field and stopped straining to read the face of a bell tower clock, tasks I’d been using to gauge my vision’s deterioration. By this time I was wearing a new, flexible kind of contact lens made out of silicone, far more comfortable and also less apt to fall out, so I was confident enough to stroll across parks and thickly carpeted rooms. I started asking the people around me what words were written on the blackboard, what images flicking by on the TV screen, and people told me. I was a person who had trouble seeing enough, or correctly, so they filled me in on the nuances I would miss on my own.

At a movie, nodding at the screen, my friend whispered, “She keeps noticing that clock. That clock has something to do with the murder.” Or, gesturing at the teacher the next day in class: “She’s smiling; she’s in a good mood. I’ll bet she’s started smoking again.”

I was being given not only facts but also interpretation. Those who could see sharply gave me shadow as well as object, context in addition to text. Did I resent all of these explanations and asides, pronounced extra slowly as if for the dim-witted? Not on your life. Friends and family were making things easy for me, and after years of constant unease, I was ready.

I drew other people’s opinions over me like a blanket. Sight, it seemed, blended right into insight, and to perceive anything was to make a judgment call. Since the people around me had the first kind of sight, I was willing to grant that they had the second. And then the corollary: Since I lacked the one, I surely lacked the other.

Anybody with half an eye can see where this story is going: I got lazy. Knowing that many details were going to be lost to me anyway, I stopped even trying to see them. I could get the notion of a landscape but not the trees it contained, and recognized a skyline, if not the clear shape of a single building in it. I was all big picture, untroubled by the little stuff.

During my junior year in college, when I was an exchange student in England, I traveled to public gardens and scenic overlooks and took pictures. Only when the pictures were developed did I find out that candy wrappers had clogged the shrubbery, and that across the top slat of the pretty green park bench somebody had carved bollox. These weren’t microscopic flaws; they were clear to anybody, even myopic me. I’d been fully able to see the candy wrappers but hadn’t bothered to. My photo album from that year is a catalog of England’s trash, none of which I saw until the pictures came back. Then I felt outraged and — this is the kicker — betrayed.

Somewhere, at a juncture I can’t pinpoint, I made a tactical shift in how I used my bad eyes. Not only had I given up trying to see the actual, physical world, but I had begun to let myself see a better world, one cut to my taste and measure, a world that, just for starters, didn’t contain flyaway Snickers wrappers. And I believed in that world firmly enough to feel cheated when the wrappers got caught on the thorns of barberry bushes.

By this time, I know, the metaphorical implications are murmuring too loudly to be ignored. For I was fully as self-deceiving — delusional doesn’t seem too strong a word — in my mental perceptions, my mind’s eye. When I came home from that year abroad, I saw myself as English and annoyed the daylights out of my friends for months by calling the place we lived a flat (although it was in fact a house), stowing groceries in the car’s boot, and pulling everybody’s beer out of the refrigerator. Now, twenty years later, I imagine a photo that might have been taken of me at that time, highway trash wrapped around my ankles,
BOLLOX
scrawled on my forehead.

Permitting someone with so shaky a grasp of reality to enter relationships was just asking for trouble. The catalog of my romances from those years is unrelievedly dreary — boys taking short vacations from their long-term girlfriends, boys who didn’t like girls, boys who needed a place to stay and someone to do the cooking. And then the hurt boys, the ones whose long-term girlfriends had left them, who called their therapists twice a day, who were too depressed to go to class. By this point I hardly need add that I saw nothing inappropriate about any of these choices.

When, at twenty-one, I announced my intention to marry a man I knew only slightly and understood less, dismayed family members and friends ringed around me, trying to make me see how inappropriate the choice was, how poorly we were matched, how little pleasure we took, even then, in each other’s company. Their attempts hardened my resolve. I looked into the eyes of my intended and saw a soul misunderstood by the world, whose inability to hold a steady job indicated his need for a supportive wife, and whose vague visions of success I could share with out quite having to get into focus.

The marriage lasted seven years — longer than it should have. Even when it finally collapsed, its flimsy walls giving way under disappointment, disillusion, and broken promises on both sides, I still couldn’t make sense of the ruin, or understand why it had happened. I couldn’t
see,
I wailed to a therapist, week after week.

“If you want to see, you have to look,” she told me.

“I do look. But I can’t see.”

“Then you don’t know how to look,” she said.

Irritated by the smug shrinkishness of her answer, I said, “Okay. Fine. Tell me how to look.”

“This isn’t some kind of mystical thing. Just pay attention. Your only problem is that you don’t pay attention.”

As always when I am handed an accurate piece of information about myself, I was stung. Days had to pass before I calmed down and heard the invitation behind the therapist’s words, weeks before I was willing to act on them. Not that I knew how to act. All I knew was that at my perceptions’ farthest horizons, a new world was taking shape, still distant and faint, but just, barely, visible.

Five years ago my second husband and I bought a house, the first I’ve ever owned, and with it came property. The house sits on an ordinary suburban lot; we’re not talking about Sissinghurst here. Still, space had to be filled up in gardens and around trees, and I learned, generally by error, about bloom time, soil acidity, shade tolerance, and zone hardiness.

Like most chores, gardening teaches me about myself, and I’ve learned that I’m never going to be a prizewinning gardener, one whose lilies glisten and whose roses scent the air a block away. At best, I’m a tidy gardener. I make time to stake perennials and deadhead the coreopsis; I struggle to preserve clean edges around the beds.

And I’m a heroic weeder, a merciless one, driven. I sometimes come into department stores with dirt under my fingernails from digging out knotweed from the parking lot planting strips. Many gardening tasks are too heavy for me, or require too delicate a touch, but weeding means the staving off of brute chaos, a task I approach with brio.

A year or so after I started gardening, I visited my mother, who has a garden of her own. Stooping to pluck weeds as we talked, I sought out the infant tufts of Bermuda grass that hadn’t yet had a chance to sprawl and colonize. “How can you even
see
those tiny things?” my mother asked, and I was so startled that I paused for a moment, still crouched at plant level.