ECCENTRIC VIEWING by Miriam Karmel
My name is Sophie. I’m 43 years old. I don’t have children, but I have a parakeet, which I named Tweet, and a husband whose mother named him Jacob, though everyone calls him Jake. My dog was named Laska, a name stolen from Tolstoy, who gave the name to Levin’s dog, who lives on in fictional perpetuity. My Laska is dead. So is my mother.
After Laska died, people asked, Are you going to get another? Nobody has suggested that I get another mother, though I can imagine someone saying, “You can clone her, you know. I read in People. . . .”
Anything is possible.
Though I miss my mother, it would be creepy to do that. And problematic. Would she come back as a baby, in which case I wouldn’t exist? Or would she return as the full-blown Francine Bernstein unplugged? Then would she be the mother I had when I was eight, or when I was eighteen, or when I was twenty-two and didn’t speak to her for a year?
Leaving aside that cat’s cradle of possibilities, let’s affirm that she is not coming back. Francine B. is dead as a doornail and is, for the purposes of this story, going to remain that way. Still, I’d like her to return so I could get to know her better.
“She had to die before I knew that I never knew her,” I told my friend Jill. We were visiting a museum searching for portraits of women doing something other than posing in satin and pearls. Jill, a historian in the University’s women’s studies department, is an authority on how little we know about the lives of women. She combs museums looking for clues.
I’ve been looking for clues, too. I told Jill how I’d emptied my mother’s pockets, went through her purses and evening bags, rummaged through her closets and drawers. “I needed something written in her hand, some something that would reveal her to me,” I told Jill.
“Women don’t leave behind records,” she replied. “Take Lucy, for example.” We were standing in front of a portrait of Lucy, patron saint of the blind. “Lucy’s story is up for grabs,” Jill said. “Did she take out her own eyes, or did a scorned suitor order someone to blind her? There is so much silence in the archives.”
“Perhaps you’ll help Lucy find her voice,” I said.
Jill shook her head and with a little moue of regret said that was as likely as me helping Lucy to see. I’m a vision rehabilitation specialist. I help people make the most of their remaining vision by teaching them to redirect their gaze to a still-functioning part of the eye. I call it ‘avoiding the blind spot,’ though technically looking at things from the periphery instead of straight ahead is called ‘eccentric viewing.’ When people ask what I do, I say: “I help people use their remaining vision so they can return to life.” This isn’t the same as cloning. My patients are very much alive. It’s just their central vision that’s gone.
I looked at Lucy, in her flowing saffron gown, a dagger in her hand, a thick impasto of white where her eyes should have been. The paint was so thick I could have scraped it off with a fingernail, but that wouldn’t have restored her sight. “No. Lucy has no remaining vision,” I told Jill, my voice unexpectedly shaking with emotion.
As we made our way through the gallery I told Jill about the blank book I’d given my mother one birthday. It was bound in leather, its cream-colored pages lined in pale green. I’d spent a long time selecting it; longer than she spent writing in it, which was no time at all. “My mother was always promising to write a book,” I said. “ ‘One of these days,’ she’d say.” I paused. “I really thought I’d find something.”
Jill nodded the way Dr. Becker would later nod when I told her that I couldn’t stop wanting to know about my mother. “This wanting is like a bad song that keeps knocking around my head,” I told Dr. Becker. She’s a psychotherapist whose card I found in my mother’s purse. I wanted her to give me something to silence the knocking – an elixir, a mantra – anything other than long silences and ambiguous nods, which I have come to interpret as reflexive signs of boredom.
Over coffee in the museum café, I showed Jill the slip of paper I’d unearthed in a pocket of Mother’s rumpled trench coat. In her sloping cursive, on notepaper from the Hotel Shangri-La in Singapore, she’d written:
frz oj 69¢ – Safeway
chunk wht tuna 99¢ – Fry’s
bananas 99¢ (4lb.) – Basha’s
I’ve imagined my mother scouring the newspaper for supermarket ads, then making a list of the specials. I’ve even pictured her driving from one store to the next, patiently checking the items off her list. Did she buy anything else in the stores? Or did she resist the seduction of the cavernous aisles, one dedicated to chips, another to carbonated beverages, another with nothing but bottled water? A woman could lose herself to such excess. Or lose her mind. Or at least feel diminished in the face of such abundance. Perhaps this was a game Mother played to fend off boredom. How many specials can I buy in a single day, without buying anything else?
I wanted Jill’s trained eye to discern something in that list (dare I call it a document?). But my friend, who flies everywhere to talk about silenced women, only said, “The rooms at the Shangri-La start at $285 a night.”
* * *
My lists are different from hers. They’re in my head, but maybe I’ll start writing them down so that after I’m gone, someone can go crazy pondering their meaning. I make lists of things I want to know, like will the water in Flint, Michigan ever be clean enough to drink? I’d like to know what is the square root of anything? Do I really need to use the extra four digits in a zip code? Where did the Anasazi go? Why didn’t my mother write in the journal?
I’ve started keeping a journal. Every day I make an entry on creamy paper lined in green and wonder what she might have written. Most of what I write isn’t interesting, which makes me sad thinking that she left the pages blank because she thought she had nothing worth recording.
In an early entry, I copied a shopping list I found in one of her purses: bean sprouts, mushrooms, rice wine, salsa, chicken, sugar snap peas. And I recorded the names that appeared on cards I’d found tucked away in the zipper compartment: Kelly Jones, RN, Outpatient Oncology Clinic. Lawrence Marks, MD, Department of Oncology. Reena Becker, PhD, clinical psychologist. Sayuri Miura, Japanese-style acupuncture.
I also noted my other findings: Costco membership card; library card; frequent shopper punch card for the Entenmann’s Bakery outlet; rain check for Bill Johnson’s BBQ Sauce.
My mother’s paper trail is miserably scant.
* * *
When she died, her freezer was packed with bargains she never could have eaten, not even if she’d lived a very long time. But Francine Bernstein was not an optimist. She saw the dark side of most everything. The child running around a swimming pool will fall in and drown. The dented can of beans will lead to death by salmonella. Candles on the dinner table will burn the house down. Ditto, dryer lint.
And yet she kept a well-stocked freezer, as if she were immune to all that. And she collected a rain check worth one dollar and forty-nine cents off the regular price of a jar of Bill Johnson’s BBQ sauce, as if she would live to redeem it.
She collected such chits the way some women once saved S&H Green Stamps for a toaster or a bathroom scale. What heartbreaking acts of faith! Faith in a future that may never arrive. Faith in redemption. Gardeners who plant tulip bulbs in the fall are imbued with such faith, though some might call it optimism.
* * *
For five years running, Millie Finberg represented her Temple Sisterhood’s card club at a national gin rummy championship in Miami Beach. Then her central vision started to go and the “sisters” kicked her out of the club. Lately, I’ve been teaching her how to get back in the game, teaching her, literally, to read the hand she’s been dealt.
Today, Mrs. Finberg laid her manicured hands on the table, drummed her fingers on the Formica top, as I shuffled a deck, then laid out an eight of hearts and a three. “Let’s look at these,” I said, and explained that if she tried reading them by moving her eyes from right to left, she’d run into her blind spot and only see the right half of each number. “They’ll look the same,” I said. “So the idea is to move your head from left to right, until the numbers come into view.”
“I can’t,” she said, then set her hands in her lap, as if they’d become as useless as her eyes.
“You can,” I insisted. “But it means unlearning everything you’ve been doing your whole life.” I pleaded with her to try again. “That’s why you’re here. You can’t see straight ahead, but I can teach you to refocus your gaze away from your blind spot.”
My words hung in the air, stilted and heavy as lead. Rushing to deflect them with a more playful explanation, I said, “It’s like running around your backhand in tennis.”
“What do I know about tennis?” she snapped. “My father cut sleeves for men’s suits at Hart Schaffner Marks.”
“Forget about tennis,” I said, struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Now let’s try again.”
“No!” she cried, then commanded me to look at her.
I obeyed and saw things I hadn’t seen in all the weeks I’d been teaching her to redirect her gaze. Her wide mouth was thickly painted a shade of red my mother would have worn. Her lacquered hair was bright as a new penny. Her expensive looking blouse had a coffee stain, which she couldn’t see.
With childlike petulance Mrs. Finberg squeezed her eyes shut and insisted I do the same. “And no cheating,” she said. “Are they shut?”
“Tight as a drum,” I replied, sinking deeper into my chair.
“Tell me what you see,” she said.
I saw stars, comets, flashes of red and white. And then I saw my mother, sitting around the table after dinner, telling a story about Old Man Kosh. “He was blind as a bat, but he could tell a twenty-dollar bill from a one,” she’d said, with an odd mixture of disdain and admiration. “I swear, that man could smell money.” Then, as if to explain his extraordinary powers, she said that Kosh sold underwear and socks at a small shop on the West Side. The shop smelled of cotton and aftershave. It smelled of egg and butter, too, because every day at noon, Kosh’s wife brought an omelet to the shop in a pan covered with a quilted towel.
I was smiling at the thought of teaching Mrs. Finberg to smell the cards, when her voice broke through my reverie. “I’m waiting,” she said. “Tell me what you see.” But before I could speak she said, “Nothing. Right? You don’t see a thing. That’s what I see. Nothing,” she said, rather triumphantly.
“But that isn’t true,” I protested, as I opened my eyes. “You can see.”
Her failing green eyes flashed with resentment. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No,” I said, and instructed her to set out the cards for a game of solitaire. “Now keep your eyes still, but move your head slowly, until the cards come into view. Try it. You’ll be able to see.”
“Wrong,” she shot back, though the fight had gone out of her voice. She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes, the way one might rub a hand or foot that has fallen asleep. “But you can see,” she said. “Up. Left. Straight ahead. You can see fine.”
She’s right. What she doesn’t know is that sometimes I look away.
* * *
The checker at Safeway pressed a bunch of carnations to his chest and crooned, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore.” His soft round body, his dyed black hair and his pale skin gave him the air of an aging diva.
The woman buying the flowers laughed. I laughed too, and was still laughing as I handed him the rain check for Bill Johnson’s BBQ Sauce.
He held it to the light and squinted dramatically. I wished he’d sing to me, maybe the song that had been running through my head all morning. “After You’ve Gone.” I couldn’t figure out where it had come from and why I couldn’t shake it. It’s about a jilted lover. Though I haven’t been jilted, my mother’s gone and there’s no denying she left me crying. Laska, too. And since bad things happen in threes, I’ve been wondering: What next?
In a grating voice, the diva said, “This is expired.” He directed me to customer service where a young man in a thin white shirt and a black string tie turned the coupon over, then over again, and again, as if it might have a third side. “I can’t honor this,” he said.
“But I found it in my mother’s purse after she died,” I protested.
He looked straight through me as if I did not exist. I nearly said, Eyes still! Move your head slowly! But he didn’t want to see me; he wanted to erase me with his laser eyes.
“I found it in my mother’s purse,” I repeated. “She would have redeemed it in a timely manner, but then she got sick.” My voice wavered, but I was determined to stick to the matter at hand: Redemption.
* * *
I should have shut down the computer, rushed across the kitchen, thrown my arms around Jake. Instead, I kept scrolling, even as he leaned over and kissed the top of my head. When he glanced at the screen, I quickly blocked it with my hands.
“Whoa!” he cried. “What’s the big secret?”
“I’m Googling recipes, if you must know.”
He seemed to consider this as he plucked a sugar snap pea from a basket on the kitchen counter. When I yelled at him to put it back, a stricken look crossed his face, as if I’d slapped it. Defiantly, he popped the pea in his mouth and crunched loudly before helping himself to another.
“Stop!” I shouted.
But he crunched even louder, then waving his hand over the counter, said, “What is all this?”
The simple answer: bean sprouts, mushrooms, rice wine, salsa, chicken, peas. But when I saw these through his eyes, arranged in pairs, lined up like partners in a precision drill team, I knew there was no simple answer. “Six ingredients in search of a recipe?” I said, reaching for a lighter tone. I didn’t want to fight. I just wanted to find a recipe. The recipe. The one she would have used.
Jake reached into the basket for another pea. If this was a test, I failed it when my voice reached a new level of shrill as I ordered him to stop.
“Oh, Sophie,” he groaned. “It’s just a pea.”
“It’s not just a pea,” I said, and told him about the list I’d found in one of my mother’s old handbags. “Now I need a recipe. There are dozens. The problem is, I can’t decide which one she would have used.”
“All you need is one,” he sighed. “Just pick one. Any one.”
“But what if it’s the wrong one?” I hated myself for whining.
That’s when I saw it: a flicker of anger, a flash of fear. Or was it confusion clouding his face? Whatever it was, it was new, and it scared me even more than the way he loosened his tie and whipped it off, as if he, my preternaturally forgiving husband, might be planning to strangle me.
Abruptly, and without speaking, he turned toward the door. When I asked where he was going, he said, “What difference does it make?”
“Just curious,” I said, with a miserable little shrug.
“Friendly’s, if you must know. Want to join me?”
“Life with extra sprinkles?” We always got a laugh out of the restaurant’s jingle, but he only flashed a grim smile and departed
I was still at the computer when he returned; the ingredients were still lined up on the counter.
He stood in the doorway, as if whatever was wrong with me might be contagious. For the longest while, he gazed at me with a clinical detachment, which was also new. Then, firmly, though not unkindly, he said, “You need help, Sophie.”
I didn’t tell him, but I’d started seeing Dr. Becker. I knew what he’d say. Your mother’s therapist! Jesus, Sophie!
* * *
When I asked Dr. Becker if I had avoided knowing my mother, she said, “What do you think?” Then we sat for a long time, the only sound the nervous ticking of a clock.
Countless ticks later, I asked if my mother ever complained about boredom.
“I can’t share patient information,” she replied.
“Not even when the patient is, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” she said flatly.
“You know.”
“Why can’t you say it?”
“What?” I said, looking down at my lap.
“You know.” Her voice was firm, but kind.
I let out a nervous puff of laughter. “Is there an echo in this room?”
After many ticks of the clock, she said, “Perhaps we ought to talk about death, Sophie.”
“What’s there to talk about? I only asked if my mother had been bored.”
I could have asked if she’d been scared. Or if she’d been looking forward to discovering what was on the other side. Had she ever talked about me, and if so, what did she say?
Dr. Becker could have told me just one thing. After all, my mother is. You know.
* * *
Father phoned last night. I gripped the receiver when he said, “I don’t want there to be any family secrets.” I was expecting a confession of infidelity or some other transgression, but before I could brace myself, he blurted out, “Your mother had an abortion.” He spoke as cavalierly as the afternoon he returned home and told Mother that he’d just sold her car and bought himself a Lexus with the proceeds. “After all, Francine, you’re not driving anymore.”
I asked if he’d known.
“Of course.” He sounded hurt.
“What I mean is, did you know before she had it?”
“We went to Dr. Newman.”
I pictured the gnomish family doctor who’d made house calls and specialized, as doctors did then, in everything from chicken pox to cancer. “Dr. Newman performed abortions?”
“No. No,” Father replied. “He just arranged it.”
“But it was illegal? Right?”
“There were three children, two in diapers at the time,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Images assailed me. Coat hangers. Knitting needles. Kitchen tables. Back alleys. “Was it in somebody’s home?”
“It was a regular medical facility,” he replied brusquely.
Suddenly, I remembered Mother telling me about her own mother’s failed abortion attempt. On the advice of a friend, Nonna took a hot mustard bath before riding a high-speed roller coaster. Mother told the story for laughs, as if the plan was a bit of high jinks, a caper worthy of Lucy and Ethel.
Yet she’d never spoken of her own.
Now I can’t stop wondering: What else don’t I know?
* * *
I was in the examining room when Mrs. Finberg told Dr. Meltzer that she wanted to keep the keys. “But only for short trips. To my daughter’s house. You know, to see the grandkids. And to the grocery store. The synagogue. Short trips. That’s all. I promise.”
I don’t know how Dr. Meltzer did it. Their noses were practically touching as he peered into the old woman’s eyes, but he didn’t skip a beat, just kept on peering, and when he spoke, his voice was steady and dry. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
I felt like shouting, Anything’s possible. They cloned a sheep! But Mrs. Finberg, with quiet dignity, said, “You’re the doctor.”
Later, she and I played cards, but even when she moved her gaze as I directed, she couldn’t read them. “Try again, Mrs. Finberg,” I said.
“What’s the point?” she cried, tossing the cards on the table.
“You’re making progress,” I assured her.
“Sure. Sure,” she said, rolling her weak eyes with comic exaggeration. Then, looking straight at me through her blind spot, she told me about a friend who called to ask if she’d seen the pink moon last night.
“I was ashamed to admit that I couldn’t see it,” she said softly. “So I lied. I told her, ‘It was really something, wasn’t it?’ ” After a brief pause, she said, “I didn’t want her pity. And I certainly didn’t want her telling me all the bad things that I don’t have to see. She’s the kind who’d try to convince you that blindness is a blessing. I’d even imagined her saying, ‘It wasn’t so great. A lot of hoopla over nothing.’ ”
She paused again, as if sifting through all the perceived slights and indignities that her friend might have inflicted. When she started up again, she said, “But I was wrong. Lillian told me, ‘Yes! It was something. The moon was magnificent.’ ”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, not even to offer a word of sympathy. But Mrs. Finberg knew I was listening, and when she spoke again, she said, “After we hung up, I looked up ‘pink moon’ on my computer. I had to make the letters big, the way you taught me. It was like being back in kindergarten, learning to read, sounding out the words one letter at a time.” She let out a light, brittle laugh. “I’m regressing, Sophie.”
“Is it like a blue moon?” I asked.
“That’s something different,” she said. “A pink moon is the first full moon of spring. It’s named for ground phlox, the pink wild flowers that grow at this time of year. Though it’s not always pink, it’s always big and bright.”
“It sounds beautiful,” I said, feeling a rush of shame for not having looked when I had the chance.
“It is,” she said, as if she’d actually seen it.
* * *
“Did you even read it?” Jake asked, waving a book in the air.
“It’s mine!” I cried, reaching for it. “Give it to me.”
He hid it behind his back and said, “No it’s not. It belongs to the library. And it’s been sitting there for weeks.” He pointed to the table in the foyer, where we leave mail and car keys, and where, for weeks, according to Jake, the book has sat. Again, he asked if I’d read it.
“My mother read it,” I said, at last. “We were on vacation,” I said softly. “We’d rented a cottage at Lake Geneva, and for two weeks she sat in a porch rocker reading, refusing to budge, even when we complained of hunger. ‘There’s peanut butter and jelly in the pantry,’ she told us, without looking up. When we said we were out of bread, she said, ‘Eat it with a spoon. It won’t kill you.’ ”
“Nice story. But what does any of that have to do with this?” Jake said, gesturing again with the book.
He tried meeting my gaze but I looked away and with a defeated shrug, said, “I wanted to see what was so compelling that she couldn’t bother to fix lunch.”
“And was it? Compelling?”
“I haven’t read it,” I confessed, casting a shy glance at him.
I was expecting another angry outburst, but his face softened into something I hadn’t seen since Laska was dying. Tenderly, Jake said my name. Then he offered to return the book.
“Who says I have to return it?” I snapped. “I checked it out with my mother’s card. What are they going to do? Fine her? Refuse to let her check out any more?”
* * *
When I asked Sayuri Miura what she’d treated my mother for, she was brusque. “I don’t remember her. I get lots of cancer patients.”
How could she not remember my mother? “She was a big joker,” I said, fighting back tears. I told her that once at a lady’s luncheon Mother covered a front tooth with licorice gum, then began one of her long stories, nattering on, as if she looked like a million dollars and not a toothless jack-o’-lantern. The women howled with laughter. They set down their salad forks and wiped tears from their eyes. “Oh, Francine,” they sighed. “You’re one of a kind.”
“I’m sure if she did that for me, I’d remember,” Ms. Miura confessed. “But as I said, I get lots of cancer patients.”
“Well, in general, what do you treat them for?”
“There is no general,” she replied. Then looking at me with sad, unflinching eyes, she suggested treating me for anxiety.
“I’m not anxious,” I snapped. “I just want you tell me something about my mother that I don’t know.” I thrust out my arm; pleaded with her to stick me with needles. “Trigger my memory,” I begged. “Or at least help me to stop wanting to know. Please.”
She sat so still, so erect, I thought she might be meditating. When she finally spoke, she said, “I’m sorry.” Her voice was soft yet clear. In it I heard what sounded like remorse, and something in me shifted. I was suddenly grateful for that memory of Mother with her blacked-out tooth and her friends looking up from their Spinning Salads, laughing. That’s all I need to know, I thought. That’s enough. Just as suddenly, I thought, No. It is not.
Perhaps Ms. Miura can help me get to the point where I can say, Enough.
* * *
At Starbucks yesterday, I ran into a woman from the dog park. I don’t know her name, but her nervous little mutt is named Murphy.
She let out a cheery, “Hey!” followed by, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How’s Laska?”
“Dead,” I replied. That was mean. But she looked so perky and pink, and I couldn’t help thinking of Murphy slobbering her with kisses when she walked through the door.
Did I say that was mean? Her face turned ashen and coffee splashed onto the front of her fuzzy, pink sweater.
“Sorry. That came out wrong,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said, dabbing at the stains with a crumpled napkin. “I mean. You just lost your dog.” She looked up at me with doleful eyes and said, “Did you ever get his DNA tested?”DNA testing had been a popular topic of dog park conversation, and she’d had Murphy tested, though I don’t recall the results.
“No,” I replied, and reached for my coat, hoping she’d get the hint, but she pressed her pink lips into an exaggerated frown and said, “Well, now it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To know what he was,” she said.
“I know what he was,” I said. “He was loyal and kind, and when I cried he rose from his slumber, shambled across the room and set his head in my lap. And when I came home, he barked and rushed to the door and threw himself at me. He loved me. And I loved him. What more do I need to know?”
“But you don’t know what he was,” she persisted. “And now you never will.”
“Here’s what I know.” I paused. Then, with surprising assurance, I said, “I know that sometimes we ask the wrong questions.”
* * *
I’d gone to Dr. Meltzer’s office for advice on a patient who wasn’t improving. Instead, he told me about his last patient. “She asked me to take out her eyes,” he said. “It sounds shocking, I know.” He explained that pain experienced in the cornea can be forty times worse than an exposed dental nerve. “And sometimes we don’t know the cause.”
He sank back in his chair and shut his eyes, as if practicing being blind. “But what if,” he continued. “What if there’s a pain worse than blindness? Or maybe the pain is all in my patient’s head. Maybe she’s only imagining it. Then I go and blind her and do that harm I swore I’d never do.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me as if for the first time, though I’d been on his staff for seven years. “Tell me, Sophie. What would you do?”
Before I could remind him that I am only the vision therapist, he said, “This isn’t one of those Zen riddles. I’m not talking about some tree falling in a forest. This just happened.”
I can’t account for what came next, but I heard myself saying, “Sometimes, I’m in such pain, I’d like to cut out my heart. Or is it my psyche? Where is it, Dr. Meltzer? Where is it that we feel the kind of pain that makes us not want to get out of bed in the morning?”
He let out a low whistle. “Gosh, Sophie. You look like such a steady girl.”
That wasn’t the first time I’d been called steady. Or sturdy. Or dependable. Once, someone said she’d leave her cat with a person like me.
“Sometimes steady can backfire,” I told Dr. Meltzer. “People come to expect steady, and you’re afraid to let them down.”
He gazed at me over steepled fingers and asked when I’d last had my eyes checked. If any of the other doctors had offered to examine my eyes, alarms would have gone off. But Dr. Meltzer is nebbishy and kind. He never gets cross. He remembers the names of all the “girls” in the office. And unlike the other doctors, he sometimes thanks us for our efforts.
Though he smelled pleasantly of coffee and antiseptic soap, I held my breath when he peered into my eyes, afraid that the slightest movement would propel me across the narrow shaft of space that separated his nose, his lips, from mine.
I exhaled only after he switched the lights back on and pronounced my eyes healthy. “But there’s something about them, something je ne sais quoi,” he said. He’d been listening to French instructional recordings, in preparation for a trip to Paris with Mrs. Meltzer. Some mornings, fresh from one of his audio lessons, he’d burst into the office and greet the staff with a hearty, ”Bonjour!” Once he brought in a box of croissants.
“I don’t speak French,” I confessed.
He shrugged a Gallic shrug. “Technically, it means, ‘I don’t know what.’ I’m trying to say that your eyes are tip-top. But they reveal an unspeakable sadness.” He suggested smiling more and prescribed a vacation.
That night I studied my eyes in the mirror to see what sadness looked like. “You can’t always smile,” I told my dour reflection. “People won’t believe that you’re eternally happy. Go ahead. Glare. Glower. Grimace. Blame your cheerless visage on the lack of sun; tell people you have SAD. Tell them you are sad, that your mother is dead. Your dog, too.”
At dinner that night, I said to Jake, “Let’s go to Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
“Why not?”
“Maybe some other time,” he said. I could tell he was trying to humor me, in case I was serious, which I was.
Then I thought about my mother, who was fond of saying, “You can’t run away from your problems, Sophie.” Once, when I said, “I don’t have problems,” she sighed and said, “Oh, Sophie. Don’t you know? Everybody has problems. Even Zsa Zsa Gabor.” When I reminded her that Zsa Zsa was dead, she said, “If Zsa Zsa were alive, she’d have troubles. And you know what? She’d pick her own over yours, and you’d pick yours over Zsa Zsa’s. That’s how it goes. Nobody trades their troubles.”
I looked across the table at Jake, who was telling me about something that had happened at work, but I was only half listening. I was wondering what troubles I’d take over my own. Mrs. Finberg’s blind spot? Pain so extreme I’d ask Dr. Meltzer to remove my eyes? I thought of St. Lucy and the daubs of white paint where her eyes should have been. And I thought of Jill’s daunting search for voices in the archives.
Jake was talking about work and I felt a surge of resentment at his unruffled soul. What troubles would this good-natured man trade for those I caused him? Out of nowhere I thought of his wedding vow: I’ll be there when the popcorn is gone.
“The popcorn, Jake,” I said, interrupting him. “It’s gone. Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still here?” I said.
“I am,” he replied.
* * *
“Can you see my nose, Mrs. Finberg?”
“Not even that,” she sighed.
“Turn your head,” I instructed. “When my nose comes into view, freeze.”
Slowly, like an oscillating fan on a lazy summer day, she turned her head. And then her face lit up. “I see it!”
I thought of my nose, the way it takes off from a bump at the bridge, then after veering off to the left, slopes down to a bulbous tip. I was fifteen years old when my mother suggested fixing it. Though she was in the habit of tweaking her own face, with injections or periodic nips and tucks, I’d never thought about my nose, never considered that others might see something in need of repair. My nose remains the one I started out with, but at times I hear my mother’s voice and feel an urge to hide behind my hand.
“I see it!” Mrs. Finberg said, as if she’d discovered a pink moon. “I can see your nose!”
“You’ve found the sweet spot, Mrs. Finberg. The part of your eye that can see,” I said. Afraid to break a spell, I instructed her to hold her eyes still and then move her head slowly up and down.
She scanned my face from forehead to chin. I felt naked; exposed. I wanted to hide behind my hand. But I didn’t want to miss something. I didn’t want to miss a moment of her joy.
Miriam Karmel is the author of the novel Being Esther (Milkweed Editions, 2013). Her stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Coe Review, Water~Stone Review, Passages North, and in the anthology Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions, 2008).