Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  Jack must have slipped out the front door and sneaked around the side of house; Roseanne sees his silhouette near the tree. He’s down at the end of the yard, acting like an alien who’s lurking at the outer edges of a family gathering.

  In the shadows, he raises his glass; for a moment, Roseanne expects him to point it skyward as he did the bird. He does not; he downs the contents, probably whisky again, in one gulp. And stays there, by the tree.

  She sees now that making fun was the worst offence. She and Tibbs could have made the book and never shown it, and Jack would be none the wiser. It’s all so much silliness, she thinks, all his damned waving and pointing and gesticulating. If he’s that thin-skinned all of a sudden, maybe he is going through the change.

  She wishes she could remember how she and Tibbs got started in the first place. Maybe they were thinking up titles for Marian’s sour-grapes magazine. She remembers trying to match catchy titles to photos, but she can’t remember whose idea the Big-Little was. All she knows is that in the afternoon she and Tibbs were sprawled out on the living-room rug, cutting and pasting, laughing until their cheeks hurt. It had not been difficult to find photos of Jack among the albums and cigar boxes. Jack, with a point for every occasion: an arm, an index finger outstretched, a stick, a hoe, a carving knife, a shovel, a baseball bat, a piece of driftwood, a fishing rod—pointing at, but at what? At the end of the driveway? At the hedge, the turkey, the flying saucer, the dunes, the migrating geese—the beyond?

  What she and Tibbs had done in their great flush of laughter and craziness was to cull the photos and paste them onto construction paper, each photo having its own page. Jack’s point was manoeuvred so that it was always aimed towards the upper right corner. They cut and shaped and produced their own Big-Little book, twenty-two pages long. They stapled the cover and printed the title, Earthman Pointing, with felt pens. And then, shrieking and holding their sides, took it to Jack to show him. The book had enough thickness so that when they thumbed the upper right corner, riffling the pages, the effect was that of Jack in rapid motion, Jack with finger in the air, swinging his implements of destiny.

  But Jack had not laughed. Had not thought this funny at all. Something in his face tightened and, while Roseanne did not miss this entirely, she and Tibbs had gone too far to turn back. They flipped the Big-Little under his nose. Their laughter flattened—and died.

  Yes, making fun had been the worst offence, and she and Tibbs had committed it. No wonder Jack is standing down there in the dark, drinking whisky beneath the tree.

  Roseanne looks at Tibbs across the picnic table. The storytelling has petered out; moments of silence are gathering before everyone starts picking up to go home. Tibbs looks back at Roseanne and raises her eyebrows and, with this exchange, Roseanne is caught off guard. Sometimes, looking at her twin is not unlike searching a mirror for her own likeness. Tibbs wriggles her eyebrow again, unnoticed by Spoke, by Marian, by Arley. She has a smirk on her face as she motions towards Jack, who has set down his glass and is pointing up to the black black sky.

  Roseanne is angry: at Tibbs for making fun; at the Big-Little; at herself for taking part; at Jack, who sees something Roseanne does not.

  Roseanne finds herself wanting, wanting to see, too. She peers down along the grass. She can’t see the remaining bird-house, just barely sees the outline of the tree. Darkness has settled. Roseanne no longer knows if Jack is even there.

  The Eyes Have It

  As he cuts into Ceese’s left eye, the surgeon begins to sing. A low hum, rather than lyrics. There is a drape over her right eye, over her entire face, and she can’t see him or the nurse, above her. Ten minutes earlier, she had been sitting on a chair in an outer room while the anaesthetist inserted a needle between her cheekbone and lower lid and injected the contents of the syringe into her. When he wheeled her, on the stretcher, into the operating room, he asked how she felt.

  “Sacrificial,” she said.

  His upside-down face had seemed puzzled. He was the kind of anaesthetist who tried to hide the needle and syringe from his patient—trying to spare her—but her glance had been quick.

  “You might be treated to a colour and light show,” he said, as if he thought this would be encouraging. “Some people are. During the operation.”

  “What if I move my head?” She was keeping her cataract eye open until the last possible moment. That’s how she thought of it, her cataract eye. Not that she could see out of it, at this point. The drops that preceded whatever he’d shoved into the space above her cheekbone had made the wall appear foggy, moveable. It was shifting, behind him.

  “Move your head?” Again, he had seemed puzzled. “You’re the one in control of that,” he’d said. “Don’t.”

  “Spanish Eyes,” she thinks. That’s what the surgeon is humming. Doesn’t he realize?

  But Ceese does not bring it to his attention. She wants him to focus, no interruptions. She doesn’t want to jar him with a thought that will cause his hands or his miniature eye instruments to shift. She suppresses the impulse to shout, “This man engages in painless torture! “

  Instead, she tries to figure a way that will help her to bear this. He’s scraping out the old lens (already it’s the old lens). How did she think she was going to bear it? When she walked into the hospital at seven in the morning, she had no plan. How can you plan for something as outrageous as another human being picking up a blade and slicing into your eye?

  Tai chi, she decides. I’ll do the set in my head. Meditation gets me through anything. She does the bow, turns her inner self to the right, turns back again for single whip. She tries to close the inner eye. Not easy when the covering of the outer eye has been peeled back. It is open, helpless. Flayed. Flayed? The word pops into her head. She’ll look it up when she gets home. If she is ever able to see again. Not out of the eyeball that’s flayed, or displayed, or whatever it is that’s happening up there on the other side of the sterile drape. Exposed. That’s how she feels. A truly terrible violation is going on and she is here beneath it. She has even agreed to it. A form of madness, like eye-rabies, must have bitten her, and there is nothing she can do. If she moves, all is lost.

  Somebody stop this man.

  She goes back to the beginning of the set. Recites to herself, deliberately, controlled, the way she instructs her tai chi students on Wednesday nights. She gets as far as single whip again and tries to push through to the next move. The digging inside her eye is robbing her concentration. The humming of “Spanish Eyes” has stopped.

  Ward off, slanting upward.

  She’s forgotten the move between. Never mind, keep going. Step up and raise hands. And then, she glides into a perfect stork cools wings, her favourite. She thinks of waterfalls, a single and elegant raised wing. Once, she read an entire book about dancing cranes. The writer believed, after years of photographing cranes, that they danced only for the sake of dancing. The act was unrelated to mating or acquiring food. Related to nothing, he believed, except play. Ceese believes this, too.

  “Ceese,” a man’s voice says, and she remembers the stranger, above her. “What kind of name is that?”

  “As in … and desist,” she says, and regrets this immediately. Don’t irritate the surgeon. “It’s short for Cecilia,” she adds, trying to placate.

  He hums a few notes and says, “Almost through—four or five minutes more.”

  She still has her other eye. Which he will never get near, she has already decided. Even if the artificial lens he’s now implanting gives her 20/20 vision in the left, he’ll never get his teeny eye spades into the right.

  She wonders if her legs will buckle when she tries to stand after surgery. She realizes that her tai chi has stalled again, that her legs might already have buckled. Inner legs buckle. She could invent a new move and call it out on Wednesday nights, and the insides of all the people in her class would cave in.

  She gives up on tai chi—requires too much concentration—and switches instead
to the sword set, one she learned from a Chinese master but knows only imperfectly. Nonetheless, if the surgeon misses, or offends, or even hurts—God forbid that the local anaesthetic wears off—she’ll tap her inner sword to her forehead and thrust. Three rings encircle moon. But more footwork is required, more than in tai chi. She reaches swallow skims water and has to give up the sword set, too.

  She now decides—how else will she get through these last minutes—that she will look out of the eye he’s working in. It’s open, isn’t it? Small supreme star. The moves in the sword set have wonderful names. Her favourite is Immortal directs the way. She wills herself to stare upward but there is only brightness. She sees no image, no shadow, no face peering into her head, no colour and light show, no fingers, no Lilliputian probe. This causes a profound and generalized panic.

  Cataract: A descent of water over a steep surface; a waterfall; a furious rush or downpour; a deluge.

  Not.

  (Except, perhaps, a deluge of tears.)

  Cataract: Abnormality of the eye, characterized by opacity of the lens, usually associated with aging.

  She is fifty-four.

  “No matter,” the surgeon told her, before booking the operation. “Some people have the misfortune to develop cataracts prematurely.”

  Fortune and misfortune. Her son, when he was four, held out his empty dinner plate and said, “I’d like a medium fortune, please.” Which made Ceese think that perhaps portion and fortune were one and the same.

  The body fails us in miserable ways. Every friend she has is trying to ward off something. Ingesting Vitamin E. Drinking cranberry juice and decaf green tea. Worrying about roving free radicals. Ceese knows nothing of radicals except what she remembers from the sixties—some of her friends still haven’t moved on. People she knows are obsessed with stroke prevention, diabetes, too much salt. Her closest friend, Lucy, weighs every item before she eats, including crackers. It is Lucy who is coming to the hospital to escort her home—an hour from now, ? blessed hour! She allows herself a wedge of hope. She’ll hug Lucy and thank her, lock the door, draw the shades, bar the light, collapse.

  “Not your husband?” the admitting clerk had asked, before surgery.

  Was this reproach, censure? The clerk looked fourteen; surely, she was older. Her brown eyes reflected boredom.

  “He’s out of town,” said Ceese. “A friend will come to drive me home.” These husbands who run off on extended jobs—no, she will recover alone. When the hospital had called with the scheduled date, she’d told Evan not to cancel his trip.

  The clerk had ground her teeth, audibly. “Then you’ll have to give me your friend’s number. She’ll have to bring you back tomorrow for your bandage removal and post-op check.”

  Did she think Ceese had not made the arrangements? But Ceese did not retort. Save your energy, she told herself. You’re going to need it. She thought of her late Granny MacCallum quoting Ezekiel: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” This child-clerk must have a sour-grapes father, or maybe she is an unhappy child-bride—Ceese thinks she remembers the flash of a ring. But no flash of sparkling eyes. Only dull brown, belying boredom.

  “Perfect.” The nurse’s voice speaks, above her. The surgeon hums assent. Ceese hears a crackling noise and smells burning flesh. Her own. Cautery. She wants to wince but can’t. She tries to scrunch her thoughts, render them minute. She tries to stay in the shrunken space where she has removed herself.

  When she was a child, every night at the dinner table during summer, the sun shone through the window in exactly the same spot, directly into her face, blinding her. Every night, her mother stood on a chair and pinned up a corner of the curtain to block out the sun.

  “Finished,” says the surgeon, a flourish in his voice, and lifts the drape. The curtain rises. Ceese’s last image while on the table is the one that stays in her mind’s eye: limitless white, milkiness, unseeing, blind.

  Why is it that everything she reads, hears, sees with her right eye—now alarmingly bloodshot like the left—why is it that everything has to do with the eye? Or was it all there before and she hasn’t been looking? “There are none so blind as those who won’t see,” Granny MacCallum used to say, usually to close an argument.

  A postcard invitation arrives in the mail—sent by the Postal Museum—and bears two eyes captured by a shaded oval, the eyes trapped in a frameless rear-view mirror. Two larger eyes stare at Ceese from the cover of a glossy magazine. She turns on the radio, only to hear an item about Peeping Toms, eyes staring in from the dark. She remembers living in a ground floor apartment, a young couple banging at the door to tell her they’d been out for a walk and had seen a man standing at her kitchen window. The man had run off when they shouted. She thinks of Cheever, and Uncle Peepee Marshmallow in The Wapshot Chronicle. She thinks of a man with a white dog who once left footprints outside her bedroom window, in the snow.

  Ceese’s older brother phones from Vancouver. He asks about the surgery but before she can reply he says, “I don’t want to hear.” She doesn’t blame him. Doesn’t he have his own future to consider? Don’t cataracts run in families?

  Evan calls, from the opposite edge of the country. She is determined not to feel sorry for herself. She tells him she was at the library the day before surgery—Main Branch, the selection is better—and borrowed fourteen books-on-tape to get her through the healing period. She tells him she’s been lying on the living-room floor, listening to professional voices. She doesn’t tell him that the first book she listened to was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She doesn’t shout at him to come home.

  She doesn’t tell him, either, that now that the bandage is off and she is applying compresses, she can’t bear to look in the mirror at her bruised eye. Battered, she’s been battered. She doesn’t tell him that she feels small.

  Their son calls, from Toronto.

  “I’m supposed to put drops in my eye,” she tells him. “Every six hours. But I’m having trouble finding my eye.”

  “Is this some philosophical problem?” he says. “Where is the I?”

  She laughs, first time since surgery.

  She stumbles from one room to another and goes down to the basement where she bumps into the ironing board. The iron falls, tinny pieces of its dial clinking on cement. She leaves the pieces where they scatter.

  At night she wears a hard silvery patch surrounded by fluorescent pink foam, to keep her fingers from tentacling upward in her sleep and rubbing the eye. Every morning she takes the patch off and peers into the mirror. The woman who peers back looks as if she hasn’t slept for weeks. It is impossible to wear glasses; the old prescription doesn’t fit the new eye and she can’t get a new prescription until the eye has healed for four weeks. Although she had no fear before surgery, now she is petrified that her vision won’t be restored, that even her good eye will somehow be robbed of sight. Good guy, bad guy; good eye, bad eye.

  Terror follows, she writes in her journal, keeping one eye closed. These are the only words she can muster. She has trained her eyes to work independently. She alternates: one eye open, one eye closed. Her eyes work in opposite directions under opposing orders. At the bottom of the page she draws a human eye with wide-apart lashes and a morose brow. Beneath the picture she prints: The victim’s version.

  One afternoon, strain in one eye, seeing double in the other, she lies on the rug, puts a compress over both eyes, and listens to a tape of the stories of Oscar Wilde. In the first story, the statue of the Happy Prince commands a little swallow to swoop in and pluck out one of his sapphire eyes. The next night, the little swallow is told to pluck out the other. Ceese removes the compress, takes out the tape, and understands that there is no escape.

  She decides to check e-mail, turns on the computer, squints at the screen. A message from Lucy pops up, with the heading: I spy with my glitter eye.

  I know you want to be left alone, she writes, and I don’t want to be annoying. I’
m just checking, to make sure you are all right. Call if you need me. Or send a message. Guide me through this. You can be the seeing-eye … well, never mind. Don’t be an EYE-dealist.

  Ceese sits back and laughs, second time since surgery. She remembers the evening she and Lucy attended a foreign language film—Danish, with English subtitles—and just as the lights went down two women took their places directly in front of them. The elder of the two was blind and accompanied by her seeing-eye dog, which settled obediently at her feet.

  But the blind woman did not understand Danish, as Ceese and Lucy had naturally assumed. Which meant that the companion had to read out the subtitles, and this she did in a loud voice. Even more perplexing, every time an actor laughed, the companion interpreted by saying “laughed”—or “coughed” or “snorted,” although bodily functions could easily be heard from the screen, comprehensible in any language. Patrons around were shifting uncomfortably but no one worked up the courage to comment. The seats were full, and there was no place to retreat.

  By the end of two weeks, Ceese has seen the surgeon twice. She no longer wears the patch at night. Every morning when she wakes, one eye opens and then the other, as if they’re no longer friends. She picks up the morning paper and reads the caption, Heights of danger. She’s still seeing multiples; there are one and a half captions now. She has a sudden insight, pops the left lens out of her old glasses and reads with the right. This works, as long as she keeps her left eye closed.

  She reads that a passenger liner at sea has encountered a giant rogue wave. It was, the captain reported, eye level, the bridge being ninety-five feet. Other height danger is reported in the same article. Volcanoes can blast clouds of rock so high, the rock drifts around in the sky. You can be buckled into your seat in an airplane, flying high, and look out the window, and there will be ash and rock, spewed up from below. Fifteen hundred passenger lives have been at risk in recent years, the report asserts, with authority.