Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  My reactions came up from the gut, as true and primitive as if I had met a hungry bear in the woods. I was scared and, God help me, repelled. Not because we were seven men in a small space, almost on top of one another. Not because I had qualms about being with women other than Charlotte. Not because Katie was unattractive. She was soft and round and wonderfully loose. I gulped for breath. I was repelled because she was blind. I wanted to scream with the horror of this revelation. I wanted to punish myself, scratch out my own eyes.

  I turned to the wall and tried to stop breathing. I was absolutely still. Little Fred, in the bed next to mine, whispered, “Hey, Andy, you want me to stop her?”

  “Tell her I’m not here,” I murmured.

  “What?” Fred asked.

  “I’m not here.”

  He stood up in his shorts and felt around for his pants. Katie had reached the top step, panting and muttering: “Come on, baby.” Fred was now in the hall, trying to deal with her. “Not you, you son of a bitch,” she howled.

  “He’s not here,” Fred said. “He’s out. Away for the night.”

  “Bullshit,” Katie roared.

  “He’s gone,” Fred said, and then he whispered in her ear and she smacked him with her handbag. Then they were both on Fred’s bed, and I heard the rustle of clothes and soft curses.

  The door downstairs slammed again, and heavy footsteps came up the stairs. Snyder, the nighttime supervisor, there to help the diabetics in case of emergency, stumbled drunkenly up. Big and gawky and grubby, Snyder walked into a night he would never forget.

  Fred and Katie untangled easily. He escorted her to the women’s dormitory, where she knocked the toilet off its moorings, flooding the downstairs. He put the toilet back together only to be yanked away to deal with Ray, who was convulsing with a serious insulin reaction. It seemed the Day of Judgment had come. In the convulsions, the deluge, the upheaval, I stood in my shorts, full of self-loathing and shame. Horrified, I witnessed Ray being carried out on a stretcher. His jaws were clamped shut and all his muscles rigid. He was handed down the stairs, making incomprehensible gurgling noises. They brought him back a day later, his chemistry fixed for the moment, ready again to drown his fear and anger.

  Katie never talked about that night. When, a few days later, someone spoke of her apocalyptic binge, she said: “I guess I really tied one on.”

  I didn’t recover, not really, for a very long time. It turned out to be a matter of years before blindness—hers, mine, all of ours—became, quite simply, the inability to see with our eyes, nothing more. But as I faced the wall that night, trying not to breathe, I saw only scooped-out rotting sockets, decay everywhere, and heard horrendous sounds, like fish eyes popping in a hot oven.

  On our last day at St. Paul’s, having “graduated” more or less successfully as bona fide blind people, Katie’s cheeks were sopping wet from the tears she shed for not knowing, as none of us really did, how to live away from the safety of St. Paul’s and the fourteen others who were more like her now than anyone she knew. I kissed her wet cheeks and cried myself, because our worlds had come together for this strange interlude, but they were so very far apart that chances were we would never see each other again.

  Coming home to Vermont, I felt worse than I did before I left. I had learned the skills of blindness. I felt assured that even when the last bits of my vision disappeared, I would still walk in the streets, ride buses, read, take care of most of my needs, and remember the sighted world. I knew that there were thousands of others like me, even worse, and they were people of all sorts: smart or dumb, rich or poor, radical or reactionary—and blind. The knowledge of all that was comforting, but I couldn’t adjust to my community—those gifted, bright, and creative friends who could see. More than I had ever imagined possible, their very existence threatened me, their expertise and imagination struck me dumb. I craved isolation or a place in a blind community, to face only the blind and the limited problems of blindness. The revulsion I felt about blindness I turned against myself, and with fierceness, certainty, and nausea, I hated myself for being blind.

  TEN

  DURING THE FIRST FEW DAYS alone in London I experienced a lightness of step I took for a slight visual improvement. I began to allow myself an unashamed immersion in my total health. In the first week, I had dinner a couple of times with Sta and Edith, once in Edith’s house in Golder’s Green and once, at my insistence, in a small health-food restaurant near Regent’s Park. I stopped smoking the day after Charlotte left and felt righteous. It was easier to stop than usual, and so I jumped at the chance to piggyback onto my ever-pinker lungs the prospect of body-wide regeneration, including ever-pinker retinas. I spent a lot of money in a little natural-vitamin shop near the health-food restaurant, stocking up on vitamins and minerals I knew existed in the eye, returning later for those I’d never even heard of, just in case. I walked back to my neighborhood and stopped into Sesame, the local health-supply shop, for a bag of sun-dried raisins from Afghanistan, a large jar of Rumanian honey, and a vegetable sandwich for lunch.

  The other people inside seemed to know one another. They were weighing out seeds and nuts in brown paper bags, discussing the merits of ginseng, sprouts, tofu. Everyone seemed straight and healthy. I did my best imitation of a fully sighted person, making believe I could read labels at the distance I estimated as appropriate for my age. I smiled and noisily crunched the huge raisins plump with seeds. I started on the flat bread filled with bean sprouts, carrots, and cucumbers, as I waited on line to pay.

  A voice behind me said: “Digestion begins in the mouth.” I turned to see a very thin girl. “Chew it well,” she advised, and smiled. I decided right then to satisfy my pursuit of health in private, perhaps stealthily, without group reinforcement. Outside, I crossed the street to listen to a minor brawl in front of the pub.

  I carried my packages to the top of Primrose Hill, where I finished the sandwich, popped a few more gritty raisins into my mouth, and washed it all down with a bottled nectar. I wanted a cigarette desperately and was about to bum one from an old man sitting on a bench not far from me. Instead, I stretched out on the grass and listened to the muffled noises of the city below. It occurred to me that with this cleansing, health-producing arsenal—and I intended to add yoga to my regimen—I wouldn’t know which, the Afghanistani raisins, the yoga, or the bees, would be responsible for the return of my sight. I sat up and laughed. The man smoking on the bench smiled at me. “Nice day,” he said.

  “Very nice,” I replied.

  “American?” he asked.

  “American,” I admitted.

  “Just visiting?” he wanted to know.

  “Actually, I’m here for my eyes. . . .”

  “Harley Street specialist?” he asked.

  “No, a rather . . . a strange . . . a fringe method . . .” I said.

  “I see,” he said, becoming more interested. “I see, I see.” He stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Shall we say a spiritual quest?” He paid no attention to my protestations. “Primrose Hill, on top of which we are both sitting, is one of the spiritual centers of the world.” He pressed his eyes closed with his fingers. “I come often, just to sit.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “As you may know,” he said, “Boadicea, at the head of the native tribe of the Iceni, fought and was soundly defeated by the Romans on Hampstead Heath. She was the first to establish the long British tradition of stoutly opposing the inevitable. . . .”

  “Oh, my,” I said.

  “Yes, and her sacred bones are buried in the barrow under us. People come from everywhere to this very spot for spiritual refreshment.”

  I was willing to hear anything, believe anything, but I was glad Charlotte wasn’t present.

  That evening, as I stoked up the pot of brown rice, I fantasized a wonderfully uninhibited sex life that might spice up my self-absorption, but as I sat there, stuffed and smiling, I decided that this would be a
celibate time—spiritual, healthy, and free of entanglements. After my supper, I took the train to Piccadilly Circus to see a movie. I needed help finding a seat, but once placed I thought I saw the film better, without the customary static swimming before my eyes. Usually, in the front row with Charlotte, both of our necks stiff from being bent backward, she would start reading the titles.

  “Hey, you didn’t read that one,” I’d say.

  “Just the makeup man,” she’d assure me.

  By the end of the film, she would have shifted to the far armrest, irritated by my impatience and stupidity, while I seethed, not knowing what was happening on the screen. Most of the people at St. Paul’s, I remembered, loved going to the movies, to be surrounded by dialogue and sound effects. I hated missing all but the grossest gestures.

  As I inched my way to the Piccadilly underground after the film, I couldn’t really say precisely what the movie was about.

  I wrote letters daily to Charlotte, keeping my health addiction to myself but scrounging for details that might suggest improvement. I wrote a jubilant letter about the movie. The mail was slow both ways, and by the time she received a glowing letter, the hint of improvement had disappeared and I was in the depths of despair again. Soon I learned not to try to communicate moods or suspected changes in eyesight, which left little to write about. But at first, while depressed because I was seeing badly again, I would open an air letter just slipped under the door to make out huge-print CONGRATULATIONS for an improvement that had faded days before.

  I called my mother in New York. “How your eyes are?” she asked. “Charlotte says it is up and down.”

  “They’re getting better,” I lied. “I don’t know what else Charlotte told you, but Helga Barnes is a remarkable woman. The bees hurt, but I’m sure I’m seeing better.”

  “How Sta is?” she asked. I was puzzled why she didn’t want more news of my eyes.

  “He’s fine. You should call him. He’s very pleased about what the bees are doing to me.” She was silent. “I asked Charlotte to send Sarah here right away. Mrs. Barnes has agreed to treat her too.”

  “I talked to Sarah yesterday,” my mother said. “She’s in school. . . .”

  “Why?” I asked. “She should be preparing to come here. She should come immediately.”

  “Do you really think so?” my mother asked. Charlotte must have been more negative than I imagined.

  “Of course I think so. Mrs. Barnes is performing miracles. Didn’t Charlotte tell you about all the cured people? She says it will be much easier with Sarah than with me.”

  “Well, if you really think so, I’ll call Charlotte. . . .”

  “Yes, right away,” I begged. But my mother’s remoteness unnerved me. It wasn’t like her to question alternative methods like this. She went to fortune-tellers all her life, and to astrologers. Not that tea leaves had much to do with healing bees, but just the same . . .

  I pictured my mother after we hung up, sitting at her desk at Maximilian Furs, surrounded by chrome racks of coats and photographs of me and Mark and Sarah and Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren and a pope, a few popes back, examining an ermine cape she had made for him. She would no doubt be bothered and get up to sit in the showroom under a fiery red nude of mine. The large painting dwarfed my mother, who wasn’t quite five feet tall. She looked old when she was troubled, though at eighty, she was still youthful and vigorous. I imagined one of the tall, thin models approaching her, asking: “What’s the matter, Madame Potok?”

  “Nothing, Nanette,” she would say. “Andy,” she would add.

  “Ah, yes, poor Andy. . . .”

  After I’d been alone for ten days, Sarah arrived. I took the bus to Heathrow to meet her and pushed my way to the rope, hoping to be able to pick her out of the crowd. I didn’t see her, and after half the plane had emptied, Sarah, with a big orange rucksack on her back, her long blond hair braided on top of her head, in jeans and white blouse, tapped me on the shoulder, laughing and kissing. “You’re going to see again,” she said as I hugged her.

  “We both are,” I said, although Sarah was seeing quite well.

  We spent the afternoon in Regent’s Park, strolling among the newly transplanted tulips. Sarah was eighteen and in full bloom. Only her round cheeks and big blue eyes still reminded me of her as a child.

  “Was it hard getting out of school early?” I asked.

  “In a way,” Sarah said. “I just started making new friends with the theater and dance crowd. It was hard to leave them.”

  “I’m sorry, honey, I hope this is going to be worth it. I think it will be.”

  Sarah pointed to a gash on her forehead. “If it puts an end to these, it’ll be worth it.”

  “Christ, what happened?”

  “I was walking back to the dorm at night after play rehearsal,” Sarah said, “and I crashed into a fence. It knocked me out.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” I said. “Why were you alone?”

  “I was the only one going to my dorm,” she said. “I didn’t want to bother anyone.”

  We sat on a bench and Sarah stretched out with her legs in my lap. We faced a pond full of noisy ducks.

  “If I’m cured, no more scars,” Sarah said. “Do you think she’ll really cure me?”

  “She seems pretty damn sure. I think she will too.”

  “Ugh, Papa, tell me about the bees. How much do they hurt? They sound disgusting.”

  “They hurt,” I said, “but they’re bearable. And the prize at the end is sensational.”

  “I was thinking on the plane,” Sarah said, “that it’s really strange to be cured of something that’s hardly made a huge difference yet in my life.”

  For the first time ever, we began talking about our RP, our shared disease. I had tried, unsuccessfully, in the past, knowing it to be my duty; but I dreaded talking of blindness, our blindness, with my daughter.

  “When did you first know you had it?” Sarah asked me.

  “I discovered I couldn’t see at night soon after we arrived in America. I remember being scared walking down Seventy-first Street until my mother told me that I actually had something wrong with my eyes. A doctor had told them.”

  I’d just learned recently about that first doctor, whom I didn’t remember at all. Till then, I remembered some vague talk of shell shock; that my night blindness would disappear with my adjustment to America. But apparently we did sit, my parents and I, at a doctor’s office, and he told them the whole story, the only true one until Dr. Lubkin, almost twenty years later. I try to picture the scene: a middle-aged Polish Jewish couple, speaking practically no English, and their little boy, anxious to please. They had just escaped the war. The doctor had seen the first darkening of the retina, the little chicken scratchings on the expanse of healthy pink. I wonder what he said to them, if he said the words retinitis pigmentosa or if he wrote it down for them. I wonder if my father took the piece of paper to the library or to a friend for translation or if he lost it. That doctor did convey the concept of blindness to them, for my mother says she knew I’d be blind from that time.

  “I guess I knew all along, too,” Sarah said. “You and Mama never believed me, but I couldn’t see at night. When you took me to Dr. Lubkin, she didn’t tell me anything either, but I was pretty sure I had it because she looked so hard and long, then she spent hours testing my field, and she seemed to be disappointed.”

  “She didn’t tell me you had it either. Just that she suspected something and when you were grown up she would recommend an ERG.”

  “I guess she was right. I didn’t need to know then. I probably wouldn’t have understood anyway.”

  We got up to walk again, and with our arms around each other, we made a few heads turn. A pleasant breeze blew ripples on the pond.

  “I remember a lot of eye doctors,” I said. “German ones with pince-nez glasses, fat Viennese ones, rude Spanish aristocratic ones with hyphenated names who rushed from one examining room to another. I knew, from the time
I was little, that these were important excursions, the ones to ophthalmologists, because they were the only ones that Nona, your grandfather, and I ever made together.”

  “Really?” Sarah asked. “Not even to movies?”

  “We’d sit in these fancy offices awaiting Herr Doktor’s verdict. He always spoke in whispers, as if to some higher power, while my parents craned their necks to catch every syllable.”

  “They didn’t understand English all that well,” Sarah suggested.

  “It wasn’t in English,” I said. “It was mostly German, which I didn’t understand. And I was never told a damned thing.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “They’d say: ‘the doctor said you have to take your pills,’ that’s all. I hated the pills. They were nicotinic acid, which made my face flush a deep red and my stomach ache.”

  “And my diagnosis, Papa. What a horrible day that was.”

  “I couldn’t bear seeing you plugged into all that equipment,” I confessed. “You seemed so delicate, so pretty, in that dark little room crammed with machines.”

  “I didn’t mind that,” Sarah said. “But Dr. Berson was all business. . . .”

  “I guess,” I said. “But he has a hard job, telling people they have RP.” Sarah had been taking driver’s ed at the time and loved to drive, when Dr. Berson told her she couldn’t.

  “I knew damn well I had RP without all that fancy machinery,” she said, “but not to drive, that was too much.”

  After her diagnosis, I couldn’t get Sarah to discuss RP, nor her future, nor anything. I had tried for two years, but she’d just give me a dirty look and turn away.

  “I bet you don’t even remember what you said to me to make me feel better,” Sarah said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You told me that both of us having RP would bring us closer together.”

  “I did?”