The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  “Okay. Time for bed,” they’d say and I’d pretend to go upstairs.

  Then I’d sneak back down, hide with my mutt, Gigi, in the pantry, press my ear against the screen door, and listen. That was when they told the good stories: my mom chased her abusive first husband from the house with a butcher knife; my dad was arrested for gambling with his mafia friends when he was seventeen, and his father refused to bail him out of jail. Later, when my dad was out of earshot, I’d ask my mom about his stories.

  “Dad told it to me,” I’d lie. “Can you remind me how it goes?”

  She said that when he was in junior high, he started sweeping hair at his father’s barbershop. His father told him, “Never open the door to the back room.” So one day my dad pretended he was sweeping hair by the door, and cracked it open—just enough to see in. A man was roped to a chair with his mouth gagged. His hand was in a vise that another man slowly turned. A third man sat in the corner, eating a sandwich. My dad closed the door and returned to sweeping hair.

  “What’s a vise?” I asked my mom.

  “You know, sort of like the thing your dad has on his workbench, that he uses to hold down wood while he cuts it,” my mom explained. “Only this was something a little different. They ground up the guy’s hand in it.”

  Another story I overheard and that my mom later confirmed: after my dad caught his first wife in bed with her cousin’s husband, his friends offered to throw her off a roof. “We’ll frame it as a suicide,” they told him. My dad refused: “I can’t. That’s the mother of my children.” I remember thinking: My dad is an upstanding man. I didn’t think: Of course you shouldn’t throw your adulterous spouse off a roof.

  MOM

  Just as I did when I was a child, I ask my mom for more stories about my dad.

  “He painted warships in Brooklyn during World War II,” she reminds me, “and developed throat cancer from the asbestos the navy used.”

  Before I was born, doctors removed his left vocal cord to prevent the cancer from spreading. I wish I had a recording of his voice. I remember standing in a hard hat and tool belt, watching my dad sand a piece of wood. He said something to me, and his voice disappeared into the sound of sandpaper.

  “He knew how scratchy his voice sounded,” my mom says. “He was careful not to raise his voice, especially around you—he was afraid of scaring you. Then he was afraid of the eye falling out and scaring you. Poor guy.”

  This reminds her of a story.

  “One evening we were eating spaghetti at the kitchen table and his eye fell out and rolled across the table. ‘Dad, your eye popped out,’ you told him and kept on eating,” my mom says. “You were just a kid. It didn’t faze you.”

  “I don’t really remember that,” I say.

  “I do. He felt so awful about it. I told him, ‘She loves you. She doesn’t care.’”

  DAD

  At Cedar Point, my dad went on the rides with me—even the one where we raced in separate potato sacks down a giant sloping slide. Sometimes people pointed and laughed. “Look at that old man,” they’d say. For the fast rides and the tall ones, my mom usually waited at the bottom. After the Blue Streak, the park’s oldest roller coaster, he was covering his left eye with his hand.

  “Is it still there?” he asked my mom.

  “It’s there,” she said, and they both laughed.

  •

  But more than the amusement park, the Erie County Landfill was my favorite place when I was a kid.

  “The dump, the dump, the dump,” I’d say as I buckled myself into the car.

  Because my parents’ friends knew how much I loved the landfill, and even though each resident was allotted only so many free trips there, they gave us some of their free tickets. I loved seeing what people threw away. I remember wondering if the trash looked as beautiful to my dad as it did to me.

  “Well she’s not too hard to please,” he told my mom.

  •

  And I loved seeing my dad unwrap the presents I gave him. One Christmas, I made him a wooden plaque out of scrap wood I found in the garage. I wrote in marker: “Best Dad,” or something like that. I put it inside an old power-tool box and wrapped it. After unwrapping it and seeing the power-tool box, he said, “You shouldn’t have.”

  I worried he’d be disappointed when he found the wooden plaque instead of a power tool. I shyly told him to look inside the box. He did, and he started to cry.

  “Now this is amazing,” he said.

  When he died, the plaque was still hanging above his workstation in the garage. I can’t look at what I made him. At some point, it may end up in the garbage, at the landfill—where he and I shook our heads at what people threw away.

  •

  Our garage was my dad’s magician’s hat. My mom helped him carry out new, amazing objects: bookshelves taller than them, rose arches, birdhouses with as many as eight different entrances, dollhouses shaped like our house. Too enormous to fit through our back door, my favorite dollhouse required him to remove the door from its hinges. In summer months, the dollhouse stayed outside. One day he mounted it on wheels.

  A “mobile home,” he called it.

  The roof, made of real asphalt like ours, lifted off to reveal an attic. He added screens and shutters to all the windows. He wallpapered each room. He used free samples of linoleum and carpet from a local flooring store; the saleswoman assumed we were redecorating our house. He even made a staircase and cut a hole in the second floor.

  “I don’t want to make your dolls have to fly from floor to floor,” he said.

  Before our garage sales, I parked the dollhouse out of view, usually on our back porch. At one sale, however, a woman noticed the dollhouse from our driveway. I was walking around with my sticker gun, lowering prices, when I saw her playing with the blue shutters. I ran over.

  “This for sale?” she asked.

  “No,” I told her. “My dad made it.”

  She removed a pen and checkbook from her purse and offered me $1,000.

  “It’s not for sale,” I said.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  I pointed at him.

  “That old man in the eye patch?”

  “He made it,” I said, “and with only one eye.”

  She stooped and patted me on the shoulder.

  “You’re very lucky,” she said and walked away.

  My dad came over and asked what she had wanted. I told him.

  “Go get her! I’ll make you a new one.”

  But she’d already left.

  •

  He built a one-room house for me in the backyard; he fenced in a private yard behind it and taught me how to manage my own garden. I had my own mailbox where my dad regularly delivered letters that he and my mom had written. He made a cement walkway leading to our back porch and before the cement dried we wrote “Dad and Jeannie,” drew a heart. We left our handprints.

  •

  He made our red picket fence out of scrap wood from a lumberyard where on its opening day I rode a pony and won a goldfish.

  •

  Passersby slowed down their cars and pointed at our yard. Finches always seemed to be splashing in our birdbaths, and strange colorful flowers appeared unexpectedly.

  “Did you plant that?” my parents asked one another.

  The answer was often no.

  •

  One afternoon, I was in the driveway, practicing how to ride a bike.

  “Don’t go too close to the street,” my dad told me.

  I was bad at braking, and he’d run and catch up with me. Mostly, though, my dad kept pace, but when he spotted a sports car speeding toward our corner with no clear intention of obeying the stop sign, he shouted and ran toward the car. The driver slammed his brakes. I was in the middle of the driveway. I jumped off my bike, chased after my dad, and watched as he reached one hand through the driver’s open window and said, “You’d be worth going to prison for.” He pointed at me, and then at the stop sign. That e
vening, he began building a long lattice fence to stretch across our driveway. A few days later, he mounted the fence on wheels. He demonstrated how it worked. My mom and I clapped.

  Now, when I think of the fence, I think of Jeanne.

  THREE

  In the Memory Game you’re expected to find two matching cards. My dad’s left eye and his right didn’t perfectly match. The i and the eye don’t perfectly match, but they sound the same. Jeanne and Jeannie sound the same, but we don’t perfectly match. I could write this story chronologically and divide it into three parts titled “eye,” “i,” and “I.”

  But I worry that I lose authority as a storyteller if I recall memories from age four. I could preface some of those memories with “I remember.” Or, in memoir, is such subjectivity implied? Like “I see” and “I hear,” “I remember” is almost always an unnecessary filter. Maybe I can preface the more detailed memories with “I remember”—a defense against any reader who thinks, There’s no way she remembers playing the Memory Game when she was four, or It couldn’t have been the Memory Game—it’s so symbolic. It feels forced.

  Do I need to be more selective with direct dialogue, or introduce hindsight perspective, or lean on my mom’s memories? I’ll keep some of her in the present tense. I’ll show how I often ask her questions, such as: “Did it happen this way?” “What was his illness called?” “Did Dad accept the loss of his eye?” But if I excerpt conversations with her that concern only him, then it looks like I care less about her life stories.

  I’ll write another book after this, a book for her.

  JEANNE

  Not once did my dad say Jeanne’s name in my eighteen years with him. My mom did when I was eight.

  I was dancing in my bedroom with an unlit candle when she called me downstairs. My teacher, Sister Paulina, had asked three second-grade girls to lead our First Communion ceremony with a dance. The dance required me to hold a candle above my head, and I was terrified of setting the church on fire. I practiced at home almost every day for a month.

  When I walked into the living room, my dad was in his chair, holding a small white box. As my mom explained that he had a dead daughter named Jeanne (pronounced the same as my name) “without an i,” he opened the box and looked away. Inside was a medal Jeanne had received from a church “for being a good person,” my mom said. My dad said nothing. I said nothing. I stared at the medal.

  Later that day, in the basement, my mom told me Jeanne had died in a car accident when she was sixteen. I sat on the steps as my mom folded clothes and confided what she knew.

  Two other girls were in the car. The car could seat three people in front. Jeanne sat between the driver and the other passenger. The driver tried to pass a car, then hesitated and tried to pull back into her lane. She lost control and the car crashed. Jeanne was the only one who died.

  “Your father blames himself,” my mom said. “He can’t talk about it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He gave her permission to go out that night.”

  Jeanne had asked him if she could see a movie with her friends. He asked what her mother had said. “She said to ask you.” He said it was fine, she could see the movie. He had no idea his first wife had already said no. He and his first wife weren’t speaking.

  “Did you know his first wife?” I asked.

  “No, he was divorced long before I met him. All this happened in New York.”

  It happened near Newburgh, where he and his first family had lived. I knew only Ohio. In my mind all of New York was made of skyscrapers, taxicabs, and car accidents.

  “What did Jeanne look like?”

  My mom said she’d never seen a photo.

  •

  I painted portraits of Jeanne in watercolor. I titled them Jeanne. My art teacher told me she was disappointed that “such a good student could misspell her name.” From then on, I included an i.

  •

  “I wanted to tell you about Jeanne before that,” my mom says, after I ask why she told me when she did. “But your dad, he worried that you’d misinterpret his intentions. I told him, ‘She’s going to find out someday. Don’t you think it’s better she hear it from us?’”

  “Did Dad have any photos of Jeanne?”

  “No. He told me his ex-wife wouldn’t let him have any. But for some reason, she gave him the medal.”

  •

  Throughout my baby scrapbook, I’m referred to as “Barbara Jean,” “Jean,” “Jeanie,” and “Jeannie.” In one letter, my dad calls me “My Darling Daughter Barbara Jean.” In a letter to my mom, he calls me “Jeanie” and “Jeannie.” My parents had planned to name me Jeanne.

  “That or Jean Marie, actually,” my mom says. “Her given name was Jean Marie. She went by Jeanne. Your father simply saw the name as a sign of respect. He even spoke with a priest about our naming you after her, and the priest encouraged him to do so, provided he never compare you. ‘I would never do that,’ your father said.”

  But while my mom was asleep after having just given birth, he named me Barbara Jean, after my mom. When he told her what he’d done, she said, “That’s no name for a baby.” She thought Barbara was too old-fashioned. That, and two Barbaras in one house would be confusing.

  “When I told him I wasn’t calling you Barbara, he got this sad look on his face. He meant to do something sweet,” she says. “He always had good intentions.”

  Legally my name remained Barbara Jean, but my parents called me Jeannie. My dad added the i.

  “Just said he was adding an i,” my mom says. “He never explained it.”

  •

  I remember the spring day that I stood alone in the corner of the school playground, thinking about Jeanne. Cars passed by with their windows open. I often wondered if my dad thought about Jeanne every time he drove our car. A classmate, another second-grade girl, asked what I was doing.

  “My half sister died,” I told her.

  “I have a stepsister.”

  I tried to explain the difference between a half-sibling and a stepsibling.

  “We share the same dad,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you had a half sister.”

  “Four of them,” I said, or maybe I said “three.” I didn’t know if Jeanne counted, or if she counted more because she was dead.

  •

  I have no clear memory of learning about Jeanne’s sisters—Carol, Arlene, and Debbie—but I know my parents told me about them before I learned about Jeanne. Arlene is the only one I knew throughout my childhood. She lived in New York. She visited us four times in Ohio—five, if you count when our dad was dying.

  “Arlene is beautiful,” I told my mom after Arlene’s first visit.

  Arlene’s dark brown eyes matched her hair. Thick and wavy, it fell just past her shoulders. Later I’d show photographs of Arlene to boys I liked; I wanted them to think that I’d be beautiful someday, like her.

  “She was a model once,” my mom said. “I think she modeled wedding dresses for a catalogue.”

  Arlene often called, wrote letters. She mailed me unusual presents: hangers with illustrated wooden cat heads, vials of sand from Jerusalem, a pair of earrings that looked like pale orange pearls. She even trained her cockatiel to say “Happy birthday, Jeannie.” She sent a video of it. I wrote thank-you letters; they went through several drafts. I wanted my cursive to look perfect.

  Carol and Debbie I’d never seen, not even in photographs. Debbie was a hairdresser in New York, and Carol owned a candy shop in Rhode Island. Carol, the oldest, was my mom’s age. Beyond that, I knew nothing.

  Once, while my dad was on the downstairs rotary, I listened through the upstairs rotary. I was in the second grade and often eavesdropped. I could hear one of his daughters—not Arlene, I’d have recognized her voice—yelling. My dad mentioned me, and she yelled more. I quietly set the phone on my bedroom carpet. I could still hear her. When no more sound came from the receiver, I looked through the grate in my bedroom floor. My
dad was at the dining room table, his head in his hands.

  “They were mad your father had his first marriage annulled,” my mom explains. “It was after your First Communion. You asked him why he couldn’t take Communion with you. He said it was because he was divorced. It’s a man-made rule—that you can’t take Communion if you’ve been divorced. If you annul the marriage, the church basically says the marriage never existed. His daughters took it personally. He didn’t mean anything against them. He wasn’t disowning them. He did it for you.”

  •

  Jeanne would come between me and almost everything I did. I studied harder. I researched the lives of the saints and how I might model their behavior. I sat before my bedroom mirror with a notebook and documented my appearance and what exactly I needed to fix. I needed to be a smart, kind, beautiful daughter.

  I tried not to hear her name when he said my own.

  •

  I followed my parents to their graves. Rain made it difficult to find our way.

  “Where do I walk?” I asked, afraid of disrespecting the dead.

  My mom told me to follow her. We passed a smaller fenced-in area where fresh flowers and toys were at almost every grave.

  “The children’s cemetery,” she explained.

  My dad stood farther ahead of us, underneath a tree. He motioned us toward him.

  I looked down at two headstones printed with my parents’ names and birth years: “Terry J Vanasco, 1922,” and “Barbara J Vanasco, 1942.”

  “Where do I go?” I asked.

  “You might have a husband someday,” my mom said. “You’ll want to be buried next to him.”

  “But I want to be with you and Dad.”

  •

  I call my mom, ask if she remembers that day in the cemetery.

  “We took you to see the graves?”

  “That’s what I remember,” I say.

  DAD

  After Jeanne died, my dad bought burial plots for himself and his wife next to the plot for Jeanne. When he and his first wife divorced, she demanded that he forfeit his plot because she didn’t want him buried next to their daughter. He agreed. Soon after the divorce, he went to court again, this time for beating up “a bum” on the street.