The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  I insisted I stay. She insisted I leave. She called Amtrak. I would be leaving in just a few days.

  “It’s what your father wants,” she said.

  JEANNE

  When my dad was dying, did he see Jeanne?

  I remember thinking: Please let there be somewhere where she is, so that—if he has to die (but not now, please not now)—she can be there, too.

  Yet I don’t remember what I felt, or rather: there weren’t words for it. I experienced his dying how a child must experience a storm before knowing the vocabulary surrounding it—not just the word “storm” but “sky” and “lightning” and “thunder” and “rain” and whatever else. My dad’s dying was a terrifying experience, but “terrifying” is insufficient. The language of death (“illness,” “cancer,” “mortality”) does little to describe it, explain it, justify it, which is why I resort to metaphor.

  I remember standing outside the room where his body was failing, a scream locked inside me. I’d fallen down a cool black well—and no one was coming for me, because I wouldn’t make a sound.

  DAD

  My mom and I were in the room with him. She was holding his hand. He motioned me closer and said something.

  “What did you say, Dad?”

  His voice was almost gone. He repeated his words. I looked at my mom.

  “He said, ‘You’re beautiful,’” my mom told me.

  The last thing he said to my mom: “You’re my best friend.”

  For the next two days, my dad said nothing. I said everything I could. I made promises while his hospice nurses moved in and out.

  I taped photographs from my childhood along the silver rails of the bed: my dad reading a book to me despite the white patch over his eye; my dad pulling me in a wooden sled; my dad clutching me on his lap and looking off somewhere as if he knew this was coming.

  JEANNE

  A light lit up the window, and I heard a car park in our driveway. My boyfriend let himself into the house. He went to a college more than two hours away. I’d been a high school freshman when he was a high school senior. We shared almost no common interests. Each time I tried to break off our relationship, he reminded me that my dad liked him, and didn’t I want to be with someone my dad liked? I reasoned that I had to see my boyfriend only on weekends and summers. It sounds cold to say this: he hasn’t seemed relevant to the narrative until now.

  My boyfriend asked if I would have dinner with him. It was a Friday night. Saturday would be my last full day with my dad. I clenched my dad’s hand.

  “I want to be here,” I said.

  My boyfriend left the room and returned with my mom.

  “Go on,” she said. “Your father’s sleeping.”

  I put on my coat and followed my boyfriend to his car. He played with the radio as we drove up the main road in town.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Can you take me home?”

  He asked when I last ate. I asked him to stop fooling with the radio. He said I needed to eat.

  “My father is sick.”

  “That doesn’t mean you stop eating. Where do you want to go?”

  I said one restaurant. He insisted on another.

  “Then why did you even ask?” I said.

  “Are you wearing your seat belt?”

  I looked up at the yellow traffic light. I glanced in the side mirror. He braked. The small reflection of a car behind us grew and disappeared.

  I remember sirens next. Then two EMTs helping me out of my seat.

  “I shouldn’t have left him,” I said.

  “He’s standing right here,” an EMT replied, not understanding I meant my dad.

  The EMTs helped me into the ambulance. My boyfriend rode in the back and held my hand.

  “Jeanne died in a car accident,” I told him.

  “Her name is Jeannie,” he informed the EMTs.

  The EMTs assured me I’d be fine.

  “My father is dying, and I’m not with him.”

  MOM

  I didn’t want my parents to know I’d been in a car accident. I gave the nurses a fake phone number, and my boyfriend’s grandparents handled the paperwork.

  When I arrived home from the hospital a few hours later, my mom was on the floor next to his bed, tossing and turning and crying in her sleep. (He’d requested a bigger bed from hospice—“Where’s my wife going to sleep? You need to bring a bigger bed”—but my mom told him it’d be okay. Every night she pretended to sleep next to him until he fell asleep. Then she moved to the floor.) Gigi, twelve years old by then, slept underneath his bed. I went upstairs to my own, pulled my blankets over my head, and invented a story: the earth had swallowed our house, and now my parents, Gigi, and I lived together in an underground world.

  DAD

  The room was dark. It was the middle of the night. I told my dad I was leaving.

  “Mom says it’s what you want, and so it’s what I’m doing.”

  He said nothing, could say nothing. His voice was gone.

  I kissed his forehead. I told him what time my train would arrive in Chicago. I told him I’d be home the next weekend. I told him that I didn’t want to leave him, but that I was leaving for him.

  I promised I would write a book for him.

  MOM

  I loaded my suitcase into the car and tried to hold back tears. My mom drove. I didn’t say much. I didn’t know what to say. As we approached the train depot, she pointed to an old white-sided, two-story house. Its windows were boarded, and a TO BE CONDEMNED sign was posted on the front door. She let out a big sigh.

  “No real surprise. They never took care of nothing.”

  I understood then that she’d pointed to her parents’ home. I never could remember which one it was. I remembered a story she’d told me. Her mother had thrown a butcher knife at her when she was twelve. The knife just missed. My mom picked it up, threw it back at her, and ran. Another time her mother threw a metal rake at her. My mom still has a scar over her left eye. Her father was mostly gone.

  “Never should have had kids,” she said of her parents.

  My mom spent most of her childhood at her maternal great-grandmother’s house, also somewhere around the train depot.

  She pulled into the depot lot and parked.

  “I don’t want to leave,” I said.

  My mom stared ahead at the empty tracks.

  “Your father wants you back at school. I do, too. You’re so smart.”

  I looked back at her childhood home.

  “Sure don’t take after me,” she said.

  The train whistled from somewhere in the distance. I went outside toward the tracks. Its light appeared. When I turned around, my mom was at the nose of our car with my suitcase.

  “I love you,” she said, holding me tight.

  She was shaking.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “I’ll be home next weekend,” I said. “Remind Dad.”

  DAD

  On the train, I couldn’t sleep. No one sat next to me, probably because I was crying. I looked at photographs of my dad, and invented metaphors and similes in my journal: “The scratches in the train window look like overgrown weeds. Today is a locked window—no, a bombed-out landscape, an empty landscape. Today is dirt. Today is a broken glass floor. Today is a trapdoor I could fall through at any time.” The train ride took six hours, as expected. I left Chicago’s Union Station and hailed a cab back to campus rather than taking public transportation. My mom had insisted I do this.

  “My father drove a cab when he was young,” I told the driver. “In New York.”

  I spent the rest of the drive talking about my dad. I never mentioned he was dying.

  The driver parked in front of my dorm. I imagined my dad behind the wheel, and tipped the driver what must have been a generous amount. He thanked me twice.

  After I entered my dorm, I realized I’d forgotten the keys to both my hall door and room. I called my dorm phone from my cell, but my roommate didn�
�t answer. She must be at her boyfriend’s, I thought. So I called the resident assistant on duty. She asked for ten dollars to unlock my room, which was standard practice. I searched through my purse and realized I’d lost my wallet. I handed her the only money I had: seven dollars and some change out of my pocket.

  “I might have more in my room.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  I dropped my bags in the middle of my room and sat on the floor next to them, anxious about what to do next. It was a Sunday. I could go to the library, catch up on schoolwork, but I didn’t want to see anyone and I didn’t want to be seen. I called home, but no one answered. I called my boyfriend and told him I’d left my keys at home.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “You don’t have to drive them here. You can mail them.”

  “Your father died this morning.”

  How easily he said it.

  “Jeannie?”

  I curled up on my floor, hugged my knees, and screamed.

  EIGHT

  My mom recently gave me a piece of the library’s glass floor. I use it as a paperweight for recent drafts of The Glass Eye.

  The year before my dad died, the library was renovated. The glass floor was removed.

  The year my dad died, the floor was cut into three hundred rectangular pieces—just four inches by three inches each. There must have been floor left, but I don’t know what happened to it.

  The year after my dad died, the three hundred pieces were polished and sold to benefit the library.

  I spend my nights researching such things.

  MOM

  My dad died at the same time my train was pulling into Chicago’s Union Station. The detail seems symbolic. I call my mom, mention it.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “You were back at school, and I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, and I couldn’t drive to get you. I was a mess.”

  She called my then boyfriend.

  “I told him that I wanted you to hear it in person. He wasn’t supposed to tell you on the phone.”

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  My boyfriend and his grandparents picked me up at my dorm in the early afternoon.

  I sat in the backseat with my boyfriend. His grandfather drove. His grandmother tried to make conversation.

  “The drive,” she said, “was no big deal. Just six hours.”

  My dad died six hours after I left him.

  I couldn’t follow the rest of what she said. My thoughts moved so fast they seemed motionless: I left, his left eye, I left his left eye, he is not his glass eye, it was not even glass, the i left him.

  MOM

  The thick stench of my dad’s cologne filled the house. My mom came to the door and hugged me.

  “Be careful of glass,” she said and began to pace. “I think I cleaned up most of it.”

  She’d smashed his bottles of cologne and aftershave. I imagined pieces of his glass eye everywhere. It wasn’t even made of glass; I knew this.

  “I didn’t want anyone else to have it,” she explained.

  I looked inside the living room. The bed was empty. When I turned around, I noticed she was wearing one of his shirts.

  “I told him I was going upstairs. I went upstairs to change the sheets on your bed. When I came back down—”

  DAD

  My first night home, I kept knocking on the wall.

  “Come on, Dad,” I kept saying.

  His doctors often told me when I was a girl, “You keep him young.” So it stands to reason, if I’d spent more time with him in high school, he wouldn’t have died—at least not when he did. He would’ve lived longer. He’d still be alive.

  Come on, Dad.

  MOM

  The next morning, the funeral director came to our house. It still reeked of my dad’s cologne. The director pretended not to notice. He sat between my mom and me on our couch, paging through a catalogue of caskets. Several featured “airtight” locks.

  “I don’t know,” my mom said, staring blankly at the catalogue.

  Gigi walked into the room, left the room, returned. She looked lost. At night she’d dig at the carpet where my dad’s bed had been.

  “Your dog looks rather old,” the funeral director said.

  “My husband loved that dog.”

  “You know, we often bury people with their pets,” he said.

  “I couldn’t,” my mom said, looking at me.

  She left the room. I remembered something she once told me about my dad; he’d been so devastated by Jeanne’s death that his brother, Frank, had to pick out the flowers and casket.

  “The bare minimum,” I said. “My father would want the bare minimum.”

  “I’m only showing you the options.”

  My mom returned. She told the funeral director she would like to begin paying for her funeral.

  “This way,” she said, “it will make things easier on my daughter here.”

  •

  I needed a dress for the funeral.

  My mom drove me to a department store where before us shirts, suits, slacks, and ties hung from floor to ceiling. I imagined buying these clothes and replacing them with those in his closet. My mom would no longer wear his shirts and not know that she had, in some small way, moved on.

  We found our way to the dresses and combed through everything black, feeling the fabric on the round racks but never settling. A saleswoman showed me a short black dress, its straps flirtatiously thin and off the shoulder. I wanted my mom to say: My daughter wants a longer dress, something no higher than the knee, preferably the shin.

  “Her father died,” she said.

  After finding a long-sleeved, modest black dress, we drove home.

  On the way there, my mom told me what she wanted to wear to her own funeral: the beige dress she married my dad in.

  “You’ll find it in the garage,” she said, “in the back closet.”

  She pulled into our driveway and I ran into the house. Later I found her in the garage, rearranging clothes hanging from a metal rod. A brown vinyl shower curtain protected them from dust.

  “Here it is,” she said. “This is the dress.”

  •

  Of course it was hard for my mom. She lost the man she loved.

  Sometimes I forget my given name: Barbara, from the Greek barbaros, meaning “foreign” or “strange,” “traveler from a foreign land.”

  My birth certificate, my high school and university diplomas, my lease, the labels on my prescription drugs—I feel as if they belong to someone else.

  Sometimes I forget I share a name with my mom.

  We share so few qualities. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. I have brown hair and brown eyes.

  “You’re just like your father,” she says. “You’re a perfectionist, like him. He’d get all worked up over nothing.”

  She knows how to relax, couldn’t care less about what others think.

  She tells me a story. After she and my dad married, he moved into the small saltbox house where she lived, the house where they’d raise me. One morning, my dad woke early and rearranged all the canned goods in the pantry. He put the soups with the soups, the beans with the beans, and so on.

  “I think he even alphabetized them,” my mom says.

  Then he went outside to the garage, and my mom—just to tease him—took them out of order.

  “He was so upset at first,” my mom says. “I told him, ‘What’s the big deal? Does it really matter?’ And he said, ‘You’re right. I guess not.’

  “You know,” she continues, “he hadn’t worn a pair of jeans in his life until he married me. Almost sixty years and not one pair of jeans. He was always dressed classy. I remember this one night we were out dancing. We went out dancing every Friday before you were born. His legs were better then. He was an excellent dancer. People would stop and watch us. Anyway, we were dancing and I started laughing. He said, ‘What’s so funny?’ I pointed out that he had one navy blue shoe on a
nd one black shoe. Well, that was that. We had to drive home so he could change.”

  DAD

  He was in his casket, looking like no one I knew. I’d been carrying his glasses with me. I slid them on his face.

  “That looks more like him,” my mom said.

  But that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted him to see me.

  “Would you like to keep your father’s glass eye?” the funeral director asked.

  I looked at my dad, his eyes glued shut.

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

  MOM

  As we sat in the front row before my dad’s body, she stood and threw herself over the casket.

  Someone pulled her back.

  And when she sat next to me, I held her shaking hand.

  And when the priest asked if anyone had any words to say, I said nothing. No one said anything.

  Only a handful of people were in the room.

  Two of the pallbearers were strangers.

  My dad hadn’t wanted a funeral, but the priest had told my mom that I deserved to see my dad one last time. She invited almost no one. His other daughters decided not to come.

  The ceremony was for me.

  “That’s not your father in there,” she said as the polished hearse doors closed.

  It was a body, its eyes glued shut.

  I’d never see them again.

  DAD

  Where did the men take him?

  I was told the hard November ground needed to break before they could bury my dad.

  So where was he?

  PART TWO

  NINE

  After my dad died, time rearranged itself. I understood it only in relation to his death.

  The Memory Game might be the solution, the overarching metaphor for the book. The Memory Game can hold the eye. But he’s not his eye.

  So is this the plot? Is the narrative present the arc that contains the plot? And then the past just sits there? Or am I supposed to find an arc within the past? My dad’s dying, should that be in the present tense—as a means of indicating he’s always dying? But what’s the intention there?