The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  “I tried to go,” Verna said, “but the funeral was mobbed. I couldn’t get in. The whole church was packed.”

  My chest tightened. I thought: I shouldn’t be upset about Jeanne’s death. Jeanne wasn’t my sister to grieve.

  “Did you hear anything about my father’s reaction to Jeanne’s death?” I asked.

  “I remember knowing that he took it very badly. Now how I knew that, I don’t know. But you know how everyone talks to everyone.”

  “Do you remember my father very well?”

  “I remember him with white hair and glasses. Just vaguely. I met him only once. It was after some political dinner. A friend asked me, ‘Can you give my friend Terry a ride home?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ At the time he lived in New Windsor, in a pretty little section across from Calvary Cemetery. I knew he had taken the death badly. That’s why I didn’t go into too much detail in the car that night. I said I liked Jeanne and what a shame it was. He said, ‘Nothing has been the same since.’ I only met him that once. Two years had passed since Jeanne died, maybe longer. I remember he seemed very sad.”

  DAD

  “My dad moved to a house across from the cemetery where Jeanne was buried”; I wrote that sentence over and over in my journal the night after I learned of his move.

  “There’s nothing worse than outliving your child,” my mom says on the phone. “I can’t even imagine. That’s the sort of thing that’ll drive you mad.”

  Did my dad stand in his front yard staring at the cemetery gates, thinking of Jeanne, thinking of his body in the ground next to hers?

  But he lost his cemetery plot in his divorce.

  Do I regret never having contacted his first wife? No. Do I hate her for blaming my dad for what wasn’t his fault? No. What we say and do in grief is inexplicable.

  “She also lost a daughter,” I tell my mom.

  “That’s true. When your father died, I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  JEANNE

  I stood with Genie outside the house where my dad and his first family had lived.

  Building permits were taped to the front windows. The third floor’s pale gray exterior clashed with the dirty yellow of the house’s lower half.

  “It’s huge,” Genie said.

  I photographed the beige picket fence. I photographed the rosebush. I photographed the exposed brick pieces of the mostly paved street. I photographed the windblown leaves scattered along the side yard. The street where we stood sloped down toward the Hudson River. Telephone wires cut across the backdrop of what looked to be ashen hills. I was photographing the backyard when a man rolled down his car window and said, “Can I help you?”

  “This used to be her father’s house,” Genie said.

  “In the 1950s,” I explained.

  “Come in for a tour,” he said, and we followed him inside to the living room.

  “You’re standing where the old staircase began,” the owner told me.

  “What?”

  “The original staircase,” he said. “I moved it.”

  Jeanne had climbed the staircase to ask my dad—our dad—if she could go to the movies with her friends. I remembered my mom telling me that he’d lived on the top floor while his first wife and daughters had lived on the first floor.

  The owner explained that the original staircase required you to ascend and descend in circles.

  “Not a spiral staircase,” he clarified. “It had hard angles.”

  He pointed at the new staircase.

  I began to climb it.

  I asked if the window had been there in 1961.

  “The same window,” he said.

  It overlooked a string of houses. Was Jeanne a girl distracted by windows?

  “Could you have looked out this window from the old staircase?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  Did Jeanne pass the view and look? Not look?

  I returned to the ghost of the staircase and tried not to look upset.

  •

  “How about we hit the cemetery?” Genie said.

  “Sounds good,” I said, staring out the car window at dilapidated houses set against a cloudless blue sky.

  Genie told me about her town, something about the New York Yankees sending their laundry to Newburgh, something about White House dinner invitations, the Italian mafia. I tried to pay attention, but all I could think about was my resemblance to Jeanne. Did my dad see it?

  “Here’s where your father would have lived after Jeanne’s death,” Genie said, “right here across from the cemetery.”

  We pulled into the cemetery’s drive and parked in section M. We split apart to search for the grave. I wanted to find it first.

  Gravestones marched toward me from the horizon. I looked back at Genie. I had turned the search into an empty competition. What did it matter if I found it first? Jeanne, to me, was a concept. The real pull of her was my dad. I was trying to find my way back to him, I knew that. I walked through row after row, occasionally glancing back at Genie.

  And then I found it: there, on the gray granite headstone, was an engraved image of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin’s eyes looked down toward Jeanne’s name, almost obscured by leaves.

  But Jeanne was more than a name. She was a person, had been a person. She’d spent my whole life there, in the earth.

  The shadow of two black maple trunks cut across the empty patch of land where my dad once planned to be buried.

  I forgot to bring flowers.

  The sun was too bright.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the ground.

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  The next morning, I boarded the train back to New York City. I sat by a window, pulled out my notebook, and stared at a blank sheet of paper. I needed to make sense of the burial plot. I didn’t know where to start.

  The conductor asked for my ticket. I fumbled through my purse.

  “Take your time,” the conductor said.

  The voice interrupted: You’re a failure, and another voice added, You should die, and then together they repeated their words. Their whispers overlapped.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  You lost the ticket, a voice said.

  I lost my mind, I thought.

  I apologized again and smiled.

  “You have a beautiful smile,” he said.

  And then I remembered my mom telling me: “Your father said she was always smiling.”

  “Found it,” I said, handing my ticket to the conductor.

  He laughed.

  “I want you to do something for me,” he said. “I want you to relax.”

  •

  “What are you doing?” Chris asked.

  Surrounded by binders, color-coded folders, paper, highlighters, glue sticks, and pens, I was sitting on the floor, cutting out individual sentences from my manuscript. A week had passed since my visit to Newburgh.

  “I’m gluing each sentence on its own piece of paper,” I explained to Chris, “and then I’m freewriting based on that sentence as a way to deepen my work.”

  Each sentence about my dad brought memories with it, as if a roof had collapsed and I was trying to dig my way out.

  I started shaking.

  “I feel possessed,” I said.

  Chris tried to hug me. I shrugged him off.

  “Jeannie’s going to die,” I said. “Jeanne’s dead.”

  “What?”

  •

  “I keep losing control of my voice,” I told my therapist. Two weeks had passed since my visit to Newburgh. “I keep saying ‘Jeannie’s going to die.’”

  “Are you hearing voices?” he asked. “You can tell me.”

  “I don’t have schizophrenia.”

  “Don’t get hung up on names,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Let me call the hospital for you. You need the hospital. I spoke with your psychiatrist, and she agrees.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “I think
—”

  “I’ll think about it,” I insisted.

  JEANNE

  That evening I called my mom and asked her about Jeanne, if my dad had ever said anything more about her.

  “When you were a little girl just learning to walk,” she said, “our neighbor Sheila calls me at the hospital. I was still working there in medical records. Your father was at home with you. ‘Barbara,’ Sheila says. ‘You better get home. Terry is pacing around the backyard, weeping and holding Jeannie. He won’t put her down.’ So I went home and gently asked your dad what was happening. ‘It’s just a hard day,’ he said. That was in April or May. I took that to mean it was Jeanne’s birthday. He was crying. You kept crying, but he refused to put you down. He was terrified you would hurt yourself.”

  After we hung up, I told Chris that I needed the hospital. I told him I liked the one in Westchester—the same hospital where I was taken three years ago after seeing Jeanne’s photograph for the first time. I didn’t make the connection aloud, but I thought it.

  “It’s a clean hospital. It’s organized. It won’t be convenient to visit,” I told him, “but you don’t have to visit.”

  “You know I’ll visit.”

  “I won’t be there for that long.”

  “Do you want me to take you?”

  “I want to handle all this myself. It will make me feel sane.”

  I called the hospital, asked if they had any beds available in the ward for mood and personality disorders.

  “Are you calling for yourself or someone else?” the receptionist asked.

  “Myself, I guess.”

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  The ward looked as I remembered it. The first long white hallway stopped at the nurses’ station. Patients could turn right into the activities room or left into the second hallway. Patients couldn’t enter the nurses’ station. A nurse told me to sit outside the activities room while the staff searched my bags. A big whiteboard with the day’s schedule—heavy on group therapy and name-your-emotion management (anger management, anxiety management, depression management, stress management)—and weather forecast (fifty-three degrees) faced me.

  Last night, when I made the decision to admit myself, the hospital seemed purely abstract, but as I played with my hospital wristband and looked around, I registered the locked windows and locked doors. Tell the doctors you made a mistake, I thought. Explain the trip to Jeanne’s grave, how any healthy person would have responded in the same way. The wristband, I noticed, listed me as Barbara.

  “Okay, Barbara,” the nurse said, handing me back my bag.

  I opened it.

  “Where are my pens?” I said. “I need pens.”

  I tried explaining to her why I needed pens, that I was here because I couldn’t write and that without my pens I definitely couldn’t write.

  “You can have pencils,” she interrupted.

  “I don’t have pencils.”

  She disappeared into the nurses’ station and returned with two pencils.

  “If you need more,” she said, “just come find me.”

  I went into the activities room. The bookcase full of novels and old encyclopedias hadn’t moved since my last stay, nor had the long table in the far corner where arts-and-crafts time was held on weekends. Two patients sat there piecing together a thousand-piece puzzle. They each had a hard, determined look.

  I sat at the window near a stack of board games. I burst out laughing at their titles.

  “Listen to this,” I announced, and proceeded to read them aloud: “Guess Who? Fact or Crap: It’s Your Call! Would You Rather? Taboo. Trouble. And, best of all,” I said, “Guess Where?”

  “You don’t look like you belong here,” one of the puzzle players said.

  “But you sound like it,” the other player said.

  Then I went to the bookcase: Whispers and Lies, Fragile, The Geometry of Sisters, The Good Mother.

  My mom. I was afraid to tell her where I was.

  EIGHTEEN

  If I fail to bring my dad to life as a fully formed, unique character, my grief and his amount to nothing more than generic loss. Maybe I have a story filled with so much confusion and silence that it’s impossible to render coherently.

  When I stop writing, the anxiety returns. The calmness of writing comes from giving shape to experience. For example, when I describe my racing thoughts as “a flock of birds scattering from a field,” I hopefully am describing racing thoughts in a way that no one else has.

  Now I see a sequence of images—the playhouse he built in our backyard, the birdhouses he made for our backyard, the dollhouses that he made to look like our house. He never felt at home, he said, not until Ohio. He wanted to be buried in our backyard.

  But my childhood house is no complete house; it’s all broken up inside me: here the back porch, here the metal grate in my bedroom floor, here the wall between our bedrooms—each preserved, as a fragment, by itself.

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  “Is Barbara here?” a doctor asked those of us in the activities room.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  It was my second day in the hospital. I followed the doctor into the dining room and sat at a round table across from my “treatment team.” The team consisted of my psychiatrist, my social worker, and two residents. My psychiatrist was the same psychiatrist I was assigned three years ago, the one who’d said: “You’re a risk-taker, Barbara, and I can see you’ll always be a risk-taker. You’re not going to change.”

  This time, I asked to be called Jeannie.

  “Why Jeannie?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “I’ve always been called Jeannie. Spelled J-E-A-N-N-I-E.”

  I proceeded to explain that my parents had planned to name me Jeanne after a dead half sister.

  “Without an i,” I said.

  I began to tell my treatment team about my recent visit to Jeanne’s hometown.

  “I stayed with a woman named Genie. G-E-N-I-E.”

  “You’re manic,” the psychiatrist alleged in a calm, impersonal tone.

  “But my father died ten years ago. And he named me—”

  “Your speech is pressured,” he said.

  “Of course my speech is pressured. I’m trying to condense my life into ten minutes.”

  I tried to tell him about my recent visit to my dad and Jeanne’s hometown. I tried to explain why the trip overwhelmed me.

  “Can you hear yourself?” he asked.

  I thought: I here’d myself, I can leave.

  MOM

  Chris visited. We sat on a couch outside my room at the end of a long hall.

  “Your mom called,” he said. “I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.”

  She and I talked on the phone almost every day, but the past month my calls home had been scattered.

  “I worry about her worrying,” I said.

  “She can call me for support,” he said, handing me his phone. “Please call her.”

  “We’re not allowed to use cell phones,” I said.

  “No one’s looking,” he said. “Call her. Please. She’s your mom.”

  I clicked “talk.” It rang once.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “I’ve been so worried,” she said.

  “Everything is fine. Just having problems with my phone. I’m using Chris’s cell.”

  Chris looked away.

  “I’ve been so worried,” she repeated.

  “I’m fine. I promise.”

  A patient interrupted. He was new. He looked professorial.

  “My name is John,” he said. “My birth certificate is wrong.”

  “What’s that?” my mom asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m outside on our stoop. It’s just people walking by.”

  “Maybe they burned out my eyes,” John said. “How could I have known? I was so young.”

  JEANNE

  The hospital chaplain spoke with us about Jacob from the Bible. I had trouble focusing until she mentioned
Jacob’s renaming.

  “And from then on he was Israel, literally ‘he who struggles with God.’ Can you think of an experience from your own life similar to Jacob’s?”

  I raised my hand.

  “I was renamed,” I said, and then I tried to explain the story behind my name. “And I recently visited Jeanne’s grave.”

  “How did you feel after seeing her grave?” the chaplain asked.

  “Pity for my father.”

  “But how did you feel? Sad, confused?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Someone else raised his hand. He said that five years ago, his older brother had died. His brother was eighteen, driving at night. There was a deer on an icy road. His brother swerved off the road and slammed into a tree.

  “He didn’t want to kill the deer,” the patient said. “He was that kind of person.”

  The patient said that he filtered his life through his dead brother. “I devised a window system,” he said, but became overwhelmed trying to explain. “I’m sorry. I’m not too good at finishing sentences.”

  After group, he and I talked. I asked him his age.

  “Eighteen,” he said as he looked out a locked window.

  His brother was eighteen when he died.

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  I described few scenes in my journal from those few weeks in the hospital. I mostly charted my moods, temperature, and blood pressure. Writing felt harder than usual.

  I made an erasure poem out of a newspaper, blacking out certain words. The ones left behind became the poem, but I don’t remember what the poem said (I think there were “islands” and “desks”). Later my doctor asked if I thought the newspaper contained hidden messages for me to decode. A nurse must have found my poem, or maybe she just saw me blacking out words from the newspaper. In the context of a psychiatric hospital, any behavior can become a symptom.

  MOM

  For a decade I’d avoided, or tried to avoid, revealing my grief to my mom. With her grief, I didn’t think there was any room for mine. So I forget exactly why I called her from the hospital phone. Chris had asked me to call her. My doctor had asked me to call her. But I’d been advised to call her during other hospitalizations. So I don’t think it was being told to call her that made me dial her number. I’d appear, appropriately, as “caller unknown.”