The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  On the next letter, he’d sketched a portrait of me as a baby in a high chair crying, “I want my Daddy!”

  I closed the album.

  I went outside to find my mom. She was in the garage, in the back corner by the dollhouse that he’d built.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “It’s okay. It’s not easy with him gone.”

  Inside the dollhouse were old unmarked VHS tapes, marbles, children’s books. It hadn’t been moved in probably twenty years. He’d made this dollhouse for me, but in some way it had also been for himself—proof that he could make something despite his eye, proof that he loved me.

  “After I finish a book for Dad, I’m going to write a book for you.”

  “Don’t do things for us,” she said. “Do them for yourself.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  For more than a decade I’ve used this book as an excuse to hold on to someone who can no longer be held. I’ve spent more time on the dead than the living.

  My dad would not have wanted this.

  “My dad would not have wanted . . .”

  “He would have wanted . . .”

  What do I want?

  I want to stop missing him so much.

  I want to stop writing this book.

  I used Jeanne as a metaphor—as a means to understand my dad’s grief, as a means to understand who he was, as a means to understand how I should grieve.

  I don’t know how to grieve.

  Jeanne was a real girl.

  I wanted to show why I loved him. I wanted to show how great he was. Yet how could I write a book about my dad, as private as he was?

  “The less people know, the better,” he often said, “It’s nobody’s business,” “You can’t trust nobody.”

  So I revealed more than I wanted to reveal about myself—as if losing my mind after he died proved how great he was.

  “You can’t call me perfect,” he often said. “Nobody’s perfect,” “You have to let yourself make mistakes,” “You’re perfect,” “I’m proud of you no matter what.”

  No matter what?

  I left, and he died.

  Did I think a book would bring him back?

  And what did I expect to do with it anyway? Sit at his grave and read it to the dirt?

  “I can’t kill myself,” I told myself every time I wanted to kill myself. “I haven’t finished a book for my dad.”

  I’ve since found in old journals different versions of my promise: “I’m going to write a book for you, so everyone knows how much I love you.” “I’m going to write a book for you, so everyone knows how great you are.”

  Which is it then? Did I promise to prove his greatness? Did I promise to prove my love?

  What were the last words he heard me say?

  “Dad” was my first word.

  JEANNE

  A few months later I was in McCarren Park with my friend Stephanie. The park separates our two neighborhoods.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever finish the book,” I told her.

  “But you have,” she said. “I read it.”

  “No, that doesn’t count.”

  “Why?”

  “My professor said readers of memoir need to know that you—the writer—are okay by the end. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay. I’ll always miss my dad. I still cry about him, and he died more than a decade ago.”

  “Wait—Jeannie, do you see that?”

  “What?”

  “That guy, he’s wearing a shirt that says ‘Jeannie’ on it—spelled how you spell it.”

  “Oh, weird.”

  “I wonder what it’s about,” Stephanie said. “There’s a picture of a woman on the shirt.”

  We continued walking. I told her that I’d decided to return to the memoir MFA program, after taking a break because of the hospitalizations.

  “Turns out,” I mentioned, “one of my future classmates is named Jeanne. Well, I don’t know if she pronounces it Jean or Jeannie. I hope it won’t be weird for her to be in class with me—given what I’m writing about.”

  “Weird for her?” Stephanie asked.

  “I’m fine with it,” I told her. “It’s not weird for me.”

  We reached Stephanie’s apartment, and she invited me upstairs.

  “No, I should get home. I have so much writing left to do.”

  As I made my way home, I passed a circle of people wearing shirts that read “Jeannie.” They were holding balloons.

  “One!” they shouted. “Two! Three! Jeannie!”

  They let the balloons go and started singing “Happy Birthday.” On their shirts was a picture of a young woman. Years were listed underneath it. A dash separated the years. Some of the people were crying.

  •

  Chris was home early from work. We fixed dinner together, took a walk. He suggested the park.

  “There was a birthday party here today,” I told him, “apparently for a dead girl named Jeannie—spelled the same as my name. A bunch of people wore shirts that said ‘Jeannie.’”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Her picture was on the shirts. She looked young, in her twenties maybe. And when I passed the people, they all shouted, ‘One, two, three, Jeannie,’ then let go of balloons and sang ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  “That’s so strange. Are you going to write about it?” he asked.

  HOME

  The dollhouse my dad made needs repainting. The windows need new screens. The wallpaper could be replaced. The carpeting should be cleaned. The roof has started to fade.

  I try to remember how we arranged the rooms. The staircase always stayed where it was, underneath a hole between the first and second floors. The kitchen went on the first floor because that’s where my dad installed the linoleum. The second and third floors he carpeted.

  “Where should the living room go?” I asked him.

  “If we put an area rug on the first floor,” he told me, “the living room could go off the kitchen.”

  So he made an area rug. The second floor became the daughter’s bedroom. The top floor is where her parents slept. But usually the parents and the daughter stayed together on the first floor.

  Lifting off the roof revealed the attic where the daughter stored her toys, but I pretended she was too mature for those.

  The dollhouse was about pretending.

  This book is about pretending.

  I pretended he watched me write it.

  I’m pretending he’ll someday read it.

  •

  A couple years later, just as I’m finishing this book, a job brings me to Baltimore. I’ve been hired to teach college students how to write about their lives. Chris moves with me, and we rent an uneven row house with two floors, front and back porches, a basement, a dining room. Even a yard. Most importantly, each of us has our own office. Sure, our desk chairs roll to the left if left alone. I block mine with a bookend shaped like a monkey. Chris uses a thick green shag rug to park his chair. We slip ceramic coasters underneath one side of the cat tree. We feel lucky.

  •

  Surrounded by stacks of flap-lock moving boxes, I want to finish unpacking but Chris insists we take a break.

  “We’ve already been here two weeks,” I tell him.

  “We’ve only been here two weeks,” he says. “Let’s get some food.”

  We walk to the organic grocery store across the street. We put frivolous things in our cart: kalamata olive hummus, chips made of lentils, kombucha. We don’t feel brave enough to try the honey-mustard dried crickets.

  “We’re ridiculous,” I tell him as we get in the checkout line.

  A sign lists the products the store refuses to sell. My favorite sriracha is banned. Something about a preservative. It’s that sort of neighborhood: record stores, bookstores, cafés, a curiosity shop that sells small raccoon-skull planters and century-old morphine prescriptions.

  “I have an idea,” I tell him while we wait in line. “What if we buy a duplex, or some house b
roken into two apartments? I could use the money my parents saved for me for college. It’d cover a down payment—probably not in this neighborhood, but that’s ok. My mom could live in the house with us, but she’d have a separate entrance, her own space. It’s the only way she can afford to move here. If I frame it as an investment for me, then she might go for it.”

  “It’d be nice to have your mom close,” he says.

  “She’d be really close.”

  “I love your mom,” he says. “Of course I’m ok with it.”

  •

  Inside one of the moving boxes marked SENTIMENTAL is a wood box my dad made. It holds our Cedar Point season passes from the 1980s and ’90s. There’s also a newsletter from Providence Hospital, dated the year I was born. It reads: “CONGRATULATIONS TO TERRY VANASCO, head painter of the maintenance department, our EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH.” I also find a card I made for him when I was a child. I used blue checkered wallpaper for the front and back. I drew a brown tree and a yellow sun. On one of the branches I wrote: “Happy Father’s Day!!” The message inside: “Dear Dad, I love you and want to thank you for everything you have done for me.” The wallpaper is the same wallpaper he used for the dollhouse kitchen.

  I open another box, this one full of Chris’s family photos. I get his toolbox. I need nails.

  While Chris is out running errands, I hang our family photos on the wall along the stairs. After hanging a few, I stand back. They’re uneven, but I know Chris won’t mind.

  When he comes home, he helps me finish.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Masie Cochran, my editor, is the reason The Glass Eye finally exists. I would still be manically revising my manuscript if not for her enthusiasm, questions, instincts, trust, and brilliance. Diane Chonette, the Tin House art director, made my memoir look beautiful, inside and out. I hope people judge my book by its cover. Tremendous gratitude as well to Nanci McCloskey, Sabrina Wise, and the whole phenomenal team at Tin House. Also, special thanks to Anne Horowitz and Allison Dubinsky, whose thorough copyediting and proofreading revealed mistakes and new meanings. And gratitude to Victoria Marini, my agent, for leading The Glass Eye to Tin House.

  Portions of The Glass Eye have appeared in another form in the Believer. Without the Believer, my personal writing might never have found readers beyond professors, classmates, and friends. The magazine’s editors, past and present—especially Karolina Waclawiak, Andi Winnette, Hayden Bennett, and Ed Park—possess supernatural powers with words.

  Alexandra Styron’s tireless dedication, generosity, and Job-level patience—long after I graduated from Hunter—will never be forgotten. Kathryn Harrison, Meena Alexander, Louise DeSalvo, and my genius Hunter comrades and friends—Molly Englund, Kate Neuman, Alice Neiley, Jeanne Hodesh, and Amy Jo Burns—gave crucial feedback and reassurance. Hunter College and New York University’s MFA writing programs offered time and support, and Poets House gave me a quiet place to write.

  I am forever deeply indebted to Meaghan Winter, Stephanie Palumbo, and Anita Anburajan. They read countless drafts over several years, and I never had to ask. I also want to acknowledge Stephanie’s grandmother, Erna Trocola. Her stories are inspiring and important, and I hope Stephanie keeps telling them.

  Special thanks to Sally Leaf, Leigh-Anne Goins, Jenna Kahn, Adam Germinsky, Courtney Allison, Rachel Riederer, Kevin Mulligan, Loren Lynch, and Madeleine Kuhns for listening to me talk about the book.

  Genie Abrams and Bette Jefferson helped with difficult research, and I am deeply grateful to them.

  My Northwestern professors—especially John Keene, Mary Kinzie, Reg Gibbons, Brian Bouldrey, and Robyn Schiff—taught me how to construct emotions with words. They made writing possible.

  For sharing their poems, stories, and essays with me, tremendous gratitude to all my students.

  And finally, my family—those I included and those I didn’t.

  Chris’s love has given me a happy ending, and my love for him will never end. He has improved my life in ways too profound to describe.

  My love for my mom is indescribable and unquantifiable. She insisted that I write anything I wanted, or anything the book needed. I could not have written this without her encouragement, understanding, and love. Every day I feel like the most loved daughter in the world.

  I did this for my dad—even though he will never know. He always kept his word. I tried to keep mine.

  PRAISE FOR The Glass Eye

  “Every memoir is a reckoning with the past, but only the most skilled and courageous memoirist can simultaneously inhabit the story that haunts her and the story of her reckoning with equal urgency. In The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco shows us why rules should be broken: because an elegy that pulses with immediacy, a fragment that is inextricable from a whole, a book that comments on its own writing can smash what you think you know into pieces, and expose a piece of truth so bright it might be your own broken heart, handed back to you.”

  —MELISSA FEBOS, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

  “Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is memoir as it ought to be, but so rarely is: beautiful and painfully raw, but also restrained and lyrical. Vanasco is brilliant, and this book proves it.”

  —DARIN STRAUSS, author of Half a Life

  “One month after going away to college, Jeannie Vanasco learned that her father had died, and with him his unconditional and sometimes all-consuming love for her. In The Glass Eye the writer asks, in prose that mesmerizes with geometric precision, how we can orient ourselves to the world when our only compass is grief. What begins as an experience of profound loss becomes an obsession, the fierce intensity of which propels readers through this breathtaking book.”

  —LACY M. JOHNSON, author of The Other Side

  “I loved every word of The Glass Eye. It’s a story about stories, a story about the impossibility of ever telling the whole story. It’s a detective story that interprets itself as it goes, raising the stakes and thickening the plot. It’s also a love story, a ghost story, a story about the most important man who ever lived: the narrator’s dad. Her literal reason for being. But it’s also a story that I can’t help but feel was written just for me.”

  —DANIEL RAEBURN, author of Vessels: A Memoir

  “With The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco has produced a debut of incisive vision. In prose as vivid as a novel and as chiseled as poetry,Vanasco shows the reader that memoir can entail an unexpected, ultimately liberating reckoning. Delving into her family’s traumatic and moving history, Vanasco unearths the true story of her late namesake, Jeanne, her father’s enduring sorrows, and how both have informed her own often difficult personal journey.”

  —JOHN KEENE, author of Counternarratives

  “The death of a parent is a stunning experience, and can upend even the most grounded soul. But what happens when the bereaved is already teetering on loose pins? How does a sensitive young writer make sense of life without a father to whom she was fiercely devoted? She writes him a book. In The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco remembers her father with great affection while turning an unflinching gaze on the insupportable grief that visits her upon his death. The book is a fascinating meditation on loss, and an enduring monument to what remains. Wise, brave, and beautifully wrought, The Glass Eye signals the arrival of an exceptionally fine new voice.”

  —ALEXANDRA STYRON, author of Reading My Father

  © THERESA KEIL

  JEANNIE VANASCO has written for the Believer, Little Star Journal, NewYorker.com, the Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she now lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University.

  Copyright © 2017 Jeannie Vanasco

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin
House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN: 978-1-941040-77-5 (trade paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-941040-78-2 (ebook)

  First US Edition 2017

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com