The doctor prepares to look at my eyes through a machine. I put my forehead and chin against the metal bands and look into the tiny ring of blue light while the doctor dabs quickly at my eye with something, but my head starts to feel numb, and I have to lift it back. “Sorry,” I say. I shake my head and put it back against the metal. Then I stare into the blue light and try to hold my head still and to convince myself that there is no needle coming toward my eye, that my eye is not anesthetized.
“Breathe,” Dr. Wald says. “Breathe.” But my head always goes numb again, and I pull away, and Dr. Wald has to wait for me to resettle myself against the machine. “Nervous today, Laurel?” he asks, not interested.
One Saturday after I had started going to Dr. Wald, Maureen and I walked around outside our old school. We dangled on the little swings with our knees bunched while the dry leaves blew around us, and Maureen told me she was sleeping with Kevin. Kevin is a sophomore, and to me he had seemed much older than we were when we’d begun high school in September. “What is it like?” I asked.
“Fine.” Maureen shrugged. “Who do you like these days, anyhow? I notice you haven’t been talking much about Dougie.”
“No one,” I said. Maureen stopped her swing and looked at me with one eyebrow raised, so I told her—although I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth—that I’d met someone in the city.
“In the city?” she said. Naturally she was annoyed. “How did you get to meet someone in the city?”
It was just by accident, I told her, because of going to the eye doctor, and anyway it was not some big thing. That was what I told Maureen, but I remembered the first time I had seen Chris as surely as if it were a stone I could hold in my hand.
It was right after my first appointment with Dr. Wald. I had taken the train into the city after school, and when the doctor was finished with me I was supposed to take a taxi to my sister Penelope’s dancing school, which was on the east side of the Park, and do homework there until Penelope’s class was over and Mother picked us up. Friends of my parents ask me if I want to be a dancer, too, but they are being polite.
Across the street from the doctor’s office, I saw a place called Jake’s. I stared through the window at the long shining bar and mirrors and round tables, and it seemed to me I would never be inside a place like that, but then I thought how much I hated sitting outside Penelope’s class and how much I hated the doctor’s office, and I opened the door and walked right in.
I sat down at a table near the wall, and I ordered a Coke. I looked around at all the people with their glasses of colored liquids, and I thought how happy they were—vivid and free and sort of the same, as if they were playing.
I watched the bartender as he gestured and talked. He was really putting on a show telling a story to some people I could only see from the back. There was a man with shiny, straight hair that shifted like a curtain when he laughed, and a man with curly blond hair, and between them a girl in a fluffy sweater. The men—or boys (I couldn’t tell, and still don’t know)—wore shirts with seams on the back that curved up from their belts to their shoulders. I watched their shirts, and I watched in the mirror behind the bar as their beautiful goldish faces settled from laughing. I looked at them in the mirror, and I particularly noticed the one with the shiny hair, and I watched his eyes get like crescents, as if he were listening to another story, but then I saw he was smiling. He was smiling into the mirror in front of him, and in the mirror I was just staring, staring at him, and he was smiling back into the mirror at me.
The next week I went back to Dr. Wald for some tests, and when I was finished, although I’d planned to go do homework at Penelope’s dancing school, I went straight to Jake’s instead. The same two men were at the bar, but a different girl was with them. I pretended not to notice them as I went to the table I had sat at before.
I had a Coke, and when I went up to the bar to pay, the one with the shiny hair turned right around in front of me. “Clothes-abuse squad,” he said, prizing my wadded-up coat out of my arms. He shook it out and smiled at me. “I’m Chris,” he said, “and this is Mark.” His friend turned to me like a soldier who has been waiting, but the girl with them only glanced at me and turned to talk to someone else.
Chris helped me into my coat, and then he buttoned it up, as if I were a little child. “Who are you?” he said.
“Laurel,” I said.
Chris nodded slowly. “Laurel,” he said. And when he said that, I felt a shock on my face and hands and front as if I had pitched against flat water.
“So you are going out with this guy, or what?” Maureen asked me.
“Maureen,” I said. “He’s just a person I met.” Maureen looked at me again, but I just looked back at her. We twisted our swings up and let ourselves twirl out.
“So what’s the matter with your eyes?” Maureen said. “Can’t you just wear glasses?”
“Well, the doctor said he couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong yet,” I said. “He says he wants to keep me under observation, because there might be something happening to my retina.” But I realized then that I didn’t understand what that meant at all, and I also realized that I was really, but really, scared.
Maureen and I wandered over to the school building and looked in the window of the fourth-grade room, and I thought how strange it was that I used to fit in those miniature chairs, and that a few years later Penelope did, and that my little brother, Paul, fit in them now. There was a sickly old turtle in an aquarium on the sill just like the one we’d had. I wondered if it was the same one. I think they’re sort of prehistoric, and some of them live to be a hundred or two hundred years old.
“I bet your mother is completely hysterical,” Maureen said.
I smiled. Maureen thinks it’s hilarious the way my mother expects everything in her life (her life) to be perfect. “I had to bring her with me last week,” I said.
“Ick,” Maureen said sympathetically, and I remembered how awful it had been, sitting and waiting next to Mother. Whenever Mother moved—to cross her legs or smooth out her skirt or pick up a magazine—the clean smell of her perfume came over to me. Mother’s perfume made a nice little space for her there in the stale office. We didn’t talk at all, and it seemed like a long time before an Asian woman took me into a small white room and turned off the light. The woman had a serious face, like an angel, and she wore a white hospital coat over her clothes. She didn’t seem to speak much English. She sat me down in front of something which looked like a map of planets drawn in white on black, hanging on the wall.
The woman moved a wand across the map, and the end of the wand glimmered. “You say when you see light,” she told me. In the silence I made myself say “Now” over and over as I saw the light blinking here and there upon the planet map. Finally the woman turned on the light in the room and smiled at me. She rolled up the map and put it with the wand into a cupboard.
“Where are you from?” I asked her, to shake off the sound of my voice saying “Now.”
She hesitated, and I felt sick, because I thought I had said something rude, but finally the meaning of the question seemed to reach her. “Japanese,” she said. She put the back of her hand against my hair. “Very pretty,” she said. “Very pretty.”
Then Dr. Wald looked at my eyes, and after that Mother and I were brought into his consulting room. We waited, facing the huge desk, and eventually the doctor walked in. There was just a tiny moment when he saw Mother, but then he sat right down and explained, in a sincere, televisionish voice I had never heard him use before, that he wanted to see me once a month. He told my mother there might or might not be “cause for concern,” and he spoke right to her, with a little frown as she looked down at her clasped hands. Men always get important like that when they’re talking to her, and she and the doctor both looked extra serious, as if they were reminding themselves that it was me they were talking about, not each other. While Mother scheduled me for the last week of each month (on Thursday because
of Penelope’s class), the cross-looking receptionist seemed to be figuring out how much Mother’s clothes cost.
When Mother and I parked in front of Penelope’s dancing school, Penelope was just coming out with some of the other girls. They were in jeans, but they all had their hair still pulled up tightly on top of their heads, and Penelope had the floaty, peaceful look she gets after class. Mother smiled at her and waved, but then she looked suddenly at me. “Poor Laurel,” she said. Tears had come into her eyes, and answering tears sprang into my own, but mine were tears of unexpected rage. I saw how pleased Mother was, thinking that we were having that moment together, but what I was thinking, as we looked at each other, was that even though I hadn’t been able to go to Jake’s that afternoon because of her, at least now I would be able to go back once a month and see Chris.
“And all week,” I told Maureen, “Mother has been saying I got it from my father’s family, and my father says it’s glaucoma in his family and his genes have nothing to do with retinas.”
“Really?” Maureen asked. “Is something wrong with your dad?”
Maureen is always talking about my father and saying how “attractive” he is. If she only knew the way he talks about her! When she comes over, he sits down and tells her jokes. A few weeks ago when she came by for me, he took her outside in back to show her something and I had to wait a long time. But when she isn’t at our house, he acts as if she’s just some stranger. Once he said to me that she was cheap.
Of course, there was no reason for me to think that Chris would be at Jake’s the next time I went to the doctor’s, but he was. He and Mark were at the bar as if they’d never moved. I went to my little table, and while I drank my Coke I wondered whether Chris could have noticed that I was there. Then I realized that he might not remember me at all.
I was stalling with the ice in the bottom of my glass when Chris sat down next to me. I hadn’t even seen him leave the bar. He asked me a lot of things—all about my family and where I lived, and how I came to be at Jake’s.
“I go to a doctor right near here,” I told him.
“Psychiatrist?” he asked.
All I said was no, but I felt my face stain red.
“I’m twenty-seven,” he said. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“Well, some people are,” I said.
I was hoping Chris would assume I was much older than I was. People usually did, because I was tall. And it was usually a problem, because they were disappointed in me for not acting older (even if they knew exactly how old I was, like my teachers). But what Chris said was, “I’m much, much older than you. Probably almost twice as old.” And I understood that he wanted me to see that he knew perfectly well how old I was. He wanted me to see it, and he wanted me to think it was strange.
When I had to leave, Chris walked me to the bar to say hello to Mark, who was talking to a girl.
“Look,” the girl said. She held a lock of my hair up to Mark’s, and you couldn’t tell whose pale curl was whose. Mark’s eyes, so close, also looked just like mine, I saw.
“We could be brother and sister,” Mark said, but his voice sounded like a recording of a voice, and for a moment I forgot how things are divided up, and I thought Mark must be having trouble with his eyes, too.
From then on, I always went straight to Jake’s after leaving the doctor, and when I passed by the bar I could never help glancing into the mirror to see Chris’s face. I would just sit at my table and drink my Coke and listen for his laugh, and when I heard it I felt completely still, the way you do when you have a fever and someone puts his hand on your forehead. And sometimes Chris would come sit with me and talk.
At home and at school, I thought about all the different girls who hung around with Chris and Mark. I thought about them one by one, as if they were little figurines I could take down from a glass case to inspect. I thought about how they looked, and I thought about the girls at school and about Penelope, and I looked in the mirror.
I looked in the mirror over at Maureen’s house while Maureen put on nail polish, and I tried to make myself see my sister. We are both pale and long, but Penelope is beautiful, as everyone has always pointed out, and I, I saw, just looked unsettled.
“You could use some makeup,” Maureen said, shaking her hands dry, “but you look fine. You’re lucky that you’re tall. It means you’ll be able to wear clothes.”
I love to go over to Maureen’s house. Maureen is an only child, and her father lives in California. Her mother is away a lot, too, and when she is, Carolina, the maid, stays over. Carolina was there that night, and she let us order in pizza for dinner.
“Maureen is my girl. She is my girl,” Carolina said after dinner, putting her arms around Maureen. Maureen almost always has some big expression on her face, but when Carolina does that she just goes blank.
Later I asked Maureen about Chris. I was afraid of talking about him because it seemed as if he might dissolve if I did, but I needed Maureen’s advice badly. I told her it was just like French class, where there were two words for “you.” Sometimes when Chris said “you” to me I would turn red, as if he had used some special word. And I could hardly say “you” to him. It seemed amazing to me sometimes when I was talking to Chris that a person could just walk up to another person and say “you.”
“Does that mean something about him?” I asked. “Or is it just about me?”
“It’s just you,” Maureen said. “It doesn’t count. It’s just like when you sit down on a bus next to a stranger and you know that your knee is touching his but you pretend it isn’t.”
Of course Maureen was almost sure to be right. Why wouldn’t she be? Still, I kept thinking that it was just possible that she might be wrong, and the next time I saw Chris something happened to make me think she was.
My vision had fuzzed up a lot during that week, and when Dr. Wald looked at my eyes he didn’t get up. “Any trouble lately with that sensation of haziness?” he asked.
I got scorching hot when he said that, and I felt like lying. “Not really,” I said. “Yes, a bit.”
He put some drops in my eyes and sent me to the waiting room, where I looked at bust exercises in Redbook till the drops started to work and the print melted on the page. I had never noticed before how practically no one in the waiting room was even pretending to read. One woman had bandages over her eyes, and most people were just staring and blinking. A little boy was halfheartedly moving a stiff plastic horse on the floor in front of him, but he wasn’t even looking at it.
The doctor examined my eyes with the light so bright it made the back of my head sting. “Good,” he said. “I’ll see you in—what is it?—a month.”
I was out on the street before I realized that I still couldn’t see. My vision was like a piece of loosely woven cloth that was pulling apart. In the street everything seemed to be moving off, and all the lights looked like huge haloed globes, bobbing and then dipping suddenly into the pocketed air. The noises were one big pool of sound—horns and brakes and people yelling—and to cross the street I had to plunge into a mob of people and rush along wherever it was they were going.
When I finally got through to Jake’s my legs were trembling badly, and I just went right up to Chris at the bar, where he was listening to his friend Sherman tell a story. Without even glancing at me, Chris put his hand around my wrist, and I just stood there next to him, with my wrist in his hand, and I listened, too.
Sherman was telling how he and his band had been playing at some club the night before and during a break, when he’d been sitting with his girlfriend, Candy, a man had come up to their table. “He’s completely destroyed,” Sherman said, “and Candy and I are not exactly on top of things ourselves. But the guy keeps waving this ring, and the basic idea seems to be that it’s his wife’s wedding ring. He’s come home earlier and his wife isn’t there, but the ring is, and he’s sure his wife’s out screwing around. So the guy keeps telling me about it over and over, and I can’t
get him to shut up, but finally he notices Candy and he says, ‘That your old lady?’ ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘Good-looking broad,’ the guy says, and he hands me the ring. ‘Keep it,’ the guy says. ‘It’s for you—not for this bitch with you.’”
One of the girls at the bar reached over and touched the flashing ring that was on a chain around Sherman’s neck. “Pretty,” she said. “Don’t you want it, Candy?” But the girl she had spoken to remained perched on her barstool, with her legs crossed, smiling down at her drink.
“So what did you think of that?” Chris said as he walked me over to my table and sat down with me. I didn’t say anything. “Sherman can be sort of disgusting. But it’s not an important thing,” Chris said.
The story had made me think about the kids at school—that we don’t know yet what our lives are really going to be like. It made me feel that anything might be a thing that’s important, and I started to cry, because I had never noticed that I was always lonely in my life until just then, when Chris had understood how much the story had upset me, and had said something to make me feel better.
Chris dipped a napkin into a glass of water and mopped off my face, but I was clutching a pencil in my pocket so hard I broke it, and that started me crying again.
“Hey,” Chris said. “Look. It’s not dead.” He grabbed another napkin and scribbled on it with each half of the pencil. “It’s fine, see? Look. That’s just how they reproduce. Don’t they teach you anything at school? Here,” he said. “We’ll just tuck them under this, and we’ll have two very happy little pencils.”
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 4