Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, APRIL 1970: I’m glad to hear about all your changes. Leave it to Kyle to appear with such a perfect opportunity at such a perfect time. You’re a natural teacher, and this college sounds very exciting—though I hope you won’t think I’m a dummy if I’m still not sure what Transcendental Poetics is. I’m not at all surprised Yuma has settled in so easily. If his three-year-old self is anything like the baby I met, he’ll have half the students wrapped around his little finger before the end of the first semester. I only ever glimpsed Arizona in scraps through the window during my cross-country bus trip to see you, but even then I was stunned by its beauty.

  I write this using one arm while a tube delivers bright red hemoglobin to the other. Such a happy color in such a gray room, entering my gray body drop by drop, giving me back my desire to look, to read, to eat, to speak. The physical realities of being gravely ill are not a choice you get to make: your body simply gives up on certain things and there’s nothing you can do about it. My coming to terms with the larger consequences of this disease has been a very different thing. Against all evidence, I’d continued to insist to myself that my recovery was only a matter of time. If not for Mr. Wythe’s visit, I might have continued to think this until it was too late; however, with his help, I’ve formed a plan for Jane and for the future. While it wasn’t easy, and I wish I hadn’t needed to, it would have been much worse to risk leaving Jane with nothing.

  After all I’d done with Mr. Wythe, telephoning my parents should have been easy, but I cried all the same. I’d always known I would let them back into my life at some point, only I’d pictured it happening in a hazy, distant future sparked by a change in Father’s health, not my own.

  Grete cried when I told her, which made me cry, too. It felt strangely good to cry together, not for my diagnosis but for our friendship, which we hadn’t properly mourned. Jane is to call Grete whenever she likes, Grete’s home is her home, sentiments Jane accepted like the echoes they are. And now I’m crying because I’m reading your description of when I was a new mother just home from the hospital, and you arrived at your apartment to the shaky note I’d taped to your door. Deb, I hope your goddaughter won’t ever need a second family, but it is a great comfort to know that she has one with you.

  101. Untitled [View from hospital roof], New York, 1970

  At first Danny was nervous about coming over to my place after work, but I reminded him that we were safe: his mother thought my mother was home with me, and my mother was in the hospital. Besides, I told him, he was doing a good deed, keeping me company. I could tell that Danny sometimes just wanted to watch TV with his arm around my shoulder, talking during commercial breaks about his day at the store, or my day at school, or about what was happening with my mom; but that wasn’t what I wanted at all.

  By the weekend, the transfusions had given my mother more energy, and the antibiotics had started bringing her fever down. Assuming her blood count stayed good, she would come home by the end of the next week, as soon as the antibiotics were done. To celebrate, she and I rode the elevator to the hospital roof, where benches had been installed inside a sort of chain-link cage that let patients look out over the city without the hospital having to worry about anyone jumping off. Lillian adjusted the focal length of her lens to get a decent shot of the view. As she clicked away with her non-IV hand, I told her about Sister Elaine’s eyes tearing up in U.S. History while she recited the Gettysburg Address, and about a man paying for his groceries with only nickels, and it felt almost like Before. Then Lillian turned to me. Listen, she said.

  Instead of taking pictures, her camera hand was gripping my arm. It didn’t feel like a sick person’s hand.

  When you’re with Danny you have to be careful, she said. Diaphragms don’t always work, and even if he says he has rubbers, that doesn’t mean he’ll put one on.

  For a moment it seemed like everything—the clouds, the birds, the cars on the street way down below—was standing still. It couldn’t have been quiet, but my mother’s voice canceled out the other sounds. My heart started beating like when you’re leaving a drugstore with a lipstick stashed in your pocket. A voice inside me said to deny everything, but my mother didn’t look angry or disappointed. She didn’t even look sick; she looked like a person telling the truth.

  Angie’s sister knows a clinic where you can get the Pill as long as you’re sixteen, I said.

  You’re fifteen, Lillian said.

  Angie’s old enough, I said. She’ll go for me if I ask.

  Good, my mother said, and nodded. Her fingers on my arm weakened. Her face changed back into a sick person’s face.

  That night I stayed out drinking with Danny and his friends and woke the next morning from a blackout to him on my couch. Danny explained that he had wanted to take me back to his house to sleep it off, but I’d insisted on going home. Given the state I was in, he’d been afraid to leave me alone. He said it was a sign of how much he loved me, him staying the night, because when he went back home that morning there’d be hell to pay.

  So don’t go, I said. He was eighteen. He could tell his parents he was moving in with his cousin. For as long as my mother was in the hospital, we could be together all the time.

  102. Untitled [Doctors conferring outside a curtained bed], New York, 1970

  It’s a safe bet this is the same hospital roommate, though all we see is her horizontal silhouette cast on the curtains blocking her bed from view. The doctors consulting their clipboards look concerned. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t remember if that bed was empty when I went to visit my mother at Memorial for the last time.

  Pretty soon Danny was inviting his friends to the apartment after work, and they’d stay until late. My mother’s blood count hadn’t stayed good, and one week stretched into two. Mornings, I’d oversleep and the place would be a mess, and my head would be killing me, so I’d stay home to empty ashtrays and wash dishes and clear out empties in time for everyone to come over again after my afternoon cashier shift. Maybe if I’d had Bohack’s in the morning, like Danny, I’d have found a way to keep doing everything I was supposed to be doing, but I didn’t see the point of being sleep-deprived and hungover just for school, not now that I was living real life. Playing hooky meant not seeing Angie, since she didn’t like Danny’s friends, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to keep going.

  Angie kept quiet about it, so it wasn’t until Danny’s brother said something that Danny learned I was skipping school. Danny yelled, and that night he grabbed at me and insulted me in front of his friends. After everyone left, I told him I didn’t like how he was acting, and he said it was my fault. Living like this was sinful, but I had made him want it, and now he couldn’t stop. Each day he wanted me more, but it was lust, not love. I dragged a mattress into the living room, which was all old food and dirty dishes. I lay there thinking about my mother and the life I’d come to hate, trying to remember a time when things had been good. When I arrived at the grocery store the next afternoon, Danny gave me flowers. On break, he told me that as soon as I turned eighteen, we could get married.

  Visiting hours were over by the time I arrived at the hospital that night, but the nurses let me see her anyway. Since I’d last been there, I knew everything had changed. My mother’s skin was gray and her hair was dull. Her face was choked with pain and exhaustion and fear. She seemed to be using every ounce of her remaining strength to tell me that we were moving to Cleveland. She was going to need chemo: the latest test showed that the cancer was in her blood after all. Treatment was very expensive, and there was also me to think of. Next she started going on about Mr. Wythe: how wonderful he’d been, how grateful she was, and how important it was that she leave me with something. Did I understand? None of it made sense, but her voice was so urgent and her stare so desperate that I nodded and reached for her hand. Mama, I said. I love you so much, she said.

  It was late by the time I got back on the subway, but I must have looked too crazy to mess wi
th. Back at the apartment, I told Danny he had to leave. My mother was getting discharged, and she and I were moving to Ohio. After that Danny cried, and I cried, and he was tender with me in all the ways I’d always wanted him to be, but I couldn’t feel a thing.

  The next day I gave notice at Bohack’s and got on the subway to bring my mother home. She was too weak to do any packing, so Danny came over to help while she issued instructions from the couch. The clothes I couldn’t take on the plane, I packed into boxes along with all the books and hats and shoes and dishes and records, but the apartment was mostly film. Lillian had always kept her negatives in boxes, so we didn’t have to do anything except stack them in one place, but it made me realize how invisible they’d always been, boxes of negatives piled in the corner of the living room, reaching up to the ceiling, lining her side of the bedroom and filling her closet, boxes stacked and pushed together to make night tables beside our beds. Then there were the prints and the darkroom equipment. It was way too much to fit into Danny’s brother’s Plymouth, but his cousin’s uncle was in the moving business, and if we didn’t mind waiting, he could use a slow period to borrow a truck. Another of Danny’s cousins was in secondhand furniture; Danny would show our stuff to him to see if he couldn’t get us something for it instead of pitching it to the curb. It was a long drive and a lot of lifting, my mother said. At the very least, Danny should keep whatever he could make off the furniture and she would pay him for the gas and for his time, but Danny said his reward for driving our stuff to Cleveland would be seeing me.

  Packing up the apartment, I wanted to remember the birthdays and bad dreams and funny conversations and wiggly teeth and yelling and laughing and darkroom times before my mother got sick, but instead I saw the life I’d been living with Danny behind my mother’s back. I was so mad at those memories for getting in the way that I didn’t cry when Danny drove us to the airport in the borrowed Plymouth, or when he kissed me goodbye, or when I looked out the plane window to see New York getting smaller and smaller. I didn’t cry until the clouds blotted out even the idea of Bohack’s and Immaculate Heart and JHS 23 and PS 542 and Kaja’s house and the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t cry until there was nothing left to see.

  Cleveland, 1970–76

  * * *

  103. Untitled [Walter Prescott driving], Detroit, 1970

  JOURNAL ENTRY, AUGUST 1970: If I’d needed chemotherapy any earlier, I would have wanted to stay in New York; but these last nightmarish months of being truly sick taught me that you and I can’t do this on our own. When I asked my doctors if I could be treated in Cleveland, I learned how much I took for granted a city where everything from camera lenses to first-rate leukemia treatment is only a subway ride away. Though the Cleveland Clinic is the top of the line for heart disease, the best leukemia facility in the Midwest is in Detroit; and so three years after I denied your wish, and under circumstances too macabre for anyone to enjoy, you are finally getting to live with your grandparents.

  Your grandmother has become careworn in the predictable ways, but I wasn’t prepared for the gray, slow-moving figure beside her. I should have expected it—your grandfather isn’t the sort to take early retirement unless he has to—but somehow that hadn’t revised my mental picture of a man whose arm I used to hang from like a jungle gym. While I’m glad the hospital transfusions returned some color to my skin, I guess nothing could have prepared your grandparents for the rest of me. Both of them recovered quickly from how thin I’ve become, but that first look on their faces is something I won’t forget.

  For most of the three-hour drive west and north, your grandfather kept the radio loud enough to prevent much talking, giving me my first chance since I was seventeen to snap a decent picture of him; but as we neared Detroit, he turned off the music.

  “Your mother didn’t want me driving you,” he told me. “If she had her way, I’d be splitting my waking hours between healthy walks, elevating my feet, and eating carrots, but when I told her I wanted us to talk, even she had to admit it was a good idea.” He darted a glance at me before turning back to the road, and his face was soft where I’d been expecting something sharp. “It seems silly now,” he said, “but I used to take it personally that at every turn, you seemed to make the choice I’d least approve of. If my heart attack taught me anything, it’s that we’re all a lot less important than we think. I still don’t agree with most of the choices you’ve made in life, but I’ve come to see that who you are has precious little to do with me. I love you, Lilly. You’re my daughter and I love you, and I’ll do anything to help you beat this thing.”

  Squirrel, so far you’ve been lucky or canny or sneaky enough to stay in your grandfather’s good graces, but that was the most he’d said to me since I’d refused to return to Ohio with him before you were born.

  For all that, I didn’t answer right away that I loved him back. Maybe that seems spiteful, or maybe your time with Danny has left you old enough to understand. “I love you too” is only ever an echo. I wanted to be sure my words were not just his bouncing back. I waited until the next morning, when he stopped at the hospital before his drive home to you and your grandmother in Cleveland. At first I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. I was about to say those three words again when he blinked several times and lifted up his glasses with one hand to dab at his eyes. “It was the glasses that stopped me,” he told me. “I’ve wanted to fly planes since I was a boy, even younger than when you started with cameras, but back then a pilot needed perfect vision. By the time that changed, well, I’d settled into a life—but sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d moved us all to Dayton and gone to flight school.”

  They mean well. They always have. Perhaps you already know that. Maybe you even suspect it of me, but considering my own belated insights, you’re allowed to take your time.

  The six weeks Lillian was in the hospital getting chemo, we visited Detroit six times. According to her doctors, she had a better than fifty percent chance at remission, and I guess that made my grandparents superstitious. Ordering dinner at the Howard Johnson’s where we always stayed, I asked for a hamburger instead of the fried clam strip platter I’d gotten the last two trips, and Grandma flinched. Her voice shook as she asked if I was sure I didn’t want the fried clams, since I always seemed to enjoy them so much. Until that moment, I’d thought it was just coincidence that we always stayed in the same room, and that Grandpa always picked the same restaurant booth for us to sit in, and that he always ordered the steak while Grandma got chicken. Now it occurred to me that a better than fifty percent chance of remission meant an almost fifty percent chance of dying. I ordered the fried clams.

  For chemo not to kill you before it cured you, it couldn’t happen all at once: after being on it for a few days, my mother had to go off it to give her body a chance to recover. I could measure how good or bad a week she’d had by how many film canisters were on her bedside table. She seemed in slightly better shape during recovery phases, but either way, we had to wear face masks and couldn’t touch her, since her immune system was shot. The chemo had knocked out her white blood cells along with the cancer cells, it being a poison that couldn’t tell the difference.

  It seemed significant the city that had been Kaja’s home for the last year and a half was now also the location of my mother’s leukemia treatment. The first three car trips, I kept my face glued to the window as soon as we hit Detroit’s city limits, convinced that spotting Kaja was just a matter of hypervigilance. When that failed, I told Grandpa Kaja’s address. He calculated that she lived only five miles from the hospital, and my confidence in fate was restored. Before I’d left Brooklyn, I’d written to say I was moving to Cleveland and that Lillian was sick, but I was still waiting for a reply. The force of my longing when I asked Grandpa if we could make a surprise visit must have been impressive, because as we were leaving Detroit, he told Grandma to make a detour.

  Around the hospital were a few nice buildings that might have been mansions once, but
toward Kaja’s neighborhood, those were replaced by crumbling row houses. After driving down a wide, empty street lined with vacant lots and the occasional building, we turned onto a smaller street with regular houses like the ones in my grandparents’ part of Cleveland. People were on sidewalks and porches, and kids rode bicycles like in any other normal neighborhood, except that suddenly my grandparents were locking their car doors and telling me to lock mine. When Grandma started driving slower, I figured we were almost there. Then she said in a scared, shaky voice that she was going to turn around and pulled a U-ey in the middle of the street. Grandpa told me he was sorry, but we needed to go back. What was wrong? I wanted to know. It wasn’t my friend they were worried about, Grandpa explained; but in a dark neighborhood like this one, my grandmother continued as if she and my grandfather had merged into one ugly person, it was better to be safe than sorry.

  104. Untitled [Dorothy Prescott holding a breakfast tray], Cleveland, 1970

  Looking at Grandma Dot’s face as she walks through that doorway, I want to stroke the side of her wrinkled cheek, smooth the bent collar of her dress, and tuck the stray strand of hair back behind her left ear. Did my mother transmit her tenderness for this complicated, contradictory person in the moment when she snapped the shutter; or did it happen in the darkroom, as she finessed the print’s lines and curves, darks and lights? Then again, maybe those are my own feelings being tapped. For the eleven years between my mother’s death and Grandma Dot’s, my grandmother scrupulously opened and closed doors and windows to keep the room containing Lillian’s three-box legacy and voluminous collection of negatives at the proper temperature. Grandma told me that my mother had left me “some things” I could have when I was ready, but for eleven years I didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t say. At first I was too full of sadness and anger, guilt and regret to want to know. Next I told myself I was too busy, because that sounded better than admitting I was afraid. Then Grandma died, and it was time to claim the things whether I felt ready or not. I walked up the stairs of the empty house on Fernvale and into my mother’s old room. Seeing those boxes waiting for me was like getting one last message from them both: my mother had left me a way to show her my love, and my grandmother had safeguarded that opportunity, an opportunity I was sure I had squandered.