I wasn’t just scared, but mad as hell. I felt victimized at every turn, like I was perpetually getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Why didn’t Rubenesque Ruby get struck blind instead of me? Now Ruby and all the other shiny, happy people would get to realize their dreams and I’d end up on government aid in an assisted-living facility at the ripe old age of thirty, maybe forty if I was lucky. I bathed in self-pity, and the longer I soaked in it, the more parched I became of positive feeling. It’s no wonder I had no friends.
One morning in August, I woke to the sound of the phone ringing in the dorm room I shared with another apprentice. On the other end was my sister Marisa calling from Italy where she was spending the summer with Aunt Rita, my mother’s sister. I heard the clatter of cutlery being laid, and Italian mothers calling across the piazza for their kids to come in for lunch. It sounded warm and lively and inviting. I felt like the Little Match Girl slowly freezing to death on the wrong side of the window, watching other people have a perfect holiday.
“You should get out of there and come to Italy,” my sister said. “Aunt Rita offered to pay for your flight.”
“It’s not that easy.” I sighed. “I’m locked into this.”
I’d been raised with industrial-strength stick-to-it-ness. I’d never so much as quit a cup of tea halfway through drinking it.
Later that day, I stood in the wings ready to dress another actress for her moment in the spotlight, listening to the dialogue of the Arthur Miller play onstage and daydreaming about Italy. I hadn’t been since I was a kid, when my grandmother took me to Priverno, her hometown near Rome. For years, I’d wanted to go back, travel the country, see the canals of Venice, but it was always too expensive or my summer was too booked with internships and part-time jobs.
Then I remembered I was going blind. If I waited, I might never see Venice.
In the middle of my reverie, I heard the line of dialogue that signaled it was almost time for the costume change I was helping with.
“You can only hope that you live with the right regrets,” intoned the lead actor.
I’d heard that line every night for weeks. But tonight, it sailed right through the clutter of my mind and struck bull’s eye.
I’m not the sort of deep-thinking person who often has revelations but waiting in the wings, I had a Big-Bang-sized epiphany.
Carpe Fucking Diem.
Taking the safe, sensible route—finishing my tour of duty in this place I hated—was the wrong regret.
I’d tell the program director the next day that my great-grandmother was ill and I had to leave immediately for Italy. It was a lie and I didn’t care. Let Ruby take my place hammering nails; she had a whole lifetime to travel and naturally curly hair to boot.
I, however, would throw caution to the wind. The way my father had attempted to when I was eleven and he pulled into our driveway on a Honda Nighthawk motorcycle.
“Oooooh,” I’d shrieked, running to meet him at the front door, “Mommy’s gonna kill you.”
He hadn’t returned that bike, like I thought he would. No, the Nighthawk had stayed; it just stayed parked in our garage. There was only one time that he took the bike out for a proper spin, crossing borough lines.
“I’m going to drive my motorcycle to work today,” he’d remarked at breakfast.
“Over my dead body,” my mother had remarked back.
They went back and forth while eating Raisin Bran, and finally reached a compromise. My dad would ride the motorcycle, and my mother, sisters, and I would follow him in the car, though the safety benefit of this is still unclear to me. I guess if he wrecked, she wanted to lock eyes with him as he flew through the air to meet his Maker so he could see those eyes shouting, “WHAT DID I TELL YOU, GODAMNIT?”
My sisters and I cried the whole way, and at red lights, we’d stick our heads out the window and shout, “Get in the car, Daddy! We don’t want you to die!”
Soon after, the motorcycle was parked in front of our house, wearing a FOR SALE sign.
I thought of this story as I stood in the wings, plotting my escape from the theater festival.
This is my Nighthawk, I thought, but I won’t keep it all locked up. I’ll ride fast and hard. I’ll ride til the wheels come off.
Within a week, I was kneeling at St. Peter’s, my face suffused with the sunlight that poured through the stained-glass dove above the altar. I sat in Piazza del Duomo, taking in the majestic glory of the cathedral while drinking a Campari paid for by a handsome stranger, who just so happened to have a seat waiting for me on the back of his motorcycle if I felt like a ride. Not a Nighthawk but close enough.
I used the birthday and graduation money I’d been saving and blew it traveling through Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam, and Paris. I drank in the sight of winding canals and towering palaces and smoking-hot international guys who didn’t speak English, but didn’t need to do any talking, anyway. I stood in front of Sacré-Coeur while its bells tolled and watched women on stilts waving scarves, and the undulating violet blur of the scarves against the white of the church and the blue of the sky made my heart ache with fullness. That was the right regret.
Dr. Hall was right. I did need to start making changes.
Life was telling me to find myself some silver linings. And to Life I said, “Don’t mind if I do.”
Tip #4: On smoking
Never light your own cigarette. You risk revealing your hidden handicap when you keep on missing. If you’re showing a little décolletage, there’s always a guy with a match nearby. Do it right and asking for a light can be alluring, very Bogart and Bacall. Do it wrong and it’s still better than lighting your hair on fire.
4. NOTHING VENTURED
On those long train rides around Europe, I had plenty of time to ponder, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I’d taken my vision for granted over the past nineteen years. I’d wasted a ton of precious time looking at the same faces, the same street signs, the same insides of the same rooms. Everything would change now that I had to cram a lifetime of sights into the next decade or so. I needed to accumulate images.
In order to see more, I’d have to do more. And in order to do more, I’d have to become someone different. Now that my eyes had been given an expiration date, there wasn’t time to waste being a dishwater blond with a good head on her shoulders.
I’d always been so cautious, sensible. “Better safe than sorry” was my family’s motto, and the phrase I’d heard more than any other growing up was, “Be careful!” My mother and grandmother repeated it with a cultlike persistence, pairing it so frequently with “I love you” that to this day I find it hard to divide the two. Being careful all the time ruled out not just recklessness and spontaneity but, to a large extent, frivolity. Thus, my mother’s idea of a good time was eliminating redundancies in the cereal shelf (“Why, WHY do we have two half-eaten boxes of Corn Flakes? Let’s just consolidate them!”). All of my father’s hobbies fell under the category of “things I’d pay other people to do,” stuff like retiling the bathroom and washing the mop. Letting loose in our house meant pouring yourself a cup of OJ straight, not cut with water. When we went on vacation, my parents planned and attacked our leisure with such intensity that it was almost indistinguishable from work; we always beat the crowds to the beach, always preplotted our route through Great Adventure, never went to a restaurant that wasn’t researched beforehand. And I’d always done the same. But not anymore.
Now I’d live boldly, like there was no tomorrow. On the plane ride from New York to Rome, I’d spent hours composing a big, sprawling bucket list, enumerating the many things I wanted to see before Lights Out. Top on the list was The Eyes of My Children, but that was one that would have to wait. Below that were a slew of travel destinations, many of which I reached that August—the canals of Venice, the Champs-Élysées, the royal palace of Vienna—and many farther flung. Then, too, there were plenty of items, each one more impossible than the last, that weren’t so muc
h things to see as ways to be, such as: Always Stop to Look at Sparkles in the Sidewalk and Sleep Only When Strictly Necessary and Read Absolutely Everything.
Sticking your nose in a book might seem like the very opposite of grabbing life by the balls, but reading had always been one of my great loves, and it was one of the things I was most terrified to lose. Sure, there were always audiobooks, but the holy communion of bringing your eyes to paper and sweeping them across the page, left to right, left to right, left to right, the rhythm of that dance, the quiet of it, the sound of the page turning, the look of crinkled covers stained with the coffee you were drinking when you read that chapter that changed your life—you didn’t get any of that when listening to an audiobook, and I wanted as much of that as I could get, while I still could.
I didn’t quite manage to read absolutely everything that August, but I did read absolutely all of Anna Karenina. And like magic, the reading of that book gave rise to real-life adventures. In particular, romances.
I was sitting on a bench next to a streetlight in Rome’s Piazza Navona one evening, reading the chapter where Vronsky follows Anna to St. Petersburg, when I heard a man’s voice next to me.
“Oh, that’s a good one.” The voice spoke in flawless English, with just enough of an Italian accent to be alluring.
I looked up and saw a thin, olive-complected man who seemed to be in his late twenties standing over me. It was nighttime so I couldn’t quite make out the color of his eyes but they were dark, like his lashes and his hair, cropped short. In his clean, unwrinkled guayabera, with the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi behind him, he looked like he was on a photo shoot for a spread in Italian Vogue.
“Are you a lover of Tolstoy?” I said in what I hoped was flawless Italian, with just enough of an American accent to be alluring.
An hour later, we were sitting at a two-top at Bar della Pace, drinking vino rosso and discussing Russian novelists. The tall, dark stranger, Benedetto, a doctor of philosophy in the field of medical bioengineering, hailed from a little town outside of Venice and was in Rome just for the night, taking care of some business related to his degree.
It occurred to me that I might have found the man not only of my dreams, but of my parents’ too. After he’d paid for our drinks, I waited for an invitation back to his hotel room (which I was pretty sure I’d decline since even handsome doctors of philosophy can be serial killers), but no invitation was issued. Instead he insisted on walking me to the door of the apartment where I was staying with Aunt Rita, Marisa, and my cousins. In the cobblestoned alley in front of the building, he handed me a slip of paper with his cell phone number, urged me to call him in a few days, and then pressed his lips to mine in a gentle, lingering kiss.
I succeeded in waiting two days before calling him, which I thought demonstrated pretty spectacular self-control. He was not just a gentleman, but an Italian gentleman, and those are the rarest breed. So when he invited me up north, to his hometown near Venice, it didn’t take much deliberation before I agreed.
“But you don’t even know who this guy is,” Marisa pointed out the night before I left, licking the panna off the top of her gelato. She was seventeen, two years younger than me, and even less accustomed to reckless abandon: “What if he’s a psycho who traps you over there and, you know, makes a coat out of your skin?”
I licked the last bit of nocciola out of my ice cream cone and took a bite: “I highly doubt it. I mean, he didn’t even try to lure me into his hotel room or anything.”
“Yeah but he probably doesn’t bring his torture equipment along when he travels,” she reasoned, “so that doesn’t prove anything.”
This was a fair point. But had I or had I not just been diagnosed with an incurable disease that would soon leave me blind? Had I or had I not resolved to carpe fucking diem? Wasn’t Find Great Romance one of the items of my newly composed bucket list? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
“Well, I’ll give you his number and address,” I told my sister, popping the last bite of cone into my mouth. “And if you don’t hear from me by midnight tomorrow, call the police and explain everything.”
Benedetto did not have a dungeon in the basement of his house. He did not, in fact, have a house at all, or even an apartment, just an attic bedroom in his parents’ place. His mamma washed and ironed his laundry and cooked dinner for him every night, including the night I came to visit. I sat at the kitchen table eating spaghetti alle vongole while his parents talked to him. About me, in Italian. Which I spoke, fluently.
“You, with the American girls,” his mother lamented. “You can’t find a decent Italian?”
“Look, I know what these foreign girls are offering you, and yes, a man should enjoy himself while he’s young,” his father chimed in, “while he still can.”
“Oh-eh!” his mother chastised. “Watch your mouth!
“But your mother’s right, enough is enough!” his dad hastened to add. “Stop fucking around! Get your life together! Find a wife, not an American piece of ass!”
That night, in his bedroom (where I noted a glaring absence of Russian novels on the bookshelf), he put on a crappy pop album that had been wildly popular in the States the summer before and acted about as gentlemanly as a sailor on shore leave. It’s not that I hadn’t been looking forward to seduction, I’d just been looking forward to it being done well. His English, which had been impeccable when he was fabricating enthusiasm for Tolstoy, was not quite as fluent in the bedroom. Dirty talk, like cursing, is hard to do well when it’s not in your lingua franca.
“Shit and balls!” he whispered. “You’re a porn star!”
I was supposed to stay through Monday but when I woke Saturday, I told Benedetto my sister needed me back in Rome and I’d have to leave immediately. He dropped me off at the train station in Venice and after I saw him pull away on his Vespa, I headed in the direction of Piazza San Marco.
I spent a long, lovely day in the city I’d so longed to see, genuflecting before flickering candles in the Basilica, wandering down the labyrinthine alleyways, pausing to sigh on the Ponte dei Sospiri.
That evening, on the five-hour train ride back to Rome, I read Anna Karenina until my eyes ached. When I heard the conductor announce the end of the line approaching, I looked up from the book, disoriented, like I’d woken from a dream. It took me a minute to remember where I was and where I’d been, and then, I was happy, satisfied that my life was as full of adventure as the great novel I’d been reading. Yes, the last chapter, with my Italian beau, had been a bit disappointing, but it’d been memorable nonetheless and it had brought me to Venice, the city I’d always dreamed of seeing. My story was changing; no longer a maudlin tearjerker about a girl gone blind, but a broader narrative of youth and adventure that was only just beginning.
Italy had been the antidote, not to my diagnosis, but to the sadness, fear, and confusion the diagnosis had elicited. I’d laid the foundation there for a new way of life.
Back in New York, about to start my junior year in college, I reminded myself to keep building on that foundation. I thought about it as I went back-to-school shopping in the East Village and bought faux snakeskin pants and red patent leather heels. I thought about it as I dyed my hair for the first time, highlighting it with streaks of Hollywood blond.
“You know those chemicals are terrible for your hair,” my mother observed, turning to look at me in the passenger seat. I was leaving for New Haven in a few days so we were running errands and had gotten caught in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, just the two of us in the car.
“It’s just highlights,” I said, fiddling with the radio that my parents had perpetually set to 1010 WINS. “It’s not a big deal.”
My mother blew her nose. Then she said: “Did I ever tell you I used to have epilepsy?”
I let go of the radio dial and looked at her. Now she was applying barely there lipstick in the rearview mirror.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. I figured she’d misspoken. Sh
e probably meant eczema or something.
“When I was a little girl. I had seizures all the time, every day,” she went on, twisting the lipstick tube closed. “In the middle of school. Everywhere. They were really very bad. My teachers would call your aunt Rita out of class because she knew how to hold me so I didn’t get hurt.”
I sat there, agog, for once hanging on my mother’s every word.
“Was this in Italy or after?” I asked. My mother had been born in a small town outside of Rome and had immigrated to America with my grandmother and aunt when she was eight.
“Both,” she said. “It got worse when we moved to Brooklyn, when I was in junior high.”
How could I not know about this? How had she managed to keep the single-most interesting fact about her childhood under wraps for nearly twenty years? Why had my grandmother or aunt never mentioned it?
“I couldn’t lead a normal life,” my mother continued, staring at the unmoving traffic in front of our car. “I really wanted to be a cheerleader but I couldn’t even try out because I might have a seizure in the middle of a game. I didn’t think I would be able to drive.”
“So what happened?” I asked like a kid listening to a bedtime story. This was the first time my mother had delivered a monologue that did not feature the word “goddamned” or “moron” anywhere in it. This was engrossing stuff.
“One day, when I was about thirteen, I made it through a whole day without having a seizure. And then the next day, too. A whole week passed with no seizures. And that was it. I never had a seizure again.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How were you cured?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know how. No one knew. One day, I just didn’t have epilepsy anymore.” She waited a beat before saying, “It was a miracle.”
Now I See You Page 4