Myopia

Myopia fosters a sense of possibility one never quite gets over, quite gives up. One can’t quite see. One is allowed another scenario, another way in which things might turn out, things lost and forgotten. One gets dizzy enough to pass from one realm to another. As a child I could fly about the upstairs guest room with its heavy furniture, its yellow wallpaper, its corner window. I was to take a nap. My eyes went dim. The ribbons on the wallpaper swerved and looped. My grandmother had just died in the spring; at the grave site, it was painfully cold. In the room I hung in the corner and visited the window, gazing at the tree which grew just a bit each year, a bit I could almost see as if in a time-lapse film. How unfair it seemed when I could no longer do this. It was an effort I remember as if my skin shrunk tight over my bones and my brain expanded in my skull, but it was an effort I could manage until one day I couldn’t. It made my stomach turn somersaults, but it was worth it and it was better even than the sidewalk glide, better than out-of-focus movies, even though I knew I had to get back under the covers before mother returned, had to feign the ordinary, had to be convincing. Someone might come back from the dead.

In the fifth grade we did reports on time zones, each zone in a different color, and I got so dizzy my eyes dimmed and I was sent to lie down in the nurse’s office. How can you stand it, I asked the nurse, all those times at the same time. Everything passing by, disappearing. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth and went out.

Things lying in the street have a magnetism that is so uncanny one swerves the car not only to keep from hitting the dead body of a possum or skunk, but to shut out the idea of what has already happened. I am driving to a 3:00 P.M. appointment. I am swerving away from the dead bodies. I am trying on glasses at the optometrist. I have to get new ones because my others disappeared. I don’t tell the assistant that I knew they would disappear. That I had bought the frames at a flea market in London. That Barbara had said I had to—they were cheap and stylish and with blue lenses fitting in I could drift in and out of afternoon pool parties in LA. It would be as if I didn’t need corrective lenses, just wanted to see the world through glass-bottle blue. The lights in the garden would blink to each of my steps around the reflecting pool that hung at the edge of the yard at the drop-off, so that it looked as if the silver water went on forever into sky.

I didn’t say that I knew they would disappear. They were just gone as I’d predicted and I was caught in that out-of-time experience of trying to reconstruct my movements, hands in and out of a purse, at a restaurant, by the TV, in the freezer where I found the key to the back door. It is a flat key; it rests perfectly flat along the top of the freezer door as if someone had acted both to hide it and to put it in exactly the right place to find it easily, except I have no memory of having put it there.

I didn’t tell her that they were the glasses of my childhood, the ones I had to wear in fifth grade, the ones I hated and could see my feet through, a time from the past that came back now full force. I remember the look of the sidewalk as my mother and I exited the doctor’s office. The sidewalk came up to meet me. The silver river along which I had walked to school in a dreamy haze was now divided into square cement segments, pock-marked and stained. It was a real sidewalk, which is what, I realized, it had always been. My feet were big and clumsy in brown lace-ups. I wanted to say, take them away, give me the silver river, but I did what was required: I held my mother’s hand and said yes when she asked if I liked the pinkish plastic frames she had just picked out.

When I hear the Tokyo String Quartet playing Hindemith, time seems caught in an endless and dizzying groove. The globe is spinning faster. From the balcony of the auditorium the chandelier is a magnet. Someone’s pink face is swinging in the rafters and I almost can make it out. I see the dizzying swing of it, the arc of leaping into the air above the heads of those below, grabbing hold of the crystals, a fistful in each hand, and swinging into the expanding universe.