Being thrust into the real world by one’s respective academic institution is scary for any young person. Top it off with a disability in a society where a high percentage of the disabled are unemployed, and you get me, age twenty-four, with a Master of Music degree from Yale University, and a hand-me-down apartment from my parents in New York City, one of the most exciting but terrifying cities in the world.
After enduring one year of a long distance relationship in which Jenny finished her Master’s while I auditioned and performed in LA, we decided to move to New York, jumping headfirst into starting a life together. Jenny and I were lucky in that we did not experience the normal growing pains of learning to live together. I learned early on about Jenny being a clean freak and her not wanting me to wear my shoes in the house after she had mopped the floor.
“Can you please wipe Mark’s feet?” she would ask just after I had taken him to do his business.
Jenny learned that I am like the Princess and the Pea, and that if there’s a single crumb of anything in our bed, I’ll feel it, jump up in disgust, and start wiping the sheets like mad.
“Please don’t eat in the bed,” I would tell her.
We teased each other about our quirks, but we compromised easily and lived harmoniously. There were no disagreements about squeezing the toothpaste from the wrong part of the tube or leaving our belongings strewn about the apartment. We were both equally guilty of these things. It was how other people viewed us as a couple, which we never could have predicted, that caused annoyance and downright anger.
“They think I’m your Asian helper,” Jenny would say in disbelief when our doormen would give her unsolicited reports on my activities. Jenny, who is fourth generation American, and who was born and raised in Hawaii, is of Japanese descent.
“You know, she took her dog out for a walk by herself,” the doormen would say, shaking their heads, giving Jenny disapproving looks as though she had neglected her duties.
“But I’ve known these doormen since 1998 when my parents bought the apartment,” I would say, my heart sinking. “Is that really what they’ve been thinking all along?”
It did not stop with the doormen. It trickled out into interactions with wait staff at restaurants who would ask Jenny what I wanted, the security officers at airports who referred to Jenny as my “helper,” and the wealthy patrons of recital series that I performed in who would ask Jenny to get them glasses of water, mistaking her for a servant at post-concert receptions.
“It’s partly because we’re gay, you know,” Jenny said. “People don’t realize we’re a couple because we’re both women. Then you add the fact that you’re blind, and I’m Asian.”
The expectations my family placed on Jenny and the lack of expectations they placed on me also caught the two of us by surprise.
“No, Laurie, let Jenny and me carry that,” Mom would say in a panicked voice as she noticed me lifting the heavy box containing the new Ikea coffee table.
From the time I was a little girl and we’d go on vacation with family friends, I was always ushered out of the way of large suitcases, which everyone was moving from the van to our condo or hotel rooms. I had always known that vacation bonding started from the moment people worked together, even during the less desirable tasks of carrying heavy, awkward items.
“I want to help, too,” I would say. “Please let me do something,” I would plead.
“You know what would be very helpful?” someone would say. “If you could carry my purse for me, or this shopping bag,” and I would be handed the lightest bag possible to indulge my desire to feel helpful or perhaps just to shut me up.
Apparently, the expectation that I should never have to lift a finger because carrying something heavy would be too dangerous for me had not gone away.
“What do people expect of me?” Jenny asked. “That I’m going to do every little thing for you? Do they really expect whomever you date to treat you like you’re made of glass?”
“Whatever you do, don’t you ever treat me like glass, and don’t you ever stop letting me carry stuff,” I said. “I refuse to be with someone who insists on mothering me. Besides, it’s my eyes that don’t work, not my arms and legs.”
* * *
After unpacking boxes and trying to make the place our own, the next step was to figure out how to survive financially. In addition to the impressed oohs and ahs our Yale degrees elicited from strangers, it also gave us some teaching experience. Every school of music student at Yale was required to have a certain number of teaching hours per semester. I had two undergrad voice students and two students in the school of music who took voice lessons from me as a secondary instrument, and Jenny taught secondary clarinet. After printing out several copies of our resumes and posters advertising our teaching services, we traveled from school to school, talking to anyone in the music department who would lend us an ear.
“You can leave these with us, but we have no openings for music teachers at this time,” directors of elementary and high school music departments would say. “We’ll put these on our bulletin boards, and hopefully some interested kids will tell their parents they want music lessons,” others would say. After dropping off packets of information about our experience at several places, tacking posters up at every local coffee shop we knew of, sending cover letters and teaching résumés to every school in the five boroughs, and posting ads up on Craig’s List, we found ourselves playing the waiting game.
We realized over time that with Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College of Music, and others in New York constantly turning out high quality musicians, there was a higher demand for students than for teachers. The six years of honing our musical craft and our time in New York trying as hard as we could to find ways of putting it to practical and financial use all seemed useless.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked at dinner one night. We had decided to treat ourselves to pizza at Big Nick’s, a dive near our house with the old school New York waitresses whose bad sides you never want to get on.
“I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I thought we would have had at least some leads right now,” Jenny said.
“I wake up each morning feeling optimistic. I get all excited about calling more schools on our list, and the most positive response I get is a receptionist who will at least transfer me to the voicemail of the music director,” I said.
After weeks of receiving no responses from schools, and after I attended several disappointing auditions, we realized that we needed to do something different. Jenny got a temp job, and I began to think of other options. Temping didn’t seem a viable solution for me. Every office had its own computer system, which would be a bitch to make compatible with my screen-reading software. And waiting tables seemed a logistical impossibility.
Since moving to New York, I felt as though I had no particular place in the world. I couldn’t even be the homemaker with a hot meal waiting for Jenny when she returned from a day of work. I had no cooking, cleaning, or any other basic skills to speak of. Before I did anything else, I realized I had to learn how to live as an independent human being, to take it upon myself to learn the things I should have learned as a child. I decided to make the best of my time, to make myself useful and valuable in my home before venturing out to find myself in the world. I would find a way to learn the things a Yale diploma couldn’t get me, and that was by taking a crash course in cooking, cleaning, and other basic living skills 101.
* * *
I received one of the best presents I was ever given during Chanukah and Christmas the year before Jenny and I moved to New York together. Mom and I decided to spend Chanukah that year in New York with Brian, who was hosting a party at his house. Jenny, who was still at Yale, was on winter break, and came to New York to join us, but her mood was a curious combination of giddiness and edginess. When I asked her about it, she’d change the subject.
The night before the party, I fell asleep while waiting for Jenny to join me. When I woke up several hours later, I discovered that it wasn’t yet morning. I stretched, felt the empty bed next to me, smelled the unmistakable scent of magic marker, and heard the rasp of somebody drawing furiously.
“Jenny?” I said sleepily. “What are you doing?”
She giggled in reply from across the room, seated at my desk. “Go back to sleep,” she said.
“What time is it?” I pressed the large, triangular button on my talking clock.
“It’s 3:00AM,” it said loudly.
“Shhhh, you’ll wake your mom,” Jenny whispered.
“What are you doing?” I asked, feeling irked that Jenny was doing some random art project in the wee hours of the night while I was trying to sleep, knowing full well she’d be grumpy and tired the morning of a busy day of holiday shopping.
“I can’t tell you,” Jenny said, trying to suppress another giggle. “Just go to sleep.”
When it was time to exchange gifts the next evening at Brian’s Chanukah party, Jenny handed me a large, flat, gift-wrapped box.
“What could this be?” I asked as I tore off the paper.
I opened the box, and pulled out a large object, unrecognizable at first. Two pieces of three-hole punched cardboard backed several pages of braille, all held together by rings. The top piece of cardboard was covered in bumps and lines, obviously made in puffy paint.
“Read the cover,” Jenny urged. “It’s in braille.
I began trying to decipher the large dots, which took up the top half of the cover. It read, “Il Ristorante di Laurimo.”
“How did you do this?” I exclaimed.
“I looked up the braille alphabet on the Internet.”
I gasped in disbelief. Nobody had done that for me before. Sure, I had received Hallmark cards that had raised pictures of balloons with brailled captions that simply read, “Balloon,” on them. And Mom always wrote me braille cards because she had taken it upon herself to learn braille when I was little. But nobody else had gone out of their way to learn braille for the purpose of making it possible for me to read something they wrote. It was just like Jenny to understand the subtle importance of that, of me being able to take in her words without someone having to read them to me. It’s a privilege most take for granted, and one I normally don’t think about myself.
“Open it up,” Jenny said.
Each braille page within contained its own surprise.
“Hi Laurie, this is the chicken and tomato egg I always make for you when you come to my house. Mmmm, writing it out is making me hungry!” wrote Ming, and a recipe followed.
“I hope you like your new cookbook,” wrote Hannah. “Here’s a rough recipe for my deviled eggs. We miss you at Yale this year, and maybe you’ll make these for me when I come visit you in New York.”
“Dear Laurie, here’s a favorite recipe of Amy’s and mine for brisket with cranberry sauce. Cook it and eat it in good health. Lots of love, your auntie Suzi.”
The book was organized into three sections—appetizers, main courses, and desserts—and each page contained another recipe for one of my favorite dishes. The dishes I adored that nobody in my circle of friends or my family knew how to make, Jenny had found recipes for on the Internet. As I read the notes from my friends and family, my eyes filled with tears. I was speechless.
“Feel the cover again,” Jenny said. “Can you guess what that is?”
She pointed out a raised drawing in puffy paint of a person.
“That’s you, and that little creature next to you is Mark. See his curly hair? And that boxy thing is an oven.”
Jenny had called all of our friends for weeks to retrieve all the recipes for the memory-filled dishes I had so loved. She had asked Mom for the recipes I had enjoyed since childhood and to procure some from my aunts and Grandma. Chocolate truffles, chicken with parmesan and heavy cream, Mom’s mouthwatering kugel that I looked forward to on every Jewish holiday, and many more treats were revealed to me as I turned the pages. Mom had brailled them all out on the braille printer she had at home in her office. This was all the result of one of those intimate conversations we had in bed where I had confessed to Jenny that I didn’t know how to cook, that I was afraid of fire, and that nobody trusted me around anything hot or sharp.
“But you could totally cook,” she said.
“You think so?” I asked, half surprised, half delighted that she seemed so confident in my potential abilities.
“Oh yeah, you would just have to learn to do it by touch, by feeling the consistency change when you’re stirring to know when the mixture is smooth, and by noticing the smells of something cooking in a pan to know when it has turned brown.”
“I want to cook for you,” I told her, putting my arm around her. “When we live together someday, I want to make romantic dinners for you.”
“And you will,” she said.
She had meant that, and the cookbook proved it. All the belief she had in me was inside of it, in those puffy painted brailled words and drawings she had made in meticulous detail. That book had changed my attitude about cooking from fear to an eagerness to learn how to do it well as soon as I could. It was that book among so many other things about being with Jenny that inspired me to be a better, more well-rounded person, not just a good singer, a good lover and confidant. Though it’s not something one usually thinks about, being the kind of person who knows the basics of running a household is just as important to a relationship as the initial reasons that bring two people together. I never wanted the burden of housework or cooking to fall on Jenny, and in fact, loving her made me want to learn all the ways I could think of to take care of her and to be her equal partner.
* * *
As a child, I had lived in fear of the kitchen. That room meant grave danger in the form of sharp utensils and hot appliances. If I happened to get too near the stove or oven when something was cooking, I would hear a shout of, “No Laurie! Get away from that. It’s very dangerous in here right now!”
My picking up a knife would cause gasps, followed by fast footsteps and the ominous object being hastily taken away from me. Because I was too attached to my appendages to risk them being cut or burned off, I learned to give the kitchen a wide berth whenever I heard the sounds and smelled the aromas of cooking.
No meals in our house were devoted to lessons on how to cut meat or how to spread butter. Instead, Mom, Brian, and Dad continued to cut my food and put cream cheese on my bagels until I left for college. It would not have been an impossibility for me to learn by any stretch of the imagination, but Mom, feeling that I already had a lot to contend with in school, decided not to overwhelm me with the little things that she felt I could always learn later. My family adopted the motto, “Laurie, it’s just easier,” when they would do things for me that I expressed interest in learning how to do myself.
I grew afraid of pouring my own orange juice, water, or milk after a few times of getting more liquid on the floor than I managed to get in my glass. I didn’t even know how to clean up the messes I made, and my guilt kept me from attempting to pour ever again.
I refused to make Jenny take care of me the way Mom and other family members had done. It was time for me to take control of my education, to fill in the pretty significant gaps.
* * *
Brenda Garboos was a counselor at the New York State Commission for the Blind, a government agency that provides rehabilitation and vocational services. I came to her office one Monday in early October to discuss my need for a crash course in cooking with her.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Rubin?” she asked, not unkindly, but in a loud monotone that suggested she had been meeting with blind people with all manner of different needs and desires for years. The resolve in her tone told me that she had government regulations and limitations to work with when dealing with each of our cases, and I was prepared for this.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” I said. “I’m here to see about getting some training in basic living skills, mainly cooking.”
“Okay,” said Brenda, beginning to scribble notes down on a piece of paper. She began asking me questions about how long I had lived in New York, had I been blind since birth, had I received services in the state of New York before. I answered easily and comfortably until she asked, “Ms. Rubin, are you employed?”
“No, not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“I’m an opera singer, so at the moment I’m freelancing and am self employed.”
“I see. When was the last time you were paid to sing?” she asked, and I could feel her incredulous gaze upon me.
“Well, I just moved here last month,” I explained.
“And have you been hired for any paid performances since that time?”
“No,” I admitted sheepishly. “It usually takes a while to break into the scene here.”
“As you probably know, music is a very difficult field to succeed in, and we usually tell our clients to consider some vocational counseling to help them find realistic ways of making an income. Have you been looking for work other than in performing?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been sending my teaching résumé to all the schools on the Upper West Side, and have been calling around to as many schools in the city as I can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody is hiring, nor is there a great need for private voice instructors.”
“When I open your case, I would like to put you in contact with a vocational counselor,” Brenda said. “You might have to be open-minded to employment in some other field than music.”
“That would be fine with me,” I said, feeling my heart drop slowly into my stomach. I could sense that Brenda felt that I had been unreasonable for not seeking work as a switchboard operator or a customer service representative at any number of blindness organizations the way their other clients did.
“I will also connect you with a rehabilitation counselor who will come to your home and teach you the cooking skills you need,” Brenda said after a deep sigh. “How are your mobility skills around New York?”
A wave of humiliation swept over me. The truth was that even though I had spent ample time in New York since 1998 when Mom and Dad bought our place, and I had lived here for an entire month, I did not feel the least bit comfortable. Crossing major avenues felt as terrifying as attempting to swim across an ocean, and I felt trapped in the small strip of neighborhood immediately surrounding our building. I still possessed my childhood fear of getting lost.
* * *
After filling out the requisite government forms, Brenda opened my case. She referred me to the Jewish Guild for the Blind, a not-for-profit organization on the Upper West Side that offers many training programs for the blind. They are a partner of the Commission for the Blind, and Brenda was permitted to send me there for all the training I had asked for. It was there that I met Gertie Reigondeaux, a warm and immediately likable woman in her mid-forties who came to my house every Wednesday afternoon to show me all the ins and outs of the kitchen and all the safe techniques a blind person would need to employ when cooking.
“What do you think about starting with apple crisp?” she asked enthusiastically at our first lesson. “You told me you have a sweet tooth, and I have an easy recipe that is to die for.”
Gertie unveiled an assortment of goodies from the Jewish Guild, including a small, manual timer with little raised lines and braille numbers to indicate the 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute markings. She then handed me a small, round aluminum disc.
“What is this for?” I asked.
“You put this in a pot of water, and it’ll make a racket when the water starts to boil. Not that you’ll need it. Boiling water is pretty loud as it is.”
“This device has a cute name,” she said, handing me an object that looked like a nine-volt battery with a clip on it. It’s called a “Say When.” It’s a sensor that beeps to let you know when you’ve reached the brim of a mug when you’re filling it with hot water. It’ll keep you from having accidents or burning your fingers.” She leaned in and whispered, “Most blind people hate this thing. Sometimes it beeps too much and becomes annoying because it’s so sensitive.”
The last gift from the Jewish Guild was a curious hybrid of a spatula and a pair of tongs. “This will make flipping meat much easier for you,” she explained. “The fact that you can grip it will keep meat from taking a dive off your spatula.”
And then the cooking commenced.
“Now keep your index finger just inside the rim of the cup,” Gertie instructed. “Hold the box of sugar with your right hand, and keep your right thumb on the flap to make sure the box stays open as you pour.”
I felt the cool, powdery sensation of the sugar touching my index finger, indicating that I had filled the measuring cup. Gertie showed me how to take a knife and to line up the flat part of it with its edge. As I scraped off the excess, I found that I was putting too much pressure on it and was not getting a nice, even, accurate half a cup. We tried it again, this time keeping my left index finger perfectly aligned with one edge of the cup while I scraped the excess with my right hand.
“It’s like magic,” I said, surveying my perfectly flat half a cup proudly. “What a neat little trick.”
“This is something that many bakers use, not just blind ones,” Gertie said.
She had me use a cookie sheet as my workspace, thus minimizing my need to clean up flyaway flower and sugar. She showed me how to pay attention to the consistency of my mixture as I stirred.
“See how it still feels kind of gritty? And you can tell that it’s rough and hasn’t yet mixed with the water and eggs.”
As I continued to stir, Gertie proceeded to put tactile labels on the indistinguishable buttons on my microwave.
“Have you never used a microwave before?” Gertie asked in surprise.
“No,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m ridiculously behind.”
“You’re not half as bad off as many of the people I work with,” she assured me. “I just went to this grown woman’s house last week. She still lives with her mother, and I had to argue with the mother for about twenty minutes before she let me take her daughter in the kitchen. When we eventually made it to the island to start cutting veggies, she gasped every time I handed her daughter a knife. I had to start from scratch with this girl, even to teach her how to hold a fork properly. I wouldn’t be surprised if her mother feeds her.”
“That’s awful!” I said. “Being blind is nothing compared to the handicapping a parent can do. How is she ever supposed to entertain the prospect of living a normal life on her own?”
“Sadly, I don’t think she ever will,” Gertie said. “I asked her what she wanted to do for a living, and she said that her mother wouldn’t let her even walk to the community college across the street to take classes.”
The mixture was feeling nice and liquidy now, and Gertie pointed out the bits of flour that were stuck to the bottom and sides of the mixing bowl. “Just reach underneath it with your spoon and scrape and fold, scrape and fold until it gets mixed in.”
Then it was time to melt a half a stick of butter in the microwave. Gertie had put large dots the size of my finger tips on each of the minute buttons so that I could count from left to right from the one to the zero. She had stuck larger dots on the start and popcorn buttons. It was so nice to become acquainted with my own microwave, to place the solid butter in a bowl, and to take it out thirty seconds later, all melted and bubbling from the heat.
The apple crisp required four apples, making this an excellent lesson in cutting and peeling. Gertie taught me to pick a certain point on the apple to start peeling from, and to use the peeler systematically until I had removed the skin in large sections. This was very quick and easy and certainly something I would have never thought to do. She took a corer from my utensils drawer and showed me how to plant it right in the center of the apple by the stem and press down. A perfectly clean core fell neatly out of the apple. Cutting proved a tad more daunting.
“Don’t even think of slicing off your fingers while I’m here,” Gertie laughed. “Keep your fingers curved, and use them as a way of lining up the knife with the section you want to cut off.”
She showed me how to hold the apple together, even once it had been sliced, and then to turn it around so that I could cut several slices at once. “This is a great technique for onions as well,” she said. “That way, all the pieces don’t get separated and make the cutting process more tedious.”
She handed me potholders after we had gotten the batter, apples and all, into the pan. “Don’t worry, you won’t hurt yourself so long as you’ve got these babies on. Now, just pull the handle and open the oven.”
I hadn’t been expecting the immense heat that shot out of the oven when I opened the door. I clumsily gripped the oily pan with my oven-mitt-clad hands, which was as difficult as holding ski poles with gloves for the first time. I gingerly felt for the center of the oven rack and closed the door.
After forty minutes, the bell on my timer made a loud “ding,” and it was time to check on it. I donned the large oven mitts again, and Gertie showed me how to take a fork and scrape the surface.
“Wait until it cools a second, and then feel the fork. Does it have any residue on it?” It did. “Then it’s not quite done yet. Also, did you notice that it wasn’t crispy when you scraped it?”
In five minutes, I checked again. This time, my fork came out clean, and there was an unmistakable and scrumptious scraping sound when my fork made contact.
“You did it!” Gertie said. “You made your very first apple crisp by yourself. How does it feel?”
“Pretty darn awesome,” I said, sighing deeply and happily as our nostrils filled with the cinnamony smell of apple crisp.
Jenny and I celebrated my newfound skills that night by eating the delicious dessert.
“Wow, it’s really good,” Jenny said. “See, I told you you could do it.”
* * *
The following Wednesday, Gertie taught me how to make scrambled eggs. It was fun to feel the eggs solidify under my spatula as I stirred them on the stove. When they were firm and almost bouncy feeling, I could tell they were well done, just how I liked them. The following week, I made pasta, and Gertie advised me to use what she called, “the cold method,” which meant that I put the pasta in the water before I set it to boil. This made things much less precarious and eliminated the possibility of me dropping pasta onto a hot burner. It was that week that I learned an interesting trick with oil.
“Oil is hard to feel at room temperature,” Gertie said as I spilled a copious amount of olive oil when overflowing my measuring cup. “The best way to handle this is to put the bottle of oil in the freezer for about ten minutes before you use it. That way you’ll feel it when it reaches your finger and the top of the measuring cup.”
My recent cooking experiences had taught me that the best and most precise techniques are not executed with the use of sight and that cooking is actually an olfactory and tactile art. Everything from proper cutting to safety around the stove and the oven could easily be managed without being able to see, but I knew that my parents and everybody else was so used to attributing all their functionality to their dependence on their sight. If only I had known in childhood what I know now, all the fine motor skills used for things like pouring, cutting, and stirring would be so much easier for me, and I wouldn’t have to give them a second thought. To this day, those things that come naturally to most take extra effort on my part because of my inexperience, not my lack of sight.
* * *
Shortly after I began working with Gertie, my orientation and mobility training began. Carol Mogue, also an instructor from the Jewish Guild, met me downstairs of my building at 9:30 on Tuesday mornings. She too had interesting tips that made getting around New York seem much easier. Many people tell me how they could never imagine getting around New York without sight, but to tell you the truth, New York is one of the most blind-friendly cities in existence. Most of Manhattan is a grid system with numbered avenues and streets, so if you lose count and forget where you are, you can just ask, and someone will say, “You’re at the corner of 10th Avenue and 45th Street.” Even if you’ve never been on that block in your life, you will know where you are in the grand scheme of things, and it’ll be easy to get back on track.
Carol also made the subways seem easier. It was she who taught me that the train doors will open on the right side at express stops, and on the left side at local stops. That way, I would always know which door to head towards before the train had reached my stop. She also taught me how to find bus stops, which were mostly offset from the corners. Mark began to recognize them very quickly and would take me to them when I told him, “Find the bus stop.” I realized that I had soon learned more about traveling around New York than the average sighted person. I was amused to find that most people didn’t know their cardinal directions, and that when in a rush, they had to look around frantically for building numbers while Carol had taught me that the odd numbered addresses were on the north and west sides of streets, whereas the even numbered addresses were on the south and east sides of streets. It was the little rhyme and reason to the way New York City was laid out that made me feel at home there at last, and after several weeks of learning from Carol, I knew it was time for me to go it alone and continue to discover New York without help.