But Oz was not as interested in the food as she expected, as she was.
He was silent, and she was about to say that he didn’t have to tell her or talk about this if he didn’t want to. She was still figuring things all out, so she thought about it a lot. But instead of saying anything, she let her question hang in the space between them. She ate a bite of the spaghetti. She waited. At last Oz leaned in a little and she heard him let out a long breath.
“My mother,” he said slowly, “my Italian mother made me the center of her world. My father was not around, and I was with her constantly. She talked to me, sang to me, and read to me all the time. That was how I learned what blindness was — from the books. We would read about what the little bear saw, and I would ask what that meant. She would try to explain. ‘Some people can get the shape of something without touching it.’ She didn’t overdo it. She didn’t tell me more than I needed. She would read a thing and then let me feel it. I didn’t mind. At a certain point, she revealed that ‘some’ people were actually ‘most’ people.”
Oz put his hand on hers. This was not an overtly sexual gesture. It was that being together and not seeing meant more touching, more body communication. The usual way Oz talked — affectedly easy, slangy, slightly stoned — seemed to fall away as he spoke. She knew that meant something. His voice was soft and low, so she had to lean in to hear him.
“But the big boom for me, the first fall in my life was not that I was missing this thing that most others had, but when I asked the question that she had avoided. It took me longer than you might have guessed for me to think to ask this, but it is hard to imagine your mother as really separate from you. It takes time, it takes a moment — a number of moments — of frustration when she doesn’t understand you to even imagine that she is not part of you. That she isn’t you.” Jelly listened very carefully, but he hesitated, stopped telling her the story.
She watched the white blur of Oz pick up his wineglass and take a swallow. Wine was sour and red wine made your lips pucker and feel like they had an edge to them. Red wine found rough surfaces and emphasized them. A crack or dry spot on your lips, patchiness on the surface of your tongue. It surprised her that she was thinking of his mouth and what it would be like to kiss him. She didn’t think she felt attracted to him, not yet, but she kept imagining this kiss. Their mouths would both be rough and sour from wine.
She could have said, “What happened?” or “Then what?” But her instinct told her to wait. She knew that would give him room to talk. She should not — could not — rush him.
“One day,” Oz said at last, “I sat on her lap as she read. I could feel the words vibrate in her chest, and I felt the smooth pages in front of us. I realized that she got the stories from the page, the smooth pages that gave me nothing. I guess I had known that for a while. But now it all came together. I interrupted her, ‘But Mama, can you see?’ and she had to admit that, yes, she could see. She was not like me, and I was not like her. I was blind, and she was not.”
Jelly reached out her other hand and placed it on his. Still she did not speak, but he understood her reaction to his story. He could feel it in the heat of her hand, hear it in the slight change in her breath. He leaned in so his face was next to hers, and they were breathing close, with their mouth and hair smells next to the food and room smells. He would kiss her, she knew, but for now they were almost motionless. She heard a murmur from one of them. Then she realized that it wouldn’t just be a kiss, that they would keep going until they were naked and their bodies entwined. They would hungrily touch every part of each other, and she felt — even before the kiss — breathless and almost faint. She tried not to talk or even think. She tried to stop. She wanted to be still.
CARRIE TAKES THE BUS
1985
Carrie Wexler stood on the lower level of Port Authority and tried not to breathe in carbon monoxide. She waited in a line that snaked from the door marked 21, and beyond the door she could see and smell the idling buses. She put her backpack on her feet and turned up the volume on her Discman. She let the sounds of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia be the soundtrack to the sightscape of Port Authority. This was the 1950 recording that she had wanted, and her father sent it to her with a note calling it one of her “odd little operas.” Her going-to-college gift from him was the state-of-the-art portable CD player. That was a thing with him, “state of the art,” and she was happy to play along even though it frequently skipped, unlike her cassette Walkman. Her father was crazy for new technology, and he liked to send his daughter extravagant electronic gifts despite the fact that her mother told her he had recently filed for bankruptcy. Carrie knew he had been broke or on the verge of broke since the divorce ten years earlier, but maybe the divorce was part of the reason he bought her things. He knew and shared her penchant for opera and musicals. Discard the cassettes, he said. He would replace them with the clear, perfect, undistorted Compact Discs. She now had a CD collection building in her dorm room, but many things were not available on CD yet, so she also kept a large collection of cassette tapes. Technological transitions are always messy. And you often have to keep multiple devices and formats. She had video as well as film cameras. In that case the video was distinctly inferior, but the film was so expensive — it limited what you shot, and you had to be so stingy about coverage. Part of the art was making blind decisions. Video is ugly but looser and more forgiving. You could experiment more. The technology would continue to change and improve. She would be drowning in overlapping gear and nothing would be perfect. She admired her father’s commitment to the new. That was a strategy for handling it. Just go forward and don’t look back.
A woman in the line ahead of her tried to get something out of her suitcase. It was overfilled and the top popped up when she unzipped it. As Carrie listened to the battling back-and-forth goofy frenzy of Rossini, she watched the poor woman trying to shove things back in so the zipper would close.
“Your eye is a camera,” Zakrevsky told them in class. “Imagine where your camera would go and where you would put it. What would be outside the frame and what would be inside the frame.” She did think of her eyes as a camera, especially when she had music flowing into her ears. It transformed the world into her soundstage. The music directed her eyes somehow. Something about that, how the music informs the looking. But of course films are scored and the music comes later, inspired by the images. The woman sat on her suitcase and her weight finally allowed the zipper a close-enough purchase to pull closed. Carrie checked for her own backpack and gear bag. She had brought a brand-new portable Betacam video camera that she had signed out from school, and she figured she could film some stuff in Meadow’s “studio.” She could edit what she shot when she got back to the city. Maybe she should have just brought the Super 8. Of course Meadow would be film-only, or whatever she was into now. Her homemade things, her projects.