“That’s right.”
“And you knew that already because that’s why you took the cab instead of driving.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mom?”
“What?”
Are you gonna go blind, Mom? She could hear his question as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud. But he was not yet ready to speak it. Instead he said, “What can you see, exactly? I mean, how bad is it?”
She thought for a moment. “You see that roll of paper towels?”
“Sure I see it. Why? Can’t you see it?”
“Of course I can see it, dummy. Didn’t I just point it out to you?”
“Huh?”
“Bring me the roll of paper towels, sport. Thanks. Now what we want here is the cardboard tube, so let’s take all the paper towels off. If we fold them — that’s right — we’ll be able to use them again. Sweetie, you look utterly mystified.”
“Well, you’ve got to admit you’re acting pretty weird, Mom. First a cab, then unrolling the paper towels. Didn’t I do something like this with toilet paper when I was a little kid?”
“You can’t possibly remember that.”
“I remember you talking about it. Did I get in trouble?”
“No, but you got laughed at. Okay, we now have a cardboard tube. Now, voila! We tear it in half and we have two cardboard tubes.”
“And if we put them together we have a whole one again. And if—”
“Hold ’em to your eyes, Thommy. Like binoculars, but right up against your eyes.”
“Like this?”
“Like that. Pointing straight out, that’s right. Now you see what I see.”
“Oh, wow,” he said. “That’s as much as you can see?”
“Gimme. No, as a matter of fact I can do a little better than this.” She shortened both tubes until they were about four inches long. “Here,” she said. “Now try it.”
“You can’t see very much.”
“No.”
“Just straight ahead? So if a car was coming from the side—”
“That’s why I took a taxi.”
“Wow,” he said. He was still holding the cardboard tubes to his eyes, looking experimentally around the room. He said, “Was it this bad last week, Mom?”
“No. He said there’s been further deterioration and vision loss since last week.”
And he hadn’t had to say that; she’d already known. Her field of vision was shrinking, and it sometimes seemed to her that she could feel it drawing in. He’d tested her: Now keep your eyes straight forward, Mrs. Duskin. Now I want you to watch the red dot. Without moving your eyes, just be aware of the red dot. Tell me when it disappears.
The red dot (and the yellow dot, and the blue dot) had disappeared sooner this week than last. Each time it passed from her field of vision she said “There” or “Now” or “Oooops,” and the ophthalmologist made a pencil mark on the sheet of graph paper. When he had finished, he connected the dots to form a pair of irregular circles. While she studied them, he handed her without comment her test from the preceding week. The circles then had been larger.
“What’s going to happen, Mom?”
“He doesn’t really know,” she said. “Since he doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, he can’t tell exactly what will happen next. My condition could just spontaneously arrest itself; the deterioration could stop of its own accord. Or it could clear up completely.”
“Or?”
Softly she said, “I think I’m going blind, Thommy.”
“You think so, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
“Do you know—”
“How much time I’ve got? Not too long, I don’t think. He wants me to see a specialist.”
“You better go right away.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t do any good.”
She thought he’d argue with her, or ask her how she could be so sure, but instead he said, “Mom? Are you scared?”
“This tea’s good,” she said. “I’m probably spoiled now, I’ll want cookie crumbs in it all the time.”
“Are you scared, Mom?”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not. Funny, isn’t it?”
She did some counseling at Indiana-Fort Wayne, and if one of her clients had said the same thing she would have labeled it denial. How could you fail to run the gamut of negative emotions at the prospect of blindness? One of her senses, perhaps the chief one, was being taken away from her. Her world was shrinking and turning dark around her. How could she react other than with fear and rage?
Yet, from the beginning, it had not felt like deprivation. It had felt like a gift. From the onset, when she started catching flashes of white light out of the corners of her eyes toward the end of the day, and then when her field of vision began to have an occasional halo around it, from those first symptoms she had sensed that more was being given to her than was being taken away.
She was not being singled out for punishment. Rather, she was being chosen for something. For something important.
Charming, her professional self commented. Instead of paranoia, she was opting for grandiosity.
Except she didn’t feel grandiose. If anything, she felt curiously humble.
She was forty-one years old, the widowed mother of a thirteen-year-old boy. She stood five-four in flat shoes and weighed 105 pounds. Except for her pregnancy, her weight had not varied by more than a pound or two since college. It stayed the same, irrespective of her diet. The great majority of the female students she counseled, and not a few of the males as well, had some sort of problematic relationship with weight and food. Many struggled with their weight, and some had serious eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia. Half the world was hungry, she sometimes thought, and the other half was either starving itself or alternately gorging and vomiting.
She had a heart-shaped face, a strong straight nose, a small mouth. Her forehead was broad, with a sharply defined widow’s peak. Ten years ago, weeks after a drunk driver had crossed the centerline on State Road 37, she had found herself wanting to change her hair style and combing tentative bangs down onto her forehead. Almost immediately she’d realized what she was doing, trying to deny her widowhood by covering her widows peak.
The hair had been dark brown then. Now it was a soft gray and she wore it as she’d been wearing it for twenty years, falling evenly to within an inch of her shoulders. Her eyes were also gray, a surprising shade a full tone deeper than her hair. They were no less imposing to look upon now that they had begun to lose their function.
Since he’d already spoiled his dinner with Oreos, she didn’t bother cooking. They had a pizza delivered and ate it in front of the television set. Neither of them watched; he was doing his homework, and she had her eyes closed and let her gaze turn inward.
He said, “Mom? This is gonna sound dumb.”
“I’m glad you warned me.”
“Well, here goes. Uh. Is there something you don’t want to see?”
“Oh, God.”
“Well, I just thought—”
“I thought the cobbler’s kids were supposed to go barefoot. But what about the psychologist’s kids?”
“Psychobabble, huh? I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Thom.” She opened her eyes, surprised for an instant by the smallness of her field of vision. Her mind’s eye still had a wide screen, and it was as if she saw less now when she opened her eyes.
She said, “I asked myself the same thing. On a metaphysical level everything that happens to us is the result of a choice we make. Even your father, on some level or other he elected to be in that accident—”
“I still don’t get that. I mean, he was driving along minding his own business, right? And some drunk came sailing at him from out of nowhere, and it’s his fault?”