Now I See You Page 10

  But David wasn’t opposed to my secret just because it inconvenienced him. He was disturbed by the way it was growing. What had started as a careful omission had become a bold, bald-faced lie. I made up stories to cover for bruises on my shin, knots on my forehead, mistakes I made when reading out loud. Put together, these little cover-ups created an alternate version of me, a version that kept getting boozier and ditzier to explain away the mistakes that were all attributable to my eyes.

  David didn’t particularly like this version of me and he got stuck spending a lot of time around her when we went out. He didn’t understand why I’d prefer people to think I was obtuse and drunk rather than just partially sighted. I didn’t understand it, or particularly like it, myself. But it was easier to keep going on the course I’d charted than start a new one.

  Eventually, I reasoned, I’d tell people. When I had to. For the time being, I got by. Through a combination of feigning car problems, riding in Kat’s passenger seat, and pushing David when I had no other options, I was able to avoid ever getting behind the wheel after dark.

  But sometimes I’d already be behind the wheel as it grew dark.

  Try as I might to ensure that whatever obligations I had would wrap up before dusk, sometimes things would run late and then I’d be stuck out after sunset. Sometimes I wouldn’t notice; I’d be busy rehearsing and then suddenly look at the window and see the sun was almost set. Usually, I would notice but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t very well call, “That’s a wrap!” midscene with a cast and crew on the clock because I was secretly night-blind.

  Then, too, there was traffic. Sometimes I’d be stuck in gridlock on the 101 and watch, helpless, as the sky grew darker. My mind would scramble for a way out as my pulse rose and my palms started to get clammy. There was no way out. I was trapped behind the wheel, sinking in a sea of darkness.

  One late afternoon, I was sitting in the waiting room of a casting agency in Sherman Oaks, waiting for my callback to play the wacky secretary in a new pilot. They were running late.

  “Sorry,” the casting assistant said. “We’ll get you in really soon.”

  I nodded, swallowing. The sky out the window beside me was descending into a dusty gray and I had ten, maybe fifteen minutes left before twilight. I’d never been to this casting office before and I’d needed to consult my Thomas Guide the whole ride over. How would I see the Thomas Guide now? How would I see the street signs? How would I see the road on those curvy, tree-lined streets that took me over the hills? I tried not to sweat through my spearmint-colored shirt.

  I’ll worry about it after, I reasoned, or else the whole callback is blown.

  As soon as the casting agent said, “We’ll be in touch,” I walked briskly out of the room, trying not to sprint in my knee-high boots. Once outside though, I did run, fumbling with my car keys and dropping them in my haste. The sky was darkening but mercifully, there were some weak rays of sunlight remaining. I could outrace the darkness.

  Keys in ignition, foot on gas, buckling my seat belt as I turned the wheel.

  Take it easy, I counseled myself. Not too fast. Don’t forget to look first.

  Once out of the parking lot, I craned my head forward, squinting at the street signs, trying to make out which one said “Deervale.” A car behind me honked as I came to a near-stop at every intersection, trying to decipher the letters that were almost invisible.

  “Hold your goddamned horses,” I yelled, brave with my doors locked and windows up.

  After passing through five intersections, I realized I’d gone too far. I would have to turn around. Five precious minutes had just leaked away and now the sky was dark purple, making it even harder to read the street signs.

  Don’t cry, I told myself. No time.

  No matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t make out the letters so I started counting letters instead of reading them. Four—no, that was too short. What was that? Six? No, “Deervale” was longer. This. Here. Eight letters. An “l” towards the end. This must be it. Yes. Go. Turn. Hurry.

  The road was curvy but, thankfully, not crowded. I hunched over the wheel, gripping it with white knuckles. With the music off, I could hear the sound of my breathing, heavy, on the glass.

  Just a little bit farther, I thought, then I’ll be on Ventura which has plenty of light.

  I squinted my eyes and widened my eyes, experimenting, trying with sheer force of will to hold on to the shape of the cars in front of me, to keep the white lines that divided the lanes clear and distinct.

  Just a little bit more.

  My foot was heavy on the gas, pressing hard, urging the car forward, faster, faster, to make this miserable interlude end. I couldn’t afford to look down at the speedometer but I knew I was going too fast. I could feel it.

  Suddenly there was a flash of red in front of me, ripping me out of my trance. A car’s brake lights, just ahead. I slammed on my own brakes hard, and closed my eyes, waiting for the impact. When there was none, I opened my eyes to see the car proceeding slowly through the intersection. I scanned the area until I located the reason the car had stopped. A stop sign. How many of those had I missed? How many more before I made it back?

  There’s no place like home, I thought. There’s no place like home.

  When I walked through the door of my apartment, I was shaking.

  David stood up, alarmed.

  “What happened?” he exclaimed, “Are you okay?”

  I dropped my purse in our foyer and let my head and shoulders fall over like a marionette whose strings were cut.

  “Can we go home?” I said. “I want to go home.”

  PART II

  Tip #10: On the sacrifices of pregnancy

  When you become pregnant, your obstetrician will hand you a long list of seemingly harmless items that can kill or mangle your fetus. Monkfish? Beware. Hibiscus tea? Contraindicated! Peroxide? You want your kid to have arms or not?

  Do whatever you want with this list. As long as you don’t drink the baby’s weight in grain alcohol and stop shooting heroin, I’m pretty sure it’ll be okay.

  There is, however, one item that should be on the list but won’t be, since it doesn’t pose a risk for most pregnant women.

  I’m talking about heels.

  Remember all those times you’ve found yourself facedown on asphalt because you missed a stair or got a heel caught in a crack in the sidewalk? Now think about hitting the pavement that hard with a baby inside of you.

  Lose the heels.

  Don’t wean yourself off gradually; just gather all your darlings together, toss them in a garbage bag, and leave them at the doorstep of the Salvation Army like a Santa Claus for the frugal shoe addict. Then proceed directly to Target and buy yourself a bunch of sneakers. Practical, frumpy, I-haven’t-had-an-orgasm-in-five-years-and-may-never-again, soccer-mom sneakers.

  Yes, it’s a sacrifice.

  Better get used to those.

  10. DAY OF THANKS

  My father froze, the hypodermic needle poised in his hand.

  “What?” he croaked.

  “I don’t have a parasite. I’m pregnant,” I repeated. It wasn’t how I’d planned on making the announcement, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

  For once, there was silence at the dinner table. The floor-to-ceiling windows in my parents’ apartment were open and I could hear the distant sound of cars honking twenty-four stories below. Ten pairs of eyes stared at me from around the table.

  “What?” my mother asked, her voice low. She was holding a wooden spoon in midair, dripping marinara sauce onto the tablecloth. Only her eyes moved, and they were in full panic mode. “What?”

  I thought perhaps they hadn’t heard me right. This was the reaction I’d expect from “I’m moving to Canada!” or “I’m practicing Wicca!” or “I’m moving to Canada to practice Wicca!”

  “You’re gonna be a grandma,” David elaborated. “Happy Mother’s Day everyone!”

  Then my grand
mother made a strange, gasping noise in her throat and began to sob, though it was anybody’s guess whether they were tears of joy or anguish.

  “Mamma Mia!” she choked out. “We gonna have a baby!”

  When a twenty-seven-year-old, newly married woman begins vomiting incessantly for weeks on end, most people don’t assume she contracted a parasite from her Hawaii honeymoon. Even if pregnancy doesn’t pop up as the first explanation in most people’s minds, chances are, it’d present itself as the second or third, certainly well before talk about running a CBC and differential, stat! Of course, my parents aren’t most people.

  To be fair, I did start the ball of paranoia rolling; instead of telling them I was pregnant at first, I told them I had the stomach flu. It was going around, I’d explained, making its way through the English program at Columbia, where I was weeks away from receiving my master’s degree.

  They bought this for a week or two, before they smartened up. This was no stomach bug.

  “Listen, I don’t want to alarm you,” my father advised, “but you may have contracted Helicobacter pylori.”

  “I really don’t think so,” I countered.

  “I’m sorry but did you get your medical degree when I wasn’t looking?” my mother barked. “Your father is a PHYSICIAN!”

  In the eyes of my family, my father’s medical degree makes him an expert in everything, not just putting in a pacemaker, but assembling Ikea furniture and marinating chicken. He is the absolute best at doing absolutely everything. It’s annoying, mostly because it’s true. Drop the man on a desert island with a hanger and a pair of toenail clippers and he’d build an entire civilization, complete with high-speed Internet. Yet, despite his skill at nearly everything else, so far he was abysmal at detective work.

  When I declined my father’s invitation for a blood test, my grandmother became apoplectic.

  “I beg you, per favore,” Nonny pleaded, “Listen to you fadda! He knows what he’s talkin’ about!”

  “For God’s sake, look at you!” my mother went on. “You’re wasting away!”

  It was shocking, really, that women who’d experienced pregnancy firsthand would be incapable of recognizing its most common symptoms. If I let this go on much longer, they’d blame my third-trimester baby belly on too much Junior’s cheesecake.

  The rational thing would have been to just tell my family I was expecting. But I put off sharing the news with them, and it wasn’t just because I was superstitious about going public before the twelve-week mark. I knew that once the announcement was made, it wouldn’t be my baby anymore but ours. I knew they’d hijack my pregnancy.

  When I was a teenager, in the face of my mother’s dictums about what I could (not) wear and who I could (not) date, I’d yell, “It’s my life!” and my mother would yell back, “It’s your life I GAVE TO YOU!” Despite the fact that I hadn’t been a child in a decade, my mother still acted like the deed to my life was in her name and I was just some renter she had to hand the keys over to who’d probably fuck the place up beyond repair. The woman still tried to order for me at restaurants, often implicating the waiter: “Oh Nicole, don’t get the chicken; you can eat chicken anytime. You always order the wrong thing! Excuse me, sir, but am I right? Isn’t the veal better than the chicken?”

  My mother wasn’t the only controlling one; there was my grandmother and Aunt Rita to contend with, and to a lesser extent, my father, too. There’d been a thirty-minute debate the week before over what dress I should wear to my sister’s rehearsal dinner, a debate that persisted despite me frequently yelling, “No one asked you!” and “You know I’m going to tell my therapist all about this tomorrow, right?” If they could be so overbearing about something so inconsequential, imagine the hell they’d raise when it came to child rearing. It’s no wonder I kept the news of my pregnancy under wraps for as long as I could.

  But during Mother’s Day dinner in my eleventh week, when my father revealed the blood test collection kit, I realized the jig was up.

  Within seconds, my grandmother was weeping, sporadically invoking heavenly beings—“O Dio!” “Madonna!” “Jesu mio!”—and kissing the side of my face so that it was soaked with tears.

  “You’re happy?” I wanted to know. The intensity of feeling was clear, but what feeling it was, precisely, was harder to decipher.

  “’Aaaaaaappy?” she wailed operatically. This is a woman who has perfected the art of talking while crying, probably because she spends so much of her time doing both. “A course I’m ’appy! And why not? I gonna have a baby!”

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I corrected her.

  “Dat’s what I said!” Nonny replied, patting my belly. “We gonna have a baby!”

  My sisters and cousins abandoned their places at the table, swarming around me with questions.

  Due date? Around Thanksgiving.

  Baby’s sex? Don’t know yet.

  Planned? Yes, thanks for asking.

  What about a job, after graduation?

  Writing articles for magazines. Freelance, to stay home with the baby.

  Within a minute or two, my father was striding over, a crooked smile on his face, to shake David’s hand and clutch me to his chest. My mother pulled me into an embarrassed embrace and joked about how no one had asked her permission before making her a grandma.

  The mayhem had given them a chance to collect themselves, and the fanfare provided them with a cue. But I’d seen the panic in their eyes when I broke the news, and though they covered for it, the “What have you gotten yourself into?” expression was unmistakable as it passed across their faces.

  I assumed the panic was related to the fact that the Blindness Deadline Dr. Hall had given me was just three years away, but I couldn’t say for sure because they didn’t verbalize their concerns. As always, we expertly maneuvered around the fat ass of the elephant in the room. I ignored the ambient tension and forgave the initial lack of enthusiasm. I could do this because, I, for one, was over-fucking-joyed.

  I was concerned, of course, about my ability to take care of a newborn with my limited vision; and occasionally, in a quiet moment, the anxieties ambushed me. What if I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk while wearing the baby in the Mayan sling? I had already given up my heels—bequeathing them to my seventeen-year-old sister Jessica—but still, I could trip, could stumble, even without stilettos. What if I couldn’t decipher the digital readout of the infant thermometer? What if I stepped on the baby by accident? This one worried me in particular because I’d done it once, when I was about eleven and Jessica was a year old. We’d been at Aunt Rita’s apartment and since the crib had been occupied by my cousin, Jessica had been napping on a blanket on the dining-room floor. I’d run into the room with Marisa in hot pursuit and hadn’t seen the baby there, slumbering on her stomach in what I now know was a mammoth blind spot in my lower peripheral vision. So I’d stepped on top of her, right on her little back.

  “Ooooh!” nine-year-old Marisa gasped, “you squashed the baby!”

  “Shut up!” I spat, watching the baby intently. How badly had I broken her?

  I must’ve been light on my feet or maybe I landed more on her diapered butt than anywhere else but by some miracle, she hadn’t been hurt. She’d just lifted her head off the blanket and looked around groggily for a second, as if trying to decide how pissed off to get. Then she concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble, literally turned the other cheek to lay her head on the opposite side, and fell back asleep.

  Now I was worried about repeating this mistake, and others far graver, with my own baby. But, I reasoned, I knew better than to put the baby to sleep on the floor.

  There, I thought with relief, one problem solved.

  I grew concerned, too, about pregnancy making my eyesight worse. One night in my second trimester, I’d sat at my desk and summoned the courage to search the Internet for information on “mothers with retinitis pigmentosa.” I was hoping that a similarly afflicted woman with kids would p
op up in cyberspace and become my lifelong friend, mentor, and one-woman support group. What I found instead was a bunch of threads in which women with RP shared that pregnancy had seemed to accelerate their vision loss. It had never occurred to me that such a thing might be possible and now, way past the point of no return, was not an ideal time to find out.

  I sat in the two-bedroom Park Slope rental we’d just moved into, surrounded by unopened boxes and unassembled baby furniture, and tried not to panic. Now that I thought about it, my vision did seem to be worse lately; there did appear to be new obstacles. It had become nearly impossible to read the New Yorker anymore unless I held it embarrassingly close to my face. I had stopped going to see foreign films because I couldn’t make out subtitles unless they happened to be white letters against a black background. Tweezing my eyebrows had become a fool’s errand.

  Still, no dramatic change had occurred. And who really cared if I couldn’t read the New Yorker anymore? I wouldn’t have time to read once the baby was born, anyway. I focused my attention on getting ready for the baby—laundering onesies in chemical-free detergent, smoothing animal decals on the nursery wall, sterilizing pacifiers—and in doing so, managed to shake off the worry that pregnancy was shooting the fabric of vision full of bullet holes. No matter how little vision I ended up with, I would have plenty of love to give—a boundless abundance of love, I reasoned. And that would be enough, I was sure. Pretty sure. Mezza mezz.

  Because I’d never really taken care of a baby before—little kids, sure, but never an infant—I was so clueless about what it entailed that my mind couldn’t produce many specific concerns. Mine was just a vague glaze of anxiety, one that was easy enough to wash away with a flood of joy and excitement.