Now I See You Read online

  It was very thoughtful of her to bring over the stuff, but there was no way I could leave it out in the open. It was humiliating, tantamount to forgetting your vibrator on the coffee table. Plus, if my grandmother or mother stumbled upon the talking thermometer, they’d probably commit a double suicide.

  It was bad enough explaining who Esperanza was to my grandmother. I hadn’t planned on sharing any of my training odyssey with Nonny but one day Esperanza showed up a few minutes early while Nonny was still at my place, getting Rosa’s stuff together so she could take her to the playground.

  “Who was dat lady?” Nonny interrogated me when she returned with Rosa a few hours later.

  “Esperanza?” I asked. “She’s … she’s a kind of teacher.”

  It’s what I had told Rosa when I introduced Esperanza: “This is a teacher who helps people with bad eyes like Mommy.” But though this vague explanation satisfied Rosa, it didn’t satisfy my grandmother.

  “Whose teacher? Lorenzo’s?” Nonny persisted.

  “No,” I replied, starting to wish I’d just introduced her as a mommy friend. Now it was too late to back out.

  “She’s a—a teacher for me,” I stammered.

  “What kinda teacher you need?” Nonny was getting suspicious. I knew that if I didn’t clear things up right away, she’d be left to her own wild speculations and would probably be calling my mother in an hour, panicking about how I had a secret lesbian Latina lover.

  “She helps people who can’t see so well,” I explained. “The State sent her.”

  I thought if I could avoid the use of the word “blind” or “disease” maybe she’d swallow my casual delivery. But Nonny is no dummy and as soon as I made reference to the State she was able to read between the lines. Her expression morphed from surprised to stricken, like she’d found out the awful memory she’d dismissed as a nightmare wasn’t a dream at all. Then she reached out and touched my face, saying, “Don’t worry Nicole, God’s gonna help you.”

  “Ok, okay.” I pulled away and busied myself slicing Rosa an apple using my fingertips instead of my knuckles. As usual, I hadn’t been worrying, but as soon as she told me not to, I started in a hurry.

  The next day, Nonny showed up with a vial of holy water from St. Peter’s. She was calling in the big guns.

  “Put it on you eyes,” Nonny urged, her own gray-blue eyes full of anguish.

  I knew she was just trying to raise my spirits but being reminded that my only shot at healing was a Bible-sized miracle did not, in fact, cheer me. So, from then on, I made sure not to schedule Esperanza’s visits on a day Nonny would be around. The poor woman didn’t have a big enough reserve of holy water.

  After Esperanza had outfitted my house with blind-person gear, it was time to take the teaching out of the classroom. On our first foray outside, Esperanza just tagged along as I conducted business as usual, bringing Lorenzo to school, taking Rosa on errands.

  “The first thing I’d like to suggest, if I might,” started Esperanza, and it was a testament to how much I liked her that her politeness didn’t drive me crazy, “I think you’d benefit a lot by slowing down.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, “it’s just, you know, places to go, people to see.” I didn’t want to tell her that I was walking at an even brisker pace than normal because I was panicked we’d run into someone I knew. I’d already decided that I would introduce Esperanza as a college friend but who knew if she’d go along with the story? Better to get back home before my cover was compromised.

  “One thing you can do to compensate for your vision loss is to scan your environment,” she went on. “That’s where you sweep your gaze methodically from left to right and back again, a little higher each time, so you make the most of the vision you have. It’s extremely helpful but it does mean you have to slow down.”

  “You’re right.” I sighed. You had to admit, the lady knew what she was talking about. “But now I think we should head back so I can give Rosa a nap.”

  A few minutes later, Rosa was settled in her toddler bed, and Esperanza was getting ready to wrap our session up. Before she did, though, she wanted to show me something. She reached into the small rolling suitcase she always brought and pulled out a tight white bundle, which she then placed on the kitchen table between us.

  “I brought you a cane,” she explained.

  I looked up at her, surprised. She knew how I felt about this.

  “Listen, I really appreciate it,” I told her. “But I think I’ll pass. I just don’t need it yet.”

  Gently, Esperanza explained that I didn’t have a choice.

  “If you don’t accept mobility training, we can’t move any further with your case.”

  “Well, what’s left? I mean, I feel like I know everything there is to know about being blind, A to Z. What more could anyone possibly teach me?”

  I’d called the Commission because I needed, and genuinely wanted, help. But now that the process was under way and getting a bit uncomfortable, I was feeling like maybe I didn’t need help so much anymore. I had tried to impart this to Esperanza a few times but she wouldn’t take “Thanks for the memories and please never call me again” for an answer.

  “I’m not positive about this,” Esperanza answered, “but I think that after me, you’re meeting with the Adaptive Technology Center.” She looked at me expectantly, waiting for my reaction. I had none, seeing as I had no idea what the Adaptive Technology Center was. Sounded pretty boring.

  Esperanza could tell she needed to work on her soft sell. “It’s where experts help you adapt your devices—computers, phones, things like that—so you can maximize your use of them.”

  Ahhh, now this was interesting. “Can they teach me how to text?” I inquired casually. This was a negotiation and I didn’t want to lose any leverage by letting on how desperately I wanted what was on offer.

  At some point in the past five years, while I was busy having babies and going blind, the face of telecommunication had changed. Phones were no longer devices you talked on but devices you typed on instead. This presented a problem for me because no matter how much I futzed with the settings on my phone, I couldn’t figure out how to make the font of the texts big enough for me to read. My phone would ding! and bing! and I’d realize that someone was trying to tell me something but I had no earthly idea who it was or what the hell they were trying to say.

  The story I used to explain my aversion for texting—that I was a luddite who preferred verbal communication—was wearing thin. I felt like someone who couldn’t pay the Con Ed bill but insisted a fire in the trash can was superior to central heat. Even my mother texted and my mother couldn’t figure out how to microwave popcorn. I needed to get in the texting game.

  Plus, if they could teach me how to text, maybe they could teach me how to use the contact list in my phone so I didn’t have to memorize everyone’s phone number like a person from medieval times. Maybe I could use the calendar and the email function, too. The Adaptive Technology Center had the potential to introduce me to the twenty-first century.

  “I’m sure they can teach you to text.” Esperanza smiled. “In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you qualify, they can set you up with a new computer and adaptive software, too.”

  Those sly bastards, I thought. They’ve got me by the balls.

  My laptop, ten years old, was literally held together by duct tape and spontaneously shut down at least once a day. The “n” and “g” keys stuck and the delete button no longer worked. As a writer, this was not ideal. I found myself avoiding the use of certain words just because I knew they’d be a pain in the ass to type; I’d basically rid my writing of the word “noggin” (probably a good thing) and the entire gerund tense.

  I desperately needed a new computer but didn’t have the money for one. And now it was being offered to me, with all the fixings. It was almost worth having a degenerative eye disease. All I had to do was get trained on the cane.

  So I told Esperanza I’d do it. But
when she informed me that we couldn’t conduct the training in the privacy of my apartment but would have to venture outside, in public, even the promise of a new computer and learning how to text could not persuade me to agree.

  “I’m sorry. You know I really want to be compliant and everything but that’s totally freaking impossible,” I burst out. “People will see me. Lorenzo’s school is just a few blocks away. I could run into teachers or other parents or shit, my neighbors, friends from college who live nearby. They’d want to know why I’m holding a blind person cane and I’d have to make up an excuse. No—no way. It’s insane. I’m not doing it.”

  Esperanza recognized a nervous breakdown when she saw one approaching so she agreed to pause the training. She left the cane with me and told me to call her in a few days, when I felt up to it.

  Picking the cane up with two fingers like it was a soiled diaper, I brought it into my bedroom and tossed it into the back of my closet, next to the red patent leather heels I hadn’t worn in seven years and a broken suitcase I’d never get around to fixing.

  Intellectually, I knew the cane was a tool that I could use as much or as little as I liked, to my advantage, not my detriment. My intellect, though, was heavily overpowered by emotion. And emotionally, the cane signaled doom. Not just defeat or failure but total, irrevocable, Greek-tragedy-style doom. As soon as I unfolded that cursed thing, I’d be a blind person, and there was no turning back. As soon as I took the handle in my hand and tapped it to the ground, the rest of my vision would fade to black and I’d live in a world without colors or shapes or patterns or faces. I’d never read again. I’d never see Moscow. I’d forget what my kids looked like. Before you could say “adaptive technology” David would divorce me, I’d go on food stamps, lose custody of the children, and end up shooting heroin in a cardboard box under the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d sooner pick up a loaded gun than that cane.

  The trouble was, not only was it impossible for me to cope with the cane, it was impossible for me to forget about it.

  As the weeks went on, it became harder and harder to ignore, like a dead body I’d hidden that was getting ripe. Yes, just like a skeleton, the cane haunted me from my closet. No sooner had I shut the door on it than I began a slow, relentless emotional collapse, like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story.

  Though I’d refused to admit my blindness for twelve long years, suddenly I could think of nothing else. I went through my day painfully aware of what I was seeing and imagined what life would be like when I couldn’t see it anymore. How would I tell the shampoo from the conditioner? How would I cut my steak or shave my legs or read Lorenzo’s report cards or ride the subway?

  But worse than speculating about the abilities I’d lose in the coming years was obsessing over what I’d lost already. This was a new phenomenon for me because ever since the summer following my diagnosis, I’d been living in a more-or-less comfortable haze of denial. The genius thing about denial—and it’s really magical—is that you never have to feel bad. I couldn’t feel bereft at losing little chunks of my vision if I just ignored that those pieces of the picture had been lost. I mean, I couldn’t help but notice things like not being able to read the nutritional facts on cereal boxes anymore, but I immediately pushed that realization, and all the nasty, dark feelings that went along with it, down, down, down. I knew all that toxic emotional sludge was still there, inside me somewhere, but it was deep enough that I couldn’t see it.

  And now Esperanza had come along and dredged all that crap up, right out into the open. She forced me to look at my blindness without turning away. And, wow, did it suck. It super-sucked. It sucked big, hairy elephant balls.

  Because here’s the problem with stockpiling a decade’s worth of grieving and trying to get it all done in a month: you end up with some highly concentrated misery.

  I felt like the world was populated with the tombstones of things I used to see and couldn’t anymore—the difference between pink and orange, the Canadian geese David pointed out overhead, a splinter in my daughter’s foot. These losses made me feel sad, and worse, incompetent.

  I realized the thousand risks I took every day that other people didn’t take, all the ways I might unwittingly put my children in harm’s way. For a long time, I’d walked the tight rope of vision loss without looking down and now that I had, I was terrified. I teetered with vertigo at the top of the stairs. My heart stopped whenever I led my kids off the curb to cross a street. And I had nightmares—lurid ones, more terrifying than the horror flicks David watched after I fell asleep. In the worst of them, I was undergoing a surgery in which my eyeballs were being removed. I watched myself on the operating table as a doctor plucked one eye at a time out of its socket. The worst part was the sound it made coming out—a sickening, sucking pop. I woke to a flop sweat.

  “I should have never started this ordeal,” I confided in David.

  “It’s darkest before dawn,” he assured me. “Pun intended.”

  I stalled and rescheduled my cane training for almost two months. Then, one March morning, Lorenzo stumbled across my cane while he was searching for his bike helmet in my closet.

  “What’s this?” he wanted to know, holding out the compact white bundle.

  I snatched the cane out of his hands, flushed and nervous.

  “That’s grown-up stuff,” I reprimanded him. “And you’re not supposed to be looking through my stuff without permission.”

  As I shoved the cane onto a higher shelf, out of Lorenzo’s reach, my heart raced.

  I am failing them, I thought. This is not the kind of mother I want to be.

  Later that day, I called Esperanza and told her I was ready to take a walk.

  Which is how I ended up standing next to the Gowanus Canal, incognito, holding a mobility cane and having a tachycardic episode.

  “So, should we get started?” Esperanza asked brightly.

  I tried to keep my hand from shaking. It felt like the cane was in control of me, not the other way around. I half expected it to yank me forward, right off my feet, like an overexcited Great Dane. Who knew where it would take me? Nowhere good, I expected. This time tomorrow, I’d probably be selling pencils out of a paper cup on the D train. But, I reasoned, it was better to get to my destination, no matter how miserable, than to keep on waiting to arrive, wondering like my kids did, “Are we there yet?” Better to rip the fucking Band-Aid off already.

  I regarded the long white stick in my hand, whose most distinguishing characteristic was its plastic roller tip, roughly the size and shape of marshmallow. Not a terribly cutting-edge piece of equipment.

  “You’d think after two millennia, someone would come up with something a little more advanced than a stick to help blind people get around,” I observed. “I mean, we put men on the moon and made money paperless and developed robots that vacuum your carpet and still, I get the same tool as Helen Keller did? This is the best we can do?”

  Esperanza laughed. “I can see you feel better already.”

  I did. I’d taken my first step without taking a step. Just like that, I’d ripped the Band-Aid off, and already, the sting was fading.

  Tip #18: On glass doors

  Walk into a glass door once, shame on the door. Walk into it twice, shame on you. Walk into it three times, get yourself a fucking game plan.

  There are many mistakes you can brush under the rug but bashing your nose into a glass door at Starbucks and spilling scalding coffee all over your front is not one of them. Getting defensive and muttering sotto voce—“Goddamned places keep the glass so clean, I’ll sue their ass,” or “Would it kill you to FROST THIS SHIT?”—will only make you look like a grumpy old lady at best, mentally ill at worst.

  No, here you will need to call upon your self-deprecating sense of humor, the Secretly Blind’s ace in the hole. After recoiling from the glass like a circus clown, you must acknowledge that you are a moron, something to the effect of, “So I guess I do not have super powers after all,” and hope t
he joke distracts onlookers from speculating about the cause of your extreme stupidity.

  As you walk away, searing with humiliation, remember this: it’s not your fault. Glass is a material engineered to be invisible. There’s some witchcraft in that.

  18. FELLOW FEELING

  It was one of those times I wished I could disapparate.

  Genius move sitting in the front row instead of by the door, I admonished myself as I sipped a urine-sample-sized cup of coffee.

  Of course, I had been operating under the assumption that support groups make you feel better, not terminally hopeless.

  I was sitting in the common room of an old folk’s home off Grand Army Plaza, surrounded by a dozen visually impaired New Yorkers, ranging on the spectrum of unfortunate from kinda-blind like me, to Stevie Wonder–blind, to blind and kinda-deaf, too. At least a third of the assemblage were residents of the home, wielding walkers, and the others hovered around the fifty-year mark, many clutching white canes. There was even a guy in a fedora holding the leash of a seeing-eye dog. The whole scene was lit with an assault of fluorescent bulbs and it stank like disinfectant.

  The good news, I tried to remind myself, was that I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew here, which was one of the reasons I hadn’t attended any of the previous meetings held at a coffee shop near my house. The bad news? Everything else.

  “The worst of it is, I’ve always loved to read and now I can’t make out the print anymore,” an eighty-something woman named Ellie from Ocean Parkway was saying. “And of course, it’s hard to get around at night and you know, I’m no spring chicken. I have to be careful now that I broke my hip. I can’t be bumping into things.”

  It’s not that I had anything against elderly people. It’s just that I didn’t want to be lumped into their category of physical well-being at the age of thirty-three.

  With every passing moment, I sank into a deeper funk until I was doing deep breathing to get through however long until we took a break and I could make a run for it. Sitting there, listening to Ellie divulge every miserable detail of her visual decline, was like getting a colonoscopy; I’d been assured it was for my own good but it was no fun at all and I immediately understood why I’d put it off for so long.