ENUCLEATION by David McGlynn
The guests twirled beneath a cosmos of artificial stars: the oak trees in my grandparents’ backyard wrapped in miniature white lights. Larger bulbs, like from a carnival ride–the filament a white-hot squiggle in the core–were strung overhead, attached to the eaves of the house. The glowing skeletons of the trees reached and grabbed at the dark, and leaves fell between the lights, as though from nowhere, landing on the tables and lawn and the checkerboard dance floor. Beyond the party, the garden was all deep shadows and amber haze, a maze of brick pathways and contorted, naked statues, eccentric things my grandmother had shipped back from Europe to ornament her azalea hedges. Couples slipped away to wander the paths, which had a kind of irresistible pull, and when they reemerged their fingers were interlaced, the ladies’ make-up very slightly smudged. Star drunk, giggling in each other’s ears, they unfurled to the ends of their arms, and coiled back, and then, because this was Texas, two-stepped toward the bar. On the way, they passed my mother, dancing alone, the universe and everything in it shining in her prosthetic eye.
This was new behavior, and strange. Most years my mother weathered the party against the terrace railing where she could remain visible, but out of the way. If she mingled, she kept her elbow linked with my father’s, or with Kay’s. She wore a matte black dress, loose enough to keep from disrupting the count of her steps. It fit her like a shadow. I had figured her new eye would make her withdraw all the more, but there she was, cutting it up on the floor, a head taller than everyone else. She spun, two-stepped backward, and pressed her palms against the night. It seemed my grandmother had been right and the rest of us dead wrong: the party was just the lift in spirits my mother had needed.
“What on earth is she doing?” my grandmother asked. She gripped the terrace railing beside me. Her gold gown fit snugly against her chest and stomach; only up close could one discern her age, by the creases in the skin around her mouth and clavicle and where her arms overflowed her dress. She was fifty-seven, tonight.
“Dancing,” I said.
“I don’t like the looks of this.”
“She’s having fun. Celebrating life. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Not quite what I had in mind.” My grandmother looked toward the garden and frowned. Through the trees a woman’s earrings glittered, along with the oyster watch face of the man reaching up to touch her chin. “You’d think people would get the hint. The band is the edge of the party. Noli intrare. I turned the lights on for ambience, not to encourage people to wander back there.”
“Pretty hard to hurt brick just by walking on it,” I said.
“Don’t sass me, Rowdy,” she said. “It’s my birthday.”
But this was no birthday party. Candles and cake and presents my grandmother considered narcissistic. “Can you honestly imagine me unwrapping gifts in front of people?” she asked me once, and honestly, I could not. Andrew Carnegie said that fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. My mother’s ruined eyes had provided my grandmother fifteen years of unfortunate souls, and a name not unlike her own–but not her own–in which to return her fortune to society. And when it came to this party, she spared no expense. In the center of the hors d’oeuvres table was an ice sculpture of the Port Isabel lighthouse, chiseled into shape that morning inside the freezer in the cook’s kitchen, rendered down to the tiniest detail: the three square windows interrupting the smooth cylinder of the tower, the double-bar railing around the observation deck just below the lantern, even the giant star announcing the lighthouse as the entrance to Texas. The sculpture was, like the party itself, a reminder that it was our responsibility to bring light to dark horizons, and that our time was short.
“I wish she’d sit down,” my grandmother said. “Save her strength. I had half a mind to tell her not to even come.” Of course, not coming was never a possibility. My grandmother had called Doctor Berkeley herself to make sure my mother was well enough to attend. If guests were going to give to the Cordelia Sterling Jarrett Vision Foundation, they needed to see Cordelia Sterling Jarrett. The foundation’s inability to restore my mother’s sight had made it strong, its cause noble and tragic, just as images of charred and decimated rainforests brought in far more money than pictures of healthy trees. The foundation funded the fight against retinal detachment, and against retinopathy of prematurity, a condition that occurred, ironically, in premature infants. My mother’s name was attached to an ophthalmology fellowship and an endowed professorship at the Texas Medical Center, more than a half-dozen research grants. Several grant recipients milled among the guests, discernible by the shapes of their eyeglasses (round), their slightly wilted collars, and the strain in their faces as they attempted to explain their science to men and women who feigned interest, and feigned it impatiently.
I feigned disagreement with my grandmother. “It’s good to see her having fun,” I said. “God knows she’s needed to get out.” By the time I finished saying it, I believed it myself.
“Regardless,” she said. “Kay should stay with her. What is she paid for?”
Kay had lived with us since the September after my mother lost her vision, when I was three months old. She had been with us for so long that Jill and I often thought of her as our mother, too. Jill, in fact, was known to tell people that she had two mothers, which led many to assume she was the daughter of lesbians. Her friends’ parents were often relieved to learn that our mother was blind. Kay sat with my father at a table on the far side of the yard. My father leaned toward her bare shoulder, her gown backless and purple, his mustache crinkling around his mouth. Kay nodded, then cupped her hand around her mouth and spoke into his ear. For months they had been talking like this, off by themselves. I assumed it was the way you talked about cancer, and in their hushed whispers they were planning for the worst, for all the forms the worst could take. My mother breathed into a champagne flute, fogging the glass. A waiter brought her a gin and tonic and she drank it down like water.
“I saw that,” my grandmother said. “Heavens.”
The way I saw it, as long as my mother remained in sight, there was nothing to fear. Almost everyone at the party was an old-line Houstonian, rich on oil or inheritance fattened by oil, and had no trouble tolerating eccentric behavior so long as it was not disruptive. My grandmother scanned the floor. “Where’s Jill?”
“I don’t know. She was behind us when we came in, but I never saw her come out. She must be inside watching TV.”
She clicked her tongue. “That girl floats on the weather.” She had me right where she wanted me. “I need a favor from you, Rowdy. I need you to keep an eye on your mother. It seems no one else is up to the job. You think you can do it?”
“Okay,” I said, though I had been watching her all along. Ever since she had come home with the prosthetic eye, I had been unable to take my eyes off it. I had seen it on the bathroom vanity, oblong and silicone, not at all the glass marble I had expected. An implant had been imbedded in her socket where it was attached to the muscle; the prosthetic fit over the top. She had to take out the eye and rinse it with saline to keep it moist until her tear ducts adjusted. I watched her hold the eye in her palm, and fit it in the hole in her face. She turned to me and asked, “Is it straight, Rowdy?” I hadn’t told her I was standing there. Spooked, I answered, “Yes ma’am.”
“No problem,” I told my grandmother.
She tucked a fifty into my breast pocket. Folded into a narrow rectangle, it slid down my pocket like a tongue. “I’m counting on you,” she said. “Eyes like a hawk.”
“None other,” I said. She tightened her eyes and I corrected myself. “Yes ma’am.”
If the party commemorated any birthday, it was mine. On the day I was born, I blinded my mother in the backyard of our house. I was two weeks past due. All summer, through the long final months of pregnancy, she had suffered through corneal edema, and pulsing headaches that spiraled around her occipital bones, and swollen ankles and feet, an aching back. Her doctor told her to avoid aspirin, and my father said he had heard Tylenol could cause birth defects, so she took neither. After my due date passed, she attempted to coax me out with chili peppers soaked in balsamic vinegar, with blue and black cohosh, with sit-ups in her underwear. At night my father drove her down the unpaved, pot-holed roads into the country toward Tomball and Magnolia, even as far as Brenham, bouncing over every bump, desperate to jar me loose. But I remained reluctant, stubborn.
Our house sat at the end of a gravel road, abutting fifty acres of uncut pines and backing up to a bayou, a smaller and wilder tributary of Buffalo Bayou, which flowed past my grandparents’ property. Trees surrounded our house on all sides except where the bayou slid away from the lawn. Beyond the bayou were more trees. At forty-two weeks, her doctor said he could wait no longer and scheduled an induction. My mother consented grudgingly and awoke that day nervous about her pale skin and the thought of her legs spread before a man she had known only as long as her pregnancy. Hoping for color, she carried a collapsible chair to the backyard, naked, her bathing suit too small and not worth the effort of trying on. It was July, hot and gauzy, mosquitoes blood-plump and hovering, heat rippling from the dogwood and grass. She rubbed sunscreen across her belly and breasts, then on her face, and lay back in the sun. She felt the heat on her chin, felt me turn and kick, and felt a pain shoot up her spine to her face. Her belly leaped and twitched. She touched the towel between her legs and found it wet. Her eyes burned from the sweat and sunscreen that had seeped beneath her eyelids. When she opened her eyes and saw the world through a soupy green jelly, as though looking up from the bottom of a pond, her first thought was to blame the sunscreen. Only hours later, after she had arrived at the hospital, her hands and knees still bleeding from her crawl to the backdoor, after the ophthalmologist had dialed his pinpoint of light into her pupils and gasped, would it become clear that the sunscreen was innocent.
What wasn’t known until the night of my birth was that during the course of her pregnancy she had developed a condition called subretinal neovascularization–tiny blood vessels beneath her retinal tissue. The formation of those vessels was not my doing, though pregnancy and its pressures most likely brought them on. And it was my movement that ruptured them, and hemorrhaged her retinas away from their moorings. I wasn’t awake yet, I wasn’t conscious, but labor is a decision made by the baby, not the mother: anencephalics, for example, must be induced, for they lack the brains to tell them to birth. I decided to come when I did, and because of that, my mother was blind.
This fact is never spoken of, and the story is almost never told. My mother told it to me only once, after a period of insistent begging, and the look in her eyes had frightened me. She looked at me as though I had cheated her in a way that motherhood kept her from admitting. She stared while she spoke, perfectly focused, which forced me to look back. She never said she forgave me, or that she didn’t blame me, for to say either thing would have been to acknowledge that I had done something in the first place. Instead what passed between us was a silence. I was to keep silent about her blindness and she was to keep silent about my role in it. I was six years old, and Kay had lived with us for longer than I could recall, and Jill was three and not ready to know such things. The fact we lived in a house with a blind mother and an extra woman in the bedroom above the garage was not to be seen as odd in any way, but as ordinary as the grass and leaves.
For years we lived in that ordinariness, even if it was an ordinariness that recognizes its special place in the world–getting along under a weight that others would deem unbearable. We did not shush Kay when she spoke during movies, narrating the scenery and costumes, nor did we question the dabs of hot glue on the thermostat and stove. Before Jill or I learned to talk we learned to guide my mother’s hand to what we wanted, to press it to our lips if we were hungry. We learned to read by listening to books on tape, just as my mother listened to her own books and even her magazines on tape. She could be moody, but so could my father, and so could Kay, and so could Jill and I, and our moodiness had nothing to do with blindness.
The summer I was fifteen she began to disappear. She walked down the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms with a shoulder pressed into the wall. She stepped into closets and stood there for hours. She wandered into the woods behind our house and vanished among the pines, reappearing on the other side, on the shoulder of the highway, her clothes dirty, her hands bloody and full of slivers. Mrs. Stevenson, our neighbor across the street, brought her home. She told us she saw my mother step onto the highway and a car swerve to miss her. “She appeared out of nowhere,” Mrs. Stevenson said. “Boom, there she was.”
My father had the hardest time with this behavior. There was no science to it, as far as he could tell. He was a neurobiologist at the Texas Medical Center and what others explained with psychology, or decaying morals, or bad upbringing, he explained with chemistry. When Jill wet the bed, he consoled her by explaining that she lacked the proper amount of antidiuretic hormone. Her kidneys didn’t know to stop producing urine during the night; she couldn’t help it, even if she wanted to. This made Jill feel better, even when she peed her pants at school. His own work constellated around the transmission of a single substance, GABA, which floated between the synaptic neurons–a space so small it had to be measured with dye and deduction, with cause and effect. GABA, and thus my father’s work, were linked to convulsions. I had been with him to the Epilepsy Study Center at the Medical Center, small rooms monitored by video cameras and clicking machines, patients wired to EEG and CPAP. On the monitor in the control room, I watched them seize, their veins bulge in their necks, their muscles spasm and twitch until their tongues bled. My father studied the images of their brains, isolated in black-and-white on a separate monitor. He pointed to something I couldn’t see and told me this was the problem. “So much suffering,” he said. “Such a small thing.” He saw no patients, considered no extenuating circumstances, weighed no environmental factors. There was no environment. There was only GABA, floating, deficient. His universe was a series of 1-by-3 glass slides, and beyond that lay distraction, and fear.
When I was eight, he caught me lighting fireworks at the edge of the bayou. My fingers were black with powder and smelled of sulfur. I held the firework until the fuse burned all the way down, then threw it up to watch it burst, a white-hot flash against the white, hot sky. It was an irresponsible thing to be doing: we hadn’t had rain in weeks, the bayou stream was down to a damp strip of mud, the grass and dogwood were as dry as kindling. My father took me to the stove, sprayed a sheet of paper with my mother’s hairspray and then dropped it to the burner. It ignited with a whoosh. A corner lifted to escape the gas, but the gas pulled it back. Flakes of ash floated up and then drifted to the floor. He said, “Imagine this is your mother’s hair. It can set fire just as easily. You have to watch, watch, watch. All the time. Do you understand?”
I pointed to the faded scar on his forearm, three concentric half circles. He said, “I got this in college, in my first lab. Set my arm on a hot plate. I was careless, but lucky.” He rubbed the scar. “Now I think twice before I do anything. Before I cross the street.” His work was defined by others questioning his every decision. His research was seen as too narrowly focused, and because of that he lived off of grants rather than regular funding from the medical school. During the years his grants were up for renewal, he stomped about the house turning off lights and dialing down the air, fearful that this time his money would not come through. He was too proud to take money from my grandparents. Even my mother’s disability check, which paid Kay’s salary, was shameful. His father was an airplane mechanic, his mother a violin teacher; they lived for forty years in the same house in Philadelphia, rarely traveled, and refused to move when their neighborhood went from blue-collar to inner-city slum. My father claimed it made him tenacious with his work. Also for that reason, he hated this party.
That July my mother disappeared in the Galleria. She and Kay were shopping in The Limited when my mother wandered off. We learned later that she drifted all the way to the Westin Hotel, took the elevator to the lobby, and spilled out the front door. The bellman put her in a taxi, and the taxi drove her down I-59 to an open-air furniture tent. My father, once he arrived at the mall, named what we all feared: that she had been led away by a strange and menacing hand. We would find her body raped and mutilated, if we ever found it. When the furniture-store owner brought her back to the mall, my father was hardly relieved. He took her face in his hands and squeezed her skull between his palms. “Cory,” he said. “What were you thinking?” We were in the security office, the captain standing with his arms crossed by the door, Jill and I slumped, exhausted, in the chairs against the wall, Kay sobbing by the water fountain. We had gone store to store for hours. My father pressed his forehead to my mother’s forehead and his nose to her nose and looked into her eyes, close enough for her to make out his shape. (Her right eye, in good light, could see the outlines of objects, bright lines on a dark road.) “We’re going in for a CAT scan,” he said. “And blood work. Something is definitely wrong.” My mother didn’t say a word. My father’s eyes filled and he shook her shoulders, lightly at first, but harder when she did not respond. “Goddamn it,” he said. He shook her again and my mother’s hair–that flammable hair–came out of its clip and spilled across her face. “Goddamn it.”
The CAT scan showed nothing, but two weeks later, at our annual eye exams, a mass was found on her choroid, the back of her left eye. Doctor Berkeley said the melanoma explained the disappearing: the pressure on her optic nerve had likely affected her orientation, though she had never once complained of disorientation. Since the eye couldn’t see, he told her the best thing would be to take it out, a procedure called enucleation. The cancer could get to her brain and why go through chemotherapy and radiation? For a time, my mother resisted. A blind eye is better than a hole, she said, just like a crippled leg is better than a stump. Not always, my father argued. We all worked to convince her. Kay pleaded on her knees, Jill clung to her neck and begged her not to die. I offered her my left eye. I’d take the prosthetic. That way, we’d each have one.
“No thanks,” she said, “I don’t need it back,” and I quit with that line of argument.
Though it wasn’t a joke. My entire life I was concerned about my role in the suffering of others. I bussed dirty tables at McDonald’s to keep the employees from getting stuck with the job; I voted for every student-council office candidate so as not to pick one over another; and that very fall I had been asked to the Sadie Hawkins Dance by Chevonne Duncan, my lab partner in biology. Chevonne played center on the girl’s basketball team and was the only girl I have ever met who was taller than my mother. She was a good two-and-a-half inches taller than me and until the night of the dance I had never seen her hair in anything but a knot. I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t say no. My phone rang eight different times with no one on the other end before I finally heard Chevonne’s voice. Kay told me, “It’s just one night, you’ll have fun,” and when I said I didn’t think it would be fun, she said, “Be a gentleman, Rowdy. Make it special.” Chevonne bought us matching Tommy Hilfiger shirts, stiff button-downs that looked as though they had been assembled from a dozen scraps of leftover material. Mine was extra-large; I think Chevonne’s was extra-large tall. The night of the dance she got her hair permed and picked me up in her brother’s truck. She paid for our dinner at Pappadeaux’s and for our pictures at the dance, my hands folded around hers, our heads leaned together. I could tell the night meant a lot to her, like it was her first date ever. It was my first date ever, but not at all how I had imagined it. In the cab of the truck in the parking lot, she leaned in to kiss me. Startled, I leaned back. She said, “Sorry,” and looked down toward the gas and brake, and I saw just how easily I could ruin her night. I said, “No, I just thought we’d wait until we got home,” and then leaned in. Her tongue was rough and tasted like Dr. Pepper and Doritos, and I wondered why everyone was so eager to tongue-kiss when it was really rather sick, especially when I thought about the Doritos–the GABA of high school–drifting between her mouth and mine. But I didn’t stop, not even when I could feel people moving past the windows, looking in at us, not even when I could hear them shouting. When Chevonne looked at the clock and said, “I’d better get us home,” I kissed her once more and said, “Thanks for a great night.” Was this the right thing to say? I didn’t know, but I understood that guilt is a force equal to love.
Combined, there is no stronger power. I had been given a job to do and I stuck to it. I watched the hem of my mother’s dress swish around her ankles, her flat-soled sandals, her brightly painted toenails, which Kay had painted that afternoon. Painting her nails was the one thing she could not do herself. Years ago Kay had strung beads on safety pins, which she attached to the hangers in my mother’s closet; the more beads, the darker the garment. Sometimes she would put on too much eye shadow, or it would glob in the corners, and Kay would smooth it out with her thumbs. Kay always looked her over, just to make sure.
The band played “Alfie” for my grandfather. He stood with three other men, all four of them singing, What’s it all about, Alfie? The source of my mother’s height, silver hair gleaming, he drifted through the party like a giraffe, his big lips nibbling from a small plate in his hand. Out on the dance floor, my mother let her head roll around on her neck, and when I drew near her, she smelled like champagne and gin and perfume. After two hours of steady playing, the faces of the band were shining and moist. “Mom,” I said.
“Who is it?” she said. As though she didn’t recognize me.
“Me. Are you okay?”
“Do I seem like I’m not?”
“Are you having fun?”
“Who do you think has the best time at a football game?”
I thought about saying, “The couple beneath the bleachers,” but I didn’t want to get slapped. She had a kind of radar when it came to me being crass. I said, “The winners.”
“Those big dumb animals that do all the flips,” she said. “Though I bet those costumes get hot. Thank God for fall.” She pinched the front of her dress and fluffed it with air. Then she stopped moving and her eye glinted. I stepped back. Since the eye had come out, she had quit wandering, but now she was disappearing in a different way. Entering the house I would call her name and get no answer but the click and whirr of the air-conditioner, though moving through the house I’d find her at the kitchen table, staring at the wall. Like the wandering, this too had an explanation: the Vicodin given to her to soothe her pain after surgery.
It was an explanation still current as I watched her finger her pocket, drag her hand from her hip to her mouth, lift her chin and gulp. “Does your eye hurt?” I asked, relieved.
“Nothing hurts, Rowdy. I’m pain-free.”
“Do you want to go sit down? Have something to eat?”
“If I wanted to sit down, I’d be sitting. Elizabeth prefers I be front and center.” She threw up her arms. “We’ve got spirit, yes we do! Go Cyclops!”
I laughed, though I shouldn’t have. “Have you talked to many people?”
“Not one.” She huffed. “Easier than–”
Just like that, she was no longer there. She shuffled left, then right. The dance floor felt like the bottom of a bowl, the terrace above us on three sides, the band on the fourth, tables spread out on the lawn, voices everywhere. I heard low male voices grumbling, controlled, another man who kept pleading, oh baby, oh darling, a group of women laughing spasmodically. The French-horn player turned away and sneezed: I heard the horn quit and I heard him sneeze. When I looked, he was playing again and everyone else at the party looked glittered and delighted. It wasn’t Halloween yet, but it felt like a costume party, everyone dressed up as they wanted to be, the awful world festering underneath.
Eventually my mother did tire enough to sit and I went inside to use the bathroom. Peeing, I heard a shuffling inside the walls and I knew Jill was close. My grandparents’ house had been built with spaces between the walls for accessing the bathroom pipes and for circulating fresh air, a technology considered cutting-edge before air-conditioning. My mother had grown up here and told stories of large fans set before the openings, metallic air and dust and bees drifting through the vents. Now the vents were sealed into the air-conditioning, leaving behind the narrow passageways, which only Jill could get through. She was skinny as a stick, her arms so bony that once I pretended to snap her wrist in my hands. Jill screamed and I let go. I hadn’t meant to hurt her.
I knocked on the wall: one, two, pause, three, pause, four. Through the wall I heard her say, “I’ll come out.”
I went to the bathroom at the back of the house. The panel at the back of the linen closet had been removed, the space between the walls a black void of warm air. I heard Jill coming and a moment later she appeared, her hair and the front of her dress glittered with dust. “What were you doing?”
“Hiding notes,” she said. “For the children.” If I was the cause of my mother’s blindness, Jill was its consequence. She feared invisibility. She auditioned for every school play, ran for office every year, volunteered to care for the class’ rabbit during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Whenever we went to Galveston, she wrote her name in the sand with a stick, in large-enough letters that passing planes could see it. Lately, she had taken to creating time capsules for her descendents. She buried her dolls in the backyard, along with a photograph of herself, and a baggie filled with hair pulled from the bathtub drain. She pilfered every trashcan on our street for weeks, gathering wine and soda bottles, then stuffed the bottles with notes and set them to float in the bayou.
She held a folded square in her hand. I asked her to see it. Dear Children, it said, I hope you’re having a good life. May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead.
“What’s that last bit?” I asked.
“I saw it on a plaque in the other room. You should write a message, too.” She stepped into the bedroom and returned with a paper and pen. I took it from her and scribbled, Go back from whence you came.
“I like that,” she said. “A warning. Here, I’ll hide it for you.” I gave her the note and she ducked beneath the opening. I don’t know how many notes she managed to hide back there, but I know it was a lot. Whenever I drive down my grandparents’ street and find the house changed in some way, I think of the new owners opening a wall and Jill’s notes fluttering out like paper butterflies–her name everywhere among the house’s history. I had long hoped for exactly the opposite. I would rather have been forgotten. In the mornings, I watched my mother pour her coffee with the tip of her index finger curled over the lip of the mug so she could tell when to stop, and when we went out I watched other people watch her, at first unaware of her blindness and then suddenly surprised by it, averting their eyes from hers or slowing their speech, the entire time a voice in my head repeating, you did this to her. She was a blind woman; it was impossible to see her otherwise. I understood her disappearing, at least in this one way. Unable to see, she hoped to slip by unseen.
Jill stepped out of the hole, bent herself straight and brushed the dust from the front of her dress. “It’ll take a real sleuth to find those,” she said.
“What’s the point of writing them if no one will ever find them?”
“The future Jill in the family will know where to look. I do. You should see all I’ve found back there.”
“We’d better head back outside,” I said. “It’s almost time.”
My grandmother stood on the bandstand in an even slimmer-fitting red dress. She made a point to change at least twice at each party. Glitter sparkled in the creases around her eyes. Guests stood together on the floor, several more seated regally in the chairs turned to face the stage. A waiter passed around champagne. One was offered to me and I took it without a word. My grandmother prided herself on never telling the same story from one year to the next. Each year’s speech, though a cousin of the speeches it preceded and followed, was uniquely scripted: this year, it was the horror of cancer. In past years she had used the phrase “the horror of blindness” to describe sights my mother had missed, my sister’s newborn face, for example, and the salesgirl who tried to swindle her by telling her that the twenties she produced from her wallet were really fives. For the present, however, blindness was a lesser enemy. She wasted little time:
Friends, this has been a year like none other. Cordelia was discovered to have cancer in her eye, and, while she won her war with the disease, she lost her eye in the battle. The prosthetic artist did a miraculous job matching her new eye with her old, and I’ll wager that none of you can tell which is which. And I’m not telling! Seeing her here tonight, I am reminded that we are blessed to be where we are in this life, and that we cannot allow our talents and gifts to go to waste. We must fight harder than we’ve fought in the past. We can no longer content ourselves with making small differences; we must make larger differences. Blindness is not the world’s foremost affliction, nor are cancers of the eye, but both are fights we can win, and having won them, we can look clearly toward the next. For that reason, we’ve decided to expand our efforts. We will soon break ground on the Cordelia Sterling Jarrett Eye Center, to be located in the Medical Center. With your help, it will become the epicenter of ophthalmologic research. With your help, it will bring light to darkness. We hope you will join us.
It was a shorter speech than other years and the guests made it through without becoming distracted. When my grandmother stopped speaking, they applauded loudly, roused and inspired, for philanthropies attached to buildings occupy the world fixedly and make for lasting legacies. Buildings meant walls with plaques and photographs. Jill understood this and said, “Cool. Maybe people will kiss Mom’s picture like they do Elvis’ statue at Graceland.”
“They do that at Graceland?”
“From what I’ve heard.” She took the champagne flute out of my hand and downed the last of it.
“I think we’d all like to hear from Cordelia,” my grandmother said. Each year, in a routine unfailing, my grandmother would call my mother’s name, and Kay, or my father, or my grandfather, would lead her to the microphone, and my mother would thank the guests and say she was praying for scientific advancements and look uncomfortably nervous, for which she was promptly forgiven. Tonight she did not heed the cue. The guests waited but my mother did not come forward. My grandmother said, “Cordelia, are you out there, honey?” She scanned the floor and terrace with her hand shading her eyes. I looked, too, but could not see her.
Besides my family, no one understood the gravity of her absence. My grandmother said, “Well, she must have stepped away. We’ll hear from her later,” and then descended the bandstand’s steps. The music, and the party, resumed, hardly a step missed. After a half hour had passed and all the doors in the house had been opened and lighted and my mother had not materialized, something approaching a panic swept through us. The fact that she was not inside the house meant that she was outside the house. She was in the world. Only a mile from my grandparents’ house was Westheimer, a six-lane jugular crossing Houston, filled with bars and men’s clubs and transvestites. I thought about the pills in my mother’s pocket, and how her black dress drew her into the shadows. My father said he and Kay were going out to look for her and told me to stay put in case she came back, a job I immediately passed on to Jill. “She might be down in the azalea garden,” I said. “I’ll make a loop and come back.”
Jill shook her head, but that was all.
The trees and shrubs were bent and twisted. I had heard stories of thieves entering the neighborhood by way of the bayou, waiting in unlit hallways until the owners went to bed. Every half step I saw a body rise up, strange eyes blinking from behind a tree. In every case it was a statue, a fountain, a whorled topiary. My grandmother had enlisted the valets and caterers to search the grounds, and across the garden I saw other flashlights floating in the dark. I heard my mother’s name, Cordelia, Cordelia. It made the search seem absurd, as though she would roll out from the bushes and say, “Here I am, you found me! I was here all along!” She would only be found when and if she chose to be found. She had a way of fading into the background and re-emerging suddenly, of popping into and out of conversations. I’d be at the sink or on the phone, someplace where I thought I could see all around me, I’d blink, and there she’d be. I never knew where she had come from, and I never knew what she knew.
I lowered my voice. “Mom,” I said. “It’s Rowdy. Tell me where you are. I won’t give you up.” I turned one corner and then another, scanning the oaks, half-expecting to find her reclining on a branch, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. In the distance I heard, “What a pile of horseshit. Keep her on a goddamned leash.” Then I shut my eyes.
This was a game I played in the woods behind our house. I never once thought the game had anything to do with my mother’s blindness, but of course it had everything to do with it. Any behavior that could be remotely construed as mocking, including walking around with my eyes closed, earned a quick slap from Kay. In the woods I could try my hand at blindness, and measure my ability to adapt to it when it came for me, as I was sure it one day would. I would walk blindfolded from one end of the woods to another. At first I walked with my hands out, touching a tree, stepping around it, touching another, but in time I grew courageous and kept my hands at my sides. Woods are noisy places if you listen, and in time, I came to hear the trees: small silences in the air, masses the wind had to move around. I, too, learned to move around them. If I heard cars, I knew I was near the highway, if water, I knew I had traveled along the bayou. Other times, I let my mind wander and imagined coming upon a secret cottage nestled back there, inhabited by a strange old woman, or a deep ravine with a waterfall like the one on Fantasy Island, or my favorite, an uncharted inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, complete with sand and sun-baked kelp and oyster shells. Since I was fifteen, I also imagined coming upon scenes more sinister and voyeuristic: young, naked bodies bathing or playing in the water. I could conjure it so vividly, in fact, that I’d open my eyes and want to weep at the sight of only trees. The rare times I got hold of magazines with naked women inside, usually from the older brother of a friend, I took them with me into the woods.
I listened for my mother’s measured breathing, her stillness. I heard the leaves rustle, a squirrel climb a tree. I stopped when I heard water. Buffalo Bayou was iridescent as oil, and as wide across as the freeway. Autumn floods had brought the water up around the bases of the pines and willows, and beneath the surface flowed a second stream of garbage, of cans and cigarettes and twigs. I watched the fog thicken on the grass and over the current, and I imagined my mother making it here, a breeze over her feet, the Vicodin rattling in her pocket. I watched until I was certain I saw something move beneath the surface–a body long and sleek, propelled by a tail. I said, once, “Mom,” and then, because I too was part of the search, “Cordelia,” and then I said both names again. The bayou made no response. A minute later a cigarette floated by on top of a can, smoke rising from its still-orange tip. I gasped, and then I turned and ran.
When I returned, the band wasn’t playing and only a few people sat around the tables, talking into their sleeves. The tower of the lighthouse had thinned and collapsed; the fallen lantern lay melting into the violet linen. I could tell something had happened in the time I was in the garden and it frightened me to think of what. Through the glass doors to the study, I saw my father and Kay standing with their backs turned. Extending from Kay’s right elbow was the telephone cord. My father stood to her left, his elbow locked tight to support his weight against the desk, his nose and mouth not far from Kay’s ear. Kay was shaking her head, but my father was nodding his and the sight of both gestures at once made me think of the worst. My mother had wandered into traffic and had been struck by a car, or had been pulled from a back lot by the police. The call Kay was making was the first act of the aftermath. I stood still, not wanting to enter, not wanting to know. My father put his hand on Kay’s lower back, on the flat, indented area where the muscles pull together, the skin exposed by her leaning forward. It’s an area I’ve come to know as supremely erotic for its proximity to other parts of the body and because a hand there controls both movement and posture. Kay looked at him and then looked back at the phone. I assumed that any touch between them, or between anyone else, would be the touch of comfort, of grief. I opened the door and braced for the news. My father looked up. In an instant, his hand was in his pocket. “Find her?” he asked. Kay turned, too. When I said I hadn’t, I could not tell whether or not they were relieved.
Jill was the one who found her, in the bathroom of the cook’s kitchen, a room that had been searched twice before my mother appeared. She was curled up on the floor with her knees pulled into her chest, her sickness lining the toilet. The caterers stood together near the range, pots and pans hanging overhead. Kay helped my mother to her knees. “We’ll get you home,” she said. She smoothed the hair from my mother’s forehead and wiped her mouth and chin with a folded square of toilet paper. “It’ll be all right.”
“How many Vicodin did she take?” my father asked. He stood on the opposite side of the toilet.
“I see three in there,” Kay said.
“Three more than that,” my mother groaned.
“Jesus, Cory,” my father said. “What were you . . . ?”
My mother shook her head.
“Should I call an ambulance?” Kay asked. “Who knows how much she drank.”
“Not yet,” my father said. “If she threw most of them back up, she should be okay.”
My mother sat back on her knees and turned her face to Kay. Kay let out a short, pitched gasp. I didn’t know why until my father moved to flush the toilet and Kay grabbed his wrist. “Don’t,” she said. “Wait.” My mother touched her face, her left cheek and eyelid. The eye had come out.
“It’s in there,” Kay said. Her eyes rolled to the toilet. Before my father or Jill or I or anyone could react, Kay reached her hand into the toilet and fished out the eye. She did this without emotion, without disgust or pain, and watching her flush the toilet and stand to wash her hands and the eye in the sink, I realized how little I knew her. Where had this stoic strength come from? Fifteen years she had lived with us and I had never met her mother, or understood where her father had gone, or seen where she had grown up, or considered what she would be doing if she were not with us. I could not imagine her not with us. She set the eye on the vanity while she dried her hands. I stared at it, fixed in its gaze, and was relieved when she wrapped it in tissue and slipped it inside her purse. “We’ll just take this home.”
My grandmother appeared in the doorway with her hands laced together. “Oh, Cordelia. I knew it was too soon for you to be out. This is my fault.” She turned and shouted into the kitchen. “Someone please call an ambulance.”
“She doesn’t need one,” my father said. “She just needs to go home.”
“She needs her stomach pumped, Lee,” my grandmother said.
“They won’t pump her stomach. The hospital will give her charcoal to drink and send her home. She’ll do better sleeping this off.”
“You’re the doctor.” My grandmother’s voice was sarcastic, my father not the kind of doctor she trusted. She stepped forward, pressed her knees together, and bent toward my mother. She rubbed my mother’s back. “Think you can stand up, honey? Think you can walk?”
“Happy Birthday,” my mother grumbled.
“Oh now, don’t say that, honey. You’re not well. It’s my fault. I wanted you to come, but I shouldn’t have pressed so hard. It was too much. Lee and Kay will take you home.” She turned to my father. “Should she stay? It’d be no problem.”
My father shook his head. “She’s drunk, Elizabeth. She needs two aspirin and a good night of sleep.”
My grandmother lifted my mother’s arm from the toilet and looped it around her neck, helped my mother to stand. “Here we go, honey. Just take your time.”
Kay wrapped her arm around my mother’s waist and together she and my grandmother walked my mother out of the bathroom. My mother’s head drooped between her shoulders. She tried to lift it, but couldn’t. Her remaining eye was bloodshot. As they passed me, my grandmother looked at me and pursed her lips and then looked away. I was supposed to have been watching her.
An ambulance waited in the driveway with its engine chugging, called despite my father’s insistence. The paramedics held orange tackle-boxes. When they saw my mother, they came toward her. “Never mind,” my grandmother said, waving them off. “We don’t need you after all.”
“You should have called to tell us,” one said. He wore a blue cap low on his forehead.
“Well, I didn’t,” she said. “Send me the bill.”
The valet brought the van around and my father slid open the back door. My mother tried to step up, but fumbled and tripped forward. My grandmother squeaked and said, “Help her, Rod,” and my grandfather, stalwart and silent, appeared, I can’t really say from where. He lifted my mother into the van. Unbending himself from the door, he placed a hand on my father’s shoulder and said, “Drive safely, Lee. Take care of my little girl.” My father nodded, then looked at me and said, “You drive, Rowdy. I’ve had one more than I should have.” I had my permit and could have qualified for a hardship license because of my mother’s blindness, but I had yet to prove myself a responsible driver. I flinched easily and drove too close to the line and had twice taken a corner too fast and put the van in the ditch. It didn’t occur to me that my father was willing to risk our safety for the sake of a satiric gesture. He said, “We’re in Rowdy’s hands. God be with us,” and then climbed in the back beside Kay.
Jill climbed in up front and said, “If you get lost, I’ll guide you. I have the map in my mind.” She tapped her temple with her index finger. She had a map of the world taped to her closet door and a map of Texas on her wall. She often lost entire afternoons thumbing through the Houston street guide.
But the night had taken a lot out of her and before we made it to the freeway, she was asleep, curled up with her head on the armrest. Soon, so was everyone else. My father’s head was craned back, his mouth gaping. Kay sat straight up, her purse in her lap, her eyes shut as though waiting for a gruesome scene to pass. My mother’s skull rolled against the glass. The radio was off, the windows were rolled up tight, and the soggy plain of Houston merged with the darkness, distant rows of lights hovering at the crease of earth and sky. The world had never felt so big, nor I so alone in it. Oh, we were a moody bunch! I thought about my mother’s prosthetic eye inside Kay’s purse, the toilet paper clinging to the silicone, the eye unblinking, unemotional, ever focused. An eye without a body is certain of everything. It hides from nothing. Had it sat beside me on the dashboard, it would have seen everything that I could not, the unformed suspicions that lay at the bottom of my stomach where the seatbelt crossed my lap: what would happen next, and next, and next, and finally. I angled the mirror to see my mother. Her eyes were open, staring at me, her left a cavern of muscle and blood. I jerked the wheel and Kay’s eyes shot open. “What the hell are you doing, Rowdy? Trying to kill us?”
“Sorry,” I said, and set my hands at ten and two and focused my eyes forward, avoiding the rearview. Before me lay the chain of streetlamps, the lines in their unending Morse code of dots and dashes, billboards rising over the road. Don’t Be Sad!, one said. Experience the Flame Broiled Difference. Who Cares If They’re Real? . . . They’re Real Close. Fog was condensing on the hood and the windshield and the asphalt. I felt the road turning slick. I tried to keep my hands steady on the wheel.
David McGlynn’s stories and essays have appeared in Image, Black Warrior Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, and Gulf Coast.