Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (2 page)

Joanna was bending over Lily’s stroller, adjusting the child’s harness. So Ken answered. “Outbound in this case means away from the center of the city,” he said. “There are two sets of tracks, coextensive.” He paused. Coextensive? Sophie had learned to read at three; her vocabulary at seven was prodigious; still … “They coextend,” he tried. “One set of tracks carries trains outbound and the other carries them … ?”

“Inbound,” Sophie said. “Then when we go back to the hotel we’ll go inbound. But why aren’t the inbound tracks next to these ones? Yesterday, under the aquarium …”

Ken inhaled deeply; for a moment Sophie regretted getting him started. “This Harvard Square station used to be the terminus,” he told her, “the last stop. When the engineers enlarged the system they ran up against the sewers, so they had to separate inbound and outbound vertically.” He had invented this explanation, or maybe he’d heard it somewhere. “Inbound is one level below us.” That much he was sure of.

The family walked down a shallow ramp to the concourse. Sophie led the way. Her straight blond hair half covered the multi-colored hump of her new backpack, a birthday gift from her parents. During their early-married travels Ken and Joanna had worn explorers’ rucksacks to out-of-the-way places. After Sophie was born they traveled only to France, always with their little girl. This venture from the northern plains, across half the country, was the first family excursion since Lily’s birth two years ago. “An excursion is a loop,” Joanna had lightly explained to Sophie. “We start from home, we end up at home.”

Ken, pushing the heavy stroller and its calm passenger, kept pace with Sophie. Joanna was at his heels, swinging the diaper bag and her scuffed brown pocketbook.

On the concourse Sophie paused. “The stairs are at the left,” Ken said. Sophie started toward them, her parents like friendly bears behind her. Other people on the way out pushed through unresisting turnstiles, but because of the large stroller Ken and Joanna and Sophie and Lily had to use the gate near the token vendor’s booth. The stairway to the street was broad enough to climb together. Ken and Joanna lifted the stroller between them. All four, blinking, reached the white light of Harvard Square at the same time. Lily, startled and amused by the hawkers, made her familiar gurgle.

“Mama,” she said to Ken.

“Dada, darling,” he returned.

“Dada.”

“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” said Sophie, dancing in front of the stroller.

“Mama,” Lily said.

She was not yet able to say her sister’s name, though sometimes, on the living room floor, when Sophie was helping her pick up a toy, Lily would raise her odd eyes and gaze at the older girl with brief interest.

She had Down’s syndrome. At two she was small, fair, and un-fretful, though Ken and Joanna knew—there was little about Down’s that they did not now know—that the condition was no guarantee of placidity. Lily was just beginning to crawl, and her muscle tone was improving; the doctor was pleased. In the padded stroller she could sit more or less erect.

“Lily clarifies life,” Sophie had heard her father say to one of his friends. Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

Even today, walking through the gates of the university that looked like the college where her parents taught, but redder, older, heavier; leaving behind shoppers in Harvard Square; feeling a thudding below their feet as another subway hurtled outbound or inbound; selecting one path within a web of walks in a yard surrounded by buildings … even today, in this uncrowded campus, they moved as a cluster.

“Massachusetts Hall,” Ken pointed out. “The oldest building in the university. That’s the statue of John Harvard over there. And dormitories new since our time—would you like to live here someday, Sophie?”

“I don’t know.”

Clumped around the stroller they entered another quadrangle. There was a church on one side and, on the opposite side, a stone staircase as wide as three buildings. The stairs rose toward a colonnade. “That’s the fifth-biggest library in the world,” her father told her.

“What’s the … sixth?”

He smiled. “The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. You were there.”

Paris? Sophie recalled stained glass. They’d had to climb narrow, winding stairs to reach a second floor. Her mother, soon to give birth, had breathed hard. Blue light from the windows poured upon them—upon her tall, thin father, her tall, bulging mother, her invisible sister, herself. She recalled the Metro, too, as smelly as day camp.

“The Bibliothèque?” her father said again. “Remember?”

“No.”

“Ken,” said Joanna.

They drifted toward the fifth-biggest library. Joanna and Ken carried the stroller up the stone stairs. Sophie, in a spasm of impatience, ran to the top, ran down, flew up again. She hid behind a pillar. They didn’t notice. She welcomed them at the entrance.

Inside, an old man sat at a desk inspecting backpacks. The family crossed a marble hallway and climbed marble stairs that ended in a nave of computer terminals. At last Lily began to whimper. They pushed the stroller into an area of card catalogs. Joanna picked Lily up. “We’ll go into a big reading room,” she crooned into a lobeless ear. “We’ll look out a window.”

Sophie watched them walk away—her mother so narrow in the familiar black coat. “Where are the books?” she asked her father.

“My little scholar,” he said, and took her hand.

The entrance to the cave of books was just a door. An ordinary, freckled boy who looked like her high school cousin casually guarded the way. Her father fished in every pocket for the card that would admit them; finally he found it.

“Children—,” began the boy.

“Ten minutes,” Ken promised. Sophie had heard this tone reassuring a woman who had slipped on the ice in front of their house; her father had used it also to soothe their cat when she was dying of cancer. “We’re in town from Minnesota. I want her to see this treasure.
Five
minutes.” The boy shrugged.

Sophie followed her father through the door. Her heart, already low, dropped farther, as when some playground kid shoved her. Upright books were jammed shoulder to shoulder within high metal cases, no room to breathe, book after book, shelf above shelf, case following case with only narrow aisles between. Too many books! Too many even if the print were large. This was floor 4 east, said painted letters on the wall.

They walked up and down the aisles until they reached the end of 4 East. Then they turned; 4 East became 4 South. Behind a grille stood an aisle of little offices, all with their doors closed. Sophie wondered what her mother was doing. Section 4 West came next. It was just like 4 East, books, books, books; a tiny elevator hunched among them. “Where does that go?” she whispered.

“Up to five and six,” he whispered back. “Down to three and two and one and A and B—”

“Are the five minutes up?”

“—and C and D.”

This time it was Sophie who led the way—easier than she’d anticipated: you just hugged the perimeter. There was even an exit sign. The freckled boy outside nodded at them.

Her mother waited next to the stroller. Lily was sitting in it again, sucking on a bottle. Sophie kissed Lily seven times.

“Was she impressed?” she heard her mother ask.

“Awed,” her father said.

She gave Lily a ride, moving among card drawers on wooden legs. Ken and Joanna watched their children appear and disappear.

“Those silent stacks,” he said. “The elevator, where I first kissed you—I’d forgotten it.” He kissed her again, lightly, on the elegant cheekbone that neither girl had inherited.

She kept her face raised, as if seeking sunlight. Then: “Let’s try the museum,” she said.

“Sophie will like the Renoirs,” Ken agreed.

But at the museum Sophie found the
Seated Bather
spacey. Her father directed her gaze toward a painting of ballerinas haphazardly practicing. What was the point of that? Only one work caught her interest: substantial angels with dense overlapping feathers and bare feet reflected in the sand. “So you like Burne-Jones,” he rumbled.

They were soon back on the street again, talking about lunch. Ken and Joanna decided on a favorite restaurant, hoping it still existed. They headed in its direction on a sidewalk next to the backs of buildings. “The library’s rear door,” Ken said, pointing. Sophie averted her gaze. They crossed the street at the traffic light.

That is, three of them did. Sophie, her head still awkwardly turned, got caught on the curb as the light flashed don’t walk. Her parents lumbered away. Other people bore down upon her, blocking her view. By the time the crowd rushed past, the cars on the street had begun to roll again, and she was forced to stand still.

That was all right. Standing still was what she was supposed to do when she became separated from a parent. “If both of us run around, you see, the chances are that we’ll never be in the same place at the same time,” her mother had explained.

“Like atoms,” Sophie said.

“I guess so … But if one of us stays put, the moving one will eventually cross the still one’s path.”

It made sense. Sophie had imagined that, in such an event, she would turn cool, a lizard under a leaf.

Instead she turned hot, even feverish. She sang “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” under her breath. The sign changed to walk. She sang “Rhody” backward. Her mother would soon cross her path. But her mother could not leave the stroller. The sign changed back to don’t walk. Her father, then. He would stride across the street, two leaps would do it, he would scoop her up, he would put her on his shoulder, though she was much too big for such a perch. She would ride there for blocks and blocks; the restaurant would have a peaked roof and a lot of panes in the windows; they always chose restaurants like that.

J
OANNA HAD MANEUVERED
the stroller rightward, had taken a step or two, had turned back for Sophie, not seen her, looked right, twice, and then left, down a pedestrian walkway, and spotted amid a crowd of kids around a mime the fair hair and multicolored backpack of her daughter. Her heart bobbled like a balloon.

“Where’s Sophie?” Ken said at her shoulder.

She pointed confidently and pushed the stroller close to the slanted window of a bakery. She’d lift Lily out and all three would have a good view of the mime—he was deftly climbing an invisible ladder—and of the delighted children, particularly Sophie in her new backpack and her old turquoise jacket, only that kid’s jacket was green and she was taller than Sophie and her hair was yellower than Sophie’s, much yellower. Only an unnatural parent could mistake that common candle flame for her dear daughter’s pale incandescence.

S
OPHIE, TELLING HERSELF
to stand still, was jostled from behind. She turned to object, but the jostler had disappeared. The sign changed to walk. Without forethought, though not unwillingly, she leaped into the street.

Sweaty, gasping, she fetched up on the opposite curb. She did not see her family. She saw strollers here and there, but none of them were Lily’s; they were the fold-up kind for regular kids. She saw a wheelchair.
That
wasn’t relevant, she scolded herself, brushing her nose with the back of her hand. Lily would walk someday. A jester with a painted white face seemed to wave. She ignored him. She drifted toward the center of the square. Earlier she had noticed a newsstand … a kiosk, her father had said.

The newsstand turned out to be a bright little house of magazines and newspapers and maps. A man wearing earmuffs sat at a cash register. The place shook slightly every few minutes: the subway was underneath.

There Sophie waited, alone and unknown and free.

By now her parents would have retraced their steps. They had already crossed her empty path.

She felt most comfortable near the far wall. Foreign newspapers overlapped one another. There were French papers. She recognized
Le Monde
from that trip to Paris.
The World
; her father, if he were here, would request the translation. There were newspapers from other parts of Europe, too—she could tell that their words were Spanish or Italian, though she did not know the meanings. In some papers even the alphabets were mysterious. Letters curved like Aladdin’s lamp, or had dots and dashes underneath them like a second code. Characters she had seen in Chinese restaurants stood straight up, little houses, each with a family of its own. Lily might learn to read, her mother had said. Not soon, but someday. Until that day, all pages would look like these, confusing her, making her feel more left out. Still, in a few years’ time she would be walking. She would stand close to Sophie. Maybe too close. What does it mean? she would whisper. What does it mean? she would whine, and pull at Sophie’s sleeve.

The man with the earmuffs gave Sophie an inquisitive look. She turned to study a newspaper. Each word was many letters long, and each letter was a combination of thick and thin lines. She knew all at once that this was German. Her father played Bach on his harpsichord, from a facsimile of an old manuscript; the title and the directions were in German. If Sophie stayed in this pretty little house for the rest of her life she could probably learn one or two of the languages whose alphabet was familiar. Here was how she would do it: she would read the English papers thoroughly and then, knowing the news by heart, she would figure out the words’ partners in the other papers.