Now I See You (25 page)

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 the 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.

Yes, this is exactly why I’d never attended a local support group meeting, even though I’d been receiving email notices about them for a while. On the one hand, the promise of enjoying fellow feeling among a group of people with similar challenges was tremendously enticing. On the other, what if those people turned out to be a pack of poor miserable bastards with all the vigor and hope sucked out of them? I wanted to attend the Hollywood rendering of a support group, with lots of pretty, young blind people who stayed upbeat and made the whole thing seem tragic in a sexy way. I wanted the fictionalized version, loosely based on a true story.
This
was not that.
This
was just the true story—not edited, not retouched, raw and emotional. I gave it two thumbs down.

I would’ve never gotten the gumption to attend a meeting at all had I not recently completed my training with the Commission for the Blind. Having survived that trial with my wits, and secret, intact, I felt like I could take on the world. The hardest part had been preparing myself emotionally to face the cane; once I took it in hand, the rest was cake. It only took a few short, incognito walks around the Gowanus to convince Esperanza that I had mastered Cane Basics.

“How do you know when you get to a street?” I asked Esperanza.

“Well, your cane will drop down from the curb. Usually.”

“That’s a pretty subtle indication,” I countered. “I mean, is a two-inch change in elevation all that’s going to keep me from getting crushed under a Mack truck?”

“You’ll probably hear a slight increase in traffic noise, too,” she offered.

“Also, far from foolproof,” I argued. “I mean, do I even stand a chance? Aren’t blind people just getting flattened like pancakes by the hundreds out here?”

She smiled, which is how she responded to what she thought were my rhetorical, and hysterical, questions. That Esperanza. I’d grown really fond of her quiet, unflappable optimism. She was an exceptional guide, my Virgil, leading me through the Inferno. I would miss her.

At our final visit, she gave me a long, tight hug.

“Do me a favor and join a support group,” she urged. “I know you don’t want to, and you might not like it at first, but it’ll help. Trust me.”

I did trust her. That Blind Guru of mine always seemed to knew what she was talking about. She’d been right to force me to confront the cane; now that I had, I could toss the thing right back in my closet, and this time it lay there quiet and subdued, just another piece of junk I didn’t need right now but would, someday. She’d been right about the Adaptive Technology Center, my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’d gotten a new computer with all the keys intact whose screen could be magnified with one easy click, giving me access to each and every piece of information contained on the World Wide Web. I’d been introduced to some ingenious inventions that were available when my vision got worse—scanners that read your mail to you in a freaky robot voice (“Dear KNEE-cole, We. Have. Sum. Eeek-citing noose aboutyourhome. Mortgage.”), portable digital magnifiers that could blow up print to a billion times its normal size, so big only a word or two appeared on the screen at a time. As Esperanza had promised, knowing that these tools were out there made me feel slightly less panicked and desperate about losing my vision.

Best of all, I learned to execute unimaginable feats of wonder on my cell phone, feats the rest of the world had mastered a decade earlier: emailing, checking the weather, and, yes, texting. The sense of triumph I felt when I sent my first text to a mommy friend—“Want 2 meet 4 coffee?”—was dizzying. Never again would I be forced to suffer the indignity of communicating with my vocal cords. And none of it would have happened if I hadn’t summoned the courage to get help.

Which is why, when I saw that the blind and partially sighted support group meeting had been moved from the coffee shop to a private room in a nursing home, I thought,
I should do this
.
I can do this.

I’d gotten gussied up for the meeting—skinny jeans with boots the color of milk chocolate and a floral wrap shirt—and before I left the house, I scrambled up a stepstool to reach the new tube of lipstick I’d hidden on top of my armoire so that Rosa, infamous lipstick-eater, could not get to it.

“Oooooooh,” three-year-old Rosa gasped as she saw me sweep the red across my lips, “why do you look so pretty, Mommy? Where you going?”

“I’m going to make a friend,” I announced. “Wish me luck.”

I was a tad concerned that the nursing home setting would bring me down but I endeavored to stay optimistic.

I’m sure it’s a very nice nursing home,
I persuaded myself on the walk over.
Probably very high-end, the sort of place you don’t even know is a nursing home without being told, with fair-trade coffee and free wifi and very peppy, attractive, nice-smelling old people like my grandmother. There’s no reason it has to be depressing.

It didn’t
have
to be depressing but it sure as hell was.

“I thought the cataract surgery would make things better but it didn’t, so why’d they cut into my eyeballs for, I want to know?” Ellie continued a lament that was going strong after ten straight minutes. As far as I could tell, Ellie’s vision problems didn’t stem from a degenerative disease, but from being nigh on a hundred years old, and I had to suppress the impulse to shout, “Isn’t it enough that you’re still alive after a whole century? What, you want 20/20 vision on top of that?”

Franny, the group leader, a round-faced woman my mother’s age who had macular degeneration, cleared her throat. Finally.