Now I See You (6 page)

I spent a long, lovely day in the city I’d so longed to see, genuflecting before flickering candles in the Basilica, wandering down the labyrinthine alleyways, pausing to sigh on the Ponte dei Sospiri.

That evening, on the five-hour train ride back to Rome, I read
Anna Karenina
until my eyes ached. When I heard the conductor announce the end of the line approaching, I looked up from the book, disoriented, like I’d woken from a dream. It took me a minute to remember where I was and where I’d been, and then, I was happy, satisfied that my life was as full of adventure as the great novel I’d been reading. Yes, the last chapter, with my Italian beau, had been a bit disappointing, but it’d been memorable nonetheless and it had brought me to Venice, the city I’d always dreamed of seeing. My story was changing; no longer a maudlin tearjerker about a girl gone blind, but a broader narrative of youth and adventure that was only just beginning.

Italy had been the antidote, not to my diagnosis, but to the sadness, fear, and confusion the diagnosis had elicited. I’d laid the foundation there for a new way of life.

Back in New York, about to start my junior year in college, I reminded myself to keep building on that foundation. I thought about it as I went back-to-school shopping in the East Village and bought faux snakeskin pants and red patent leather heels. I thought about it as I dyed my hair for the first time, highlighting it with streaks of Hollywood blond.

“You know those chemicals are terrible for your hair,” my mother observed, turning to look at me in the passenger seat. I was leaving for New Haven in a few days so we were running errands and had gotten caught in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, just the two of us in the car.

“It’s just highlights,” I said, fiddling with the radio that my parents had perpetually set to 1010 WINS. “It’s not a big deal.”

My mother blew her nose. Then she said: “Did I ever tell you I used to have epilepsy?”

I let go of the radio dial and looked at her. Now she was applying barely there lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I figured she’d misspoken. She probably meant eczema or something.

“When I was a little girl. I had seizures all the time, every day,” she went on, twisting the lipstick tube closed. “In the middle of school. Everywhere. They were really very bad. My teachers would call your aunt Rita out of class because she knew how to hold me so I didn’t get hurt.”

I sat there, agog, for once hanging on my mother’s every word.

“Was this in Italy or after?” I asked. My mother had been born in a small town outside of Rome and had immigrated to America with my grandmother and aunt when she was eight.

“Both,” she said. “It got worse when we moved to Brooklyn, when I was in junior high.”

How could I not know about this? How had she managed to keep the single-most interesting fact about her childhood under wraps for nearly twenty years? Why had my grandmother or aunt never mentioned it?

“I couldn’t lead a normal life,” my mother continued, staring at the unmoving traffic in front of our car. “I really wanted to be a cheerleader but I couldn’t even try out because I might have a seizure in the middle of a game. I didn’t think I would be able to drive.”

“So what happened?” I asked like a kid listening to a bedtime story. This was the first time my mother had delivered a monologue that did not feature the word “goddamned” or “moron” anywhere in it. This was engrossing stuff.

“One day, when I was about thirteen, I made it through a whole day without having a seizure. And then the next day, too. A whole week passed with no seizures. And that was it. I never had a seizure again.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How were you cured?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know how. No one knew. One day, I just didn’t have epilepsy anymore.” She waited a beat before saying, “It was a miracle.”

Ahhh. Now I understood the point of the story. But just to be sure, my mother spelled it out.

“Miracles do happen,” she said, looking at me with welled-up eyes. “And you’ll get a miracle, too. I know it.”

I realized with no small amount of surprise that this crazy, out-of-the-blue pep talk had actually made me feel better. A lot better. Hopeful.

Later, at a computer at the library at school, I researched “childhood epilepsy” and found out there is a strain of the disease that corrects itself, usually before puberty, but this didn’t contradict my mother’s story about being the beneficiary of a miracle. One day she was biting her tongue on the classroom floor, and the next she was perfectly, entirely well and would never be sick like that again. That’s a miracle no matter what scientific explanation there is for it.

We never discussed the childhood epilepsy again. I don’t know if my sisters know about it, or my father. I’ve never even thought to ask them. I did wonder for a while afterward if maybe she really shouldn’t have told me sooner, if maybe that wasn’t exactly the sort of information the doctor meant when he asked the routine question, “History of epilepsy in your family?” Of course, since it was corrected, she probably figured it wasn’t relevant. And since it wasn’t relevant, it was easy enough to snip right out of her story.

I could understand that. A similar phenomenon was occurring with my own sickness, which didn’t belong to my past but to my future. Something magical had happened while I was having adventures in Italy; my eye disease had been lifted out of the present tense, had been gathered together, all the loose ends tied up, and flung far, far down my timeline, beyond the vanishing point of my distant future. Now, it was as if someone had gazed into a crystal ball and told me that in ten to fifteen years, I’d suddenly be struck blind. It would happen at some point but it wasn’t happening
now
.

What made this possible was the fact that over that long, eventful summer, my eyesight hadn’t gotten any worse. Not as far as I could tell, anyway. Intellectually, I knew that the deterioration of my retinas was slow, largely imperceptible, and that the steady elimination of my visual field happened even when I didn’t notice it. Of course, intellect, particularly in teens, is exceedingly easy to ignore. All that mattered to me was that in September, I could still see as well as I had in June, could still read my copy of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
could still sew buttons on my pants, could still make out a professor’s scrawl on the white board if I sat in the first few rows of the room.

Nothing was different—at least, with my vision. Which was funny because all the rest of me was changing, more and more every day.

I returned to college looking very much the same, seeing very much the same, but in the midst of a personality makeover. Of course, the transformation didn’t happen overnight; learning to make bad decisions and do stupid shit, like anything else, takes practice. I got the ball rolling the way any nineteen-year-old would, in the bedroom. If your destination is Life in Living Color, it goes without saying that the fastest shortcut is the Indiscriminate Sex highway. My experience in Venice had proved to me that if I wanted to “Find Great Romance” I couldn’t sit back and leave it all up to the men. If you want something done right …

In the beginning, the whole thing was pretty clumsy. My inaugural attempt at seduction targeted a cute freshman who was hanging lights for a Mamet play I was rehearsing. My roommate and best friend Beth masterminded the affair, so that all I had to do was follow the script she laid out. At her coaxing, I called him one night and invited him over and at her suggestion, I answered the door in a red teddy and knee-high leather boots.

What the hell do I do now?
I thought, as the flannel-clad freshman looked around nervously, probably wondering the same thing. Beth hadn’t scripted this part. So I regurgitated phrases I’d seen in movies, wincing internally as I said things like, “Glad you could make it,” while lighting the wrong end of a Dunhill. I’d left the lights off in my room to create an atmosphere of romance, but it ended up backfiring when I couldn’t see jack and nearly lit my hair on fire. Of course, the promise of no-strings-attached sex is so blinding to a teenage boy, the freshman probably wouldn’t have noticed had I set
his
hair on fire.

Afterward, I was very pleased with myself. I was taking life by the horns, becoming mistress of my own destiny. I called the shots, not some eye disease.

Screw you Dr. Hall,
I thought,
I’m making changes but not the kind you had in mind.

Just like that, before you can say, “woefully self-deluded,” I’d persuaded myself that casual sex was a crucial part of my Carpe Diem strategy.

The rest of my college career was filled with brief dalliances each pretty much indistinguishable from the next, save for a tiny detail, some small remembrance—listening to “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” for the first time while a Texan made breakfast; the chiseled biceps of a King Crab fisherman; opening a gift box containing silver earrings brought back from Barcelona. These moments were little shards of color and if you put them all together the right way, I thought, they’d make a mosaic showing a grown-up, gutsy girl living life out loud, a girl who didn’t take orders from a fat doctor on Park Avenue.

The whole idea was, of course, bullshit. I was doing nothing more bold or original than any other college coed does, desperate for attention and distraction—just tarting up, plain and simple. Still, I loved my new-and-improved persona. I loved being the kind of ballsy broad who wore geisha red lipstick and skirts short enough that you could catch a glimpse of garters. I loved cursing like a sailor, adopting pets without asking my roommates first, taking late-night skinny dips and generally undertaking asinine antics that would make my parents gasp, just because I could. Still could.

All of it was so terrifically exciting, I hardly ever thought about my eye disease, except every once in a while, and then only to convince myself that the diagnosis might just be the best thing to ever happen to me. It had woken me from complacency, given me a new lease on life and all without me actually having to grapple with any real consequences because my vision was, as far as I could tell, untouched. And since I wasn’t thinking about the disease, and it didn’t really affect me in any way, there was no reason to tell anyone about it.

I’d shared the news of my diagnosis with a handful of people, my close friends, right after I visited the Park Avenue doc, while I was still reeling. But once I’d found the cloud’s silver lining, I decided not to share the news with anyone else. I didn’t want the awkward pep talks and looks of pity. I didn’t want my tale of woe to undercut the sexy, coming-of-age story I was improvising.

Besides, who knew what the future held? By the time the shit hit the fan with my eyes, I’d be like, thirty, maybe even older. Ancient, in other words. Who knew if I’d even
live
that long? And anyway, it was personal. Sort of like how I didn’t go around volunteering my bra size when I ordered a cup of coffee or announcing to my Introduction to Fractals class every time I was on the rag.

It wasn’t like it was a
secret
or anything, I convinced myself. I knew about keeping secrets and
this
wasn’t
that
. You had to protect a secret with lies, like when a wife of my dad’s colleague asked my mother for her famous cheesecake recipe and my mother maintained she’d lost the index card. My mother knew precisely where that stained and crinkled index card was; she just thought the lady should do her own legwork if she wanted to be known throughout downtown Brooklyn for her prize-winning cheese-based confections. Yes, I reasoned, I knew secrets and this wasn’t one. This was an omission.

For all we know, Anna Karenina had a hint of a lisp or suffered from a touch of hip dysplasia; Tolstoy didn’t tell us about it because it simply wasn’t relevant. Really, I reasoned, this was the same thing: an extraneous detail I could cut out of the story. For now, at least.

Tip #5: On mood lighting

When attempting a scene of seduction, create ambience and prevent accidents by availing yourself of mood lighting. Candles are the obvious choice, but not the safest, since chances are good that you’ll knock one over while climbing into bed or toss your lace demi-cup right on to the open flame, thus setting the room ablaze, only not the way you intended.

Try a lava lamp instead.

5. TECHNICOLOR

“Are you
insane
?” my mother’s voice rang out from the phone receiver. “
Circus
school?”

“Just for the summer,” I assured her. I was sitting on my dorm bed amidst piles of Post-it-riddled library books, making a meal of Twizzlers and Cherry Coke. “Don’t worry,” I added, “I’m not going to
actually
join the circus.”

“Well, what a relief,” she answered, piling on the sarcasm. I heard her yell to my father, who was probably reviewing echocardiograms in his office down the hall, “GREAT NEWS! YOUR DAUGHTER DECIDED NOT TO JOIN THE CIRCUS AFTER ALL!!!”

Then she turned her attention back to me: “Let me get this straight. Your father and I have been killing ourselves, working like animals, to send you to the most prestigious college
,
just so you can graduate and go to—clown class? While everyone else in your class is clerking for judges and working at Goldman Sachs?”

I wasn’t the first college graduate in my family—my father, the son of a plumber, had matriculated from a small college in Brooklyn and worked his way through medical school in Italy—but I was the first to get a name-brand diploma, which had been my parents’ greatest dream for me since I was a zygote. One of my earliest memories is meeting a Yale student while on the N train from Bensonhurst with my mother. As I read a Nancy Drew mystery, my mother had bombarded the girl with questions about the application process, SAT test prep, and the price of textbooks.