The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  THE

  GLASS

  EYE

  a memoir

  JEANNIE VANASCO

  TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York

  The hero is a feeling, a man seen

  As if the eye was an emotion,

  As if in seeing we saw our feeling

  In the object seen . . .

  From “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” by Wallace Stevens

  My parents raised me in a white-sided saltbox house, the sort children draw in crayon. Years before we lived there, it had been cut in half and moved across town. We never learned why.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  The night before he died, I promised my dad I would write a book for him. I was harboring profound confidence charged with profound grief.

  The day after he died, I was supposed to turn in a paper about Hamlet. My professor granted me an extension. I focused on the development of Hamlet’s grief for his father, and the question of madness.

  One week after he died, I was supposed to take a sociology exam. My professor did not grant me an extension. I did not read the chapter about grief, though I answered the questions about grief correctly.

  One month after he died, I wrote on my arms and legs until they turned black: “before I lost him he lost his left eye I left his left eye he is not his glass eye the i left him.”

  Nine years after he died, in an attempt to organize my thoughts, I started keeping several color-coded binders labeled “Dad,” “Mom,” “Jeanne,” and “Mental Illness.” Within each binder are categories, such as “Vision” and “Voice.” “Jeannie” isn’t a binder. I’m “Mental Illness.”

  DAD

  I remember almost nothing from before my dad lost vision in his left eye—as if my life begins there. Years of my life appear full of shadows, but the night I disappeared is full of light.

  My parents and I were playing the Memory Game. The goal was to find among all the cards two that matched. I was four. It was my dad’s turn.

  I waited what felt like a long time for him to choose a card as he closed one eye, then the other. When the right eye closed I disappeared.

  “I close my right eye,” he told my mom, “and I can’t see Jeannie.”

  I closed my left eye, then my right, a game of illusions that moved objects, moving my dad an inch each time.

  •

  In photos, my dad is almost always looking at me, never at the camera. This made it hard to choose his obituary photo. In the newspaper, my mom and I were cropped out of it.

  In the original photo, the three of us are at the kitchen table. My dad is sixty-six, my mom is forty-six, and I’m four. In a month, at that same wooden table, his left eye will stop working, but in the photo his eyes are fine—a deep brown so piercing they seem to look right inside me and know me. What hair he has is white and blends in with the white curtains behind him. His olive skin shows wrinkles. His forehead and cheeks have a greasy shine. He looks strong, thick-waisted but not fat. He wears belted gray slacks and a crisp white button-down shirt. Underneath his shirt likely hangs his gold necklace of the Holy Family. He stands behind my mom, leaning in and smiling. She’s smiling too and holding me on her lap. With her clear tan skin and thick curly blonde hair, she looks young enough, is young enough, to be his daughter.

  And then there’s me. At four years old, I want—or will remember wanting—one blue eye the shade of my mom’s, and one brown eye the shade that my dad and I share. But in a month, his eye doctor will tell me, “You have your dad’s eyes,” and I’ll never want a blue eye again. My wavy brown hair is pulled into a ponytail tied with a blue ribbon. My dad likely tied that ribbon. When I was a child, he did my hair—trimmed, brushed, and often braided it. He’d been a barber when he was young, and throughout my childhood he seemed young.

  Worried that other children would tease me about his age, he tried to color his hair dark brown the year I started kindergarten; it turned deep red, and until it faded he wore a hat everywhere—including at home.

  MOM

  Almost every day my mom and I talk on the phone, and almost every day we talk about my dad. He finds his way into the conversation, or rather we lead him there: “I remember this one time your father . . .” “How did Dad tell the story . . .” “I wish I could have him back.”

  She still lives in Sandusky, Ohio, in the house he died in. I live in New York, not far from the house where he was born.

  “You only wanted him,” my mom says. “You wouldn’t stop crying unless you had him. You wouldn’t let me put you to bed, read you stories. You were with him all day. You were used to him. I’d call from work and ask what he was doing. ‘I’m making Jeannie animals out of paper.’ Or ‘I’m teaching Jeannie how to twirl spaghetti.’”

  She pauses. “He saw how unhappy I was. ‘She needs her mother,’ he told me. So I agreed to quit working. You were a year old. I was worried about money, but he said we could make do on his retirement and Social Security.”

  And we did. No one could say I did without. I had dogs and turtles and bunnies. I attended private school. I practiced ballet at a dance studio near the lake, learned how to paint fish and birds on Saturdays in an artist’s home. Every month, I accompanied my dad to the bank where he bought savings bonds in my name.

  “For your college someday,” he said.

  DAD

  I remember only one visit to my dad’s eye doctor—though my mom tells me there were more.

  My dad sat in the middle of a white room, peering into a coal-black lens machine with his left eye. A circle of lights shone over him. I stayed at my mom’s feet with a coloring book.

  His doctor leaned cautiously into him, prodding the eye with a wand of light.

  The doctor left the room and returned with a nurse. She motioned for me to follow her into the hallway. I did, and she closed the door behind us.

  “Your grandfather is a brave man,” she said.

  She told me to stay where I was and disappeared into another room before I could say, “He’s my dad.”

  I cracked open the door and looked at him. The doctor was pressing a needle into my dad’s eye, and my dad didn’t flinch.

  MOM

  “How did Dad accept the loss of his eye?” I ask my mom. “Did he accept it?”

  “Yes, I think so. I don’t know if you remember how he used to throw up constantly and couldn’t walk up and down the steps. We had that sofa bed in the living room and he had to sleep down there all the time. It was like a pressure that built in his eye. He either had to live with it or have the eye taken out. So he said, ‘Let’s have the eye taken out.’”

  I remember the hospital felt a long way from home.

  I remember we stopped on the way and ate hamburgers in what used to be a bank. Chandeliers hung above us.

  “Do you remember the priest in his room, the other patient?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “The priest told your dad, ‘I don’t know if I could accept that,’ and your dad said, ‘Well, what difference does it make if I accept it? It’s not going to change it.’ He was very brave about it. Your dad was very brave.”

  DAD

  Almost every week when I was a child, my parents either walked or drove me to the library, a turreted limestone building. One small room, on the grown-up side, featured a glass floor.

  “You won’t fall through,” my parents took turns promising.

  My dad would offer me his hand, and I’d tap my foot against the glass and say something like, “Next time.”

  But I wanted to walk bravely across the glass. And I want to say his loss of his left eye gave me courage. I knew his surgery meant he was brave, because that’s what his nurses and doctors told me.


  But I forget my immediate feelings about conquering the glass floor, about seeing—for the first time—the room’s books about wars, physics, and clouds. I remember, though, waving at my dad from across the room, and returning to him.

  MOM

  “Degenerative eye disease, maybe?” my mom says on the phone. “Advanced glaucoma? The doctor said it happens to something like one in a million people.”

  “What happened exactly?”

  “Your dad’s tear ducts were closed and clotted with blood, and the doctors couldn’t get them to drain. I don’t know what you call it.”

  “Try to remember.”

  “I can’t.”

  DAD

  Not long after he lost his eye, I lost one of my front teeth. My parents told me to put it underneath my pillow.

  For the tooth fairy, they said.

  In the morning, instead of my tooth I found a one-hundred-dollar bill. I ran down the steps, two at a time.

  “The tooth fairy gave me a hundred dollars!” I shouted.

  My parents exchanged looks.

  “Wow,” my mom said. “I bet the tooth fairy thought she gave you ten dollars.”

  My dad opened his wallet.

  “Her mistake,” I said.

  MOM

  He built me toys and shelves.

  “He wanted to prove himself,” my mom says after I call again, asking about his eye. “One morning—this was a few weeks after his surgery—he started building you a dollhouse. I was washing dishes when he came inside with a piece of wood stuck in his stomach. ‘I almost lost my hand,’ he told me. You weren’t there. You were in school.”

  “Was it serious?” I ask.

  “The wood wasn’t in deep. I helped him pull it out. But it hurt his confidence.”

  At our next garage sale, his saw shared a table with clothes I’d outgrown. I was assigning prices with our sticker gun.

  “How much for the saw?” I asked him.

  The question seemed so inconsequential then.

  DAD

  I watched a woman paint my dad’s new eye. Spools of red thread, shiny blades, small jars of paint, and brushes thinner than my watercolor brushes were arranged on her long desk.

  It was important the new eye look like, rather than be, an exact match, because no one’s eyes match perfectly.

  As she painted, she looked at my dad’s real eye, then down at the glass eye, then back at his real eye.

  “What do you think?” she asked me when it was finished.

  I looked at my dad, then down at his new eye.

  MOM

  I call my mom again.

  “Am I remembering right?” I ask her. “Did I watch someone paint Dad’s new eye?”

  “You watched,” my mom says. “And I remember what you said when it was done: ‘It looks real.’”

  DAD

  “I can’t see out of my left eye,” I told him after he received his glass eye. “Do you think I need a glass eye?”

  “Are you lying?” he asked gently.

  “I want to be like you,” I said.

  TWO

  I’ve written hundreds of pages about my dad: poems, essays, short stories, a novel, several versions of a memoir—all titled The Glass Eye.

  Here on my writing desk is an anatomical model of the human eye. Lifting off its upper hemisphere reveals painted veins that look like blue and pink branches. The white body inside the eye is mostly transparent, mostly scratched. According to the gold label on the pinewood stand, the eye was crafted by a Chicago company that also manufactured maps and globes. It makes sense; my dad’s eye is my world.

  But why does his eye matter?

  Only after he died did it obsess me. Describing my dad through the metaphor of his eye comes easy; encapsulating him in plain language feels impossible.

  My dad’s eye was plastic, but sometimes I call it glass. Glass implies the ability to be broken.

  What if I write a book about the history of artificial eyes?

  What if I write a book that avoids even mentioning the eye?

  What if I write the book I want to write, the one about my love for my dad?

  What other book is there?

  I need to pan out, not focus so much on his eye. I haven’t even described the town where we lived. My dad loved Sandusky.

  DAD

  If you spread out a map of Sandusky, Ohio, you can see that at many intersections you can turn left or slightly left, continue straight, or turn slightly right or right. Twenty-five thousand people live there, but every summer more than three million visit for Cedar Point, the local amusement park. When passing car accidents in town, I often looked at the license plates; they almost always belonged to cars registered elsewhere. A former city manager once told me that some of the streets form the Masonic symbol. I noticed MASON printed on several limestone and sandstone buildings after that. My dad, when he was young, drove a taxi in New York, yet when he first moved into the house where my mom has lived much of her adult life, he often would get lost in town.

  MOM

  “This one morning,” she tells me on the phone, “maybe the same week he moved in, he left the house to pick up milk and came home five hours later. He couldn’t remember our address or our phone number.”

  The house had belonged to her and her first husband, who she married at eighteen.

  “Did it bother Dad,” I ask her, “that you’d lived here with someone else?”

  “No, but originally we’d planned to move to Arizona, or someplace warm like that, after we married. But then you were born, and he immediately started putting away money for you. It made sense to stay. And he loved this house.”

  “What did he love about it?”

  “He liked that it was in a quiet neighborhood. Rarely did a car go by. The double garage gave him plenty of room to build things. The yard had enough room for a nice garden, your playhouse, your swing set. If you remember, we’d play badminton in the backyard, the three of us, behind the garage. He loved sitting on the back porch, drinking a glass of scotch, and looking out at all the flowers and shrubs. He wanted to be buried in the backyard.”

  •

  Whenever my friends called our house tiny, I tried to ignore them. They lived in sparsely furnished houses with pale furniture and tall ceilings and pet gates. No one wore shoes past the front door. Their living rooms were off-limits. Their family rooms looked like their living rooms—only friendlier. Their coffee tables absolutely required coasters. Our coasters sat underneath one side of our furniture. Sometimes we used blocks of wood.

  “We have them because our house is crooked,” my mom explained when I asked why no one else kept their coasters there.

  We never could hang a picture straight. So as a kid, when I drew landscapes, I started with a crooked horizon.

  DAD

  “You know there’s a 216 West Boalt?” visitors to our garage sales often told us.

  We lived at 216 East Boalt Street. West Boalt and East Boalt never meet, and the sign for West Boalt says only Boalt Street.

  “New York has the grid,” I once overheard my dad explain, and I was briefly reminded that he’d lived there; he rarely mentioned it.

  “Do you miss it?” I once asked him.

  “Not at all,” he answered. “Sandusky is heaven.”

  •

  “Across from the baseball field and IAB,” we often included in our garage sale listings in the Sandusky Register. After the newspaper raised its ad rates, charging by the letter, we shortened our directions to “near IAB.” Most people in town knew that IAB stood for Italian American Beneficial Club.

  MOM

  “Little Italy my ass,” I heard my mom mumble the night she tore the green Welcome to Little Italy sign out of the ground. I was seven and couldn’t understand why the sign made her so angry. I liked it. The city had placed it right by our driveway, next to the stop sign on the corner where we lived. I ran inside and told my dad what she was doing.

  “Go tell her the cop
s are going to come for her,” he said. “That’s city property.”

  I begged my mom to leave the sign alone.

  “The police!” I yelled.

  “Go back inside or they’ll take you too,” she said.

  The next evening, at our kitchen table, I asked my parents why they were so quiet.

  “I’m angry at your father,” she said.

  “When people are angry,” he explained to me, “they say things they’ll come to regret.”

  Shortly after they married, they made a pact that if either of them was angry at the other, they’d say nothing until their anger had cooled. Usually, if my mom was angry, she’d reorganize kitchen drawers and cabinets, and my dad and I knew better than to ask where the forks had gone. If she felt stressed, she’d rearrange our furniture. This time, though, she hadn’t moved the couch or the silverware. This time she’d yanked a heavy metal sign—pole and all—out of the ground.

  “What are you angry about?” I asked.

  My dad and I looked at her for an answer.

  “Do you know?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t remember,” she said.

  They laughed, and I laughed, and our uneven house became idyllic again.

  DAD

  Late summer nights when I was a child, my parents sat on the rusted aluminum glider on our back porch and told stories about their lives. My mom as a girl once put her little “tattletale” sister on a slow-moving train.

  “She was sucking her thumb and waving from a train car when a neighbor saw and went running to my mother,” she said, “and did I ever get beat.”

  My dad learned how to cut hair when he was a boy by practicing on homeless men—“bums,” he called them, with a fondness in his voice.