The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  The future tense, can something be done with that?

  DAD

  After his funeral, I sorted through a small wooden box that belonged to him. I’d never seen it before. I thought that maybe it held a photograph of Jeanne. Instead I found divorce papers.

  “Dad was married to a woman named Mercedes?” I asked.

  “He didn’t want you to know,” my mom explained. “They weren’t together more than a month.”

  “Mercedes?”

  “He told me he was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing when he was drunk. It was after Jeanne died. He really lost it after that. He drank to forget, I think. When I met him, he was a big drinker. All that stopped after we had you.”

  “Why would he think I’d care about Mercedes?”

  “Your old Catholics don’t believe in divorce. He was ashamed.”

  A week later, I returned to college with a sentence trapped in my thoughts: “After Jeanne died, he really lost it.”

  •

  Back at college, I spent more time with the maintenance man in my dorm than I did with the other students. He and I communicated with hand motions, as he spoke almost no English and I spoke almost no Spanish. One morning in the laundry room, he explained that he’d been a doctor in Mexico. He made more money in the United States, cleaning up after college students, than he did healing patients in his hometown. He mailed his earnings to his wife and daughter, both in Mexico.

  “Su padre?” he asked me.

  I knew the word for it.

  “Muerto,” I answered.

  How easy it was to say in another language.

  “Su madre?” the maintenance man asked.

  How do you say: Seems dead?

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  In the weeks after my dad died, I tied nooses, cut my feet, scratched my wrists. I wandered through campus with my phone pressed against my ear, telling my dad that “I should have been with you.”

  Alone in my dorm room one night, I was at my desk, writing to him, when the lights flashed off. Then on. Off. On.

  The walls approached me from all sides.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, closing my eyes.

  My chair legs screeched. I was being pushed or dragged; I didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  I opened my eyes, and I was where I had been before I closed them: at my desk, an unfinished letter to my dad in front of me.

  That night I wrote in the margins of my textbooks: “I left him.” Over and over: “I left him. Jeanne would not have left him.”

  MOM

  I returned to Ohio to spend Christmas with my mom. The staircase had no gold garland wrapped around it. No stuffed Santas sat between its balusters. There were no nativities, no wreaths. There was no tree, no Dad.

  “It’s not the same without him,” my mom said.

  I looked around for some sign of him. His work shoes sat with a pile of other shoes and boots near the back door. His cane hung from our coatrack.

  “I’m going to stop at the store to get some shampoo,” I lied.

  “I have shampoo,” she said. “So much of it.”

  “I use a new kind.”

  DAD

  I drove to the downtown harbor, where signs of Christmas were everywhere: red ribbons fastened to streetlamps, green garland wrapped around the railings of the boathouses, pine trees dressed in ornaments and fat blinking bulbs of light. I parked the car outside the barbershop where my dad took me after he no longer could cut my hair. A young man and woman walked by, pushing a stroller.

  “I’m glad you were older when I was born,” I said with the windows rolled up.

  I reversed and without thinking drove to the local police precinct.

  “I need police records for a case I was involved in,” I said. “It involved a high school teacher of mine.”

  I found it surprisingly easy to secure the records.

  I drove with them to the cemetery. I parked and with the engine running began reading the detectives’ reports. Much of the material was blacked out. My newspaper advisor told the detectives that I hadn’t been sleeping. The detectives noted my “bloodshot eyes.” They emphasized that I’d waited months to report the “alleged incident.” The high school girl in that report didn’t know precisely how far up her teacher’s hand had wandered. She was reluctant to demonstrate it on her own thigh for the detectives. I left the records in the car and decided to search for my dad’s grave, but I couldn’t find it underneath all the snow. In the pale yellow sunlight, the cemetery was a white sheet against a vague horizon. I was too embarrassed to ask the cemetery attendant to help me find my dad. So I knelt and started digging through the snow, but I couldn’t find his name. I settled on a grave underneath a tree. He was buried near a tree; that, I knew.

  “I love you,” I said, maybe to a stranger.

  MOM

  I returned to college, avoided people when I could. I felt afraid to speak in class. I didn’t want to start crying, and nothing except I miss my father seemed worth saying.

  Arlene phoned to wish me a happy nineteenth birthday.

  “I would have sent you a card,” she said, “but I worried your mother would have thrown it away.”

  “My mother would do no such thing,” I said and hung up.

  My mom asked if I’d heard from Arlene on my birthday.

  “I did,” I said.

  “How is she?”

  “I don’t know. I hung up before asking.”

  As I explained the exchange to my mom, I thought: Why am I telling her this?

  “Why does she think I’d do that?” my mom said. “Of course I would never do that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I would never do that.”

  “That’s what I told her,” I said.

  “She put me through hell after your father died,” my mom told me. “You don’t know what I went through. She said I was sending him to hell for not having the funeral in a church.”

  •

  I call my mom, ask her to remind me what Arlene said exactly.

  “It was so long ago,” my mom says.

  “But you remember.”

  “I remember. She said, ‘You’re baptized in a church, you’re married in a church, you die in a church.’ Your father didn’t want a funeral, period. I did it for you. I tried to explain that to Arlene. But she was upset. I was upset, too. So I went to the priest. He told me, ‘I’ve never heard of something so stupid. You tell her to call me.’ Well, she called the priest, and the priest told her off. Look, I know Arlene lost her father. I know that. I know it wasn’t easy for her to have her father remarry, especially me—my being so much younger. But it’s not like I broke up his first marriage. He and her mother had been long divorced. And it’s not like I married your dad for money. I had more than he did when we met, and that’s not saying much.”

  “You loved him,” I say. “Arlene loved him. We all did.”

  “What I wouldn’t give to have him back. I was a wreck after he died.” She pauses. “I wasn’t really there for you after he died.”

  “You were.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  •

  The summer after my dad died, I returned home to see my mom. She looked thin and pale. Even in the heat, she wore all black.

  “Where’s the fence?” I asked her.

  Instead of asking how she was, I asked again, “Where’s the fence?”

  The fence he built for our driveway—to protect me—was gone.

  “It was too much,” she said, “having to get out of the car every time to undo it so that I could pull the car in and out.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I had to get rid of it. It was falling apart.”

  “But he made it.”

  •

  It’s important to remember, and impossible for me to forget: she lost him too.

  I ask her to remind me how she and my dad met.

  “We were both wo
rking at Providence,” she begins.

  Providence, which no longer exists, was a hospital in our town.

  She organized medical records. He painted the walls. Sometimes they passed one another and smiled—nothing more than that.

  “Every afternoon, I’d see him outside my office window, running through the parking lot,” she tells me. “He lived across the street. I always wondered why he was in such a hurry.”

  One day after work, she visited her father in that same hospital. He’d just had surgery. My dad was in the room when she arrived. The two men were chatting about the IAB. Both were Sicilian.

  When she came in, my dad said to her, “I didn’t know you were Sicilian.”

  Not long after, they began dating.

  On one of their dates, she asked him why he was always running across the parking lot.

  “He was embarrassed to tell me,” she says. “It was because he watched that soap opera The Young and the Restless during his lunch breaks. The show ended just a few minutes before he had to be back to work. He liked the actress Jeanne Cooper. When he told me he wanted to name you after his daughter, I teased him, ‘You’re naming her after that soap actress.’”

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  After I returned to campus in the fall, I called my boyfriend. He still lived in Ohio. He was finishing his last semester of college.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

  He asked me what, and I said, “This, us.”

  He said I missed my dad.

  He said, “Why punish me?”

  He said, “There’s someone else. I knew this would happen.”

  He demanded a name, an address.

  “I’ll shoot him,” he said. “I swear I’ll shoot him.”

  “I just don’t love you,” I said.

  After we hung up, he called my mom.

  “He told me he was worried about you,” she explains. “He had me scared. I didn’t understand.”

  He borrowed her car, drove six hours, and yelled at me. I asked him to leave my dorm. There was more yelling, more crying. I screamed, “Get out!” Still in my pajamas, I retreated to the common room, where there was a pool table. No one was there; I’d hoped someone would be. I sat on the table’s edge. He grabbed my hand and kept squeezing it. A popular sitcom played on the television next to us.

  “Please stop,” I said.

  He bent down on one knee and proposed marriage with his NCAA Rifle Championship ring. On one side was an engraved image of a shooter crouched with a rifle. On the other side was his last name, a name that he wanted me to take.

  “No,” I told him.

  He led me back into my dorm room and lifted my shirt.

  I yanked it back down, but again he lifted it.

  “You’ve lost your mind,” he said. “What is that?”

  I looked down. I’d written in black marker all over my stomach. The words were indecipherable.

  He pulled me by one arm to my mom’s car. He drove me to a hospital, but I refused to go inside.

  “You need help,” he said.

  “You need help,” I said.

  He sighed, drove me to my dorm. He left me with his ring. I tried to give it back.

  “Just consider it. I’ll buy you a real engagement ring.”

  I told him no.

  “You don’t even have to take my name. You can keep Vanasco.”

  TEN

  A manila folder in the top drawer of my desk holds news clippings about my half sisters, articles that I recently found in online newspaper archives.

  One article says that among two hundred contestants, Carol won first place in the nationality division of the Catholic Daughters of America’s doll contest in 1954; she would have been eleven or twelve.

  Another announces Debbie’s engagement. In her photograph, her dark hair frames her fine-drawn face. A simple cross hangs from her neck. If she’s wearing makeup, it’s modest and unnecessary.

  The last two articles concern Arlene. Her junior year of high school, she was elected president of the Southeastern Zone of Future Teachers of America. The other article reports that after her high school graduation, she was accepted for stewardess training with the Atlanta Airline School in Hartford, Connecticut.

  What would they think if they knew about my research? If they knew how much I cared?

  MOM

  “Your dad’s first wife made his relationship with their girls very difficult,” my mom tells me. “During one of their separations, it was his turn to watch Debbie. He was living somewhere else during the separation. Debbie was still a little girl so she was living at their house with her mother. He drove over to pick Debbie up and she ran toward him. Her mother called her back, and Debbie cried. She’s real sensitive, like you. After the divorce, his first wife wouldn’t talk to them if she found out they were in contact with him. Your dad told me all this. He said he eventually realized he was doing Debbie and her sisters more harm than good by staying. That’s why he left New York. It wasn’t as if he didn’t provide for them. He’d already paid for Carol and Arlene’s weddings. He’d soon pay for Debbie’s. When I met him, I remember he was going away for a weekend to paint Carol’s house. He tried the best he could. But after losing Jeanne, I think that was it for him. He blamed himself. The only reason he didn’t kill himself back then, he told me, was on account of his girls. He couldn’t do that to them, he said.”

  DAD

  A month after my breakup, I began dating someone new at college. Someone nice, “a gentleman,” my dad would have called him. He could recite portions of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. A painting by his mother hung in his dorm room. He cared about current events. He studied computer programming.

  “Programming has similarities to poetry,” he said. “The more condensed the language, the better.”

  He never pressed me to sleep with him.

  “We can take it slow,” he said.

  •

  Winter break. I was at a party with friends from high school. I remembered what my mom had said about my dad’s grief for Jeanne: “He drank to forget.”

  I drank to forget.

  Two friends carried me downstairs to a bed. They tucked me in, then returned to the party; one of the two stayed behind.

  “I’ve liked you for so long now,” he said.

  I felt my jeans coming off, my underwear coming off.

  “It’s just a dream,” he said as I tensed up. “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

  I felt his hand between my legs.

  “I’ve liked you for so long now,” he said again.

  I moved my mind elsewhere, and when I thought he was elsewhere I opened my eyes.

  He was standing with his pants and boxers around his ankles, looking down at me. He was no longer touching me, but I knew what he was doing.

  “It’s just a dream,” he repeated.

  I lay rigid, holding in tears.

  I closed my eyes and waited until I heard him finish and stumble away.

  I remembered my dad saying, “If only I were well enough,” as he clenched his cane.

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  I forgave my friend. I returned to college. I studied. Every night I called my mom. I avoided parties. I performed well on exams. I held on to my scholarships.

  I heard voices.

  I didn’t tell my new boyfriend. I wanted to hold on to him, too.

  I was in the middle of a history exam about the development of the modern American city when I heard my name repeated by angry voices.

  I stood, sat, stood.

  I was inside a big ringing bell.

  The other students were in a classroom, answering exam questions.

  I walked outside into the cold. The teaching assistant followed.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I paced, sat on the grass, stood, paced some more.

  “Fail me,” I said.

  “Let’s go see the professor,” she said gently.

  S
he walked me to his office, the same path I walked when searching for my mom and Sharon, and he offered me a seat.

  “I studied,” I assured him as his assistant left the room. “I’m sorry.”

  For the next hour my professor asked me about myself. I said I was from Ohio. He too was from Ohio. I said I was studying journalism, but that I also wanted to study poetry and fiction.

  “Which writers do you like?” he asked.

  I mentioned Henry James. I said that James captures in his letters and books the development of the modern American city.

  I described passages I had read from James’s notebooks about his travels. In The Bostonians, for example, James mentions Delmonico’s—one of the first restaurants in New York City.

  I remember standing and sitting and standing throughout our conversation. The office felt too small.

  “How about you write a paper for me,” he said, “and forget the exam. What do you say?”

  I thanked him, rushed to the library, and read what I could of James’s letters until a sentence about his dead father stopped me: “But he is already a memory, & every hour makes him more so—he is tremendously & unspeakably absent.”

  •

  The next day, a woman from the campus health center called. Would I please come in for a mental health evaluation?

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “Someone’s very concerned about you,” she said. “It’s important you come in.”

  At the health center, I filled out a questionnaire about my mood. Had I ever considered suicide, been sexually abused, cut myself, et cetera? Then I met with a psychiatrist.

  “Do you mind if I record our interview?” he asked.

  The tape recorder sat between us, his finger poised on the red “record” button.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  He pressed the button, and we began.

  “I see you left the question about sexual abuse blank,” he said. “Have you been sexually abused?”

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  “By your father?” he asked.

  “God no.”