Tucked in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, Oneonta is a two-hour drive from Newburgh and covers less than five miles. Route 17 never touches it.
“Girl from Unhappy Home Cold Killer at 16” also ran on the front page that day. Betty Joy Ebert, a Chicago runaway, murdered a truck driver in East Greenbush, New York, an hour-and-a-half drive from Oneonta.
Jeanne lost her life. Betty took a life. The editor made a conscious decision to stack the two stories. God works in mysterious ways. Was that what readers thought when they opened the Oneonta Star?
•
“Let’s have a wall of family photos,” I told Chris.
Together we framed photographs of our families, and I noticed that I had far more photos of my dad than of my mom. And then I found a photograph of Arlene, my dad, and me from when I was four years old. A white patch is taped over his left eye. He’s smiling, standing behind Arlene and me at the kitchen table. Arlene holds me on her lap. Her thick dark wavy hair falls below her shoulders and blends in with mine. We all have the same olive skin. She looks like my sister. She called me her sister. I was never her “half sister.”
“Isn’t she beautiful?” I said to Chris, handing him the photo. “Carol and Debbie were beautiful. Jeanne was beautiful.”
Then my phone rang.
“It’s Bette,” I told Chris. A few months had passed since I last spoke with her. “Isn’t that strange? I was just talking about Jeanne.”
Bette said that my dad’s first wife had died.
“Have you contacted your half sisters yet?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I will. But I should wait, what with their mother’s death. They were very close to her.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
“I think you should stop,” Chris told me. “This research is clearly upsetting you.”
I tried following his advice.
When Bette e-mailed, I delayed replying. When I finally replied, I made excuses for my delays.
But Bette continued reaching out. How could she know about my unpredictable mania—and the depression that snuck into mania?
I doubted I could hold a job after graduating from the poetry program. But I needed some way to pay rent, and my freelance work felt increasingly hard to piece together.
So I applied to another graduate writing program, this one in memoir, at another university in Manhattan. If I tried to write a memoir, then I’d have to continue my research.
I could lean on student loans if I needed. I could find health insurance through the university. Then I could have two more years to figure out the correct combination of medications. I’d read somewhere that it takes between five and seven years, on average, for someone with severe bipolar disorder to find the right combination. I just needed more time.
The program accepted me, and it was funded. Now I had an excuse to continue with my research. Maybe I’d finally finish the book I promised my dad.
DAD
I stepped back from Jeanne. The book, I decided, would be about my dad’s life—and I wanted to start writing it before my memoir classes started.
He was born in a wood-frame clapboard house when electric and horse-drawn trolley cars still ran through his hometown, a city on the west bend of the Hudson River.
His first language was Italian.
His birth certificate lists him as Giovanni Battista Vanasco, but the 1925 census lists him as Terry Jr. Vanasco. He was three years old.
I tried to find his army records, but in 1973 they were destroyed in a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.
JEANNE
Bette reached out again, put me in touch with one of Jeanne’s high school friends, a woman named Larraine. In an e-mail, Larraine wrote of Jeanne: “She was tall, slim, pretty with long dark hair and dark eyes. She was liked by everyone and had a great smile.” I didn’t reply.
Bette updated Jeanne’s entry on the Newburgh high school’s memorial page. It no longer said that Jeanne had died in a car with two boys. I thanked Bette.
Soon spring spilled into summer.
I helped manage a citizen journalism project based in Sudan. I worked remotely from my apartment, editing news reports of genocide.
I taught high school students in the Bronx.
Summer spilled into fall. I threw myself into more research about my dad.
I tried to adopt an eyeless dog.
DAD
I was in my neighborhood, in McCarren Park, writing in my notebook, when Chris showed up. He was wearing the same blue plaid shirt he’d worn the day before. I sniffed him, then he sniffed himself and shrugged, shook his head as if to say, I don’t smell. I closed my notebook, slipped it into my bag.
“It’s pet adoption day,” he said and pointed to the other side of the park.
Somehow I hadn’t noticed the tents or heard the music.
“I think Flannery and Bishop might like a small dog,” I told him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was just thinking we’d look.”
As we approached a circle of tents, one of which included a DJ, I mentioned that I was thinking about visiting Newburgh. Before he could tell me it was a bad idea, I said: “What jerk hires a DJ to play at pet adoption day?”
In a tent next to the DJ’s tent, a small white dog was pacing underneath a table.
“Why would they play loud music with all these dogs?” I continued. “Look at that poor white one.”
I grabbed Chris’s hand and pulled him toward the dog.
“Are its eyes sutured shut?” he asked.
I hadn’t realized. I ran over, leaving Chris, and learned from a man whose name tag read “Volunteer Joe” that a jogger had found the dog in a park in Queens, her fur matted and her eyes badly infected. She was about seven years old.
“The vet thinks animals attacked her,” Volunteer Joe said. “That’s why her eyes had to be removed.”
I knelt and petted her, she nuzzled my hand, and I asked for an application to adopt. Chris was distracted at some other tent.
“Our cat Flannery lost a leg,” I told Volunteer Joe while I hurriedly filled out the application. “Before I adopted her, I mean; I didn’t do it. And our other cat, Bishop, had an injured hind paw when I adopted her. So the eyes, or no eyes, are not a big deal.”
I was writing on the form why I wanted Milly (her name would be Milly, I decided, after the blind poet John Milton) when I heard Chris say, “There’s a Victoria’s Secret model here.”
I nodded and continued writing.
“Not like I care,” Chris said. “It’s funny is all. What are you doing?”
“I’m just filling out an application,” I said. “I’m not going to adopt her or anything.”
“Adopt who?”
“Milly,” I said.
“The eyeless dog?”
“Just putting my name in, you know?”
A week later, a woman visited our apartment to interview Chris and me about our relationship.
“What I need to know,” she said, “is can you provide a stable home for this dog?”
•
While I planned my trip to Newburgh, Chris researched how we could arrange the apartment to meet Milly’s needs. He was pricing playpens online.
“I guess I could bring her to work with me,” he said, “on days you can’t be with her.”
“I’m just worried about Flannery and Bishop,” I said. “Will they adjust? I don’t think they’d hurt her.”
“Maybe they’ll empathize,” he offered. “We’ll be a home for disabled animals.”
Flannery scratched at her head with her phantom leg. I shined a laser on the wall and Bishop chased the small circle of light.
“By the way,” I began, “I’ve decided to visit Newburgh.”
JEANNE
I entered the graduate program in memoir just as I was finishing the graduate program in poetry. If acquaintances—even some friends—asked why I was doing another writing program, I told them that I was
writing a book of creative nonfiction. I changed subjects before the next presumed question: About what? I was still in my twenties. I didn’t want to be told that I was too young to write a memoir. I didn’t want to be told that there were enough grief memoirs being published. I didn’t feel like defending my decision to write about my dad. I also didn’t want to mention mental illness.
But to my memoir professor and eleven classmates, I could say I was writing a memoir.
The first day of class, we sat around a large table on the twelfth floor. One of the walls was a window. Outside, skyscrapers and clouds.
“My memoir is called The Glass Eye,” I said. “It’s about my father. I use his loss of his left eye as a metaphor for my grief. He died when I was eighteen. The book is also about his loss of his daughter Jeanne, my half sister. She died in a car accident when she was sixteen. He named me after her, except he added the letter i to my name. Mental illness sort of figures into it.”
I explained the sonic thesis that held the story together: eye + i = I.
Meanwhile, I thought: What did the skyline look like when my dad lived in New York, he never wanted me in New York, would he like where I live, would he approve of my memoir?
After class, my professor told me that my memoir was not about my dad or mental illness.
“This is about your experience of having a dead half sister,” she said. “The eye stuff, save that for another book.”
She recommended I let go of the sonic thesis.
“What if I don’t present it as a mathematical equation?” I asked.
“Focus on your half sister,” she said.
•
“What would I even write about my dead half sister?” I asked Chris.
He was sitting on the couch, against our wall of family photos in mismatched frames. Joseph Brodsky’s Collected Poems in English was open on his lap.
“Maybe,” Chris said, “you could include—but not focus on—your half sister?”
“I was already planning on that, but my professor wants it to be all about my half sister.”
Chris recently had won a major national poetry award, and I felt embarrassed by even attempting to write. If he heard me tell anyone that he was the better writer, he’d say I was wrong. In addition to embarrassment, I felt guilty. His development job at a music nonprofit consumed his life. I had more time to work on a book.
“Those photos on the wall,” I said. “I just noticed: I appear either with my mom or with my dad, but none of them show the three of us together. That could be metaphorical.”
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“Or simply logistical,” I continued. “There were only the three of us together usually. So who else was going to take the photo?”
Bishop jumped on the couch. Flannery crawled onto my lap.
“I hope we get approved to adopt Milly,” I told Chris.
“We will. Now let’s go to sleep.”
“I might stay up and write,” I told him.
“You should sleep. You know what happens when you don’t sleep.”
•
I called the cemetery’s main office and was told where Jeanne was buried: section M, plot 369.
“She’s double-deep,” the cemetery worker said.
“Double-deep?”
“Her mother is buried on top of her. They share the same plot.”
“What about the plot next to it?” I asked. “My father had bought it for himself.”
“Your father bought it so it belongs to him.”
“If he’s dead,” I began.
I explained that he’d lost the plot in his divorce, but then his ex-wife offered it back to him. I said that he chose to be buried in Ohio.
“It’s listed here as belonging to him,” the cemetery worker said. “Did he leave it to anyone in his will?”
“Not specifically,” I said. “He wanted everything of his to go to me.”
“Then it belongs to you.”
“Even if he didn’t specify? I doubt he ever thought I’d look into his empty cemetery plot.”
“It’s yours.”
SIXTEEN
For three hours now I’ve revised the same page.
I hate the sudden shifts of mood that happen throughout the day. How do I articulate but not experience them? Lately it’s been hard to write without crying.
Maybe I should move my memories and research into one binder, the “Dad” binder. “Mom,” “Jeanne,” and “Mental Illness” could fit within it—separated by dividers.
But I don’t want to give up the “Mom” binder.
I could keep the binders as they are, and within each binder could be the other binder categories. So within “Mom” would be “Dad,” “Jeanne,” and “Mental Illness.” But then I worry about duplicate passages—because so much overlaps.
What’s my hindsight perspective?
Is this my narrative present?
If I could organize my thoughts, I could organize my writing.
I should stop today and start again tomorrow.
DAD
In my pages, my dad didn’t seem human, some of my classmates told me. He lacked flaws.
“Don’t you resent him for naming you after his dead daughter?”
“What about him being so old when he had you?”
“Do you think it was irresponsible?”
“But he knew he wouldn’t survive much past your adolescence. How could he? He was so old.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
Chris booked a flight to Indiana to see his parents.
Before a cab picked him up for the airport, we hugged and kissed as if he were leaving for war.
“Let me know as soon as you get there,” I told him.
Shortly after his plane landed in Indiana, meteorologists predicted a deadly hurricane on the East Coast. They named it Sandy. Chris called from his parents’ house and launched into exhaustive hurricane safety tips. Apparently our street divided two different zones. Our side could experience flooding, but it seemed unlikely. Chris said he had e-mailed me the details, something about the zones being numbers, letters, or colors.
“You’ll only be gone for two weeks,” I reminded him.
“Had I known—”
“It’s good you’re visiting your parents. I’ll be fine. I’ll write and play with the cats.”
Of course I couldn’t write the entire time, nor—as tempting as it sounded—only play with the cats. So I meandered around the neighborhood, brainstorming my options. My mom had called three times already. I definitely should call her back. But first I needed to make a plan. I could paint the walls. I’d be stuck in the apartment anyway. I was thinking a soft green accent wall for the kitchen—maybe around the two big windows overlooking the landlord’s garden. I stopped by the local hardware store for paint, then, on my way home, visited the kitchen store, where cookie cutters of the non-boring, non-holiday variety—dinosaurs, giraffes, dogs—were half off. I was never someone who particularly enjoyed baking, but maybe I’d start. Or I could hang the cookie cutters from nails on the new accent wall. I ended up spending fifty dollars, but really I was buying more than cookie cutters. I was buying décor.
My mom called again and I answered.
“Are you inside?” she asked. “Do you have enough groceries?”
“I’m running errands,” I told her. “I’ll get groceries and then I’ll be home very soon. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Call me as soon as you get home. Please.”
After we hung up, I walked toward my apartment and thought about Sandy. Couldn’t the meteorologists have chosen a more menacing name? Monosyllabic, perhaps? Anything from Norse or Greek mythology would be cliché. But it couldn’t be something too contemporary either. I didn’t want to know someone whose name also linked to a natural disaster. I wondered if anyone had written about the gendered naming of storms. I wondered if someone named Sandy had broken a meteorologist’s heart. I wondered what Chris would have named the h
urricane.
I stopped underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, set down the paint and bags of cookie cutters, and called him.
“What’s that noise?” he asked. “Where are you?”
I was under the BQE, in some small, relatively empty parking lot where the only vehicle was a rusted van with no wheels. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I said: “I’m on our street.”
“What’s going on there?” he asked. “Are those sirens? You should be inside.”
“Aw,” I told him, “I can see Flannery in our window. Hi, Flannery.”
Then I told him all my ideas for the apartment.
“Please don’t paint anywhere near windows during the hurricane,” he said. “Stay out of the kitchen as much as you can. Go to the living room, where we don’t have windows.”
“I’m not stupid,” I said, while mentally revising my plan. “All of this is for after the hurricane.”
“I really am sorry I can’t be with you,” he said. “I love you.”
“I love you too. I’ll be fine. I should go. I should get inside the apartment.”
But first I went to the local office supply store and bought binders and dividers and notebooks and sticky tabs and pens in various colors. If I experienced trouble writing, I’d organize my writing. I’d color-code scenes involving the different characters. I’d color-code repeating imagery and symbols. I’d give each character his or her own binder and within the binder I’d organize . . . I wasn’t sure yet. I’d figure that out.
Soon I was back under the BQE, this time with two bags of office supplies slung over one shoulder, and the paint and bags of cookie cutters at my feet. I considered hailing a cab. A red car slowed alongside me. The driver rolled down his window, asked, “Are you okay carrying all that?”
“Yep,” I said.
“You sure? A storm’s coming.”
“I’m almost home.”
The Glass Eye Page 12
