The Glass Eye

by Jeannie Vanasco

  Afterward, I wandered through Manhattan with no destination in mind. I came upon St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and I remembered learning that Jeanne had received her medal in this St. Patrick’s.

  I rushed into the church, sat in a pew, and opened my journal.

  “Yes!” I wrote. “I’m in St. Patrick’s where Jeanne received her medal. Everything is coming together: the third-floor fire—a sign to step back from my dad’s life; Genie—a sign that a name is simply a name but that Jeanne is the focus of my story; ‘the Elephant Whisperer,’ like Jeanne, died on March 2—a reminder that grieving is a ritual.”

  •

  My therapist, psychiatrist, friends—they advised me to put aside any writing about Jeanne or my dad.

  “You don’t understand this need,” I told them. “It’s a way to spend time with him.”

  But when I again worsened—crying at the supermarket, the ATM, the sight of a girl with someone resembling a father—I practiced not writing.

  Not writing was worse.

  I hit myself. I screamed at nothing.

  Several months after my last visit I returned to the hospital, but this time, before admitting myself, I told my mom where I’d be.

  •

  I brought my “Mental Illness” binder with me to the hospital, and a young intern tried to take it away.

  “I need it for school,” I lied.

  I explained that I was finishing graduate school for poetry, and was in graduate school for memoir: “I should have been done with the poetry program before the memoir one, but there was an administrative error on the poetry side, if that makes sense. It’s too boring to explain.”

  She was in graduate school for psychology. Her thesis concerned the writing style and structure of patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

  “Do you think the illness triggers the poetry or the poetry triggers the illness?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever I have makes whatever I write hard to write.”

  “Do you mind if I write that down?” she asked.

  I told her she could.

  Together we paged through my binder. We discussed a list of questions I had written: “Did I hide my illness from my mom because of bravery or guilt? Do I have an illness or is it grief? Do I have bipolar I disorder or schizoaffective disorder or borderline personality disorder? How does my dad see me?”

  “Almost all of these are either/or questions,” she said.

  “How does my dad see me?” remains the crucial question.

  “How” is an essential word.

  Without “How,” the question becomes: “Does my dad see me?”

  •

  The next morning, I met with the same doctor as before.

  “I keep having these spasms,” I told him. “My boyfriend had to restrain me.”

  “Restrain you?”

  “I couldn’t stop hitting myself. That’s what he said. He writes down my behavior because I don’t always remember.”

  “What about your writing?” the doctor asked.

  “Are you still writing about your father?”

  “You told me to stop.”

  “Did you?”

  I told him that I’d cut caffeine completely, slept between eight and nine hours every night, worked out every morning. I showed him my schedule (“I even schedule when I read the newspaper—I wait until the late afternoon because the stories make me cry”).

  “I really am trying to get better,” I said.

  “Are you still writing about your father?” he asked again.

  “What counts as writing?”

  “Have you written the words ‘dad’ or ‘father’?”

  “What if I write about him but call him something else?”

  “What would you call him?”

  “He loved birds. He built dozens of birdhouses. I could call him ‘Landlord of the Birds.’”

  “Try not to write,” he said. “See what happens.”

  •

  I dreamt my mom and I were inside a gutted house. She said she wanted to show me something. She tore off the living room carpet, and I realized we were in the room where my dad died. Suddenly I had a shovel and was digging. I hit something hard.

  “Your poor father,” she said, and I woke up.

  My second night in the hospital, I dreamt my mom told me that my dad was still alive.

  “What?” I said.

  “Someone told me,” she said. “That man down there.”

  And then I recognized my wood floors, my living room walls. We were in my apartment.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling her toward a window. “Don’t trust that man.”

  I opened the window, but my mom was running away.

  “He’s a liar,” I yelled, and I woke up.

  The third night I dreamt my half sister Carol repeating, “I want nothing to do with you. I want nothing to do with you.”

  The fourth night I dreamt my dad was dying, and when I woke up I thought he was still dying.

  The fifth night I dreamt I was leading him through my neighborhood, but he kept wandering off. I finally found him on a bodega floor, babbling to no one.

  “Nightmares night after night,” I told my psychiatrist. “Is it the medication?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s grief.”

  •

  Excited and relieved, I called Chris.

  “My doctor here acknowledged my grief,” I said. “He said I’m grieving.”

  The doctor’s exact words: “You still have a severe form of bipolar disorder. It’s complicated by a severe form of grief.”

  “Did he ever think you were not grieving?” Chris asked.

  “None of my doctors ever focused on it. They really didn’t ask about my dad. It was always, ‘You have an illness.’”

  TWENTY

  I wish my doctors had acknowledged, did acknowledge, the illness as part of my grief, but they still maintain the grief is secondary. When I tell them that I hear voices or experience racing thoughts only when I remember that my dad isn’t coming back—no matter how many pages I write about him, he’s not coming back—the doctors remind me: “You have an illness.” But as I near the end of The Glass Eye, the illness looks like those distant ashen hills that Jeanne could have seen from her house in Newburgh. Had she lived long enough to lose our dad, would she have responded the way I did? Would she have blamed herself?

  MENTAL ILLNESS

  I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. My last day there, I reluctantly participated in another group therapy session. A new intern spoke to the patients slowly and loudly, as if we were deaf.

  “Okay, everyone,” she said. “Now please quiet down. We’re going to do an exercise together.”

  The patient next to me whispered, “She’ll get jaded soon.”

  The intern distributed a handout titled “Relationships Role Play” and read it aloud to us: “Consider a current relationship with someone close to you (spouse, friend, sibling, parent, child, etc.) with whom you are experiencing an obstacle. This may be a difference of opinion, difficulty communicating, or conflict over a particular subject. Choose a partner and describe the situation. Decide who will role play you and who will role play the person close to you. Then, role play a discussion where you address the issue in a calm way with the goal of reaching some understanding and/or resolution. Take turns with each partner’s role play. This should take about 10–15 minutes per partner.” She paired us off. I was assigned a patient my own age.

  Meanwhile, a patient on the other side of the room raised his hand.

  “The handout says that we can choose a partner,” the patient said. “But you chose our partners. Also, ‘role-play’ should be hyphenated.”

  The intern ignored him.

  My partner asked me to go first, so I briefly explained my situation.

  “I’ll be Arlene,” the patient said.

  “I’ll be me,” I said.

  I didn’t
want to be me.

  “I plan to write Arlene a letter,” I said, “give her my number, and then she can call me if she’s open to it. If I call her, it might be too intrusive. So let’s pretend we’re on the phone.”

  “Ring, ring,” the patient said.

  “Hello?”

  “Jeannie, this is Arlene.”

  “Thank you so much for calling. I was hoping you’d call,” I said.

  “Why do you want to talk to me?”

  “For a long time I’ve wanted to apologize for my name. I’ve often felt bad about it, that maybe my presence upset Carol and Debbie. You were understanding. You didn’t blame me, or seem to blame me.”

  “I didn’t blame you.”

  “There’s another reason I called,” I said. “I wanted to tell you this sooner. I started researching your sister Jeanne’s life.”

  “What?”

  “I visited your childhood home. I visited—”

  “Why? Why didn’t you tell me? You should’ve told me.”

  “I thought it’d upset you,” I said.

  “You should have told me,” she repeated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Chris appeared in the doorway. I was allowed to go.

  JEANNE

  I called my mom after being released from the hospital.

  “I might contact Arlene,” I told her.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” she said. “You do share a father. And she always loved you.”

  For two months I labored over what to say. Should I explain my silence? Should I apologize?

  And then on Father’s Day, I wrote a simple letter to Arlene that said I missed her.

  She called. Less than a week had passed since I mailed the letter. More than ten years had passed since we last spoke.

  “You have to visit,” she said. “Can you visit? You can’t imagine how happy I was to see your name on the envelope.”

  •

  Arlene lived less than an hour’s drive away. Chris and I borrowed a friend’s car, and he drove.

  “I don’t want to mention Jeanne,” I told him in the car, “but it’d be dishonest not to mention her. I don’t think I can tell Arlene the truth, that I’ve been researching her sister’s life.”

  “Just see where the conversation takes you,” he said.

  Arlene was standing in her driveway when we arrived. She wore a fitted black-and-white dress and sunglasses. Her hair was still thick and dark. Her husband, Clyde, stood next to her.

  She removed her sunglasses and hugged me.

  “It’s so wonderful to see you,” she said.

  I’d forgotten how much her eyes looked like our dad’s.

  We sat on their back porch overlooking a koi pond and talked. She reminisced about her visits to Ohio.

  “Do you remember what you had in your bedroom when you were a kid?” she asked.

  “A font of holy water?” I said.

  “That’s what I was thinking of,” she said, and we both laughed. “Do you remember what you wanted to be?”

  “A nun,” I said, embarrassed.

  “I think Chris is relieved you didn’t go that direction,” Clyde said.

  “I don’t think Dad was for that idea,” she said. “I think it’s for the best you didn’t pursue it.”

  She asked me questions about my life in general.

  “I write mostly,” I said.

  “What kind of writing?” Clyde asked.

  “Essays, book reviews. Poems, I guess. That’s what I studied in graduate school. But Chris is the poet. He’s extremely talented.”

  I didn’t say that I was writing a book for our dad.

  “I remember when you left for college,” Arlene said. “You were going to study journalism. Dad was so proud of you. You know, you’re the only one of us to go to college.”

  “Did you ever want to go?” I asked.

  “I did. I wanted to be a teacher. But I overheard Dad and my mom talking about money one evening when I was in high school, and I don’t know. I thought that college must cost too much. So the next day I pretended that I didn’t want to go.”

  “Do you still do journalism?” Clyde asked me.

  “Not really. I mostly review other people’s books,” I said.

  “Do you think you’ll ever write your own?” he asked.

  “You have more than enough material to write about,” Arlene said.

  This is your chance, I thought. Tell her.

  “So,” she said suddenly. “What’s your penance?”

  “Penance?” I said.

  I didn’t understand. I looked at Chris. He looked confused. Did she think I was punishing myself by visiting her? Did she know that I was researching her sister? I didn’t ask her to clarify.

  “For the longest time,” I said, “I’ve felt bad about my name.” I paused, thought: Don’t cry. “I didn’t learn about”—I didn’t know how to refer to Jeanne—“my name, that I was named after your sister, until I was in the second grade.” I could hear my voice shaking. “I’ve felt guilty ever since.”

  “It’s nothing you should feel guilty about,” Arlene said.

  “Not at all,” Clyde said.

  She stood and said, “There’s something I want to show you. Wait here.”

  “She’s getting the album,” Clyde said as she disappeared into the house. She returned with a photo album and handed it to me.

  “You have to understand,” she said, “our mother wanted nothing to do with us if we spoke to Dad. I couldn’t put you in the main family album because of my mom.”

  “So you got your own special album,” Clyde said.

  I opened it, and noticed that almost every photo was of me. There were a couple of photos of our dad, but I found myself fixated on a photo of my mom and me—taken when I was in kindergarten. She was on the kitchen phone while I was on the orange rotary phone in the living room. Our relationship had developed into mostly that, I realized: her in Ohio, me in New York. Always on the phone.

  At the end of the album were letters I’d sent Arlene and Clyde for various occasions, including Halloween. I wrote to them from a slumber party, reporting that I was learning how to write in “cursave.”

  Now I wanted to tell her that I was learning how to write about her sister.

  “Dad couldn’t talk about Jeanne,” I told Arlene. “He kept her church medal. I don’t know much about her.”

  Jeanne smiled a lot. She played with her sisters in their backyard. She received a medal from a church.

  “She smoked,” Arlene said. “She loved to smoke. She’d send me to the corner store to buy cigarettes. I wasn’t even a teenager yet. ‘Now here’s some money for you to pick out your ice cream,’ she’d say. She knew I loved chocolate ice cream.”

  And then, as Arlene started to talk about the car accident, her eyes searched the yard.

  “The ambulance carrying Jeanne passed by Carol. Carol was in her car. She was on her way to show her baby to Jeanne, and here Carol didn’t know—”

  Clyde stopped her.

  “Our mom blamed Dad,” she continued. “I blamed him. We all did.”

  “For giving Jeanne permission to go out?” I asked as evenly as I could.

  “Yes,” she said.

  We were both quiet for a moment.

  “I don’t know why Dad added the letter i to my name,” I said. “Maybe—”

  “Jeanne spelled her name with an i,” Arlene said, “same as you.”

  The newspaper article about the car accident spelled her name Jeanne.

  The yearbook spelled her name Jeanne.

  My mom had told me that my dad chose to add the letter i to my name.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  I looked down at the album open on my lap. There we were on the phone, my mom and me. The name no longer felt important.

  MOM

  A month after visiting Arlene, I boarded a train to Ohio—the same train that I rode the night before my dad died: 49 Lake
Shore Limited. I drifted in and out of remembering my promise: I needed to finish a book for him.

  My mom met me at the station in Sandusky.

  “You must be tired,” she said, hugging me. “Fifteen hours in that train. You should fly next time. It’s worth the extra money. You know I’ll pay.”

  On the short drive home, while she talked, I watched her hands on the steering wheel. The two wedding rings reminded me of how lucky I was. I was raised by parents who loved one another.

  Once home, though, I found almost no trace of him. I felt like I was in a stranger’s house—until I went upstairs. Framed photographs of him hung on her bedroom wall. There he was, in his work clothes at the hospital where he painted. There he was, in his pajamas with a cane—I wanted to throw it away. Why remember him like that?

  I fell asleep, and in the morning, my mom said she wanted to go for a drive.

  “Where?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I thought we could get out.”

  In the car, she asked about Chris and my friends in New York. I asked about her job at the library. We drove past cornfields and cows.

  “Do you think you and Chris will stay in New York?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’d like for us to live near you.”

  And then I felt my throat narrowing. My thoughts raced too fast to catch. She’d turned onto the road to the cemetery.

  “Do you want to visit Dad’s grave?” she asked.

  I looked out the window at a big empty field. I said nothing, could say nothing.

  She started to say something and I interrupted, “Why would you suggest the cemetery? Why would you suggest that?”

  “I just thought you might want to visit his grave. I thought that maybe you didn’t want to ask.”

  “You can’t just suggest something like that out of nowhere,” I said.

  I stared out the window, away from the cemetery, as we passed it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  No, I’m sorry, I didn’t say.

  I was being irrational, I didn’t say.

  I can’t acknowledge Dad’s gone, I didn’t say.

  She changed topics. I forget the topics.

  We pulled into the driveway.

  I went into the house while she fed some stray cats behind our garage. I decided to comb through photo albums and scrapbooks. I found handwritten letters from my dad that I hadn’t read in a long time. In one, addressed to me when I was a baby, he described the most wonderful trip in his lifetime as a trip to the hospital to watch me being born: “I shall never experience a more beautiful trip. So you see when someone tells me of going on a trip, I always feel they will never have one as good as mine.”