Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “Have fun,” my mother said.

  We trudged down the corridor. In each room lay two sad patients.

  The pizza parlor, two blocks away from the hospital, had tiled walls and a feral odor. There were no booths, only tables. It was too early for the supper crowd. Except for a few solitaries in Wind-breakers we were the only customers. We ordered our pizza and sat down to wait for it.

  Four girls burst in. We recognized them from the neighborhood. They must have traveled here by trolley and underground—from our spying we knew they didn’t get driven anywhere. Roller skates hung from their shoulders. Amaryllis’s were in a denim case.

  “Hello,” they said.

  “Hello,” we said.

  They swept to the counter to order their pizzas. We studied their various backs (erect, round-shouldered, slim, bisected by a braid) and their various stances (jumpy, slouching, queenly, hands in back pockets) and their noses as they turned their profiles this way and that, and their languor or purpose as they visited the jukebox or the ladies’ room, and their ease as they more or less assembled at their table, one always getting up for something, where are the napkins anyway, talking, laughing, heads together, heads apart, elbows gliding on the table. The girl with glasses—I was pretty sure her name was Jennifer, so many girls were Jennifers—sat in a way that was familiar to me, her right knee bent outward so that her right foot could rest on the chair, her left thigh keeping the foot in place like a brick weighing down a Christmas pudding. This position caused a deep, satisfying cramp; I knew that pain.

  “Wilma,” called the pizza man. Willy got up to get our pizza. The girls didn’t watch her. Willy brought the pizza to our table, and we divided it, along with our salad. “Nicole,” the pizza man said. The girl I’d thought of as Jennifer uncoiled and went to fetch the pizzas with Amaryllis. Nicole and Amaryllis set the big round pies carefully on the table. Then came an unseemly scramble. They laughed and grabbed and accused each other of greed, and somebody spilled a Coke. “Pig!” they cried. “Look who’s talking.” “Jen, you thief,” said the bespectacled Nicole, laughing as Amaryllis overturned one wedge of pizza onto another, making a sandwich of it, doubling her first portion. “Jen, you cow!”

  So Amaryllis was just another Jennifer. She raised her face. She was wearing a tomato-sauce mustache, beautifying. She looked directly at me. Then she looked directly at Willy. Four-Eyes—Nicole—raised her head, too, and followed Amaryllis’s gaze—Jen’s gaze. Then the third girl. Then the fourth.

  We were all over them in a minute. We swarmed, if two boyish eleven-year-olds can be said to swarm over a quartet of nubile adolescents. Eleven-year-olds? Yes, we had celebrated our birthday the month before. We were officially teenagers, my father had said from his bed in the front room (he was out of stir that weekend), handing us each a leather diary, one brown, one blue. Any number between eleven and nineteen, inclusive, belonged in the teens mathematically, my mother explained; we might call ourselves one-ten or one-teen if we liked. Many languages used that locution, Aunt Kate affirmed.

  We were one-ten; this interesting fact we told our new friends. We talked about pizza toppings. We discussed television programs we’d never seen. Boys in the neighborhood, too.

  “You know Kevin?” Nicole asked.

  “I know who he is,” I lied. “Wicked.” We knew that wicked meant “splendid.”

  Did we like Robert Redford? the Stones? Had we ever seen the gas-meter man?

  No one asked us what grade we were in.

  Did we skate?

  Skating was our passion, Willy said. We had practically been born on little steel wheels. Next to watching television and plucking our eyebrows …

  “We come to the rink on a lot of Saturdays,” said Amaryllis, who would never be Jen to me. She stood up, and her associates stood with her. “Maybe we’ll see you here sometime. Here.”

  Hear, hear: here. Any further commerce between us would be off-neighborhood. We got it: we were known in their homes, and not thought well of. Maybe their families had glimpsed the whorish dressing gowns of our mother and aunt. Perhaps they were prejudiced against men in turbans.

  The schoolgirls whirled out. Willy and I shuffled back to the hospital. My mother was waiting for us in the dim lobby. We three walked wordlessly to the car.

  IN THE LATE SPRING my father came home for the last time. He could no longer eat, unless you count tea. “I’d like to play a little,” he said to Kate.

  Whenever the quartet or the symphony performed he sat up on the stage, remote, as if the music lifted him away from us, as if his bow gliding back and forth drew him to some place we couldn’t reach. He was separated even from himself: the fingers on his left hand seemed to dance on their own. Once, though, he had fiddled almost in our midst, at the wedding of my mother’s youngest brother; standing, he played “The Anniversary Waltz” by request, borrowing an instrument from the hired trio. He was wearing his tuxedo on that occasion, and his red hair above the black-and-white garment gave him a hectic gaiety. My mother told us that “The Anniversary Waltz” was an old Russian tune, stolen and given words in order to fill a need in a movie musical.

  In our rented living room my father did not play “The Anniversary Waltz.” He played a few sweet things—some Mendelssohn and some Gluck—and Aunt Kate did well with the accompaniment; very well, really, since she was quietly sobbing. Then he played “Isn’t It Romantic?” and Kate recovered and pushed through with a nice solo bit, Oscar Peterson-ish. We knew the tune and the lyrics, and we could have hummed along or even sung along. But we sat mute on the sofa, flanking our mother. Outside, the streetlamps illuminated the cardboard facades of the other houses. The sky was purple. My father wore a striped hospital robe over custard pajamas. His eyes closed when he reached the final note. Silence. From the kitchen the Teletype began to clatter.

  “NO DEPENDENT CLAUSES,” said the principal back home, in August. “No Middle Ages.” She was muttering, but in a kindly fashion. She was trying to decide whether to enroll us in the fifth grade or simply to declare it skipped. “Tell me what you did learn.”

  Willy sat looking out of the office window at the playground. I sat looking at Willy. “What did you learn?” the principal gently repeated.

  We kept mum. So we had to repeat fifth grade, or endure it for the first time, who cared, same difference. Willy did master long division. I never figured out how to forget.

  HANGING FIRE

  NANCY AT CYNTHIA’S WEDDING had made a kind of hit. That is, one of Cynthia’s uncles had fallen in love with her.

  “My dear Miss … Hanks?”

  “Hasken.”

  “That’s what I said. Sweet girl graduate. Lovely green stalk. How old are you, Hanks—twenty?”

  “Twenty-one,” Nancy admitted. A pair of dancers hung above their table. Nancy shook her beaded bag over her plate. As her eyeglasses landed she grabbed for them. The dancers, revealed as Cynthia and her new husband, floated away.

  “Glasses, and that filmy green dress—you remind me of a studious naiad,” the uncle said. When his hand crept between goblets toward the girl’s elbow, his wife at last claimed him. “I am not an old fool,” he protested as he was led away.

  Thus the wedding. The next afternoon, Nancy, in dungarees and T-shirt, slumped against the window of a Greyhound. The bus was rumbling northward along a New Hampshire highway. Her duffel bag lay in the overhead rack. Nancy drew a compact from her back pocket and opened it. That uncle might be no fool, but he had a poor eye for similarities. She was not a nymph. What she did resemble, though, was a tutor—a tutor of German literature, say: the sort of fellow who used to hire out to young gentlemen hiking in the Dolomites. He’d quote Goethe while his charges frolicked with barmaids. Nancy had seen pictures of such scholars in biographies—limp hair just covering the ears, and long chins, and gold-rimmed glasses. The likeness was remarkable. She ran a comb through her bangs, and wondered where the Dolomites were.

  The trees along the highw
ay were taller now, and greener: Maine. Nancy shifted in her seat and took out her worry beads. When in doubt, tell your assets. A bachelor’s degree, cum laude; a boyfriend, Carl; a skill at certain languages; a good forehand. Yes, and she was an expert skier. She was discreet, too; for more than a year she had borne a hopeless passion for an itinerant tennis coach, and not a soul suspected. She’d do. Ahead waited her family, such as it remained—three kinswomen, couchant. She’d be fine.

  At six the bus pulled into the Jacobstown depot. Nancy de-barked, compact, comb, and beads in the back pocket, duffel bag over the shoulder. She walked quickly away from town. Sidewalks narrowed, then withered altogether. The road climbed a hill. At the top, a board on a pole marked the entrance to the Jacobstown Country Club. The girl sat down beneath the sign.

  A few days earlier at around this time her relatives, driving back from her commencement, would have reached this spot—weary ladies with champagne headaches. Nancy could imagine their approach. Aunt Laurette would have been at the wheel of the Jeep, her heavy lips folded like arms. Nancy’s mother would have been beside her, as thin as asparagus. Old Cousin Phoebe nodded in back. They chugged uphill, raising dust, awakening a vagabond on the grass … and, sitting up, Nancy saw that what had stopped today was a Renault, not the family Jeep. Two golden eyes glowed at her. “Miss Hasken?”

  “… yes.”

  “It’s Leopold Pappas,” he said, telling her what she could herself see, presenting her with a situation which she had herself invented, and many times: that on this hill, at this hour, he would appear, sweaty from the game just won, and invite her to ride with him, to leap, to soar … “Hey. Can I give you a lift?”

  “I’ll level with you. I walk on purpose.”

  “Oh. Good for the digestion.”

  “… I suppose.”

  “See you at the club this season?”

  She nodded.

  He rolled away.

  Blank-mindedness, for five or ten minutes. Then Nancy lumbered to her feet, hoisted the duffel bag, and tramped on. Soon she had reached her mother’s property. The pines and firs were dense. She left the road, walked along a path, and reached a clearing. Still under cover of trees, she gazed at her home.

  It was a low white house, silvery now in the summer evening. An ample porch encircled the first floor. Upstairs, dormers and turrets. The house was comfortable. Plays could be written here, or revolutions planned. At present, on the porch, three St. Petersburg countesses were enjoying high tea. Their posture seemed a shade too arrogant—one had to squint to be certain—yes, arrogant. Nancy sighed. She drew something from her pocket, raised it, took aim …

  “Is that you, Nancy?”

  “Yes, Mom.” She walked across the lawn and swung a leg over the porch rail. Cousin Phoebe leaned forward and tapped her knee.

  “What were you doing out there? Something silver flashed.”

  “Steel,” the girl corrected. “A steel comb.”

  “Oh. I imagined it a pistol.”

  Nancy handed her the comb and swung the other leg over.

  “Welcome,” said the nasal voice of Aunt Laurette.

  “Welcome,” Mrs. Hasken said, gently.

  “Welcome,” Phoebe said.

  They were drinking gin out of teacups. Mrs. Hasken was placid. Aunt Laurette grinned under her globe of orange hair. Phoebe was currying her skirt with Nancy’s comb. They were not aristocracy after all—only stand-ins.

  “Tut,” Phoebe said. “Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, my girl; it’s not so bad to have come home.”

  Nor was it. Often during the semester just past, Nancy had furiously contemplated her future, coming up always with a single agreeable vocation: governess. But these days, who required a governess? Genteel spinsters took up other trades now, Nancy figured. Veiled, they turned up in Washington as prostitutes or lobbyists. As for her friends, some were settling into New York apartments. Some were hitching west. One had gone to live on a houseboat. But such enterprises were out for Nan. She had her family to consider …

  They were at this moment considering her, regarding her coolly over their gin like the aunts they all more or less were, for Phoebe seemed closer than a cousin, Mrs. Hasken more remote than a parent. But whether aunts or ancestors, lineal or collateral, these dotty ladies were Nan’s by blood. In consanguinity lay their claim—consanguinity, and affection.

  She slipped from the rail and settled on the glider. Phoebe handed her a gin and mint. Her mother smiled. Laurette began to whistle.

  “Hello, Nancy,” said a housemaid at the window.

  “Hello, Inez.” Inez vanished.

  “Did you dance a lot at that wedding?” Mrs. Hasken asked.

  “Some, with Cynthia’s uncles.”

  “Men are creeperoos,” Laurette said. Each winter she flew to the Caribbean for two disappointing weeks. “Do I really resemble Simone Signoret?”

  “Like sisters,” Cousin Phoebe said.

  “How’s Carl?” Mrs. Hasken inquired.

  “Since yesterday,” Phoebe added.

  “… fine.”

  “You don’t love him.” Mrs. Hasken’s pale eyes were spoked and rimmed with black. She had been a widow for ten years.

  “No, I don’t,” Nancy said.

  “He loves you,” Phoebe remarked.

  “The way of the world,” Laurette said briskly. “Usually the shoe’s on the other foot. Anyway, what’s love? Duping, derangement. I like Carl.”

  “I say, take him,” said Phoebe. “Or else, don’t.”

  “Maxima Gluck is dead,” said Mrs. Hasken.

  “The old schoolteacher? Too bad.”

  “Also Mr. Sargent.” Mrs. Hasken fastened her gaze on an inch of wicker. Cousin Phoebe massaged a veiny calf. Aunt Laurette calculated the price of the scenery.

  Phoebe said, “We are thinking of adopting a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Any particular one?”

  “No. We might settle for a second TV.”

  “Your mother has taken up weaving,” Laurette said.

  Mrs. Hasken said, “We are otherwise unchanged.”

  “Since yesterday,” Laurette said.

  The porch glider hadn’t much in the way of springs, and her partner the duffel bag was dead to the world, but Nancy tried to pump anyway. Glider scraped floorboard, halted. “I’ll unpack,” Nancy murmured, and fled.

  Upstairs in her room, clothes flew around; finally a framed Carl emerged from a sweater. His face was as thin as hers. He was bespectacled also, and they had the same julienne hair. At college other students had often mistaken them for relatives—brothers, Nancy supposed. She left him on the desk and walked out onto a small wooden balcony. There she adopted a rentier’s stance—arms spread, hands on the rail. She would track down an interesting job, she vowed. She would study Hesse and Mann. She would refuse to make a nightly fourth at bridge, and to pay calls on local drips. This austerity would clear her decks for action. Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist? Presently she heard her mother calling her for dinner. She ran inside and pulled off her clothes and put on a long black skirt and a blouse with conical sleeves, wearing which she felt like a schoolmaster, in drag. Piously she ate her meal. The evening passed.

  Thus Nancy’s first day home. The next few were inconclusive, but by the end of the second week she had wedded herself to the porch glider. In its embrace she was studying Laurette’s collection of detective novels. She slept late each morning, and whenever she awoke found breakfast waiting, prepared by a joyous Inez. Inez had a lover, Nancy’s mother reported from the far side of the table. Nancy inspected the ads. In town, Laurette, who managed a dress shop, was pushing her summer merchandise. Cousin Phoebe, under a tree, worked on her memoirs.

  Dinners began with cocktails on the porch, ended with beer in the living room.

  “Are you planning to get a job?” Mrs. Hasken occasionally inquired.

  “Yes.”

  “O
f course she is,” Phoebe said.

  “Soon,” Laurette promised. “Let’s go to the movies.”

  Every third evening the Jeep bounced into town. Laurette at its wheel. On the way home it was Nancy who drove, slowly probing a leafy darkness. In the front seat she and Laurette were as silent as lovers. The other two drowsed in back.

  She felt pampered: an adored young nephew. She observed no routine except to turn up three afternoons a week for her tennis lesson. On the court she was all energy …

  “No slashing!” Leo shouted. “The racket is not a saber.”

  A July Monday, a turquoise sky. Nancy, at net, frowned. Leo lobbed a high one. Nancy held her racket stiff above her head, like a protest sign. The ball struck its face and ran down its neck. Leo joined her at net. During the winter a mild paunch had developed above his belt. His right knee bore a familiar scar.

  “Not bad. Work on the angle,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “See you Wednesday.”

  That night at dinner, Phoebe said, “I hear he’s loose.”

  “What do you mean, loose?” Laurette snapped. “Débauché or incontinent?”

  “Unbuttoned,” Phoebe answered. “Last year he kept to himself. This year he’s been seen with every bit of fluff in town. Are you aware that he used to teach Art History? And then loafed in Europe for several years? And is at last attending medical school? He’s thirty.”

  “Thirty-one,” Nancy said. “He’s relaxed, is all.”

  “His eyes are like lozenges,” panted Laurette.

  Nancy began to arrive early for her lessons. Her costume didn’t change, though—baggy seersucker shorts and a T-shirt. Brown hook-on lenses covered her everyday specs. She carried the news-paper. It became their custom to take a break halfway through the session, sitting side by side on a whitened bench. Leo, who’d grown fond of certain localities during his six months abroad, talked about his favorites. At a certain London hotel, where the tapestries are faded and the linen a wreck, you can feel heir to all that is gentle. Courtyards in Delphi are chalk by day, flame and cinnamon in the twilight. One hesitates to visit the Palais-Royal, yet behind that cold colonnade can be found an ice-cream parlor and a Romanian upholsterer.