The first day I stopped wearing my glasses Mom stopped looking at me. Maybe it was because the sight of my clouded-over pupils made her wince. But Mom knew my glasses were useless now. I was going blind, and had been for years.
I stuck to a routine where I pretended nothing was different. Mom pretended I didn’t have glaucoma and I pretended she had no idea I was sleeping with the girl she made sandwiches for. Dee picked me up for ball hockey as she usually did on Friday nights throughout the spring and summer. Music thumped from her car as she turned the corner. I hollered a good-bye to Mom who hollered back, “Where are you going?”
“Hockey, remember?”
“Lia, hang on!” Mom rushed through the kitchen. The breadboard clunked against the counter, the fridge door sucked shut, wax paper crinkled.
“You don’t have to feed Dee every week,” I said, as Mom put two sandwiches in my hands.
“She gives you a ride. You can give her a sandwich.”
Dee’s car vibrated in the driveway. She held her hand out in expectation as I opened the door. “Your mom is awesome,” she said. “She doesn’t get tired of making me sandwiches, eh?” The inside of Dee’s car smelled like arugula, spicy and florid.
“Is that why you pick me up every week?” I said.
“I’m hooked. What is this? Are these pumpkin seeds in the bread?”
The Frank Cavella Recreation Complex (a.k.a the Cave) was a short drive from my house. We took the back way in behind the Winners' Plaza, where the houses on Wanda Street were neat and boxy, with short slanting roofs, wrought-iron porch railings, no kids, and especially no toys strewn across the lawns. In my neighborhood, wagons were parked on driveways, Tonka trucks were lined up in yellow convoys across verandas, and tennis balls were lost against curbs. Summertime was bike chains whizzing and sprinkler spray and mothers yelling out of windows.
My neighborhood hadn’t matured the same way Wanda Street had. Grown people didn’t leave home but instead stayed and raised their kids there, too. Additions were built over garages and basements doubled as apartments. It wasn’t at all uncommon for unmarried, adult children, like me, never to move out, which was why it was weird that one of the houses on Wanda Street had a Mickey Mouse statue at the end of its driveway, somehow exempt from the Neighborhood Association of West Aetna’s aesthetics policy, and whenever Dee and I drove by it I chuckled like Mickey.
“Why not? You guys have the same ears,” Dee’d said the first time.
“Hey, you didn’t do it,” Dee said today.
“Didn’t do what?”
“Your Mickey. We just passed him.”
I shoved the last bite of sandwich in my mouth. I didn’t see Mickey, faded to nearly white after years of being perched in the sun.
I followed Dee from the car into the rink and then into the dressing room. She looked like a traffic pylon in her orange sweatshirt and black cap. I pulled my equipment on, breathing through my mouth so not to smell the crescendo of sour that leapt from everyone’s equipment.
My first half was abysmal. Passes skipped by me. I fanned on a shot. At the start of the second half I tripped over someone’s stick, skinning my knees. I pulled my gloves off and touched my right knee, skin peeled back like wood shavings. I stalked to the bench, yanked my helmet off, and flung it against the wall, cracking right where the cage screwed in above my brow. I spent the remainder of the game resting my broken helmet in my lap, wrapping and unwrapping the chin strap around my finger.
The thing about sports is that you can act like a complete maniac and forgiveness is applied instantly. The rink is immune to violence and tantrums in a fucked up, practically sacred way. You can pitch a fit on the bench and within minutes it’s forgotten. You can punch someone in the head and no one holds it against you. It’s like a black, smoky force field cloaks the exterior of the rink and hems the angry, bitter things inside.
* * *
My younger sister Antonia and her husband Stef would come over to Mom and Dad’s on Sunday nights. After dinner and dishes, but before dessert, we would sit at the kitchen table while the coffee brewed, the smell nudging us awake from our carb coma. I would carry the table cloth out to the veranda and give it three good shakes. On breezy days I used to watch the crumbs get taken by the wind, but they disappeared just like when you stand up too fast and those flecks of light shoot around your eyes. If the air was still, I would sweep the crumbs into a nest made mostly of Nero’s black cat fur.
I would give the table cloth back to Mom, who’d throw it back over the table and serve dessert. It was only after we’d had coffee and a shot of grappa that Antonia would take out her tweezers and pluck Mom’s eyebrows, then mine. This tradition started by accident one night, when Antonia complained my eyebrows were starting to get bushy. And she was doing eyebrows now, professionally, and how could I go around looking like that.
Usually Anto’d pluck a couple of Mom’s first and Mom would close her eyes in a way that made me think she was praying through the whole thing. She never flinched, though, or yelped. Dad would also close his eyes and laugh.
“Even for an Italian girl you’re hairy,” Anto said to me each time. I would wince, holding my glasses in my fist as the metal tip of her tweezer grazed my brow right before she tugged.
This was the first Sunday I didn’t have my glasses on. I had nothing to squeeze in my fist as Anto played Sunday night esthestician/sadist. She plucked, and I sucked my teeth. On the third pluck I found my hand gripping hers. “Oh, come on,” she said.
“You’re evil,” I said.
“Well, you’re an animal with hair like this,” she said.
“She’s also being a testa dura,” Mom said from across the table. “Not wearing her glasses.” Anto plucked again before I could snark back at Mom.
“Oww, Jesus!” I said.
“Watch your mouth! Antonia, tell your sister. How stupid for her, not to wear her glasses!” Mom said.
This again. All week I’d heard it from Mom. And all week I thought about how I’d rather be going deaf. “They don’t do anything,” I said.
“Then get new ones,” Mom said. I heard the chuffy sounds of Kleenex being yanked from the box.
“Oops. Made you bleed,” Anto laughed, pressing a napkin against my brow.
“Get new ones?” I said.
“Yes, Aurelia! Get new ones!” Mom said.
“Easy,” Anto said, glancing down to look in my eyes. I blinked back at her, my brows on fire. “'Lia looks cuter without them, anyway.”
“Cuter?!” Mom said, slamming the cupboards shut now. She exploded into dialect that cut at my ears and began sobbing. She continued sobbing and wiped the clean end of her dish towel against her cheeks then dried the dishes, every so often letting out a yowl that meant she wasn’t even close to being done.
Anto and Stef left soon after. I walked them to the door, clutching the table cloth for another shake before I went to bed.
“Is that really it?” Anto said. “With your eyes, I mean.”
“Getting close,” I said. She ran her thumb against the sweep of my brow, just to make sure the remaining eyebrows stayed put.
I shook the table cloth out into the wind, a wind that pulsed the night air and sent crumbs flying back into my face.
* * *
Sometimes when I woke up I didn’t open my eyes right away. I used to think it was because I was trying to hang onto a few more minutes of sleep, or a dream that I didn’t want to come away from yet, but that wasn’t really it. I was afraid to open my eyes and realize that everything was darker than it was the day before.
I kept my blinds opened at night so in the morning I would never wonder whether or not there was really light entering my room. I obsessed over what time I woke up and spent weeks memorizing where the sun fell through my window on my quilt until I could tell without looking at my clock, until the seasons shifted and I would have to remember the paths of the sun again.
I got up the next morning (8 a.m., according to my quilt) and trod to the bathroom. I drank water straight from the tap while Nero swatted at the drawstrings on my pajama bottoms. My phone made non-stop bird chirps in my pocket, the notification sound Dee had set up so I would know it was her texting me. I called without looking at any of her messages.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Didn’t you read my texts?”
“Nope.”
She huffed. “Okay. Want to go watch the co-ed tournament at the Cave with me later?”
“Um. Maybe.”
“Oh, maybe? What do you have better to do? I’ll come by around four to pick you up.”
My hanging-up was a juicy invite for Nero to swipe at my hand. “Cazzo!” I yelled, my thumb searing. I threw my phone at him, the black fur-flash that bolted down the hall.
I waited on the porch for Dee after spending the rest of the day dusting and washing the baseboards and wainscoting, tracing the length of every wall in the house. Dee pulled up and turned her music down. “What the eff happened to your hand?” she said.
“Nero,” I said.
“Punk-ass Nero,” she said. “You’re a hot mess lately. First your knees, now all these scratches. He did a number…actually this scratch does look like a number. Eleven. Maybe you should wear that on your jersey instead of double zero.”
Dee drove towards the Cave, stopping with a jerk on Wanda Street and slapping me on the leg. “Li, Li, look!”
“What?!”
“The Mickey statue! They’re throwing it out!” Dee pulled over and got out of the car, grunting as she lifted the statue out of the garbage can before trying to jam it in the back seat of her two-door. “Holy crap, this thing is heavier than it looks. Come here and help me.”
I lifted Mickey’s feet while Dee held him by the ears. He was probably about three and a half feet tall, and covered with dirt-dust from having stood so close to the road for so long. We sat him in the backseat behind me and fastened his seatbelt.
“What are you going to do with it?” I said.
“Let’s go to my place instead and paint Mickey. I can’t believe they were going to throw him out. He’s, like, the only interesting thing in this whole neighborhood.”
“You want me to paint?”
“Why not?”
“I’m shit at that stuff.”
“Please, how hard can it be? I’ll order pizza.”
She didn’t have any paint at home, so after stopping at the dollar store and the beer store for all things necessary to paint a stolen garbage statue, I hoisted Mickey onto my shoulder and carried him through the threshold of Dee’s front door.
She painted while I sat at her kitchen table listening to the baseball game on the radio, sitting with him between her legs, smoking and painting and intermittently wiping her hands on her apron.
“Here, you have a turn,” she said.
“I’m good.”
“This statue is a big deal. It’s the most famous piece of crap in Aetna. Once day you will look back and think, oh, I wish I had taken part in restoring him to his youthful...never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I shouldn’t push you. I read it in the brochure When Someone You Love is Going Blind.”
“Shut up,” I laughed. “I can still see some stuff.”
“Like my underwear lines?”
“Like anything that’s not in my black spots, for now.” I’ve heard other people compare their vision loss to looking through a slush-covered windshield. Or that they were looking at a puzzle with half its pieces missing. I thought it was like looking up at the sky through a fully-leaved tree: I could hear the birds and feel the wind, but the sun that was definitely there, I could not see.
* * *
Dee’s fridge was stocked full of juice. I stood with the door open and let the air assuage my hot skin, peering in at the jugs and cartons of what were likely orange or pineapple. I pulled the smaller carton out and held the label right up to my face before taking a sniff and drinking it straight from the carton. Pineapple.
It was midnight, and I was hungry and thirsty and restless. Fresh sweat dampened the space between my navel and waistband and soaked the hairs on the back of my neck. I felt more fragrant now, too, my hair and skin rich with Dee’s melon-scented shampoo and coconut body butter.
“Want some leftovers?” Dee asked behind me, wrapping her arms around my neck. The oversized T-shirt she wore to bed swept against the backs of my calves, the shirt that threatened to disintegrate from sheer exposure to oxygen, light, and warm temperature. At some point in its lifetime it read “Toronto Maple Leafs Norris Division Champions 1993” before the lettering had washed away. The T-shirt meant she had no intention of driving me home yet.
“Sure.”
Outside, June bugs whapped against the porch light. “God, they’re so funny!” Dee said as the microwave beeped.
“They’re funny, like stupid, funny. They actually can see where they’re going,” I said.
“Really? Tell me whose job it is to know something like that. Is there someone out there with a career as a June bug optometrist? Imagine being that kid’s guidance counselor?” She slid a plate of leftover lasagne in front of me and poured a glass of orange juice. “You can take pasta for lunch tomorrow if you want. Tomorrow night we’ll go find a dress for you to wear to your cousin’s wedding.”
“His wedding’s in three months,” I said. “The invitation hasn’t even arrived.”
“So, you know you need a dress anyway. I love finding you stuff to wear.” She wiped a spot of sauce off my cheek with her thumb. “Plus, I want to try that new chicken wing place Em told us about with the pool tables and the big screens.”
I twirled a strand of mozzarella around my fork and nodded.
“I booked my appointment to get a new tattoo on the inside of my wrist, like the sun on briscola cards. I showed you the picture already, right?” Dee said.
She had. I’d given it a good look so when it was actually tattooed on her person I would remember that it was there and what it looked like and that one day she had asked me what I thought and I told her “It’s nice.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You should get one, too, like on your arm or your ankle. Oh, Li, please, you have to get one. It would look so cool.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, get Mickey Mouse. Or Minnie. Oh my God, get two Minnies making out!” Dee said, reaching across to play-slap me while she laughed. The pasta burned my mouth. What a weird thing to eat when I was already so hot. Dee continued to laugh and I chewed and kept my eyes on her, on the way her laugh punched the air around us, on the smell of juice and the bugs outside who just wanted light.
“What are you thinking about?” Dee said.
“Nothing.”
“Are you thinking about what an amazing girlfriend I am?” She sat down next to me and rested her head against my shoulder, sighing into the hollow space between my collarbone and throat. Her breath was hot and toothpaste-minty and made me put my fork down. “Come back to bed with me.”
“Dee. I have to go home.”
“No, you don’t have to. You don’t have kids waiting up for you or a dog that needs to be let out or anything. Just stay here.”
I picked the fork back up and blew on my forkful of night lasagne while she played with my ponytail, inching my hair tie out until my hair fell against my shoulders. She disliked that I wore my hair up all the time. But I didn’t like the way it fell into my eyes when it was down, or covered my ears.
“I don’t feel like driving you home.”
“Okay, I can walk.”
“Please, I can’t let you walk home in the dark, Lia. I can’t even let you walk home when it’s light out. I’d worry you walked into an open manhole or something.”
I moved my fork around the plate to feel for more lasagne. Empty. “I’ll be fine.”
Dee sat up, the chair scraping against the pocked vinyl flooring that was coming up at the corners. I waited by the front door for her to put pants on. Her keys scratched the counter as June bugs continued crashing against the porch light.
Dee smoked out her window while she drove me home. “Why don’t you move in with me?” she said.
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah, you. Then you could finally sleep in my bed overnight. Tell me you’re not sick of living with your parents, still, at twenty-eight.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why? You still think your parents don’t know? I know they’re old school but they can’t be that stupid. Okay, whatever. You just don’t want to be with me, right?”
“No, it’s my eyes and stuff,” I squeaked. I didn’t know what else to say, because it was true. I didn’t want to be in her bed in her room the morning it happened, for her to witness my first moments of complete darkness.
“What else is new?! You haven’t been able to see for years. I never rejected you for it!” she said. “Fuck.” She stubbed her cigarette out and cried into my shirt. Her heart was quick, thrumming as she pressed her chest against mine. I only moved to breathe, paralyzed to even pat her on the back or hold her hand. She was a rare bird and I was just watching.
* * *
I showered at home, scrubbing the smell of coconut lotion, sweat, and cigarettes off my skin while soap drained down my leg and burned my knees. I mouse-laughed, imagining the twin scabs on my knees as Mickey Mouse’s eyes on his white face.
Nero was sleeping on my bed. I pulled the blanket out from under him, envisioning fur floating in the air against the slip of porch light that snuck in under my blinds. His feet thumped against the carpet. He meowed in protest before rubbing his head against my leg. “Get lost,” I said.
Nero pissed on the carpet in my bedroom a year ago. I’m the only one who can still smell it.
* * *
Em picked me up for ball hockey. Dee and I dressed on opposite sides of the room and sat on opposite ends of the bench where I felt her not looking at me. In the parking lot after games I sat in Em’s car and listened to the other girls crush beer cans under their feet and recount shots they missed and laugh about the shorts someone wore. I found Dee’s laugh among everyone else’s, sounding washed out, pale yellow, like she was laughing through strips of gauze.
* * *
Mom complained about the June bugs. She came home from her church meeting and two flew in after her. Nero hopped and swatted at them while meowing incessantly. I sat on the porch and listened to the bugs careening into the porch light and bouncing off the insides of the light fixture.
Amidst the night dew and garbage cans I thought I could smell Dee, a sweet mix of orange juice and coconut lotion, a smell that licked at my insides. I stared into darkness and wished my empty hands were touching the Mickey Mouse statue, the chip in his left ear, his bulbous nose, the peaks of his smile, the ovoid creases in the plaster that made his eyes. Eyes that Dee had painted anew.
I stuck to a routine where I pretended nothing was different. Mom pretended I didn’t have glaucoma and I pretended she had no idea I was sleeping with the girl she made sandwiches for. Dee picked me up for ball hockey as she usually did on Friday nights throughout the spring and summer. Music thumped from her car as she turned the corner. I hollered a good-bye to Mom who hollered back, “Where are you going?”
“Hockey, remember?”
“Lia, hang on!” Mom rushed through the kitchen. The breadboard clunked against the counter, the fridge door sucked shut, wax paper crinkled.
“You don’t have to feed Dee every week,” I said, as Mom put two sandwiches in my hands.
“She gives you a ride. You can give her a sandwich.”
Dee’s car vibrated in the driveway. She held her hand out in expectation as I opened the door. “Your mom is awesome,” she said. “She doesn’t get tired of making me sandwiches, eh?” The inside of Dee’s car smelled like arugula, spicy and florid.
“Is that why you pick me up every week?” I said.
“I’m hooked. What is this? Are these pumpkin seeds in the bread?”
The Frank Cavella Recreation Complex (a.k.a the Cave) was a short drive from my house. We took the back way in behind the Winners' Plaza, where the houses on Wanda Street were neat and boxy, with short slanting roofs, wrought-iron porch railings, no kids, and especially no toys strewn across the lawns. In my neighborhood, wagons were parked on driveways, Tonka trucks were lined up in yellow convoys across verandas, and tennis balls were lost against curbs. Summertime was bike chains whizzing and sprinkler spray and mothers yelling out of windows.
My neighborhood hadn’t matured the same way Wanda Street had. Grown people didn’t leave home but instead stayed and raised their kids there, too. Additions were built over garages and basements doubled as apartments. It wasn’t at all uncommon for unmarried, adult children, like me, never to move out, which was why it was weird that one of the houses on Wanda Street had a Mickey Mouse statue at the end of its driveway, somehow exempt from the Neighborhood Association of West Aetna’s aesthetics policy, and whenever Dee and I drove by it I chuckled like Mickey.
“Why not? You guys have the same ears,” Dee’d said the first time.
“Hey, you didn’t do it,” Dee said today.
“Didn’t do what?”
“Your Mickey. We just passed him.”
I shoved the last bite of sandwich in my mouth. I didn’t see Mickey, faded to nearly white after years of being perched in the sun.
I followed Dee from the car into the rink and then into the dressing room. She looked like a traffic pylon in her orange sweatshirt and black cap. I pulled my equipment on, breathing through my mouth so not to smell the crescendo of sour that leapt from everyone’s equipment.
My first half was abysmal. Passes skipped by me. I fanned on a shot. At the start of the second half I tripped over someone’s stick, skinning my knees. I pulled my gloves off and touched my right knee, skin peeled back like wood shavings. I stalked to the bench, yanked my helmet off, and flung it against the wall, cracking right where the cage screwed in above my brow. I spent the remainder of the game resting my broken helmet in my lap, wrapping and unwrapping the chin strap around my finger.
The thing about sports is that you can act like a complete maniac and forgiveness is applied instantly. The rink is immune to violence and tantrums in a fucked up, practically sacred way. You can pitch a fit on the bench and within minutes it’s forgotten. You can punch someone in the head and no one holds it against you. It’s like a black, smoky force field cloaks the exterior of the rink and hems the angry, bitter things inside.
* * *
My younger sister Antonia and her husband Stef would come over to Mom and Dad’s on Sunday nights. After dinner and dishes, but before dessert, we would sit at the kitchen table while the coffee brewed, the smell nudging us awake from our carb coma. I would carry the table cloth out to the veranda and give it three good shakes. On breezy days I used to watch the crumbs get taken by the wind, but they disappeared just like when you stand up too fast and those flecks of light shoot around your eyes. If the air was still, I would sweep the crumbs into a nest made mostly of Nero’s black cat fur.
I would give the table cloth back to Mom, who’d throw it back over the table and serve dessert. It was only after we’d had coffee and a shot of grappa that Antonia would take out her tweezers and pluck Mom’s eyebrows, then mine. This tradition started by accident one night, when Antonia complained my eyebrows were starting to get bushy. And she was doing eyebrows now, professionally, and how could I go around looking like that.
Usually Anto’d pluck a couple of Mom’s first and Mom would close her eyes in a way that made me think she was praying through the whole thing. She never flinched, though, or yelped. Dad would also close his eyes and laugh.
“Even for an Italian girl you’re hairy,” Anto said to me each time. I would wince, holding my glasses in my fist as the metal tip of her tweezer grazed my brow right before she tugged.
This was the first Sunday I didn’t have my glasses on. I had nothing to squeeze in my fist as Anto played Sunday night esthestician/sadist. She plucked, and I sucked my teeth. On the third pluck I found my hand gripping hers. “Oh, come on,” she said.
“You’re evil,” I said.
“Well, you’re an animal with hair like this,” she said.
“She’s also being a testa dura,” Mom said from across the table. “Not wearing her glasses.” Anto plucked again before I could snark back at Mom.
“Oww, Jesus!” I said.
“Watch your mouth! Antonia, tell your sister. How stupid for her, not to wear her glasses!” Mom said.
This again. All week I’d heard it from Mom. And all week I thought about how I’d rather be going deaf. “They don’t do anything,” I said.
“Then get new ones,” Mom said. I heard the chuffy sounds of Kleenex being yanked from the box.
“Oops. Made you bleed,” Anto laughed, pressing a napkin against my brow.
“Get new ones?” I said.
“Yes, Aurelia! Get new ones!” Mom said.
“Easy,” Anto said, glancing down to look in my eyes. I blinked back at her, my brows on fire. “'Lia looks cuter without them, anyway.”
“Cuter?!” Mom said, slamming the cupboards shut now. She exploded into dialect that cut at my ears and began sobbing. She continued sobbing and wiped the clean end of her dish towel against her cheeks then dried the dishes, every so often letting out a yowl that meant she wasn’t even close to being done.
Anto and Stef left soon after. I walked them to the door, clutching the table cloth for another shake before I went to bed.
“Is that really it?” Anto said. “With your eyes, I mean.”
“Getting close,” I said. She ran her thumb against the sweep of my brow, just to make sure the remaining eyebrows stayed put.
I shook the table cloth out into the wind, a wind that pulsed the night air and sent crumbs flying back into my face.
* * *
Sometimes when I woke up I didn’t open my eyes right away. I used to think it was because I was trying to hang onto a few more minutes of sleep, or a dream that I didn’t want to come away from yet, but that wasn’t really it. I was afraid to open my eyes and realize that everything was darker than it was the day before.
I kept my blinds opened at night so in the morning I would never wonder whether or not there was really light entering my room. I obsessed over what time I woke up and spent weeks memorizing where the sun fell through my window on my quilt until I could tell without looking at my clock, until the seasons shifted and I would have to remember the paths of the sun again.
I got up the next morning (8 a.m., according to my quilt) and trod to the bathroom. I drank water straight from the tap while Nero swatted at the drawstrings on my pajama bottoms. My phone made non-stop bird chirps in my pocket, the notification sound Dee had set up so I would know it was her texting me. I called without looking at any of her messages.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Didn’t you read my texts?”
“Nope.”
She huffed. “Okay. Want to go watch the co-ed tournament at the Cave with me later?”
“Um. Maybe.”
“Oh, maybe? What do you have better to do? I’ll come by around four to pick you up.”
My hanging-up was a juicy invite for Nero to swipe at my hand. “Cazzo!” I yelled, my thumb searing. I threw my phone at him, the black fur-flash that bolted down the hall.
I waited on the porch for Dee after spending the rest of the day dusting and washing the baseboards and wainscoting, tracing the length of every wall in the house. Dee pulled up and turned her music down. “What the eff happened to your hand?” she said.
“Nero,” I said.
“Punk-ass Nero,” she said. “You’re a hot mess lately. First your knees, now all these scratches. He did a number…actually this scratch does look like a number. Eleven. Maybe you should wear that on your jersey instead of double zero.”
Dee drove towards the Cave, stopping with a jerk on Wanda Street and slapping me on the leg. “Li, Li, look!”
“What?!”
“The Mickey statue! They’re throwing it out!” Dee pulled over and got out of the car, grunting as she lifted the statue out of the garbage can before trying to jam it in the back seat of her two-door. “Holy crap, this thing is heavier than it looks. Come here and help me.”
I lifted Mickey’s feet while Dee held him by the ears. He was probably about three and a half feet tall, and covered with dirt-dust from having stood so close to the road for so long. We sat him in the backseat behind me and fastened his seatbelt.
“What are you going to do with it?” I said.
“Let’s go to my place instead and paint Mickey. I can’t believe they were going to throw him out. He’s, like, the only interesting thing in this whole neighborhood.”
“You want me to paint?”
“Why not?”
“I’m shit at that stuff.”
“Please, how hard can it be? I’ll order pizza.”
She didn’t have any paint at home, so after stopping at the dollar store and the beer store for all things necessary to paint a stolen garbage statue, I hoisted Mickey onto my shoulder and carried him through the threshold of Dee’s front door.
She painted while I sat at her kitchen table listening to the baseball game on the radio, sitting with him between her legs, smoking and painting and intermittently wiping her hands on her apron.
“Here, you have a turn,” she said.
“I’m good.”
“This statue is a big deal. It’s the most famous piece of crap in Aetna. Once day you will look back and think, oh, I wish I had taken part in restoring him to his youthful...never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I shouldn’t push you. I read it in the brochure When Someone You Love is Going Blind.”
“Shut up,” I laughed. “I can still see some stuff.”
“Like my underwear lines?”
“Like anything that’s not in my black spots, for now.” I’ve heard other people compare their vision loss to looking through a slush-covered windshield. Or that they were looking at a puzzle with half its pieces missing. I thought it was like looking up at the sky through a fully-leaved tree: I could hear the birds and feel the wind, but the sun that was definitely there, I could not see.
* * *
Dee’s fridge was stocked full of juice. I stood with the door open and let the air assuage my hot skin, peering in at the jugs and cartons of what were likely orange or pineapple. I pulled the smaller carton out and held the label right up to my face before taking a sniff and drinking it straight from the carton. Pineapple.
It was midnight, and I was hungry and thirsty and restless. Fresh sweat dampened the space between my navel and waistband and soaked the hairs on the back of my neck. I felt more fragrant now, too, my hair and skin rich with Dee’s melon-scented shampoo and coconut body butter.
“Want some leftovers?” Dee asked behind me, wrapping her arms around my neck. The oversized T-shirt she wore to bed swept against the backs of my calves, the shirt that threatened to disintegrate from sheer exposure to oxygen, light, and warm temperature. At some point in its lifetime it read “Toronto Maple Leafs Norris Division Champions 1993” before the lettering had washed away. The T-shirt meant she had no intention of driving me home yet.
“Sure.”
Outside, June bugs whapped against the porch light. “God, they’re so funny!” Dee said as the microwave beeped.
“They’re funny, like stupid, funny. They actually can see where they’re going,” I said.
“Really? Tell me whose job it is to know something like that. Is there someone out there with a career as a June bug optometrist? Imagine being that kid’s guidance counselor?” She slid a plate of leftover lasagne in front of me and poured a glass of orange juice. “You can take pasta for lunch tomorrow if you want. Tomorrow night we’ll go find a dress for you to wear to your cousin’s wedding.”
“His wedding’s in three months,” I said. “The invitation hasn’t even arrived.”
“So, you know you need a dress anyway. I love finding you stuff to wear.” She wiped a spot of sauce off my cheek with her thumb. “Plus, I want to try that new chicken wing place Em told us about with the pool tables and the big screens.”
I twirled a strand of mozzarella around my fork and nodded.
“I booked my appointment to get a new tattoo on the inside of my wrist, like the sun on briscola cards. I showed you the picture already, right?” Dee said.
She had. I’d given it a good look so when it was actually tattooed on her person I would remember that it was there and what it looked like and that one day she had asked me what I thought and I told her “It’s nice.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“You should get one, too, like on your arm or your ankle. Oh, Li, please, you have to get one. It would look so cool.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, get Mickey Mouse. Or Minnie. Oh my God, get two Minnies making out!” Dee said, reaching across to play-slap me while she laughed. The pasta burned my mouth. What a weird thing to eat when I was already so hot. Dee continued to laugh and I chewed and kept my eyes on her, on the way her laugh punched the air around us, on the smell of juice and the bugs outside who just wanted light.
“What are you thinking about?” Dee said.
“Nothing.”
“Are you thinking about what an amazing girlfriend I am?” She sat down next to me and rested her head against my shoulder, sighing into the hollow space between my collarbone and throat. Her breath was hot and toothpaste-minty and made me put my fork down. “Come back to bed with me.”
“Dee. I have to go home.”
“No, you don’t have to. You don’t have kids waiting up for you or a dog that needs to be let out or anything. Just stay here.”
I picked the fork back up and blew on my forkful of night lasagne while she played with my ponytail, inching my hair tie out until my hair fell against my shoulders. She disliked that I wore my hair up all the time. But I didn’t like the way it fell into my eyes when it was down, or covered my ears.
“I don’t feel like driving you home.”
“Okay, I can walk.”
“Please, I can’t let you walk home in the dark, Lia. I can’t even let you walk home when it’s light out. I’d worry you walked into an open manhole or something.”
I moved my fork around the plate to feel for more lasagne. Empty. “I’ll be fine.”
Dee sat up, the chair scraping against the pocked vinyl flooring that was coming up at the corners. I waited by the front door for her to put pants on. Her keys scratched the counter as June bugs continued crashing against the porch light.
Dee smoked out her window while she drove me home. “Why don’t you move in with me?” she said.
“Me?” I said.
“Yeah, you. Then you could finally sleep in my bed overnight. Tell me you’re not sick of living with your parents, still, at twenty-eight.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why? You still think your parents don’t know? I know they’re old school but they can’t be that stupid. Okay, whatever. You just don’t want to be with me, right?”
“No, it’s my eyes and stuff,” I squeaked. I didn’t know what else to say, because it was true. I didn’t want to be in her bed in her room the morning it happened, for her to witness my first moments of complete darkness.
“What else is new?! You haven’t been able to see for years. I never rejected you for it!” she said. “Fuck.” She stubbed her cigarette out and cried into my shirt. Her heart was quick, thrumming as she pressed her chest against mine. I only moved to breathe, paralyzed to even pat her on the back or hold her hand. She was a rare bird and I was just watching.
* * *
I showered at home, scrubbing the smell of coconut lotion, sweat, and cigarettes off my skin while soap drained down my leg and burned my knees. I mouse-laughed, imagining the twin scabs on my knees as Mickey Mouse’s eyes on his white face.
Nero was sleeping on my bed. I pulled the blanket out from under him, envisioning fur floating in the air against the slip of porch light that snuck in under my blinds. His feet thumped against the carpet. He meowed in protest before rubbing his head against my leg. “Get lost,” I said.
Nero pissed on the carpet in my bedroom a year ago. I’m the only one who can still smell it.
* * *
Em picked me up for ball hockey. Dee and I dressed on opposite sides of the room and sat on opposite ends of the bench where I felt her not looking at me. In the parking lot after games I sat in Em’s car and listened to the other girls crush beer cans under their feet and recount shots they missed and laugh about the shorts someone wore. I found Dee’s laugh among everyone else’s, sounding washed out, pale yellow, like she was laughing through strips of gauze.
* * *
Mom complained about the June bugs. She came home from her church meeting and two flew in after her. Nero hopped and swatted at them while meowing incessantly. I sat on the porch and listened to the bugs careening into the porch light and bouncing off the insides of the light fixture.
Amidst the night dew and garbage cans I thought I could smell Dee, a sweet mix of orange juice and coconut lotion, a smell that licked at my insides. I stared into darkness and wished my empty hands were touching the Mickey Mouse statue, the chip in his left ear, his bulbous nose, the peaks of his smile, the ovoid creases in the plaster that made his eyes. Eyes that Dee had painted anew.