Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

BARBARA FELT THE BEAM cast by his eyes, and turned to face it. He was holding Anna so oddly, like a garment. Anna, one hand clawing his upper arm, righted herself, looking aggrieved. Barbara tactfully shifted her own gaze to the square, where smoke rose from the pipes of standing men; and a café waiter stacked chairs, one on top of another on top of another; and the news vendor, the hour of repose come round, lifted the handles of the barrow and trundled it across the cobblestones, his footfalls managing to keep time with the church clock; ten unsteady steps … click; ten steps … click; ten steps …

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” she heard Fergus loudly saying. His shoulder brushed hers. “We have to call the States early, because of the time difference,” he said, somehow getting it wrong even after all these years, or pretending to; anyway, he rushed her away from their new friends with only the skimpiest of good-byes.

FERGUS, IN PAJAMAS, sat on the billowing quilt, clipping his toenails into the wastebasket. Barbara, in her nightgown, brushed her short hair.

“I thought they’d lost her,” he said.

“They lost sight of her.”

“Bernard, a bereaved father, I thought. Well, bereaved in a way. His children were never allowed to be born.” He got up and moved the wastebasket back to the corner of the room and put the clippers on the highboy.

“He’s made other people’s children his,” Barbara said. Fergus, considering, put his elbow on the highboy. “A reasonable alternative to the terrors of parenthood, some would say,” she added.

He gave her a look of distaste.

She countered with one of boldness. “Maybe even preferable.” “Some would say,” he hurried to supply, sparing her the necessity of repeating the phrase, she who had experienced mother-hood’s joys in such reassuring milieus — just listen to that faithful clock. “Well, we know better,” he said.

And waited for her assent.

And waited.

NO MATTER HOW EARLY the hospital counsel gets to work — and he is very early this Tuesday in May — the attending physicians are there already, each of their unremarkable cars in its assigned place in the garage. The nurses have also arrived, the counsel knows; but most of them travel by bus. The clowns’ purple wagon is parked at an annoying diagonal, occupying two spaces. Maintenance should speak to those jokers. The bicycles of the residents are chained tightly to posts.

The counsel locks his car and moves swiftly through the garage. Within its gloom his fair hair looks like dust. His first task today is to draft a preliminary argument, and it will take several hours. The hospital is at last going to sue the state for reimbursement for Tess — poor Tess, the counsel thinks; pretty Tess.

TUESDAY WAS MY DAY OFF. That Tuesday I stopped at the diner on the way to the train.

I was always a good waitress. When I had to leave the Sea View a month before the baby because of some law about lifting and stuff, Billie said not to worry. I could come back whenever I was ready. She raised my pay, too, so I could afford the old lady I’d lined up to watch the kid. It turned out I didn’t need the old lady, but Billie gave me the raise anyway when I came back.

Billie must have been surprised to see me but she only asked did I want a cup of coffee.

TESS IS PRETTY. The feeding tube entering her body near the mid-line provides every nutrient a two-year-old has been discovered to require, even a two-year-old who cannot talk or walk or for that matter make any purposeful motion, though she does hold up her wobbly head, and she will more or less clasp an offered finger. Another tube burrows through her chest and into her superior vena cava; outside her body this line is connected, through a cheery plastic device, bright aqua, to four more tubes drawing essential minerals from translucent bags. Nourished abundantly, Tess has round limbs and plump cheeks. Pretty.

She is pretty also because of her hazel eyes and she is pretty especially because of her eyelashes: long, brown, and curly. These lashes could adorn royalty. She is sometimes called “Princess” by the staff. Tess is pretty because of her translucent pallor, alarming though it can be. After a transfusion she is pretty in a party girl’s way, as if she has been lightly rouged.

I DIDN’T WANT COFFEE, just wanted to lay eyes on big old Billie. So I stood there. She said nobody would take me for thirty-six in those jeans and that leather jacket, why didn’t I get me a student pass for the train, whack a student or something. Both of us laughed.

I never knew how long two years was until this two years.

TESS’S SPARSE SILKY HAIR, washed daily and kept trimmed by one nursing assistant or another, is the same brown as the lashes. The nose is merely a blunt little wedge. But the mouth is gorgeous, the upper lip with its two peaks resembling a miniature suspension bridge. A designer lip, thinks the nursing student who is selecting Tess’s wardrobe today (a light rose top and a deeper rose bottom and lime green socks; this nursing student has a flair for style). Tess’s lower lip creases into two tiny pillows when she frowns, and stretches into a crescent when she smiles.

The smile … It is a curious thing, that smile. It seems responsive, seems to mimic a smile initiated by someone else, anyone else, anyone who accompanies the greeting with a hearty gesture, bending or even squatting beside Tess’s wheeled padded chair. Strangers, unaware that Tess is deaf, talk to her in standard baby. “Heartbreaker,” they wheedle. “You adorable girl,” they pronounce. (Tess’s gender is unmistakable; all her garments have ruffles.) “You have exceeded the cuteness quotient,” said a pharmaceuticals representative who met Tess in the lobby while she was on an excursion to its tropical fish tank. Tess smiled. Her friends — she has innumerable friends within this hospital, her home since she was medevaced from the seaside hospital she was born in — her friends know she cannot hear, but they talk to her anyway, for to see faces in action, lips moving, is instructive for Tess, according to the neuro-audiologist. Tess smiles at these efforts, too. She smiles also at toys placed on the tray of the special stroller — a yellow plush rabbit with black felt eyes; a plastic merry-go-round that revolves whenever somebody pushes a button. But she has been seen to smile at no one and at nothing: carelessly, even mindlessly it is feared, her head against its supports aslant like a chickadee, or like a robin, or — one much-traveled resident thinks to herself — like that flirt, the ostrich.

This resident possesses a dangerous combination of optimism and inexperience. She is one of the few people around Tess to imagine the child’s future — or, more accurately, to redesign it, for each of the caretakers imagines it. But the resident — she has plans. Knowing that Tess’s neurological deficits are multiple and tangled, the determined little doctor reads history after case history. She thinks about what she reads. She is thinking now while supposedly snatching a much-needed nap in the on-call room. Elbows on the desk, slender brown fingers probing her dense hair, she thinks about clever neurons taking over from failed ones.

I LIKE THAT SLOW TRAIN. It goes from town to town, and at the first three stations you can still see the ocean. Then the train runs behind pines like the ones in Maine. I was born in Maine. It runs past factories. It stops in the city.

I got off there, in the city.

I was scared, but I didn’t turn back.

THE RESIDENT THINKS about synapses creating themselves; and she remembers that there are areas of Tess’s damaged brain that have not yet been fully scanned; and she says to herself that until Tess reaches some plateau — and she’s not there yet, she’s still climbing — why, no cap can be put on her progress.