Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Often I got up at night — to use the bathroom, if anybody asked — but really to draw closer to the dark heat in the living room. Sometimes Aunt Kate played Chopin or Schubert on the upright. Usually she lay on the couch, her knees bent, reading. Mom sat at the desk, coding. Music came from the hi-fi: Rosamunde, Egmont, Siegfried . The two women talked a little. One time, without preamble, my mother got up from the desk and crossed the room and dropped to the floor and laid her head on Aunt Kate’s stomach. She began soundlessly to cry. Aunt Kate placed the book she’d been reading, still open, across her own forehead, like a sombrero. She held it there with her left hand as if against a gale. With her right hand she fondled my mother’s foolish hair.

IN MARCH MY FATHER was transferred to a rehabilitation center. One Saturday afternoon my mother took us to see him there. We drove across the city. The place was near grim buildings of mostly undefinable uses, though one of them, we knew, was a popular roller-skating rink.

Dad was not connected to an IV. “A free pigeon,” he said, flapping his elbows. His gait was unsteady but he could walk without a cane and without leaning too much on my mother — his arm around her shoulders was mostly an embrace. The four of us tramped up and down the corridors, as if not daring to stop. I think he guessed what was coming — the tumor’s steady growth, the blindness in the right eye, the new operation, the new operation’s failure … Along the polished linoleum the sick man marched, whispering into his wife’s ear. Her hair separated, revealing her meek nape. We trailed behind.

At four thirty my parents finally sat down on my father’s bed. They were going to share supper in the cafeteria, they said. It was always nutritionally appropriate. “Bilious,” Dad confided. “Maybe you two would like to go out for pizza.”

If we stayed we could watch her eat, watch him pretend to eat, eat ourselves — see! good children — swallowing the clam cakes, the stewed fruit. “But—,” Willy began.

“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.