Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Or a hotel housekeeper,” my mother said. “Just you and piles of linen.”

“Or an astronomer, alone with her telescope,” my father said. That was the best offer. “The work requires a bit of math,” he added, mildly.

Later that day Milo took my brother and me to Bosky’s Wild Animal Preserve. We visited Bosky’s once or twice each summer. The wildest animals there were a pair of foxes. Foxes are devoted parents while their offspring require care. Then they separate, and next season they find new partners. But Bosky’s two downcast specimens were stuck with each other year after year. The male peacock didn’t seem to have much fun, either. His occasional halfhearted display revealed gaps in his feathers. A pichi, a female rock snake, a few monkeys chattering nonsense — these were our wild animals. But beyond the pathetic cages was a large working farm, with chickens and turkeys and an apple orchard and a field of corn. A pony in a straw hat dragged a cart around the cornfield. Two other chapeaued ponies could be ridden around a ring, though not independently: you had to endure, walking beside you, one of the local teenagers who worked at Bosky’s. These louts did not hide their contempt for nag and rider.

The rock snake was fed a live white mouse every two weeks. This public meal was unadvertised but word got around. When we got to Bosky’s that day with Milo, there were a dozen small children already gathered in front of the snake’s cage. Their parents, wearing doubtful expressions, milled at a distance. My brother went off to the ponies. Milo and I were tall enough to see over the children’s heads, so we two and the kids viewed the entire performance — the lowering of the mouse into the cage by Mr. Bosky, the terrified paralysis of the rodent, the expert constriction by the snake, and then the mouse’s slow incorporation into the snake’s hinged mouth. She fed herself the mouse, whose bones were all broken but who still presumably breathed. In it went, farther in, still farther, until all we could see was its tiny rump and then only its thin white tail.

The little kids, bored once the tail had disappeared, drifted toward their pained parents. One skinny mother vomited into a beach bag. Milo looked at her with sympathy. Not I, though.

“A recovering bulimic,” I told him as we moved away.

“Giving herself a thrill?” he wondered. “Could be,” he said, generously admitting me into the company of interpreters.

I love you, Milo , I might have said if we said that sort of thing.

IN THE FALL I BEGAN to attend school regularly, forcing myself to tolerate groups at least for a classroom hour. I had to choose a sport so I went out for track, the least interpersonal of activities. I did my homework in most subjects. I made up the math I had flunked the year before.

My mother needed to call Milo less often.

I even achieved a kind of intimacy. My best friend — almost my only one, really, unless you counted Dr. Judah’s daughter and Dr. Lenore’s daughter and the younger Plunket boy, who were all in my grade — was an extra-tall girl with an extra-long neck. Her parents had been born in India. They both practiced radiology. Their daughter planned a career in medicine, too, as casually as a child of other parents might look forward to taking over the family store. Anjali — such a beautiful name — was plain and dark, with drooping lids and wide nostrils. Her last name was Nezhukumatathil—“Where my father comes from, the equivalent of Smith.”

She lived a few blocks from us. She and I walked home along the same streets every day, rarely bothering to talk. Our route took us past the stretch of row houses that included Milo’s, past his small, low-maintenance garden: a dogwood tree, a cast iron white love seat below it, pachysandra around it. Milo’s front door had two bells, one for the living quarters, one for the office and playroom. He was always working in the late afternoon, and so I didn’t tell Anjali that I knew the owner of that particular narrow house.

But one May at five o’clock there he was on the lacy bench, he and his cigar. A patient had canceled, I immediately understood. There was an exchange of hellos and an introduction; and then — after Milo had poked the cigar into a tin of sand beside the love seat — we were inside; and Milo was telling Anjali the provenance of some of his figurines and showing her his needlepoint utensils. How had he guessed that this mute camel liked small things and delicate handiwork? If I’d been walking with Sarah — another girl I sometimes made myself pal around with, a very good runner — he’d have known to put “Hair” on the stereo and discuss stretching exercises. Ah, it was his business. I sipped a can of Coke. You might guess that it tasted like wormwood, that I was full of jealousy — but no: I was full of admiration for Milo, performing his familial role for this schoolgirl, comfortably limited by the imminent arrival of the next patient; within ten minutes he’d give us the gate. And he did, first looking with a rueful expression at his watch. “Good-bye, Anjali,” he said at the door. “See you soon, Susan. Thank you for bringing your friend,” as if I had done it on purpose to display my hard-won sociability.

A block or so later Anjali made a rare disclosure — she’d like to live like Milo.

“In what way?” I asked, expecting mention of the figurines, the needlepoint, even the dogwood.

“Alone.”

Me, too! I wanted to confide. But the confidence would have been false. I already guessed that someday I would marry and produce annoying children. I was not as bold as Milo, as Anjali. Nature would again prove too strong for me.

August: just before senior year. I ran every morning; it was no longer an obligation but a pleasure. The third week Anjali came to the Cape to visit me, and one of my brother’s friends came to visit him, and Milo came to visit the family. He swam and baked blueberry pies and treated us to impromptu lectures on this and that — the nature of hurricanes; stars, though I had already dismissed astronomy as a career; the town of Scheveningen, where, at the age of four, he had spent the summer. He liked to recall an ancient Dutch waiter who had brought him lemonade every afternoon and talked about his years as a circus acrobat. “Lies, beautiful lies, essential to amour propre.”

“To the waiter’s amour propre?” I asked.

“And to mine. Taking lies seriously, it’s a necessary skill.”

In bathing briefs, muscular and tanned, Milo could not be mistaken for a woman. But my brother’s friend, whose schoolteacher parents were not part of our exalted circle, told my brother that Milo was so fucking helpful he was probably some cast-off queen. My brother didn’t hesitate to repeat the evaluation to me. “A queen!”

“There’s filth on your knees,” I snapped, but of course he didn’t get the reference. I was furious with all three of them: the unappreciative guest, my unfeeling brother, and Milo, who had brought the accusation on himself with his pies and his reminiscences. He’d encouraged the taciturn Anjali to talk about ancient artifacts, too. Apparently they were her prime interest nowadays. Apparently Anjali and Milo had run into each other at the museum during the spring — some dumb exhibition, pre-Columbian telephones, maybe. Afterward he had treated her to tea.

On Thursday of that week Milo and I drove Anjali through a light rain to the bus station — she had to get back to town for a family party. She jumped out of the backseat and threw her traveling sack, studded with tiny mirrors, over her bony shoulder. “Thanks,” she said in her toneless voice. (She had properly thanked my mother back in the bungalow.) She slammed the door and strode toward the bus.