Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

A white mustache coats Milo’s upper lip. His hair, also white, is still long. His hairline has receded considerably, and he’s subject to squamous carcinomas on the exposed brow. Advised by his dermatologist, he covers his head. In the winter he sports a beret, in the summer a cloth hat with a soft brim.

Today, wearing the summer hat and a pair of oversize cargo pants that look like a split skirt, he is riding one of the ponies. That saddle must be punishing his elderly bones. Maybe he’s trying to amuse my sons. Certainly they are entertained. When he reaches the far side of the ring they release unseemly snickers. “Granny Wild West,” snorts one. “Madame Cowpoke,” returns the other. Meanwhile Milo is bending toward the kid who’s leading his pony — eliciting a wretched story, no doubt; offering a suggestion that may change the boy’s life or at least make his afternoon a little better.

I’d like to smack both my sons and also smoke a cigar. Instead I inform them that Milo represents an evolved form of human life that they might someday emulate or even adopt. That sobers them. So I don’t mention that he was once valued and then exploited and then betrayed and finally discarded; that, like his displaced parents, he adjusted gracefully to new circumstances.

We stand there, elbows on the railing, as Milo on his pony plods toward us. We smile at him. Within the rim of his bonnet, his face creases; below the soapy mustache his lips part to reveal brown teeth. He is grinning back at us as if he shared our mild mockery of his performance: as if it were his joke, too.

WHEN CORNELIA FITCH RETIRED from the practice of gastroenterology, she purchased — on impulse, her daughter thought — a house beside a spring-fed pond in New Hampshire. She did not relinquish the small apartment of her widowhood, though — three judicious rooms with framed drawings on the gray walls. This apartment, in the Boston suburb of Godolphin, was a twenty-minute walk from the hospital where Cornelia had worked; and her daughter lived nearby, as did both of her friends; and at Godolphin Corner she could visit a good secondhand bookstore and an excellent seamstress. One of Cornelia’s legs was slightly longer than the other, a fault concealed by the clever tailleur . “Do you think there’s anybody what’s perfect,” her aunt Shelley had snorted when, at fifteen, Cornelia’s defect became apparent. Aunt Shelley had lived with the family; where else could she live? “You’re a knucklehead,” added that gracious dependent.

The place by the water — Cornelia had had her eye on it for years. It reminded her of the cottage of a gnome. “Guhnome,” Aunt Shelley used to miscorrect. The other houses in the loose settlement by the pond were darkly weathered wood, but Cornelia’s was made of the local pale gray granite, sparkling here and there with tiny golden specks. It had green shutters. There was one room downstairs and one up, an outdoor toilet, a small generator. Aquatic vines climbed the stones. Frogs and newts inhabited the moist garden.

She spent more and more time there. At the bottom of the pond, turtles inched their way to wherever they were going. Minnows traveled together, the whole congregation turning this way and then that, an underwater flag flapping in an underwater wind. Birches, lightly clothed in leaves, leaned toward the pond.

There was no beach. Most people had a rowboat or a canoe or a Sunfish. They were retirees like Cornelia, who passed their days as she did — reading, watching the mild wildlife, sometimes visiting each other. Their dirt road met the main road a mile away, where a Korean family kept a general store. Thompson the geezer — Cornelia thought of him as a geezer, though he was, like her, in his early seventies — sat on his porch all day, sketching the pond. Two middle-aged sisters played Scrabble at night, and Cornelia joined them once in a while.

“I worry about you in the middle of nowhere,” her daughter, Julie, said. But the glinting stones of the house, its whitewashed interior, summer’s greenness and winter’s pale blueness seen through its deep win dows, the mysterious endless brown of the peaked space above her bed … and pond and trees and loons and chipmunks … not no where. Somewhere. Herewhere.

“CORNELIA, GOOD SENSE demands that we treat this,” the oncologist said. “A course of chemo, some radia—” He paused. “We can beat it back.”

She stretched her legs — the long one, the longer. She liked her doctor’s old-fashioned office with its collection of worn books in a glass-fronted case. The glass now reflected her own handsome personage: short hair dyed bark, a beige linen pantsuit, cream shirt. A large sapphire ring was her one extravagance. And only a seeming extravagance, since the stone, though convincing, was glass. The ring had been Aunt Shelley’s, probably picked up at a pawnshop. But the woman who now wore this fake article was a woman to trust. People had trusted her. They’d trusted her with their knotty abdomens, their swollen small bowels, their bleeding ceca, their tortuous lower bowels. Meekly they presented their anuses so she could insert the scope and guide it in, past the rectum, the sigmoid, the descending colon …

“Cornelia?” He too was reliable — ten years younger than she, a slight man, a bit of a fop, but no fool. Yes, together they could beat back this recurrence, and wait for the next one.

“Well, what else can we do?” she said in a reasonable tone. “Will you ask your nurse to schedule me?”

He gave her a steady look. “I will. Next week, then.”

She nodded. “Write a new pain-med scrip, please. And the sleeping stuff, too.”

ON THE WAY NORTH she stopped at Julie’s house. The children were home from day camp — two enchanting little girls. Julie hugged her. “How nice it’s summer, I’m not teaching, I can be with you for the infusions.”

“Bring a book.” She hated chatter.

“Of course. Some lunch now, what do you say?”

“No thanks.” She touched her hair.

“And there’s that lovely wig, from the last time,” Julie said, shyly.

They waved good-bye: younger woman and children in the doorway, older woman in the car. It was a lovely wig. A bumptious genius of an artisan had exactly reproduced Cornelia’s style and color, meanwhile recommending platinum curls — hey, Doc, try something new! But she wanted the old, and she’d gotten it. There wasn’t much she’d wanted that she hadn’t gotten: increasing professional competence, wifehood, motherhood, papers published; even an affair years ago, when she was chief resident — she could hardly remember what he’d looked like. Well, if Henry had been less preoccupied … She had failed to master French and had lost her one-time facility with the flute. She was unlikely to correct those defects even with a remission. She had once perforated a colon, early in her career — it was repaired right away, no complications, and the forgiving woman remained her patient. She’d had a few miscarriages after Julie, then given up. Her opinions had been frequently requested. She’d supported Aunt Shelley in that rooming house, so messy; but the old lady, who liked bottle and weed, refused to go into a home. At retirement Cornelia had been given a plaque and an eighteenth-century engraving. Novels were okay, but she preferred biographies. If she hadn’t studied medicine, she might have become an interior designer, though it would have been difficult to accommodate to some people’s awful taste.

She stopped at the general store and bought heirloom tomatoes, white grape juice, a jug of water. “The corn is good,” advised the proprietor, his smile revealing his gold tooth.