Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“I’ll bet it is. I’ll be in again tomorrow.”

Now the tomatoes nestled in the striped bowl on her kitchen counter. For a moment she regretted having to leave them behind, their rough scars, their bulges. Then, eyes wide open, the knowledgeable Cornelia endured a vision: emaciation, murky awakenings, children obediently keeping still. She squinted at a bedside visitor, she sat dejectedly on the commode, she pushed a walker to the corner mailbox and demanded a medal for the accomplishment, she looked at a book upside down. The mantle of responsible dependency … it would not fit. With one eye still open, she winked the other at the tomatoes.

She changed into her bathing suit and took a quick swim, waving to the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer. Back in her house she put on jeans and a T-shirt, tossed the wet suit onto the crotch of a chokecherry tree. What should a person take for a predinner paddle? Binoculars, sun hat against insidious sidelong rays, towel, and the thermos she’d already filled with its careful cocktail. Pharmacology had been a continuing interest. “I’ll swallow three pills a day and not a gobbet more,” Aunt Shelley had declared. “You choose them, rascal.”

Cornelia pushed off vigorously, then used a sweep stroke to turn the canoe and look at the slate roof and stone walls of her house. Just a little granite place, she realized; not fantastical after all. She had merely exchanged one austerity for another. She thought of the tomatoes, and turned again and stroked, right side, left, right … Then, as if she were her own passenger, she opened a backrest and settled herself against it and slid the paddle under the seat. She drank her concoction slowly, forestalling nausea.

Sipping, not thinking, she drifted on a cobalt disk under an aquamarine dome. Birches bent to honor her, tall pines guarded the birches. She looked down the length of her body. She had not worn rubber boat shoes, only sandals, and her ten toenails winked flamingo.

The spring was in the middle of the roughly circular pond. Usually a boat given its freedom headed in that direction. Today, however, the canoe was obeying some private instructions. It had turned eastward; the lowering sun at her back further brightened her toenails. Her craft was headed toward the densely wooded stretch of shore where there were no houses. It was picking up speed. Cornelia considered shaking herself out of her lethargy, lifting the paddle, resuming control; but instead she watched the prow make its confident way toward trees and moist earth. It would never attain the shore, though, because there seemed to be a gulf between pond and land. No one had ever remarked on this cleavage. Perhaps it had only recently appeared, a fault developing in the last week or two; perhaps the land had receded from the pond or the pond recoiled from the land; at any rate, there it was: fissure, cleft … falls.

Falls! And she was headed directly toward them. All at once a sound met her ears … plashing not roaring, inviting not menacing, but still. As the canoe rode the lip of the new waterfall she stood up, never easy to do in a boat, more difficult now with substances swirling in her veins. She grabbed an overhanging bough, and watched in moderate dismay as her vessel tipped and then fell from her, carrying its cargo of towel, paddle, binoculars, sun hat, and almost-empty thermos.

What now? She hung there, hands, arms, shoulders, torso, uneven legs, darling little toenails. She looked down. The rent in the fabric of the water was not, after all, between water and shore: it was between water and water. It was a deep, dark rift, like a mail slot. She dropped into it.

Into the slot she dropped. She fell smoothly and painlessly, her hair streaming above her head. She landed well below the water’s surface on a mossy floor. Toenails still there? Yes, and the handkerchief in the pocket of her jeans. A small crowd advanced, some in evening clothes, some in costume.

“Cornailia,” whispered her Dublin-born medical-school lab partner. How beautifully he hadn’t aged. “Dr. Flitch,” said her cleaning woman, resplendent in sequins. “Granny?” said a child. “Cornelia,” said a deer, or perhaps it was an antelope or a gazelle. She leaned back; her feet rose. She was horizontal now. She was borne forward on an animal along a corridor toward a turning; the rounded walls of this corridor were sticky and pink. “Rest, rest,” said the unseen animal whose back was below her back — an ox, maybe, some sort of husband. They turned a corner with difficulty — she was too long, the ox was too big — but they managed; and now they entered a light-filled room of welcome or deportation, trestle tables laden with papers. She was on her feet. “Friends,” she began. “Sssh,” said a voice. Some people were humbly hooked up to IVs hanging from pine branches. They ate tomatoes and sweet corn and played Scrabble. Some were walking around. I’m chief here, she tried to say. She lay with a feathered man. “Don’t you recognize me, Connie?” He presented his right profile and then his left. That boiled eye … well, yes, but now she couldn’t remember his name. She was on her back again, her knees raised and separated; ah, the final expulsion of delivery. Julie … She was up, dancing with a rake, holding it erect with lightly curled fists. Its teeth smiled down at her. She saw her thermos rolling away; she picked it up and drank the last mouthful. She kissed a determined creature whose breath was hot and unpleasant. “I’m a wayward cell,” it confided. The talons of a desperate patient scratched her chest. Then the breathable lukewarm water enveloped her, and she felt an agreeable loosening.

A sudden rush of colder fluid, and the room was purged of people, apparatuses, creatures, animals. Everyone gone but Dr. Fitch. Her tongue grew thick with fear. And then Aunt Shelley shuffled forward, wearing that old housedress, her stockings rolled below her puffy knees, a cigarette hanging from her liver-colored mouth. How Cornelia and her sisters had loved climbing onto Shelley’s fat thighs, how merrily they had buried their noses in her pendant flesh. “Scamp,” she’d say with a chuckle. “Good-for-nothing.” No endearment was equal to her insults, no kiss as soothing as the accidental brush of her lips, no enterprise as gratifying as the attainment of her lap.

A scramble now, a rapturous snuggle. One of Cornelia’s sandals fell off. Her forehead burrowed into the familiar softness between jaw and neck.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. Something was pawing at her … Regret? Reproval? Oh, get lost. This was bliss, this sloppy and forgiving hug. Bliss, again, after six dry decades. “Stay.”

It could not last. And now there was no one, no relative, no friend, no person, no animal, no plant, no water, no air. Cornelia was not alone, though; she was in the company of a hard semi-transparent sapphire substance, and as she watched, it flashed and then shattered, and shattered again, and again, all the while retaining its polyhedrality, seven sides exactly — she examined a piece on her palm to make sure, and it shattered there on her lifeline. Smaller and smaller, more and more numerous grew the components. Expanding in volume, they became a tumulus of stones, a mound of pebbles, a mountain of sand, a universe of dust, always retaining the blue color that itself was made up of royal and turquoise and white like first teeth. The stuff, finer still, churned, lifted her, tossed her, caressed her, entered her orifices, twirled and turned her, polished her with its grains. It rose into a spray that threw her aloft; it thickened into a spiral that caught her as she fell. She lay quiet in its coil. Not tranquil, no; she was not subject to poetic calm. She was spent. She was elsewhere.

SOMETIME LATER the geezer rowed out to the middle of the pond. He had been watching the drifting canoe for the last hour. A person’s business was a person’s business. He saw that his neighbor was dead. He tied the prow of the canoe to the stern of his rowboat and towed her ashore.