Amy Bloom - A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

An aide brings Jorge off the elevator, and they both stare at me in surprise. I open my briefcase slowly, making a show of the tight buckles as Jorge approaches. I can hear the warm, sticky roll of the tires on the linoleum floor. We’ll have to pull up the guest room carpeting.

“Gum?” he says.

I unwrap the gum and put it in his mouth, telling him my name so that the grape sugar on his tongue will become his thought of me.

He nods and chews. I sneak my hand to the vinyl headrest, almost skin temperature, and smoothed by his neck and hair.

“Let’s go find the unit chief,” I say, and Jorge follows, the heavy movement of the chair shaking the floor beneath us.

Iget into bed with the phone book and my list: medical equipment, pharmacy (delivery service?), furniture, foreign-language tapes (in case his Spanish is better than his English), carpenter (ramp). I underline “carpenter” twice and call three names, leaving messages on their machines. It can’t take more than a week to put a ramp where the kitchen steps are now. In my mind I move the living room furniture around and get rid of the glass coffee table. When Marc falls asleep, dried red wine sitting in the corners of his mouth, I get up and move the actual pieces, shoving the coffee table into Marc’s study for now. My body hums. I hang up my clothes, wipe Marc’s damp mouth with my fingers, and pull the blanket up around him. I fall asleep easily, dreaming of Jorge, my little egg, rolling around on our queen-size bed, the silk spread smooth beneath his skin.

My senior year in high school, I was in two car accidents, neither of them my fault, and I was arrested twice, also not my fault. I couldn’t keep my hands on the wheel, and the guardrails flew right at me.

I found myself on emergency room examining tables, looking into slow-moving penlights, counting backward from forty to demonstrate consciousness, and calling my mother terrible names. I hate hospitals. The smell makes me sick, and the slick floors trip me up. When I visited my four dying grandparents, who dropped like dominoes the winter I was ten, I had to leave their rooms and go throw up. By February I had a favorite stall. With my mother, I could never get that far; before I even saw her I’d throw up from the thick green smell laid over the pain and stink and helplessness. When there was no reason to keep her, they let her come home.

My mother painted about forty pictures every year, and her hands smelled of turpentine, even when she just got out of the shower. This past year she started five or six paintings but only finished one. She couldn’t do the big canvases anymore, couldn’t hang off her stepladder to reach the upper corners, and that last one was small enough to sit on a little easel near her bed so she could work on it when she had the strength. After December she didn’t leave the bed. My mother, who could stand for hours in her cool white studio, shifting her weight from foot to foot, moving in on the canvas and backing off again, like a smart boxer waiting for the perfect opening. And then, in two months, she shrank down to an ancient little girl, loose skin and bones so light they seemed hollow. A friend suggested scarves for her bald head, but they always slipped down, half covering her eyes and ears, making her look more like a bag lady than a soap opera star. For a while she wore a white fisherman’s hat with a button that said “Don’t Get Me Mad,” and then she just gave up. I got used to the baldness and to the shadowy fuzz that grew back, but the puffiness in her face drove me crazy. Her true face, with cheekbones so high and sharp people didn’t think she spoke English, was hidden from me, kidnapped.

When I got too angry at her, I’d leave the house and throw rocks against the neighbors’ fences, hoping to hit someone’s healthy mother not as smart or as beautiful or as talented as mine. My friends bickered with their mothers over clothes or the phone or Nathan Zigler’s parties, and I wanted to stab them to death. I didn’t return calls and they all stopped trying, except for Kay who left a jar of hollyhocks or snapdragons on the front porch every few weeks. When I can talk again, I’ll talk to her.

I could hardly see the painting my mother was still working on, since I went blind and deaf as soon as I touched the doorknob. I stared at the dust motes until my vision blurred and I could look toward the bed. My mother held my hand and sighed, and her weakness made me so angry and sick that I’d leave the room, pretending I had homework. And she knew everything, and I couldn’t, and cannot, forgive myself for letting her know.

It was June, and everything outside was bright green and pale pink, and our house was dark and thick with dust. My mother used to say that we were messy but clean, and that used to be true. My father hid out in his study, emerging to entertain my mother and then lumbering back to his den. He’d come out, blink in the light, and feel his way to the kitchen, as if he’d never been in our front hall before. We avoided dinner conversation by investing heavily in frozen foods. He’d stay with my mother from five to six, reading to her from the National Enquirer, all the Liz Taylor stories, and then I’d take over the chitchat brigade while he drank bourbon and soda and nuked a Healthy Choice. The nurse’s aide went home at five, and my father and I agreed we could save money by not getting another aide until the late shift. Six terrifying hours every night. While my mother rested a little, if the pain wasn’t too bad, I’d go down to the empty kitchen and toast a couple of apple-cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint and eat the whole box. If my father’s door was open, I’d sit in the hall outside and wait until the sharp, woody smell brought him out shaking his head like a bloodied stag; we didn’t have the energy to really fight. More often than not, we’d end up back in the brown fog of his study, me taking a few last puffs with my legs thrown over his big leather armchair, my father sipping his bourbon and staring out at the backyard. I ate Cheez Doodles most of the night, leaving oval orange prints all over the house. We took turns sitting with my mother until eleven. I watched the clock. One night I woke up on the floor of my mother’s room, my feet tangled in the dust ruffle. I could see my father’s black shoes sticking out on the other side of the bed, gleaming in the moonlight. He’d fallen asleep on the floor too, his arms wrapped around my mother’s cross-stitch pillow, the one that said “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit by me.” I don’t know what happened to the aide that night. By morning I was under my father’s old wool bathrobe and he was gone.

On her last good days, in March and April, I helped my mother paint a little. She always said I had a great eye but no hand. But my hands were all she had then, and she guided me for the bigger strokes. It was like being a kid again, sitting down at our dining room table covered over with a dozen sheets of slippery tan drawing paper.

And I said, “Mommy, I can’t make a fish, not a really fishy one.” And she told me to see it, to think it, to feel its movements in my hand. In my mind it glistened and flipped its adorable lavender tail through bubbling rainbows (I saw Fantasia four times), but on paper all I had were two big purple marks and two small scribbles where I wanted fins. She laid her big, square hand over mine lightly, like a magic cloak, and the crayons glided over the paper and the fish flipped its tail and even blew me a kiss from its hot-pink Betty Boop lips. And I was so happy that her hand could do what my mind could see.