Bad Eyes

Erin McGraw

        Seeing less than others
        can be a great strain.
                  —Robert Lowell

The subject veers almost uncontrollably toward metaphor, but I mean to take it literally: I have unusually poor vision, minus thirteen hundred diopters and still losing ground, ordinary progressive myopia that never stopped progressing. In me, the process by which light is supposed to focus images at the back of the eye has gone berserk, and the point of focus shifts ever closer to the front, like the projection of a movie falling short of its screen.
    My eyeballs aren’t round, like marbles or baseballs, but are oblong, like little footballs. This awkward shape puts so much strain on the retinas that a rip has developed in my left one, where the tissue gave out like exhausted cloth. Now my ophthalmologist carefully includes a retina evaluation at annual checks, and I have a list of warning signs that would indicate a significant rupture: sudden, flashing lights; floaters showering into my vision like rain.
    Mostly, though, nothing about my vision is so fraught or dramatic. I am shortsighted, is all, mope-eyed, gravel-blind, blind-buck and Davy; a squinter, the sort who taps her companions at plays and baseball games: “What just happened? I missed that.” I live in a world where objects collapse into haze. Beyond the narrow realm that my contact lenses permit me to see clearly, I navigate by memory and assumption.

Here are some of the things I can’t see, even with my contacts in: a baseball in play, birds in trees, numbers and subtitles on rv, roads at night, constellations, anything by candlelight, street signs, faces of people in cars, faces of people twenty feet away. One of my consistent embarrassments comes from snubbing friends who stood more than a shadow’s length from me, friends I didn’t even nod to because I couldn’t tell who they were. So I’ve adopted a genial half-smile that I wear when I walk around my neighborhood or down the corridors of the department where I work. I have the reputation of being a very friendly person.
    Here are some of the things I can find when I narrow my eyes and look: tiny new weeds in the front garden, fleas scurrying across my dog’s belly, gray hairs. My mother, watching me struggle before the bathroom mirror for ten minutes while I spray and brush and bobby-pin to hide the worst of the gray, comments, “I don’t know why you bother. You don’t have much. No one even sees it.”
    “I see it every time I look in the mirror.”
    “Well, you see what you’re looking for.”
    She’s told me this all my life. I roll my eyes and keep working the bobby pins.

The glasses I remember best and loved most arrived when I was eight years old. They were my second pair; the first were brown with wings at the corners, the eyeglass equivalent to orthopedic shoes. I was delighted when the doctor announced that they needed to be replaced.
    My parents didn’t share my delight—only a year had passed since we had gotten that first pair. For six months, unconsciously, I had been moving books closer to my face and inching nearer the Tv. Nothing was said about it. I think my parents assumed that I must have been aware of a development so obvious to them, but I was a dreamy, preoccupied child and hadn’t noticed that the edges of illustrations in my books were no longer crisp. When I was moved to the front row of my classroom, it never occurred to me to ponder why.
    I was pleased to be there, though, and preened in my new glasses. Sleek cat eyes, the white plastic frames featuring jaunty red stripes, they were 1965’s cutting edge. I often took them off to admire them. When my correction needed to be stepped up again, I insisted on using the same frames, even though by then I had to keep the glasses on all the time, and could only take pleasure in the candy-cane stripes if I happened to pass a window. In my school pictures for three years running I wore these same glasses. By the third year they were clearly too small for my face, and my eyes practically disappeared behind the thick glass.

Every six months my mother took me to the eye doctor, and nearly every visit meant new, slightly heavier lenses. At first I resented only the hours spent in the waiting room, where I was often the only child, but gradually I began to dread the examination itself, the stinging dilation drops and my frustrating attempts to read the eye chart. While I struggled to focus on letters that seemed to slip and buckle on the far wall, fear bloomed in my stomach.
    “T,” I would begin rashly, remembering that much from the visit before, but then I strained to make out the next wobbly shape. “U, maybe, or C. It could be 0.” Not bothering to comment, the doctor tilted back my chair, pulled around one of the clicking, finicky machines, and began the measurements for the next set of lenses. Both he and I ignored my quick, anxious breathing and dry mouth, but when he was finished I burst out of the office as if I were making a jail break.
    Back in the world, my panic dropped away, and my worsening vision seemed nothing more than an inconvenience. Perhaps if I had been an outdoorsy kind of child, a girl who noticed leaves or clouds or insect life, I might have grieved the first time I was unable to detect a distant, sly animal. But I wasn’t especially fond of the natural world, which was too hot or too cold and full of things that made me itch. The steady loss of detail—my inability first to make out the petals of a flower, and before long to discern the flower at all without glasses to help me—felt unimportant. I jammed on my glasses first thing in the morning, took them off after turning out my light at night, now and then remembered to clean them. Easy enough.
    Only occasionally did I get the sense that I was hampered. The sisters at my Catholic school made me take my glasses off before games at recess, a sensible precaution; I was a terrible athlete and could be relied on to stop dead in front of almost any moving object. So I was hit in the face by kickballs, tetherballs, basketballs, and once, memorably, by a softball bat that caught me square on the cheek. The sister blew her whistle and bustled toward me, scolding. Why hadn’t I gotten out of the way?
    I didn’t cry when the bat hit me, although it hurt, but her chiding made my lips start to quiver. I hadn’t seen it, I protested. All of a sudden something had hit my face; the blow came out of nowhere.
    It came out of the batter’s box, the sister pointed out. You shouldn’t have been standing so close. You know you can’t see well, so you have to be cautious.
    She handed me my glasses and I walked off—sulkily, coddling my sense of injustice—nurse’s office. The nurse said I’d suffered only a bruise, but I couldn’t easily dismiss the incident. Up to that point, no one had told me, You are at risk, you must take precautions.
    Back at home, I took my glasses off and looked at the house across the street. I recognized its shape and details, but that hardly required vision. I saw the house every day, and could have drawn from memory its long, flat roof and the row of bunkerlike windows.
    So I walked up the street, turned onto a cul-de-sac that I didn’t know well, and took off my glasses again. Instantly, the turquoise stucco bungalow before me smeared into a vague blue box. I could make out windows, but couldn’t tell if the curtains were open or closed; could find the front door but not the mail slot; the wrought-iron handrail but not the steps it accompanied.
    A shout erupted and I spun around, shoving my glasses back on to find that the shout had nothing to do with me: a couple of boys were playing catch at the top of the street. Nevertheless, my heart was whapping now, hurting me. I was foolish to stand so publicly, blinking and helpless, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Anyone could have sneaked up, knocked me to the ground, and taken my wallet, if I had had a wallet.
    I thought of comic-strip blind beggars on city streets, their canes kicked away, their tin cups stolen. For the first time, my bad eyes took on meaning: they were an invitation to bullies, and the fact that no one had yet taken my glasses and knocked me down was just dumb luck. Pressing my glasses in place, I ran home. This new notion of myself seized my imagination, and I fell asleep for several nights imagining scenarios in which I was unfairly set upon, a lamb before wolves. I saw myself suffering nobly and being remembered reverently.
    And then I forgot about my experiment in front of the blue house. I continued to play games without glasses at school, continued to get smacked with kickballs, continued not to be accosted by glasses-snatching bullies. Finally tired of my red-and-white striped glasses, I zipped through half a dozen new pairs, trying Out granny glasses in three different shapes, including ones with octagonal lenses that made me look unnervingly like John Lennon.
    By the time I was entering junior high, though, I was tired of wearing glasses. More precisely, I was tired of my bespectacled reflection, how glasses made my eyes look tiny and dim, my nose like a tremendous land mass. So I initiated a campaign to get contact lenses, which were just becoming widely available, although not usually for twelve-year-olds. To my astonishment, my cautious, conservative ophthalmologist immediately agreed.
    “Contacts help sometimes, with myopia like this,” he explained to my skeptical mother. “The theory is that the contact flattens the lens of the eye. It can slow down the disease’s progress.” I was so elated that I hardly flinched when he called what I had a “disease,” a word we usually avoided. And so, a month later, we began a regime that I was in no way ready for.

These were the days when the only contact lenses were made of inflexible plastic, thick by today’s standards, hard, immovable foreign bodies that had to be introduced to the protesting eyes at gradual intervals. The first day, the wearer put them in for two hours, then took them out for an hour of recovery, then in again, out, in, out. The second day, three hours.
    The optometrist guided my shaking hand, showing me how to slip the lens directly in place. Before I could even look up, I had blinked the contact out; it bounced off the counter beneath us and hit the floor. My mother hissed. The optometrist ordered me not to move; he gently dropped to his knees and patted the linoleum until he found the lens and laboriously cleaned it again.
    I blinked the lenses out twice more before he could get them centered on my corneas. Then, tentatively, he stepped back and asked, “How’s that?” I was too stunned to answer. For all the talk about wearing schedules and tolerance, no one had told me that contact lenses would hurt. Each eye felt as though a hair had been coiled precisely on top of it, and hot, outraged tears poured out. Although the optometrist kept telling me to look up so that he could take measurements, I couldn’t keep my eyes from snapping shut. Light was like a blade.
    “It always takes a little while,” he was telling my mother, “but she’ll get used to them. Just take it easy. Don’t let her overdo.”
    No fear of that. I was already frantic to take the lenses back Out again, and the remaining hour and forty-five minutes of my first wearing period seemed interminable, an eon of torment. My mother had to lead me back out to the car by the hand; even with the sunglasses the optometrist had given me, I had to close my eyes. Light bouncing off of car windows and storefronts was searing.
    For the next month, all I could think about was my eyes. As the optometrist had promised, they began to accommodate to the contacts, but accommodation wasn’t comfort. My eyes stung, lightly, all the time. Every blink set the lenses shifting, and that slight movement felt as if it were grinding a ridge into the moist corneal tissue. The irritation made me blink again, shifting the contacts some more.
    I spent the summer steeped in resentment. I refused invitations to parties and shopping trips because I had to put my contacts in and take them out, in and out, none of which would have happened if I had had reasonable eyes to begin with. Even after I built up some expertise and didn’t have to spend ten minutes tugging the corners of my eyes raw to dislodge the lenses, the contacts kept falling out on their own, vaulting away from my eyes, forcing me to freeze in midstep. With slow, scared care I would sink to my knees and begin patting first my clothes, then the ground around me, feeling for a tiny, mean-spirited disk.
    For the first year I spent a lot of time apologizing about lost lenses, ones I rinsed down the drain or cracked, one that the dog snuffled up, and ones that simply shot out of my eyes and disappeared. My parents were understandably unhappy, and I became familiar with the dread that curled through me as soon as I felt one of the lenses begin to shimmy, the indicator that it would soon try for a getaway.
    But that dread, at least, was practical. Cresting through me like high tide was the other dread, the one I had forgotten about and put off for years. With the contacts ejecting themselves at malicious whim, I was constantly aware that my next breath might leave me marooned, half-blind, vulnerable. The fact that no one ever treated me with anything but solicitude—often strangers got down on their hands and knees with me—did nothing to soften my fear. I started to walk more slowly, to avoid shag carpeting, to sit with my head tilted slightly back, hoping gravity would keep the contacts in place. Outside, I lingered by the sides of buildings.
    By now the myopia was at a full gallop, and the world I saw without any lenses was no longer blurry; it was pure blur. If, for some reason, I had to walk across a room without glasses or contacts, I shuffled like a blind girl, groping for handholds, batting at the air in case something—a lamp, a shelf, some pot hanging from the ceiling—might be ready to strike. Smudged, bulging shapes crowded against me. I imagined fists or rocks or sudden, steep edges, threats from dreams that seemed probable in this shapeless landscape.
    At visits to the ophthalmologist, I strained and fought to see the eye chart, memorizing B F O T Z and F X I O S C before the doctor caught on. I paid closer attention to the toneless way he informed my mother that I needed, again, a stronger correction, and felt my throat clench. My mother said, “I thought the contacts were supposed to slow this down.”
    “They might be doing that,” he said. “There’s no way of telling. She might be going downhill even faster without them.” He bent over to write notes on my chart, which was half an inch thick by now. My eyes were good enough to see that.
    I could see other things, too. I could see the expression on my friend’s face when I came to spend the night and unpacked all my cumbersome equipment: cleansing solution, wetting solution, saline solution, and the heat-sterilization unit that had to be plugged in for two hours. I could also see her expression after I emerged from the bathroom wearing my glasses. “Let me try them on,” she said. I handed them over to let her giggle and bang into walls, and tried not to betray how anxious I was to get them back.
    In biology class, I saw my teacher’s impatient look when I told her that I couldn’t draw the cells clustered on the microscope’s slide. “Just close one eye and draw what you see,” she said, and so, hopelessly, I did, even though I knew no cell ever had such peculiar zigzags. When I got my lab book back, the teacher had written, “You obviously have trouble seeing enough. Or correctly.”

Maybe it was that prim, striving-for-accuracy last phrase that caught me. Or the clinical tone. Whichever, instead of feeling embarrassed or crushed, I was relieved. In a voice that didn’t whine or tremble, her note offered me an interesting new self-definition. I grabbed it.
    With relief, I gave up trying to make out faces across a football field and stopped straining to read the face of a bell tower clock, tasks I had been using to gauge my vision’s deterioration. By this time I was wearing a new, flexible kind of contact lens made out of silicone, far more comfortable and less apt to fall out, so I was confident enough to stroll across parks and thickly carpeted rooms. I started asking the people around me what words were written on the blackboard, what images were flickering by on the TV screen, and people told me. I was a person who had trouble seeing enough, or correctly, so they filled me in on the nuances I would miss on my own.
    At a movie, nodding at the screen, my friend whispered, “She keeps noticing that clock. That clock has something to do with the murder.” Or, gesturing at the teacher the next day in class: “She’s smiling; she’s in a good mood. I’ll bet she’s started smoking again.”
    I was being given not only facts, but also interpretations. Those who could see sharply gave me shadow as well as object, context in addition to text. Did I resent all of these explanations and asides, pronounced slowly as if for the dimwitted? Not on your life. Friends and family were making things easy for me, and after years of constant unease, I was happy with that.
    I drew other people’s opinions over me like a blanket. Sight, it seemed, blended right into insight, and to perceive anything was to make a judgment call. Since the people around me had the first kind of sight, I was willing to grant that they had the second. And then the corollary: since I lacked the one, I surely lacked the other.

Anybody with half an eye can see where this story is going: I got lazy. Knowing that many details were going to be lost to me anyway, I stopped trying to see them. I could get the notion of a landscape, but not the trees it contained; I could recognize a skyline, but not the buildings within it. I was all big picture, untroubled by the little stuff.
    During my junior year in college, when I was an exchange student in England, I traveled to public gardens and scenic overlooks and took pictures. Only when the pictures were developed did I find out that candy wrappers had clogged the shrubbery, and that across the top slat of the pretty green park bench somebody had carved BOLLOCKS. These weren’t microscopic flaws; they were clear to anybody, even myopic me. I had been fully able to see the candy wrappers, but hadn’t bothered to. My photo album from that year is a catalogue of England’s trash, none of which I looked at until the pictures came back. Then I felt outraged and—this is the kicker—betrayed.
    Somewhere, at a juncture I couldn’t pinpoint, I had made a tactical shift in how I used my bad eyes. Not only had I given up trying to see the actual, physical world, but I had begun to let myself see a better world, one cut to my taste and measure, a world that, just for starters, didn’t contain flyaway Snickers wrappers. And I believed in that world firmly enough to feel cheated when the wrappers got caught on the thorns of barberry bushes.
    My inability to see the physical world had infected my mind: I had learned to deceive myself using my mind’s eye, just as my real eyes had been deceiving me for years. When I came home from that year abroad, I saw myself as English and annoyed the daylights out of my friends for months by calling the place we lived a flat (although it was in fact a house), by stowing groceries in the car’s boot, and by pulling beer out of the refrigerator to let it warm up. Had anyone had a mind’s camera in those days, they might have pictured me with highway trash wrapped around my ankles and BOLLOCKS scrawled on my forehead.

Permitting someone with so shaky a grasp of reality to enter relationships was just asking for trouble. The catalogue of my romances from those years is unrelievedly dreary—boys taking short vacations from their long- term girlfriends, boys who didn’t like girls, boys who needed a place to stay and someone to do the cooking. And then the hurt boys, the ones whose long-term girlfriends had left them, who called their therapists twice a day, who were too depressed to go to class. By this point I hardly need add that I saw nothing inappropriate about any of these choices.
    When, at twenty-one, I announced my intention to marry a man I knew only slightly and understood less, dismayed family members and friends ringed around me, trying to make me see how inappropriate the choice was, how poorly we were matched, how little pleasure we took, even then, in each other’s company. Their attempts hardened my resolve. I looked into the eyes of my intended and saw a soul misunderstood by the world, whose inability to hold a steady job indicated his need for a supportive wife, whose vague visions of success I could share without quite having to get them into focus.
    The marriage lasted seven years—longer than it should have. Even when it finally collapsed, its flimsy walls giving way under disappointment, disillusion, and broken promises on both sides, I still couldn’t make sense of the ruin, or understand why it had happened. I couldn’t see, I wailed to a therapist, week after week.
    “If you want to see, you have to look,” she told me.
    “I do look. But I can’t see.”
    “Then you don’t know how to look,” she said.
    Irritated by the smug shrinkishness of her answer, I said, ‘Okay. Fine. Tell me how to look.”
    “This isn’t some kind of mystical thing. Just pay attention. Your only problem is that you don’t pay attention.”
    As always when I am handed an accurate piece of information about myself, I was stung. Days had to pass before I calmed down and heard the invitation behind the therapist’s words, weeks before I was willing to act on them. Not that I knew how to act. All I knew was that a new world was taking shape at my perceptions’ furthest horizons, still distant and faint, but visible just barely.

Five years ago my second husband and I bought a house, the first I had ever owned, and with it came property. The house sits on an ordinary suburban lot; we are not talking about Sissinghurst here. Still, space had to be filled up in gardens and around trees, and I learned, generally by error, about bloom time, soil acidity, shade tolerance, and zone hardiness.
    Like most chores, gardening teaches me about myself, and I have learned that I am never going to be a prize-winning gardener whose lilies glisten and whose roses scent the air a block away. But I am a tidy gardener: I make time to stake perennials and deadhead the coreopsis; I struggle to preserve clean edges around the beds.
    And I am a heroic weeder, a merciless one, driven. I sometimes come into department stores with dirt under my fingernails from digging out knotweed from planting strips in the parking lot. Many gardening tasks are too heavy for me, or require too delicate a touch, but weeding means the staving off of brute chaos, a task I approach with brio.
    A year or so after I started gardening, I visited my mother, who has a garden of her own. Stooping to pluck weeds as we talked, I sought out the infant tufts of Bermuda grass that hadn’t yet had a chance to sprawl and colonize. “How can you even see those tiny things?” my mother asked, and I was so startled that I paused for a moment, still crouched at plant level.
    How can I even see those tiny things? I can spot an errant sprig of clover from halfway across the yard, but can’t make out the face of a good friend five rows down in an auditorium. I can see my gray hairs as if they were outlined in neon, but can’t read a football scoreboard on TV. The college co-ed who didn’t notice trash and graffiti has become a woman who scours every scene, vigilant in her pursuit of jarring notes, infelicitous details. She has learned to look, and to pay attention. But she still can’t see the picture itself, or the happy accidents it might contain.

Bad eyes pick out the bad—it makes sense. Put like that, the condition sounds dire, requiring corrective lenses for the brain or soul. But my myopia is physical before anything else; I am truly unable to make out the face of my friend in that auditorium, however much I might want to see her. A hinge exists between the literal and the metaphorical reality of my crummy vision. I can bear in mind that my vision is untrustworthy, but I can’t change it.
    All of which brings me back to my high-school biology teacher, God bless her, who diagnosed me more accurately than anyone else. I am a person who has trouble seeing enough, or correctly. Knowing this, I must go forth with useful caution, avoiding quick turns and snap decisions.
    And, truly, I do all right. I haven’t yet stepped off a cliff or driven into a pedestrian, and my judgments in recent years seem little worse than anyone else’s. I just have to look, then look again. I have to remember that I am seeing only part of the picture. I have to remind myself to allow for my margin of error, and then bear in mind that the world is, always, more populous and bright and bountifully landscaped than it appears.

Erin McGraw teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Lies of the Saints, her most recent collection of fiction, was named a Notable Book of 1996 by the New York Times. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere.

“Bad Eyes” appears in our Spring 1998 issue.