Before My Eyes Page 3

  “Take Izzy,” I say, softly. “Can’t you take just her today?”

  “I don’t want to take Izzy without you. She’s too young for all this.”

  “She’s six,” I say, knowing that sounds dumb from a seventeen-year-old.

  I wish I were “too young.” I know I’m being horrible. But I hate the rehabilitation center. I hate going there. I hate having to smile at her and pretend everything is going fine, that I’m happy to be there, that it’s a happy day to visit my mother at the rehabilitation center. I’m holding it all together, but I can’t smile.

  “Come on, Claire, for me.”

  I do everything for him. Cook. Clean. Take care of Izzy. I wrap myself into my blanket.

  He sucks in more breath.

  “It’s going to be over ninety-five degrees again,” I say, going to my door but not opening it. We couldn’t take my mother outside yesterday, it was sweltering. Yet the inside of that rehab center was airless. A thrum of machines and moans swept down those long corridors—and I could barely breathe. Izzy sang “It’s a Small World” with my mother, struggling out the words. They must have sung that song ten times. Yesterday, I was there forever, stuck to a plastic chair, pleasing no one, watching dust swirl in the heat, and mouthing without sound, “It’s a small world after all.”

  I can’t go there today. I won’t. I deserve a day off.

  And I can’t open my bedroom door now. I don’t want to see my father. If I see him, if I look him in the eyes, I’ll cave. I’ll go to the rehab center. Maybe I will insist that we bring her outside to the courtyard, no matter the heat. I’ll work with her on standing. I can support her. Upright, with a cane in her good hand, Izzy always cheering us on.

  However, if she stands, I will see how much thinner she is, thinner than she has been since Izzy was born, even thinner than she was before Izzy. I’ll see that she’s all loose skin, as if vital organs have been sucked out of her. She will not have the strength to walk and talk. It will take all her concentration to struggle, left foot, right foot. After a few steps, my father will want her to sit. They may even argue. She is determined to walk. Soon enough, we will have to ease her back into her wheelchair. I will have to sing with Izzy “It’s a Small World,” until all other songs—all other sounds—are banished and I’m without images or words.

  “Why don’t you take a day off from visiting, too?” I say to my father in a whisper, as if not going to visit my mother can be a secret between us. “And a day off from work, too?”

  “I can’t,” he says. “I haven’t worked a full day at the office since this happened to your mother.”

  He hasn’t taken a day off all summer. He’s pasty-pale and exhausted. “All you do is work,” I say, without adding—and visit her.

  “All I do is work, Claire? I don’t know if I can afford the rent on my office space anymore. Or the mortgage here.” Right before my mother’s stroke, he was forced out of his corporate job. He set up his own income tax preparation business, but I know it’s been hard, even though he was always saying at first that it was the best time to go into business for himself.

  “I don’t know if I can do this much more, Claire. I just don’t know. I know I should go to the beach with you and Izzy. I know I should do more for you two girls—” His voice breaks. “But the insurance.”

  I can’t bear his tears, again.

  I drop the blanket away from me, feel like I’m molting. But I’m not becoming anything else. I’m not a caterpillar turning into the butterfly. I fling open the door. “I’ll go with you.”

  He is disheveled, even more than I am. He’s in khakis and a wrinkled polo shirt with a stain above the pocket. I almost want to say that he should take off his shirt and I’ll wash it, but he may not have a clean one. Our laundry is like a spore, one attracts another, one towel, another. Who knew three people could produce so much laundry?

  Yet I have everything else under control. I wake up, make breakfast, vacuum and dust. I vacuum and dust every day. I am good at that. The entire house. Every day. But the laundry piles grow. Dishes, too. But laundry more. My father turns to leave me.

  “I’ll go,” I say again, louder, as if he can’t hear me. His eyes wander over my head, as if someone else, anyone, is going to exit my bedroom. He never looks at me anymore. I’m not sure what he doesn’t want to see. Unfortunately, I’m hard to miss. I’m five-foot-nine, broad-shouldered, wide-hipped, long-legged, oversized, not fat, just everything else. My mother used to say that someday, I’d find a boy who would appreciate me. Not here. Not in South Lakeshore, or across town, in North Lakeshore. Not here, where size zero is a goal as specific as a top-tier college. “You’re athletic,” my mother always said. I am not athletic. I’m too big on top, too bouncy, though when no one is looking I like to run. I like to swim. I need to do it more. My mother always said that she should exercise more, but she never did, and look what happened to her. She was overweight; she had high blood pressure; she was prediabetic, or so I learned afterward. She was forty-three years old when she gave birth to Izzy and gained fifty pounds from her pregnancy. She was always asking me to go for walks after dinner, and I was always refusing. In some way, this is all my fault.

  My father gazes down the short hallway as if he expects my mother, or anybody else, to come save him from talking to me. “You’re right, Claire,” he finally says. “You don’t have to go. You shouldn’t go. Your mother and I have to figure out what to do next.”

  “Please, let me go?”

  “Don’t go for me.”

  “I know how hard it is on you, isn’t it?”

  “On all of us.”

  I think he’s going to hug me, or I think I should hug him. If we were another family, we would. Instead, he inspects his shoes. They are scuffed. My mother would tell him that they needed to be shined. She’d even polish them for him because, she’d say, your father isn’t good at remembering to do things like that.

  “I don’t want you to go. None of this adds up. None of it makes sense. I can’t make sense of the numbers.”

  “What’s going to happen next?”

  “Too many questions. It’s better that you don’t go today. I need to do this alone—or just with your mother. Just her and me need to figure this out.”

  He blames me, too. I don’t do the laundry, don’t remind him to shine his shoes, and I didn’t call 911 fast enough for my mother.

  He sighs. “Why don’t you go to the library with Izzy today? It will be nice and cool at the library. Just be careful, that’s all. Watch your sister.” His face is big and jowly and loose. His dark curly hair is grayer at the temples than I remember it, from yesterday or the day before. He needs a haircut, too; my mother would make him go to the barber. He comes home later and later each night and eats alone—cold fast food from paper bags. My mother would yell at him about that. Before, we’d always have dinner together—almost every night—my mother was big on sitting down to dinner, no television, no telephone, no anything, just the four us. I realize now that it was the best part of the day, the four of us around the kitchen table. I was always wanting to hurry and she’d always tell me to slow down. It was the only time of day she seemed to sit. I’d always want to get to my friends. Now, I haven’t seen any of my friends over the summer, and of course, my best friend, Sara, moved to Washington, D.C. She was the only one who understood how important my poetry is to me, how serious I am about it. So I don’t even really have any true friends. Except for Izzy, I’ve spent the entire summer alone.

  “Just promise me you won’t go to the beach. Go to the movies. And even there, make sure you keep an eye on your sister.”

  “Don’t I always watch Izzy? Haven’t I spent the whole summer watching Izzy? What else do I do except watch Izzy?”

  “Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t want you at the beach. I heard that the undercurrent is particularly bad right now. Your mother would never forgive me if something happened to Izzy,” and he adds, “or you.”<
br />
  “If we go to the movies, I’ll need at least twenty bucks.”

  He drops his shoulders, sinking into himself, a big man made small. He reaches into his back pocket and yanks out a worn-thin wallet. Inside there is one bill. He hands it to me. I don’t even want it. I should have gotten a job this summer like everybody else. But I take it. “You’re sure?”

  “Take it.”

  “I’m going to do all the laundry today.”

  “Go have fun. You’re right. Go to the movies. It’s the last weekend of the summer. Your mother would want you to have fun. Life is too short. Didn’t your mother always say that?”

  His voice catches.

  My mother never said that. She said smarter things, and not just because she was a psychologist. I correct myself: She is a psychologist still, isn’t she? Does a stroke take away that, too?

  I curl the twenty-dollar bill into my hand, wanting to be that fun-loving, easygoing girl who hangs out, has a good time, is game for anything and everything. I want to be somebody else.

  Max

  Friday, 6:45 A.M.

  Spend your summer having to work at the Snack Shack at the town beach. Work with freaks: Trish, Peter, and worst, Barkley, who smells like rotten eggs mixed with seawater.

  Study, when forced, to take the SATs for the third time, even though you’re going to screw up again anyway. Write at least fifty versions of the introduction paragraph of your college essay.

  Keep your dog locked up in your bedroom. Your mother doesn’t want the dog running through the house all day while they are focusing on your father’s reelection. You agreed to this. But you didn’t think King would be locked in your room for months.

  Imagine you are on the field again. It all started with the last soccer game of the season. You were playing mid-field, and you went flying on the grass, landing flat on your back. It was the first game your parents watched from beginning to end that entire spring. They hadn’t seen you hit hard before—you had been caught in more than one slide, elbowed more than one time—but this time when you went down, you blacked out, only for a few seconds. When you stood up, everybody cheered, your mom the loudest, breaking your name into two syllables: Maa-ax. And you didn’t want to show weakness or pain. Coach never wanted to hear complaining, even though you’d been hit harder than you’d ever been in your life.

  You were given a penalty kick. Walking to the line you felt like a steel rod had been rammed into your back. The kick spun high, toward the corner, the left corner, just as the coach had you practice a hundred times. It flew—a white-and-black bird—too wide, shot off the goalpost, and missed the net. You would have had a perfect season without that loss.

  Afterward, you were on your knees. Your mother and father were leaping out of their chairs, emblazoned with Reelect Glenn Cooper, your neighbor. At home, they wanted you to go to the doctor, and you went. The doctor checked you over for five or ten minutes tops, and said that you should take it easy, take over-the-counter meds, and return in a week or two. Your father had to be back in Albany and your mother had to be at a fund-raiser, and you nodded and agreed. Later that night, you borrowed one of your father’s prescription pain pills for his back. That’s when you started taking a pill, now and then.

  Even now, eight weeks later, it sometimes hurts as much to lie down as it does to stand. Now you need something, again, to stop the pain. You need to wake up. You need to walk. You need to stand all day at work. You need a pill, now and then, even when the pain isn’t there, just to keep the memory of pain away, to dull your senses, to float instead of walk or stand.

  * * *

  Singing. Chirping. Not mermaids. I don’t know why I wake up thinking of mermaids: too many days at the Snack Shack. Sand in my brain just like it’s embedded in my skin. No, not mermaids. Frantic birds sensing rain, I hope. Not mermaids at all, I say aloud to myself as if I have been submerged. I surface slowly from sleep enhanced with over-the-counter pain and sleep aids. Lie in a pool of sweat on top of my plaid bedcovers. Lie still. One last weekend to go at the Snack Shack on the beach, and I am done.

  King, loyal black Labrador retriever, stretches out beside me. He should be sleeping in his crate in the corner, according to my father. But I rarely make him go in the crate. King is the first and the last dog I will ever have. I couldn’t bear to have a King II. My mother once told me about a hotel in New York that has always had a pet cat. If the cat’s male, it’s named Hamlet; if it’s female, it’s named Matilda. If I were to die, would my parents just come up with a Max II?

  Yup, maybe they would: Max II. But I couldn’t have a King II. No dog could replace King. I wipe my slick hands down his black coat from head to tail; being rubbed by me is one of his favorite things, but these long strokes are as much an attempt to dry my palms, pull myself out, save myself from mermaids.

  King shifts his snout from the pillow we are sharing and sniffs my hand. He would know me in the blackness of a cave or mine, or grave. He licks me. Now I’m wet from him, too. I think of kisses, of a girl kissing my face, finding my mouth, and drawing my lips to hers. Of course, I know it’s my dog. I try to push him off my bed. He digs in. Instead, I stretch. Feels strange to stretch. I’m two and three-quarter inches taller than I was in that doctor’s office. I could say three inches. I’m three inches taller.

  I close my eyes and think about the girl I’ve been thinking about all summer: short, real short, only about five feet tall. I should call her petite. She’s blond, swinging blond hair, and in a different string bikini at the Snack Shack at least three times a week, each time the bikini somehow magically growing smaller over glossy skin, until one day, perhaps today, she’ll just show up naked. Her name: Samantha, never Sam or Sammie, only Samantha to her friends. I’m not one of her friends.

  King groans, or I groan first. But he’s just hungry, castrated and hungry, and I’m—what am I? I heave upright. His ears, alert, hear my movement, and he anchors himself onto four legs.

  My mother is always saying I’m the most handsome guy she’s ever met, but she’s my mother. I have dimples, you can only see them when I smile, and blue eyes with 20/20 vision, and splotches of acne made worse from a summer eating hot dogs and soft swirl and sweating from every pore. I play soccer, varsity. Other than that, I’m ordinary, very ordinary, contrary to what my parents, the extraordinary state senator and his wife, want to believe.

  I rub my lower back. One pill would do it. But I can’t risk taking another pill from Dad’s supply. Nothing over-the-counter is strong enough. Every day at work, I spend the whole day, or at least my eight-hour shift, standing, serving so-called customers, pathetic, moronic, sorry job that it is. I need one pill.

  King shifts, raises his head, barks at the rustle of trees against the windows. I wish I could open them wide, and let some fresh air in for him. The central air is blasting a cold breeze, and my parents would kill me if I opened a window. But then, I never knew how hot summer could get until working behind a grill.

  Two more days of work, and then Sunday—and Sunday night, the party. I groan. This is the last weekend before my last year of high school. I wish I could take a pill and have the whole year be over. My back tightens. Sunday night is my mother’s annual birthday party for me. Will it be the last? I shouldn’t even be having a party this year. She always gets me a huge cake and I don’t want a cake this year. I don’t even like cake. And I don’t want to see any more of my so-called friends. But maybe Samantha will come, if I ask her. Maybe she’ll show up in her bikini, one of the pink ones, I muse, easing onto my back, feeling sore and bruised, smelling the sea off my skin, even though I showered as soon as I got home last night. I can almost feel the pounding of the waves, hear voices calling out to me, not mermaids, I don’t even know why I think of mermaids, it’s the echoing of kids wanting ice cream swirls, demanding cold bottles of water, shoving sandy dollar bills at me. Ice cream. Vanilla? Chocolate? Or swirl? Two bucks. Water? Two bucks. Yes, it’s cold. It’s always cold. Vanilla?
Chocolate? Or swirl? Two bucks. Water? Two bucks. Yes, it’s cold. It’s always cold. Will I die saying those words? Will they be my last? Yup, they will be.

  One more weekend. One last weekend.

  I’m going to talk to Samantha today. I’m going to ask her to my party.

  I’ve got to admit it, my head is clearing all too fast. I want to wake from sleep slowly. I want to keep focused on Samantha in her bikini or, better yet, another image: Samantha at the Snack Shack without a bikini, with nothing at all. Right now I want to be alone, not with her, but with the image of her strolling up to the Snack Shack all blond and tanned. I once overheard her tell her friends that she was a size zero. Can you be less than zero?

  A rap at my bedroom door wipes out Samantha. “Time to get up, Max.” My mother. I am never alone. Next to me, King scrambles. Barks at the closed door.

  Now she lowers her voice. “What did I say about that dog, Max? Please quiet him down in there.”

  “Deb, he’s a dog,” says my father from somewhere behind my mother. “Maybe he should be let out of this room?”

  “As long as we are in campaign mode, I can’t have that dog all over the house. The way we are going to win this election is to be focused and organized. Isn’t that what we agreed to, Glenn?”

  All my life, she’s been the PTA mom—president of my elementary school PTA at one point, even the president of the Board of Education. My mother encouraged my father to run for office. Two years ago, people were eager to vote for change, anybody but the incumbent, and my father, to my surprise, and even to my mother’s, I think, won. He won by a 1 percent margin, by fewer than two hundred votes. Winning is winning, he always said to me, my father, the former high school quarterback. There are no losers in this family, he said to me on election night.

  King growls. Something instinctual in him says to protect and defend. I wish I had his instincts. I sense what he senses: my father is on the other side of the door. I can hear him breathing and hesitating. I pet King down with, “Good boy. Good dog. I’m going to get up and feed you in a minute.” He turns to my voice as if challenging me to do it now. I’m not up to any challenge. I can feel the crack of every vertebra. A vise clamps down the center of my back.