The Glasses

All the way home from the optometrist’s office, I cannot not stop pulling down the sun visor and admiring my new red eyeglass frames in the mirror. They are thick and resinous, dark ruby red outside changing into a fiery crimson underneath. The lenses are thin, uniform, unobtrusive. I smile at my image, wondering if I should whiten my teeth more to create a more dazzling contrast. Maybe I will even start wearing lipstick – a daring fire-engine red.

My husband glances at me in amusement as he drives us home. “I’ll bet this is the first time you’ve chosen glasses based on how pretty they are on you,” he says. He is partly right.

In third grade, I wore large clunky brown-framed bifocals, the kind you’d expect to see on an old librarian, or on the forgetful neighbor who just moved to the nursing home downtown. I’d had major eye muscle surgery when I was four years old, and the doctors at the university hospital tried technique after cutting-edge technique to improve my muscle control. When I was tired, even in glasses, one eye would drift towards the other, each crossing and sticking to the other like magnets.

The children did not have to be cruel to make fun of me. My eyes were unlike any they had ever seen, and not in the beautiful fairy tale way, not like the violet eyes of the lovely changeling waif with white-blond hair. I was the troll.

In the middle of a biyearly visit to Shands Eye Hospital, Dr. Romano told me that I would need new lenses since my eyes were improving so quickly. He and Mom decided that I should have new frames to accommodate them. So Mom guided me to the optical center where I, squinting from all the atropine drops and fluorescent light, reeled at the choices available to me.

Oh, so many! Until this day, I had noticed very few types of glasses. There were my own, heavy and brown; the silver wire frames my father wore; and the funny horn-rimmed black ones Mrs. Baker, my teacher, wore on a thick purple cord around her neck more often than she did on her face. It was all I could do to keep my hands folded in front of me so that I would not touch the bright turquoise-studded ones, or the ones encrusted with thin metal flowers, or the ones made of such a clear plastic that they hardly showed. After a long, fascinated browse and several pleas from my mother that we make a choice and move on, I found the perfect ones. They were wire frames enameled with pale blue on the top half and a peachy-pink on the lower half. The optician placed them gently on my nose and said, “Well, look at that beautiful girl!” I could hardly recognize myself: so much more of my face showed, I could almost see cheekbones - high and lean like Mom’s -, and, most of all, my eyes looked larger, browner, brighter. I grinned dreamily at myself in the mirror as my mom used the desk phone to call my father. After a long conversation, Mom returned to me, looking tired. “Let’s get them, why don’t we, darling?” I floated through the rest of the doctor’s visit and pestered Mom about the glasses all the way home. One week to wait for them seemed much too long.

Each night before bed, I would plan for my new arrival. I cleared a special space on my nightstand for them to sit. I drew pictures of myself in the new glasses, surrounded by hearts and bluebirds that matched my blue and pink frames. At the bottom of the nightstand drawer, I hid my favorite, most secret drawing: the one in which Kimberley Gupton, the prettiest and most loved girl in the class, was eating snacks with me at recess. All the other girls stood stiffly by in their triangle skirts and blue crayon eyes, waiting in a straight line to befriend me, too. On the last day of waiting, I sneaked into the farthest corner of the back yard and dug a deep hole in which to bury my terrible brown glasses when I no longer would be expected to wear them.

When I finally was seated on the high cushiony stool at the optical center, the optician took a very long time in the back, emerging at last with a yellow envelope and a large expectant smile on her face. I wiggled in my seat, and my mom sat beside me with her hand on mine. I opened the yellow envelope like a long-awaited Christmas present I knew I was getting but could hardly believe I was getting. I opened the wrong end, though, and the glasses slid onto the table.

Something was very wrong. The frames were as sleek as I remembered, but they looked pregnant. The lenses were huge and overstuffed the delicate housings. I stared at them head on, my jaw dropping. The lenses were not clear and thin as they had been before. Instead, they had a grotesque pattern seemingly scratched into them – a vicious white spiral starting at the middle and spreading to the outermost reaches.

“What’s wrong with them?” I stammered.

My mom opened her mouth to speak, but remained silent. The optician took over in her pleasant, reasonable voice. “Honey, these are special lenses that are going to help you focus straight forward. Now that you can see so well up close and far away, the doctors want to keep your eyes from crossing. That’s what these lenses are for.”

While she was talking, she slipped the hideous things onto my face. I could not help but look in the mirror. Except through the tiny unmarked holes in the middle of each lens, I could not see my eyes. I looked like the ventriloquist in the Saturday cartoons.
When I was older, I would understand more easily that, between the doctor’s bills and other young family costs, my parents had paid far too much for those frames. If there was one shard of grace in that moment, it was an instinctive sense that I was not the only one who had lost in this exchange. When the optician murmured, “Doesn’t she look wonderful, Mom?” I did not say a word.

At school they made fun of me even more than when I’d worn the old brown clunkers. Kimberley Gupton did not ask me to sit with her during snack time at recess. She and the other girls whispered and giggled every time I had the misfortune of walking past them. I had to admit to myself that for the most part I could not blame them.