This Is the Story About the Eyeball I Found In the Gutter
Originally Published in The Blue Monday Review, November 2016
This morning, I found an eyeball in the gutter. I went out in my slippers and robe to pick up the newspaper and saw it at the edge of the big leaf pile. It still had the shine that eyes are supposed to have, like it had just blinked.
My kids love that part.
I tell them how at first I wasn’t sure it was an eye, so I crouched down with my butt resting on my heels and I grabbed a stick from the leaf pile and I gave it a poke. The stick slid across the surface of the lens. I poked the trailing band of stringy, fleshy nerves and they seemed drier and rubbery.
Kids like gross things.
I threw the stick to the side. I tell my children that I stood up and looked down the road in both directions to see if anyone was missing an eyeball. And I tell them that when I looked back down, the eyeball was gone.
I like to tell my children stories. I love the way they look at me breathlessly and cling to my voice. I tell them all the stories I can think of, except for the story of Maddie. I do not tell them that eighteen years before today, Madeline, my first daughter, died of complications from a heart transplant. Neither of them knows that I had another daughter. My husband doesn’t know about her, either. The anniversary of her death used to seem poignant, but now it doesn’t feel better or worse than any other day.
I’m not proud of that feeling. Sometimes I’d rather have the grief that made me feel closer to her. But instead that’s been replaced by the smell of the pancakes I’m making for my family. I tell the spooky story to Michael and Nicole. They sit at the breakfast bar and swing their feet and they gasp when I mention the texture of the rubbery nerves. They scream with delight when I tell them the eyeball was gone.
I do not tell my children that the eye was blue. And I don’t tell them that after I found it, the way the egg yolks looked sliding into the bowl of flour made me dry heave over the kitchen sink.
My house is filled with Ikea furniture. Our family grew too fast for our furniture and finances to keep pace. Dan wants even more kids. Dan wants an army of children, so we’d need a yellow school bus for family trips to the supermarket and I’d need a baton to lead the parade through the aisles. He said ‘I want kids’ so many times during the first few months we dated that I asked him once whether he was falling in love with my uterus or with me.
“I love you,” he said, and he laughed.
It’s a Sunday and he comes to the kitchen wearing a worn blue bathrobe and worn slippers and his hair is peacocking in the back. He kisses us all, 1, 2, 3. The first pancake turns out lumpy and browned on the edges and raw in the middle, but Michael wants it anyway. He’s eight and wants everything first. A few weeks ago he heard that a kid down the block was getting a skateboard, and so quickly bought one of his own with his saved allowance. He carries it around the neighborhood like a badge of honor. I’ve never seen him ride it. I slide the ugly pancake onto his plate and he shoves half of it into his mouth, shoots a mocking grin at his sister as the pancake erupts from between his teeth. He’s making fun of Nicole because she’s missing so many front baby teeth that she can slide an Oreo into her mouth without moving her jaw. Dan tells him off halfheartedly. The rest of the pancakes come out fine. We eat them on furniture named after lingonberries and Swedish men.
Dan rubs his round stomach as he eats, then has a swordfight with Nicole using their forks. I love the way she bites her tongue with fierce concentration as they battle. When breakfast is over Dan tells the kids it’s okay to go watch cartoons in the den, but don’t sit too close to the television. They leave and I pour him another cup of coffee.
I try to ask him nonchalantly if there is a hunting season in Dayton that I don’t know about. Deer, maybe?
“In Dayton?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, “and do deer have blue eyes?”
“Becky,” he laughs, “what are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say. I top off his already full mug of coffee and then smooth the back of his hair with my hand, cupping the top of his scalp. He closes his eyes like a dog might in the sun. “Nothing,” I say again, “I’m going to take a shower.”
I do not tell my husband anything about the past. He doesn’t know I had my first daughter when I was 23, that I lost her when I was 28. Dan does know that I was married once before, but he thinks my debt is from lawyer bills and bad decisions with credit cards. He doesn’t know that what I owe is from Madeline’s medical expenses.
I met him two years after Maddie died. It was too soon to meet him. They say hindsight is 20/20 but I knew it then, too. My divorce had just been finalized and I’d moved to Ohio because it was not Massachusetts. We met at a bookstore coffee shop over the creamer. He had a round face with eyes that seemed just a little too small, and he had wide hands that poured milk into my coffee for me as we discussed the books we were carrying–mine on gardening with minimum effort, his a large tomb of historical fiction.
Things are complicated, I told him when he asked to see me again.
Please? he said.
Dan and I met in Dayton, Ohio. It’s a clean city and everything is laid out in neat rows. Boston was the city where I fell in love with Larry, where I did everything too young, where life was messy and confusing and where I learned how to be in love and how to be a mother, and when those things ended they took Boston with them. I used to try to go back every year and visit her grave, but the gesture started to feel empty. There’s nothing more for me to do at her grave but feel sorry for myself because Madeline isn’t here to feel sorry for anymore.
Dan and I are in a bowling league.
Dan and I go to parent teacher nights together.
Dan and I hold hands sometimes when it’s just the two of us watching television.
I do not tell Dan about the eyeball in the gutter.
This is me now, I tell myself, and I’m happy.
In the shower I wonder when Larry will call. He always calls on Maddie’s anniversary. If Dan picks up, Larry tries to sell him a subscription to People Magazine. If the kids answer, he hangs up immediately.
I shampoo and I repeat aloud, barely whispered, the steps of the transplant procedure as they had been explained to me. Anesthesia, scalpel, spread the ribcage, clamp the aorta, start the heart-lung bypass, remove the heart, wait. Most people don’t know that they usually take the heart out before the new heart is in the building. The new, healthy heart will still be en route via helicopter, and they put the transplant patient on the heart-lung machine, and then they remove the old, broken heart. Sometimes they even chop up the old heart for research. I used to know a woman whose daughter-in-law was a surgical nurse, and she told me that part. The surgeons will all stand there for fifteen, twenty minutes staring at an empty, gaping chest cavity, the room completely silent. She said her daughter-in-law used that time to pray. Staring at an empty chest cavity, at the back of the ribs, at the deflated lungs, the veins pinched like green garden hoses under a boot–I wonder what sort of prayers were inspired in the surgeons while staring at this empty, living body.
During the surgery, Larry and I mostly sat in the waiting room. Sometimes we moved to the cafeteria, and sometimes Larry went out alone and smoked a cigarette in his car with all the windows rolled up while I tried to memorize everything in the vending machine in alphabetical order. When he came back in he told me how nice the weather was. Really autumn, he said, really.
I get out of the shower and dry off with the towel hanging on the Ikea smörgasbörg over-toilet shelf. The main thing I still think about on Maddie’s anniversary: she died of pneumonia. Complications created by the breathing tube in post-op. The new heart they’d transplanted had worked just fine.
Nicole turned four last week.
Maddie was normal until she was four, when she had her first seizure. Not normal–exceptional. I’m biased, but that’s what I think. She already knew how to read when the first seizure hit. She always had a book in her hand. She was perched at the top of the slide when it happened. There was a rusting swing set in the yard with a plastic slide attached, and the whole structure pitched and moaned when she used it. She was sitting quietly at the top of the slide reading and I was in the kitchen doing the dishes. I heard the groaning of the swing set and looked out the window and she was thrashing and lurching down the slide on her back, convulsing against the plastic, and I ran out with my yellow rubber gloves still on, still covered in soap suds.
For the past week, I’ve been watching Nicole from the dining room window whenever she goes outside. I’m in the bedroom when I hear the back door slam so I run to the other side of the house to watch her. My hair is soaking the back of my shirt. I hadn’t wanted another house with a swing set. Dan comes up behind me, puts his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s unhealthy,” Dan says, “the way you worry about her. What’s the worst that could happen?” I don’t say anything, just continue to watch.
Nicole isn’t much like Maddie. She has short hair cut to her ears and likes to make mud pies with worm filling. But even so. Dan couldn’t understand. He didn’t understand why I asked the pediatrician two weeks ago if there was any merit in performing an echocardiogram on her at this age, just to see. I don’t think Dan could understand, even if he knew everything.
Dan hugs me from behind as I watch Nicole straddle the rubber swing seat sideways. He says, “She’s fine. Stop worrying.”
I pick up the phone in the kitchen. “Hello?” I say.
“Hello,” Larry says.
“Sure, I have a little time to update our information,” I say. Dan and the kids are in the den watching television. I bring the phone into the bedroom and close the door. I listen to him breathe on the line for almost a full minute before I say, “Hello,” again.
“How are you holding up?” Larry says. He always says this first.
“I’m holding up,” I say. “How about you?”
“Not as well,” he says, which is another thing he always says, and I wonder if the whole reason we keep these calls going every year is for me to make him feel stagnant so I can feel superior, and for him to make me feel guilty about moving forward so he can feel like a saint. “I thought I saw Maddie in the park the other day.”
“Well,” I say.
“But not Maddie like when she was alive. I saw her like she’d be now. Older. She was reading a book under a tree. She had this long hair–” he pauses. “Maybe I’m crazy, you know? It felt really real to me.”
“Well,” I say, “you’re in good company. I found an eyeball in the gutter this morning.”
“An eyeball?”
“Yes,” I say, “it was blue.”
“Becky,” he says.
“I found it in the leaf pile out front. It still had the nerves attached. The nerves were all ripped and bloody but the eye itself was clean, totally clean.”
He listens to me breathe on the line before he says, “Maybe we’re both nuts now. Maybe we’re both completely nuts at this point. It’s been a long time, Becky. A really long time.”
“Yes.” I say.
It’s been a long time since Maddie died, but it also feels like my entire life has been very, very long. As he keeps talking about the girl he saw in the park, how hard it has been for him to sleep, I try to remember what it had felt like for so many years, loving him. I feel pity now, maybe, but nothing more. Pity, because it has been 18 years and he has not let himself find an ounce of happiness, even though I think it’s probably more work to be miserable than it is to submit to being content. I try, but I can’t feel anything for the person I’d thought was the love of my life, whatever that means.
I met Larry when I was 8 years old. I was lying on the hill behind the school with my eyes closed in the sun. It was hot, really hot outside, I remember that clearly. Larry was 10 and on the swings nearby and just as I closed my eyes he jumped off the swing and landed a few inches from my head. I opened my eyes immediately, the sunlight dizzying, my breath caught in my throat. I don’t remember anything else from that day except the heat and the blinding sun and the horrible falling feeling from the thump of his feet, so disorienting even though I hadn’t moved.
The day I said goodbye to Larry, I thought I’d feel the same thing. That falling. He was most of everything I’d known. He was the boy who shared his clementines with me in the lunchroom, where I had my first soursweet kiss, bitter like the orange seeds. And later he was the boy who snuck beers from his father’s garage and drank them with me in the dark of my parents’ patio, his tongue slightly metallic from the cans. He was the boy who told me he loved me, the words exhaled with cigarette smoke. His attention made me feel charged, high. He was the boy I married. We moved to a nice neighborhood. We had a daughter. But if I’m honest to myself, our relationship never felt real until she got sick. The illness gave us a common purpose. A reason to console, to plan, to decide.
One night we brushed her hair together. Maddie sat in front of us on the floor and we sat on the couch. She had hair down to her butt that knotted up because she spent so much time in bed. I would hand him a section of hair gingerly, and he would brush it as I separated the next section from the tangled mass on the top of her head. Later that night the two of us lay in bed and kept finding long strands of her dark hair in our mouths. It’s the only memory where I felt with Larry how I now feel with Dan.
“An eyeball,” Larry says again.
“An eyeball,” I say.
“What did you do with it, Becky?” he asks me.
“It was just lying there.”
“Alright,” he says, “but what did you do with it?”
“Maybe you’re right and we’re both crazy,” I say to him. “It’s been a very long time.”
After Madeline’s new heart stopped, halted like a car shuddering out of gas, Larry left the room. He needed to walk, he said. He was pale. I let him go. I felt less lonely after he left the room. Her body still right there with me, so small, bruised, the sutures in her chest still raw beneath a blue sheet. Her little body, all it had been through. I wish I could go back and tell myself how eventually we can all live without the people we thought we couldn’t live without. I didn’t know that then.
I think that I found an eyeball in the gutter this morning. When I think about it, it seems very real to me. I discovered the eyeball because its strangeness contrasted with the dried, brown leaves–– it still had the shine that eyes are supposed to have. It was early enough to be very cold and what was probably dew a few days before was now frost. The shimmering crystals clung to the rope of nerves. I poked it with a stick. I pulled the stick away and it was tacky with blood or tears or whatever keeps an eyeball that consistency. I threw the stick to the side.
I stood up, and slowly nudged the eyeball into the storm drain with the side of my slipper. I watched it disappear into the grate, heard it fall. It wasn’t the right thing to do, but that’s what I did.
“Maybe I’m crazy,” I say to him.
When I think about it, it feels very real to me.
I hang up the phone and I’m so tired it hurts in the core of my joints. It’s hard to get up from the edge of the bed but I do. I walk down the hallway towards the sounds of Sunday morning cartoons. The hallway walls are covered in the kinds of things that suburban families frame–pictures of first bike rides, expensively matted school art projects. I wish I had the energy to take them all down and lay them on the grey carpeting like hot coals and walk across it all with bare feet.
When I get to the den, I stand in the doorway and look at the back of Dan and the kids’ heads. I get this horrible wave of feeling, and I wonder if all of this happiness is a lie I’m telling myself.
I am so tired, my joints are so heavy, that I feel the need to sit on the floor and lean against the wall. I love my kids, in this primal, obsessive way. And I know I love Dan in the way I still know my childhood phone number by heart. I think about the love I felt for Madeline as I held her hand, listening to the oxygen tank whir, watching her eyes droop above the mask as the anesthesia took over. The carpeting is so soft and so I slide down a little farther, a little farther, until I’m staring at the ceiling. I think about how Larry made me feel in those years when we were both drowning, caring for Maddie–crazy and wild and feeling like the love would just burst out of me like an avalanche and swallow us all up whole. I’ve never felt that way in Dayton. I feel safe, and happy, and flat.
Oh God, I think, oh God this is such a mistake. And I don’t mean that I don’t love my children, or Dan, or this life. This is all such a mistake, I think, and that doesn’t mean that it was a mistake to move to Dayton or to move on. Lying to Dan about everything was not the mistake. This is all such a mistake, it really is, and I mean that I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that if I’d tried even less to be happy I would have been better off. Because I know now that the happiness part figures itself out. We figure out how to love more, or love less, for survival.
This is all such a mistake, I think, and I mean that if I could, I would go back to when I was eight years old and I would tell myself to lie down in the grass, in the sun, just a little while longer. A lot longer. I’m lying on the carpeting listening to the sound of cartoons and I close my eyes and my Dayton reality goes dark. If I could go back to when I was eight I would tell myself to notice the rushing red behind my eyelids, feel the beetle crawling across my shin. Keep your eyes shut, Becky, I’d say. And I’d force myself to notice how the stiff crabgrass scratches the back of my neck, even though it irritates me and turns my skin red. Feel it all as it actually is, right now. I would tell myself oh Becky, how wonderful.