Abby entered high school with eyeglasses and a damaged reputation. She felt self-conscious about both. It didn’t matter what style of glasses she tried; her correction was so substantial that it made the Abby behind the lenses appear much smaller than the Abby around them. The distortion line looked huge to her if she wore big Jackie O frames, and her round face made her appear grandmotherly to herself when she put on Lennonesque wire-rims. She begged for contact lenses but her father said, “They won’t correct your astigmatism” or “They’ll be too uncomfortable to wear with your allergies” or “It takes too much willpower to get used to them.”

As for her reputation, it grew along with her breasts. Boys paid attention to her and girls didn’t, and the attention some boys paid wasn’t just about sex. Abby felt a few were her friends. She drew a line between kissing boys that made her squirm and practice-kissing with friends, and the latter never seemed like it was wrong. Even when practice-kissing sometimes led to a little groping, it wasn’t too sweaty or weird; it seemed okay to her.

She hit her stride in college. Her breasts and eyes united and she felt more attractive than ever before (or since). She finally got contact lenses, hard ones because of her astigmatism, and she adjusted to them with ease. Her father had been incorrect; the process took almost no effort. Suddenly she had peripheral vision. Objects were no longer reduced in size by her correction. It was as mind-expanding for her as when she’d just gotten her first eyeglasses and had seen, from the car window riding home, individual leaves on trees and knotholes in wooden fences.

And there were her eyes. Unmasked by her glasses, they contended again for best feature. They were well-shaped and a fierce blue. She began to wear eyeshadow and liner and especially mascara. Those were the years when she was always on a low-key search for the perfect mascara wand, when she experimented with false eyelashes, when once even, she superglued individual lashes to her own and had a few Tammy-Faye months before they all grew out.

Her breasts were stand-out, too. Literally. Very large but not yet sagging. She felt attractive. She didn’t expose them but she never hunched. She had no trouble getting dates. As fine as were her eyes, most of her male friends tended to focus on her chest.

Abby’s father had spoken often in praise of direct eye contact. That, a firm handshake, and small jewelry (“Simplicity is class,” he’d say, ignoring the fact that while she was short she was not petite). Abby tried using eye contact to beckon men’s eyes away from her tits. It got to where she was noticed for it – a friend describing Abby to someone would always mention how direct and sincere she was – but it didn’t work as a distractor. Her breasts to most guys were like balloons to a toddler or yarn balls to a kitten: they drew the eye the moment they moved.

As a bearer of direct eye contact Abby came to laugh at the term. It wasn’t about eyes at all; it was face contact. When Abby addressed a group of people at work, she aimed at their foreheads and they thought she was looking in their eyes. When she spoke one-on-one to someone, she watched the other’s mouth and lips and teeth and tongue, the lines around the nose, the cords and wrinkles in the neck.

Not the eyes. Almost never the eyes. In Abby’s opinion, you only look in the eyes before love or war. As a prelude to sex or a fight. Actually, she’s pointed out that you can’t look in another’s eyes. You have to choose one eye or the other.