Sputterpub's Blog

Abby’s breasts didn’t bring her good fortune but her eyes did. The breasts got her lots of attention and countless free drinks, but the feeling of power she had in the parked cars and strange bedrooms turned out to be temporary and really just a function of blood pressure and body fluids.

Her straightforward eyes opened doors for her. She landed in banking with a sociology degree, and everyone liked her directness. She was trusted. She worked hard enough. She advanced.

Which was more than fortunate, because both her breasts and her eyes quit her early. She put on weight in her 20s, which made her boobs even bigger but her whole shape blocky. The chest that used to stop traffic became a shelf for her short folded arms. She tended to rest her breasts on the lunchroom table (to provide some relief to her aching shoulders, for even the best Wacol bra couldn’t uphold all day). Her bust became the stuff of office jokes. It didn’t help that Abby chose to collect cute little cow ornaments and decorate her office with them.

Her eyes became trouble again when she was 30. She started getting some cloudiness, which her ophthalmologist ascribed to a little corneal edema from oxygen deprivation from her hard lenses. He ordered the latest in gas-permeable material but she hated them (they worked too well for their own good, normalizing her corneas so she began to feel the irritation when a little grit got in her eye, which made wearing them less comfortable than her good old bad lenses), so Abby, in one of the rare disobediences in her life, rejected the doctor’s order and returned to her old pair of lenses.

By the time she was 36 the damage to her corneas was considerable. And hormonal fluctuations were playing games with Abby’s tear production; even after she switched to the most permeable lenses available she didn’t get more than an hour of clear vision before her eyes fogged up. Her days of contact lenses were over.

She returned to wearing glasses but she couldn’t see very well. She was starting to get the far-sightedness of middle age; as often as not she left her glasses on her desk and just read the computer screen without correction. Her naked blue eyes took on a soft-focus appearance which was not unattractive.

Sometimes she went without her glasses even outside. It was like the old days in junior high, guessing identities by posture and color.

Which was (again) fortunate, because it allowed her to notice what none of her able-eyed relatives did. If Abby could have seen her father’s face she might have been distracted from his posture. But as it was she detected the change in his walk, the shift in his stance, even the way he held his head a bit to the side. And it was she with her childhood memories of brain pain who paid attention when he mumbled about headaches.

Abby’s father had been having a series of small strokes. Because he never went for a checkup his atrial fibrillation wasn’t discovered until then. The doctors said it would have been very serious, perhaps catastrophic, if it had gone much longer undetected. Abby’s father said it would have gone undetected if it hadn’t been for her.

As for Abby, she said she doubted that. Hugging her father she’d state that it was just a matter of time, short time, before someone else would have commented about him. But she stopped complaining about her bad eyes after that. She settled back and looked at the world myopically, astigmatically, through pretty blue eyes, and found other things in her life with which to disagree.

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.

Her eyes were blue at birth and everyone expected they’d darken. Most white babies come with blue eyes, but Abby’s parents were brown-eyed brown-haired people of brown-eyed brown-haired stock, so her relatives all waited for the blonde fuzz to be replaced with dark curls and for those blue irises to melt into the liquid chocolate hue of the Grays.

Like a changeling, Abby persisted in difference. Her mother was delighted with the silky blonde hair; most of the baby pictures show Abby with a ribbon bow somehow affixed to her head. The progression of childhood photos have her hair in varying lengths and steadily darkening as she grew toward high school and the discovery of peroxide, but the eyes always stayed blue.

Her surname was Gray but she came of Llewellyns and Ahernes. Her genes were mixed northern European, with strong tides of Welsh and Irish. And Ireland, like Iran, means Aryan(land), and Hitler, the moron, thought that meant blonde/blue. But the original people had markers for pigment, and it was only those travel-mad, emotionless, horny Vikings who inserted recessive genes across the pond.

Abby’s eyes stayed blue. They were the best feature in an adorable face. She had a ring of silver around her pupils, over gray-blue edged in navy. They shined between thin lids, well-spaced above a small nose centered over a rosebud mouth that never grew beyond child-size. Her jaw was small. Her cheeks were plump and hid their bones. She wasn’t beautiful but her face was cute well into middle age.

When Abby was 12 her mother heard a strange tale from a facialist. While this woman named Michaela slathered fruit-based emollients over her T-zone and (always stroking upward) along her neck, she told Abby’s mother that blue eyes are a sign of somatic purity. Michaela had a degree in nutrition and had been her own guinea pig for a graduate project. Over a two-year period she followed a strict vegan diet. All organic, all vegetable, with little cooking and reduced calories. Michaela was of Italian/Romanian heritage – olive-skinned, dark-haired, brown-eyed – and within 20 months on the clean diet her dark eyes cleared to baby blue.

Abby’s mother immediately thought back to her daughter’s infancy, and wondered if all her care with the baby food, all the grinding of organic vegetables and steeping of whole grains, had produced this marvel of iris. “But that can’t be,” she reasoned back at herself. For she’d given the same care to the food she fed Abby’s brothers, and they both had the family coloring. Anyway, much as she tried to guard her kids from refined sugar and unrefined TV, Abby and her brothers had all found plenty of candy and cartoons at their friends’ homes.

From then on, Abby’s mother wondered if irises were like deciduous trees. She remembered being struck to learn that autumn leaves don’t change color; rather, they lose it as their chlorophyll goes, and the vibrant red, alarm orange, and sunset gold are what’s left after nature leeches out all the green. “Maybe eyes without color are watery blue,” Abby’s mother thought. “Maybe brown and green and hazel are added pigments, and my daughter’s striking eyes fall short.” It made as much sense to her as the idea that an attractive dimple is actually a deformity, but she’d heard that somewhere, too. Abby’s mother was an extremely social individual, and sometimes she couldn’t remember from whom she’d heard what.

When Abby was 13 her eyes retreated. The breasts which she began at 12 outgrew her training bra. They pulled at the front of her T-shirts and made her blouses gap. They were particularly prominent because the final spurt of growth which followed their painful appearance (and stopped a year later, when her periods started) only pushed her height to 5’1″. Those precocious breasts supplanted her eyes as her best feature.

Her eyes took revenge in headaches. The cutting pain came about twice a week that winter, but because no one else in her family needed glasses as a child, her parents didn’t think to have Abby’s eyes checked. She spent afternoons at home with her aching head on her mother’s lap, waiting for the aspirin to work. She would rather have been in her own bed in her room, but for some reason Abby’s otherwise impatient mother took comfort in supporting Abby’s head and neck and occasionally stroking her brow.

The best medicine for the headaches turned out to be eyeglasses. It took almost six months before Abby saw an opthalmalogist, and then he was rather impressed with how well she was managing, given her level of myopia. For Abby uncorrected was only seeing 20/400. Excellent as she was at recognizing people by the way they moved or the colors they wore, the strain to her eye muscles was producing headaches.

Also, although she could interpret people’s gross movements without her glasses, Abby missed small facial expressions. She didn’t acknowledge many smiles of greeting. A lot of the girls thought she was a snob. The boys didn’t mind it that she appeared to ignore them; her breasts were the stuff of their dreams and excused everything. They looked, they wondered, they admired, they snickered, they sometimes even told tales. The girls overheard, and some went from calling Abby a snob to branding her a slut (in 3 moves: snob-slob-slot-slut).

The bleeding stopped but Bill had a headache. The top of his head throbbed beneath the bandage. He leaned against his workbench despairing a little, wishing the older kids would visit. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen right then. Emily was still besotted with her rich husband and their “work,” and Ned wanted to avoid any political arguments. It was hard for Bill to admit it, but his daughters were apparently horny and his sons were just not aggressive.

Rick’s shooting misadventure made him a juvenile felon, and while that wasn’t going on his adult record it was enough to keep him out of the army. At 27, Ned was too old unless he really pushed himself, and Bill knew Ned wasn’t going to do that. The girls wouldn’t serve because they didn’t have to serve.

It made Bill feel angry. Powerless. He knew it was corny but he opened his gun safe and started cleaning his revolver. There was something about the heft of the handle that was comforting.

“Things fall apart,” he thought then, and “The centre will not hold.” He saw the English spelling in his head and knew he was quoting poetry, but he couldn’t remember whose.

Mary, Liz, and Laney were still in the kitchen. Mary had been reminiscing about old games all day, and she suggested that they work on a jigsaw puzzle. The girls thought it would be fun. They didn’t know and Mary had forgotten how hard a jigsaw can be on the solvers’ lower backs.

They rejected the puzzle with the picture of Manhattan. They’d just agreed on the circular farm scene when the gunshots startled them. Each looked at the other and they hurtled to the garage.

It had been a rat. Bill was okay. He was cleaning his gun when he saw the nasty rodent poking around in the far corner of the garage, where it was darkest. On any other day Bill probably would have walked inside, made a comment, called the exterminator. He didn’t know what came over him, but he just aimed his gun and fired. Kind of nicked a hole in the garage wall but really blasted the rat. Got him right in the head.

Bill cleaned up the rat carcass. Everybody looked a little better to him after that. Mary didn’t seem so insipid. Liz might not die. Laney could mature. And Rick: well, actually Rick was doing better than anyone expected a few years back. Just as he had that thought, Rick himself appeared in the garage doorway. Home safe from the peace rally. Looking blonde and friendly. Looking like a kid.

“Hey, son…help me out. I’ve got a poem in my head. ‘The centre falls apart?’”

“That’s ‘The Second Coming’ by Yeats, Dad.” Rick didn’t like history or science but had an affinity for math and poetry. He quoted the ending: “And what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

Something in Bill’s chest seemed to melt then, and he was filled with tender anxiety. Rick’s future loomed long and uncertain in Bill’s imagination, and he felt too tired to know what should be done. He clapped his right arm around Rick’s shoulder. They walked into the house.

Everybody felt a little better. It was like a storm had passed; the air was lighter, and clean. Together they started to work on the puzzle.

 
The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

– William Butler Yeats, 1920

Scalp wounds bleed. The way the blood came out of Bill’s head reminded Mary of the time Liz pierced her ear once too often. She went against direct parental orders with that hole in her cartilage, and Mary had thought the appropriate consequence was removal of the stud. For such a thin little ear, she was amazed at the quantity of blood that poured from it. Ribbons of bright red in the white bathroom sink.

It was a little more understandable, all the blood welling from a gash in the head instead of a little hole in an ear, but even so it was impressive. Mary stained three towels with it, applied pressure and ice, and still it bled. They were in the kitchen – they needed the room – Bill sitting upright at the table and Mary ministering above and around him. The blood looked very bright against his pale scalp, matting his thin dark hair, clotting above his right temple. He became quiet: that and his pallor gave Mary the idea he might be in a little shock, even though the cut was not deep. She didn’t think they’d need the hospital. She offered him a drink. She wrapped a soft bandage around his head.

“There,” she stated with some satisfaction. “You look like Yankee Doodle.”

Bill fingered the gauze. “Hah,” he retorted with a wry look. He sipped his bourbon. “I’d sure as hell fight if I were younger.”

“Mmmmm.” Mary resumed cleaning the kitchen, which was the activity that led to her opening the window and Bill standing up into it, in the first place.

They heard the back door open, followed by the voices of their younger daughters. Liz and Laney entered the kitchen and startled their parents again, Liz with her pierced, tattooed emaciation and Laney with hideous hair. Lately she sported a head one-third shaved, with the remaining hair dyed chartreuse. They were discussing their lovers without discretion; Bill and Mary got to hear about Liz’s latest dark beau (they all looked Middle Eastern to Bill, but they were probably just Mexican), and Laney’s enthusiastic conversion to homosexuality (she was completely infatuated by an older and not unattractive dyke named Barbara).

“Where’s your brother?” Bill asked them, as much to change their subject as anything else.

They looked a little guilty, and Bill knew Rick was at the peace rally. The girls even tried to forestall Bill’s rant by acting like he was inquiring about their older brother instead, but that didn’t distract Bill. Laney admitted that they had left young Rick at the civic center park, marching with the other lefties.

“I don’t get it,” Bill said. “It’s pretty strange that a kid who shot his junior high teacher has now become so passive.”

“Pacifist, Dad,” corrected Liz. “Not passive.”

“Yeah,” compounded Laney. “And it’s not so weird. Maybe Rick actually learned… You know the saying: ‘Good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgment.’”

They were right, but that didn’t calm Bill. In fact he felt like he was going crazy. He was filled with a love of country and passion to avenge lately, and he was surrounded by a moron, a junkie, a hippie, and a delinquent, all of whom preached nonviolence. Agreeing with each other. Reinforcing one another. He downed his bourbon and rose abruptly. He headed for his workbench in the garage.

The timing was unfortunate, as far as Bill was concerned. Not that there was ever a particularly good time for war, but since it looked like they were going to have one, he wished he or his could participate in a meaningful way. Heroic. Historic. At least mentionable.

Bill himself was a coastal boomer; he missed the military boat. He was raised a Navy brat – that’s how his folks came to settle near San Diego after his father retired – but he was first a student and then a young man with a high-lottery birthday (December 15th was number 266) – so he avoided the whole Southeast Asian conflict without having to feign insanity or homosexuality or emigration. He didn’t use his Masters in English literature; the kids came too soon, and he first worked at and then owned the car dealership his father had established. He despised that. But he justified it.

The kids were too young for the Gulf War, and were now either too old, too bad, or too female to serve in the real one. All Bill could do was hoist the flag up in front and talk to the neighbors out back. To the extent his family was around they didn’t agree with him.

His wife ignored him. It wasn’t anything personal; Mary puttered around the kitchen, plump, blonde, and stupid, in Bill’s eyes no longer cute, alternately nurturing and petulant, a passive-aggressive pacifist.

The older kids, the good ones, the twins with brown hair like Bill’s family, they’d both moved out and on. He was left among the pale ones, Liz and Laney and Rick, with round blue eyes and round fair faces like their mom.

That’s when Bill tore his head on the bottom edge of the kitchen window. Minor accidents were common around the household; if Mary wasn’t cutting her hand with a paring knife then Bill could probably be counted on to smack his head against something. The kids sustained the usual assortment of injuries. In the beginning they spent some evenings in the emergency room, but they gained medical confidence over time, and now they treated most wounds on their own.

Their tract home was a single-story stucco ranch house, with crank-open aluminum casement windows. One of the kitchen windows was directly above the spigot for the front-yard hose. Although Bill usually injured himself, that morning he was Mary’s victim. She didn’t intend to get him, but she couldn’t have done it better if she’d had a choreographer.

She didn’t know Bill was there, turning the water to the lawn sprinkler on, when she decided she was hot, immediately and unbearably hot for a menopausal moment, and abruptly cranked open the kitchen window for some air. Bill was bent over the spigot, his back obscured by the hibiscus bush that bloomed there most of the year. He couldn’t even hear the window opening, because he was paying attention to the sound of the water, gauging the pressure to the sprinklers by the hum in the hose. He bent, she cranked, the window swung outward, and Bill, righting himself, smashed the crown of his head into the aluminum frame.