Because I suffer, to use my mother’s favorite verb, from myopia–or did—I used to think I was invisible. Now entrenched in what some might call my dotage, my eyesight has improved to such a degree that I forget to put on my glasses until half the day is gone, This unexpected improvement is a consequence of the far-sightedness of age correcting the near-sightedness of youth.
I used to like to say for dramatic effect that I was legally blind because I couldn’t make out the big E on the eye chart. Nevertheless, I could identify people by their gestures, walks, general outlines–even people I didn’t know but who took the same buses or trains as I and if they passed by me years later in another setting I’d recognize them. Of what practical use this was I can’t say since I never greeted them or was called upon to identify them to the police. And I was far from blind—a good squint sufficed when I needed to see or read something at a distance—I have never needed glasses for reading up close. Scrunching up my eyes, however, greatly irritated my mother and stepfather. The latter would mimic my squint to make me stop or ask me why I was squinting, which I would deny I was doing. Neither allowed me to wear my glasses when in public because I then no longer qualified as pretty. “Take your glasses off,” my mother said when I was summoned to the sunroom to meet her guests.
In my late teens I was fitted with contact lens. They were hard in substance and harder to get used to—a callus had to form on the inside of my upper eyelids. I rarely wore them especially after my first devastating experience when they were newly inserted and I was out with my mother and stepfather. We were seated at a table in a restaurant when I looked up from the menu to the panorama before and all around me: I was able to see everyone in the room, not simply their outlines and fuzzy gesticulations but the smallest detail of their eyes, noses, frowns and smiles. That was terrible partly because the world and the people in it were not nearly as beautiful, friendly and smooth as I had thought but mostly because everyone in the room could see me and some of them were in the process of doing just that.
One August night in my eighteenth year before I was fitted for contact lens I was about to get out of my date’s car after a evening I did not care to repeat—although I had already been embarrassed into accepting another invitation for the following Saturday—when he grabbed me without warning and kissed me. I can still see his open mouth approaching. I was not pleased—it was the first time I’d ever been kissed on a first date and this wasn’t even someone I liked. Later I looked at myself in the mirror expecting to see the face of a girl whose reputation was forever sullied but although she appeared none the worse for wear, I rebuked her silently:You have been kissed by a blind date and you don’t have any idea what he looks like.
It may come as no surprise to say this was the man I eventually married so determined was he to have me whether I knew what he looked like or not. As for me, I was and, for many years remained, invisible to us both.
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