Blind: Miranda

by Elizabeth Clarke

I used to blindfold myself and try to find my way by touch, familiar distances stretching under my shuffling hands, from my bedroom to the kitchen downstairs. Even beneath my mother's old Hermes scarf, my eyes were squeezed so tightly shut that the muscles in the corners and lids would twitch and spasm before subsiding into numb heat.

This was in a house on a leafy street of houses where, in the wide front yards, squirrels spiraled up fat tree trunks and the noise of their chasing feet was very loud. A gardener's hand shears on a boxwood hedge. Or a lawn-mower, louder then anything.

The daddies on the street had jobs that involved the pages of the newspaper with no pictures, no reassuring twenty-four point headlines, only stacks of tiny numbers. I was nearly nine years old before I realized that the newspaper had other sections, since this was all I ever saw my father read.

Inside the house were the sounds of Mae running the vacuum cleaner and the soap operas she watched while she ironed. Mae was there once a week during the school year, three days during the summer, in the mornings. When she wasn't there, the sounds were my mother on the telephone, my mother calling me from another room.

"What did Mae give you for lunch? The fruit and cheese I left is still in the refrigerator." My mother, back from garden club, leaning into the refrigerator still holding her purse. Back from The Perfect Nail, smelling like a doctor's office, opening the refrigerator with the hook of her thumb, her fingers splayed out stiff.

The faint texture of paint on plaster blossomed into a ridged code, the peaks and whorls of fingerprint. I inched my way down the hall, dizzy with fear. I would never reach the bathroom door -- it was no longer there. I would never touch the kitchen counter and take off my blindfold and look out the window at my swing-set in the backyard. I was a little blind girl in an endless, doorless hall. Maybe there was the tidal roar of the vacuum cleaner, somewhere else in the house. Maybe the roar was the hall itself.

If I ceased to move through my fear like a shark through water, I would suffocate beneath its weight.

The staircase was easy, after the hall. I scuffed towards the edge of each step, and there was the handrail to guide me. Sixteen steps, then a landing, a turn, four steps more. I listened for my mother's voice or footsteps. A smooth gliding rail my whole way down. Then the foyer, shorter than the upstairs hall, with an Oriental runner for guidance and one closet door that I could reach from the base of the stairs, if I stretched my arm; just barely.

I could tell when the foyer opened into the living room by the feel of the light on my cheek, the smell of Lemon Pledge furniture polish. Air and sound opened around me so that instead of the coffin-space of the hall and foyer I was a tiny dot as seen from an airplane, creeping towards a shimmering horizon. Coffee tables, end tables, all spined with chattering porcelain, lamps, picture frames, reaching to bite with sharp corners.

Barefoot on the soft silent carpet, with searching toes, hands low down, feeling the air. The kitchen was on the other side; just the dining-room left to negotiate.

"Miranda, what are you doing?"

I snatched the scarf off, ripping out strands of hair caught in the knot, a thin watery pain. The living room appeared through a wash of mist: the vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet, the cut-glass lamps on the end tables and the wires inside the glass reflected, fly-eyed, by the pattern of diamonds that caught the light slanting through the blinds. The brass-handled fireplace tools. My mother in the doorway. Her pink summer suit and her low-heeled shoes. My mother shook her head, laughing. She would tell her garden club, she would tell the nail lady what she had seen me doing. I would spend the rest of the day disoriented, bumping into things, my depth perception off, an anxious quiver in the pit of my stomach. Waiting for my next step to drop me off the edge of a cliff, waiting for the dark to snap shut around me: the price of failure, of ritual left incomplete.