When I was a child, adults were always off getting their glasses fixed. Something has gone wrong with the arms! They no longer connect as they should; no longer move in the right way: smooth like a trapeze artist up and over their ears. Hooked, that was the point, to hook them onto that thin piece of skin, the ear-isthmus, where skin meets bone meets a soft inlet folded over; the ear cave connecting itself to the eyes along those thin frail arms made of wiry gold metal; gold-covered to give a sense of luxury.
But there is nothing luxurious about myopia, it is simply unfortunate; and these days there are so many of unfortunates whose spectacles cannot quite climb over her nose; his nose, their nose, flapping about with the small hoop shaped space for the nose where the spectacles sit and irritate us with her pince-nez style opinions. And yet there she is slipping, always slipping off to the side. A poorly trained jumper missing her jump. Nothing properly aligned. (Has she even practised; I wonder?) Her eyes, the hoop, her hands, behind the flap of skin we call the ear. That small dark descent into the nighttime world; the cave where nothing comes out again.
Nothing properly aligned except the abrupt sound of the spectacle case opening and closing like a small tomb; and underneath, lining her bottom, the soft-soft cloth for wiping off lint and bacteria; and the slow exasperated sigh of the adult trying to fix herself up to see. To see, oh to see! Miss Cull my music teacher at school assembly sitting on the piano stool too low to accommodate her. (She had terribly short legs). Did she ever see over the sheathes of uninspiring music? Or the pages of The Arun Gazette? Or the church newsletter where stray spectacles found at the back of the church in the final line of pews were announced for the taking, the reclaiming. Redundant. Nothing fancy. The lenses were terribly bleary. The arms bent out of shape. Mashed and coiled at the ends. A crushed snail. You cannot possibly see out of those, Edith said her mother, said my mother to me.
But we do not see these days what is in front of us; or we see only what we are told to see, what is pushed in front of us; what is returned and served up as seconds or thirds after the main course has been cleared away. Whisked right away in front of us. Did anyone even see it go? There, on that golden trolley, that woman with the high heels, she took them. My spectacle case whisked right away.
And my spectacles. Where are they?