Eye Contact
I fell asleep on my stomach, in a patch of sunshine created between the shadows of two soaring elms. I was reading a novel, out in the back on the grass, and looking at old texts. They made me laugh, one about a dirty sock, and I thought of that night in May, when you reached over to take my hand while we walked along the Chicago river. I remember how the streetlights looked on the surface of the water, glistening in broken pieces, and the laughter from the wine bar we passed, and the way my feet felt in woven flats.
The nap on my tummy was dreamless and black. I woke with a start and I’m not sure why. I couldn’t hear splashing in the water across the lawn, and I couldn’t find my little boy’s head. A shot of fear jolted me upright. But the rope where he launched from still swung from its perch, swaying in the air softly, next to the dog who didn’t move and only looked at me, when I looked that way.
I found his head soon enough, bobbing in the crystal blue. He’s alone in this round monstrosity of a pool, this backyard pond we erected with plastic pieces and hose water and an instruction book as thick as my first knuckle. He’s turning ten this summer and he’s begged for months for a pool. It keeps him occupied in the most consuming sense and he is constantly busy with it. Ladders and ropes and pool noodles and toys. He wanted a watermelon floatie and seeing how big it was once he unboxed it, he abandoned it. Too impatient to inflate it with his own little lungs, he left it there for me and you to deal with. When I wake to it (that perfect plastic circle), I’m too impatient too—I leave it be; I leave it for you to tend to and finish up—for you to make better. Fix it; make it; fill it up. But you are asleep too. Your hat is covering your face and I feel, keenly, the weight of you next to me, the energy of your sun-warmed skin.
Did we get more gorgeous in quarantine? You are tan and lean and your hair is wild and blond and brown and gray, and all along your face—bangs, sideburns, stubble. Your eyes burn blue. I only got older, a little more wrinkled, skinnier without muscle. My hair is long and flat and dark. Listless and heavy. But something changed in my eyes, and maybe that’s what you see, when you’re looking so closely in the mornings, when I roll over and hover above you and you place your left hand on my right cheek and say, “You are so beautiful.” I do look different somehow.
I read an essay on my phone, before I fell asleep. Before the book and after the old memories that got me thinking, and it was about an aquarium and the creatures that swim behind glass. What do those fish and invertebrates see? Are we only visiting images, warped on the other side of the glass? A disconnect of misunderstanding perplexed by what is seen? A gaping sense between species?
(Will any of us ever understand each other at all?)
She said to me the other day, my fourteen year old: “Mom,” do you ever look at yourself in the mirror like this?” Then she stares at her reflection close, so that her nose is almost touching the mirror, and she moves her head slowly from side to side, not breaking eye contact with herself. It’s so specific a thing, and so general. The reckoning of self in the mirror, and yes, I’ve done it too. When I was a girl her age, I would think, “Is that really me?” a strange enmeshment between body and spirit—outsides and insides—and the lasting question: do they match?
And then he, the pool-obsessed almost-ten-year-old boy, says: “The dog’s eyes lead her direction.” He wants me to look at the dog and I do. She is a recently shaved Golden Retriever and she’s so old and white that she looks like the newly shorn sheep we passed while driving through the countryside near Laketown. But goodness, he’s right somehow. The dog’s eyebrows arch one way and her eyes follow, and then her head follows. Her gaze is her compass. She wants water and first she arches that way, then looks that way, then rises to drink. She wants to go outside, same thing.
Really, she’s a dumb old dog full of insecurity and unknowing. The kids love her. When they touch her, she lifts her chin, she seems to calm. Her carriage rises and her gaze feels wise. And I wonder and recount if she is dumb and insecure or just a really great actress.
That moment when I woke from my nap, my open book by my face, pages dancing in the wind, when my son was invisible to me, the dog wasn’t paying attention either. (Or was she?) She was lying in her own spot of sunshine on the grass, a quarter acre from me. When I woke from my nap and saw her, she lifted her head to me. And what I cannot be sure of but am sure of is that she first lifted her eyebrows, then her eyes, and then her head. Across the distance, we made eye contact. She was completely still. What did she know before I saw my son? What did she see? Was she telegraphing something to me?
Maybe. Maybe this:
He’s okay. We’re all okay.
