Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

Author:Edith Pearlman [Pearlman, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature, Stories
ISBN: 9780982338292
Publisher: Lookout Books; University of North Carolina
Published: 2011-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

HOME SCHOOLING

NAUSEATED, DIZZY, I LAY on the backseat of our dusty car, my head resting against the garment bag that held my father’s two tuxedos. Beyond my raised knees I saw a mortar sky. Above the front seat rose my Aunt Kate’s ponytailed head and shoulders, and my twin sister Willy’s head, or at least the top of her baseball cap. Willy kept fiddling with the radio and singing French songs we’d learned from our parents. “Yaagh,” I said every so often.

“Feeling better, hon?” Aunt Kate asked, not taking her eyes off the road. Just two days earlier she’d quit her graduate program in classics, chucked those Romans as if they were all losers, chucked her boyfriends, too. “They can cool their heels,” she’d told us. “Your dad is my current boyfriend.” We’d left Cincinnati the day before. “Feeling the same?” she asked me.

“Feeling worse.”

“Let us know if you have to stop.”

“I have to stop.”

At the next opportunity Aunt Kate pulled over. I sat on a hump of grass and thrust my head between my thighs. New England dandelions, I noticed, were different from Ohio ones, though the grass seemed browner in late August than Ohio’s. I could smell hamburgers from a highway McDonald’s. If I hadn’t been nauseated before, I would have been nauseated now. Aunt Kate stood nearby. Willy gazed at us from the car.

“It might be better if you did throw up,” Aunt Kate said, not unkindly. “Car sickness is your specialty.”

“Vomiting is not my specialty,” I reminded her, though I spoke into my skirt and probably couldn’t be heard. I can still remember that ugly plaid—turquoise and peach. At the time—we were ten—I thought it gorgeous. My nausea at last subsided. I thought of the delicacies that awaited us: clams and lobster. The streets of Boston were paved with them, my father had said.

My car sickness had something to do with my inner ear, our pediatrician had told us: I had an atypical vestibular canal. Willy’s vestibular canal was less atypical, the doctor had tactfully said, when pressed. More normal, better—but he didn’t say those things. Who cared? I had a more atypical memory than Willy. That is, she remembered a lot and I remembered almost everything.

Otherwise we were pretty similar in aptitudes and tastes, though we don’t look alike—I am dark and she is fair, I have a blunt short nose and she has a long thin one. In those days we both wore braids.

I didn’t throw up, not once on the two-day journey to Boston. My father had thrown up at the beginning of his illness, when the headaches began. He and my mother were already in our new home while we were driving and I was not throwing up. Our new home was a rented flat in a three-decker section of the city. My parents had flown ahead with two suitcases and my father’s violin. “The doctors in Boston are better than the ones at home,” my mother had explained. “No, not better—more experienced in Dad’s disease.

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