Blind

Nadia was irritated. Her temper was always close to its boiling point these days; any minor hitch was enough to set her off. Today was no exception. She grumbled to herself as she blindly groped along the surface of her dresser, hoping to make contact with her glasses. Where had they gone?

She racked her brain, trying to remember. She had removed her glasses just a minute ago, placing them carelessly on the dresser, turning, and leaning back against the wood in exhaustion. Nadia recalled rubbing her eyes and taking several deep breaths before reaching for the spectacles, which, of course, hadn’t been where she had left them.

They’ve probably just fallen to the floor, she told herself sternly. Muttering under her breath, she sank slowly to her hands and knees, all the while casting her arm out wildly in front of her. Her hand hit the open suitcase on the ground with a dull thud, and she drew her arm back immediately, cursing in pain. This was ridiculous. There was nothing else for it; she would have to ask Harry to help her find them, no matter how unappealing the idea of asking for his help was.

“Harry!” she shouted loudly, to no response. Nadia felt a familiar anger start to blossom in her chest. She always had to call his name multiple times before he even acknowledged her. She bellowed his name again and attempted to calm her quickly growing annoyance as she heard the slow pounding of his footsteps down the hall. He was in no rush to get to her, she noted resentfully.

“What?” Harry demanded, sounding irritated himself, as Nadia had known he would. “What do you want?”

“You don’t have to take that tone,” she started, and sensed rather than saw him open his mouth to snap back. “Anyway, I’ve misplaced my glasses,” she hurried on.

“Your glasses?” Harry repeated. Nadia could see his blurred image moving around the room, searching. She imagined how she must look right now, seated hopelessly in the corner of their bedroom next to her packed belongings. She had been planning to leave for her sister’s house tonight; what would she do if she couldn’t find her glasses by then? A sharp panic overtook her at the thought, and she coaxed it away -- what an unreasonable fear. The glasses certainly weren’t lost forever; Harry was probably going to locate them any second now.

She squinted up at his fuzzy form just in time to see him resignedly collapse onto the bed. “Can’t find them. Don’t you have a spare pair?”

“This was my spare pair,” Nadia said, frustration creeping into her voice. “My regular pair broke last month, and I never got around to replacing it, what with all this mess about the divorce.”

She couldn’t see him, but she knew he had cringed. He always winced every time she spoke about the divorce aloud, as if the word itself were poisonous. Nadia didn’t understand what the issue was; they were ending their marriage, weren’t they? What was the point of beating around the bush about it? Harry had seemed strangely unwilling to proceed with the divorce paperwork despite being the one who had asked for the divorce.

She sighed. “Look, Harry, don’t you have a spare pair of glasses? I know our prescriptions aren’t exactly the same, but at least I’ll be able to see something. Can I borrow them?” He grunted in assent, and Nadia heard him rummage through the drawer of his bedside table.

Harry was almost as visually impaired as she was. Years ago, they had joked that they would produce children with the worst eyesight ever when they decided to have kids. Yes, Nadia thought to herself bitterly, it had always been “when we have children,” never “if we have children.” But that ship had sailed, she reminded herself. She was roused from her recollections by an apologetic grunt from Harry.

“Nadia?” he began uncertainly. “I… can’t find my spare pair. But also…”

“What?” she demanded, a slight trace of panic invading her voice. Harry rarely sounded so unsure.

“Don’t be angry, Nadia…”

“Don’t be angry about what?” she growled. This situation was quickly spiraling out of control. She should have been fully packed by now.

“I also… can’t find my first pair.”

“Your first pair?” Nadia asked blankly. “You don’t mean… you don’t mean the pair that was on your face when you came into the room, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes? Is this a joke? What, did they vanish into thin air?”

“It… certainly seems like it.”

Nadia let out a low moan of distress. “Harry, this isn’t funny,” she said. “I don’t have time for this right now; I need to --”

“Look, Nadia,” Harry began. His voice was worried and shaky, and this calmed Nadia’s anger more than anything else. Could this actually be happening? “I don’t know what happened, or how it happened. I know I’m forgetful and messy, but this is absurd, even for me. All I know is that I have lost my glasses, too, and you know that I can’t see very much more than you can right now.”

Nadia sat in stunned silence. This was not at all how she had imagined her Friday evening; she had expected to throw some clothes in her suitcase and be off. Instead, here she was, seated blindly on the floor, accompanied by her soon-to-be ex-husband, who was just as sightless as she was. The situation was ludicrous, she thought to herself with an involuntary giggle.

A small noise startled her from her musings, and Nadia realized with a jolt of unrecognizable emotion that Harry was chuckling along with her. She couldn’t help herself, and within seconds they were both convulsed with laughter. Her anger had evaporated; the situation just seemed funny now, just overly bizarre.

“You know,” Harry murmured, once their giggles had subsided, “We would have found this hilarious, back in the day, I mean.”

“We’re laughing at it now, too,” Nadia pointed out.

“I know, but we would have made something of the situation. We would have enjoyed it while it lasted.”

“Enjoyed… our blindness?” Nadia said incredulously, but she had an inkling of what he meant. A year or two earlier, before the hospitals and emergency surgeries and constant disappointments had turned their relationship sour, they’d have relished the opportunity to be together, ludicrous as the situation might be.

She carefully pulled herself upright and joined him on the navy blue blur that was their bed. The emotion she hadn’t been able to name shot through her again, seemingly landing at the base of her throat and lodging itself there. Steeling her resolve, Nadia inhaled deeply. “Let’s enjoy this, then. What would we have done?”

Harry’s voice wavered as he began to speak, and Nadia knew he was deciding whether to play along. For a fleeting moment, she wished he would snap at her and tell her this was ridiculous, that they had better call for help and rectify this situation. A fight, at least, would be familiar territory, comforting in a horrible sort of way.

He didn’t try to start an argument, however, and Nadia couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved. “We would have probably tried to do something enjoyable anyway… you know, we would have thought it was just more fun to watch each other struggle without our glasses.”

“Something enjoyable…” Nadia repeated. “Are you hungry? Do you want to cook something? We used to cook together all the time, remember?”

“Yes, that was before you started screaming at me for every drop of food spilled on the counter while cooking,” Harry remarked bitterly. “But,” he continued hastily, as if expecting her to retort with her own cutting remark -- which, Nadia admitted to herself, was not improbable in the least -- “I’m game. Let’s do it.”

Nadia felt his hand close around her upper arm and almost jerked away before she grasped that he was trying to help her up. They stood and stumbled toward the hallway, holding tight to one another as they tripped over furniture and almost slammed into a wall.

“Maybe it’s for the best that all our attempts to reproduce were foiled,” Nadia joked as they groped for the kitchen door’s handle and were met with solid wall instead. “It would have probably been against the wishes of natural selection.”

An uncomfortable, stony silence met her words, and she immediately regretted what she had said. “Sorry --” she stammered. “I was just kidding, you know, because we’re both so blind, and you know, survival of the fittest and all that….”

She trailed off, feeling guilty, but the shame was almost immediately overpowered by annoyance. How dare he make her feel bad for trying to lighten the mood? Why was he the one offended by the joke? Hadn’t it been Nadia who had spent heartbreaking nights in hospital gowns? Hadn’t it been her body that had suffered, her body that had betrayed her? She opened her mouth to tell him so, but that something that had settled at the bottom of her throat caught the words before they could come out. For some reason, she didn’t want to spoil what was happening now. She swallowed the words, and, locating the door’s handle, swung it open and pulled Harry into their kitchen.

Looking back, Nadia doesn’t remember whose idea it was to bake a cake, but she does remember laughing harder than she had in months as they struggled to recall the recipe for hummingbird cake. Harry still knew most of the instructions, Nadia realized with a pang -- it had been their favorite cake, and they had baked it together for almost every anniversary and birthday. They both had gaps in their memory, however, and they spent the evening happily inventing steps to fill in the blanks.

“Can you feel this? Does it feel more like a teaspoon measure or a tablespoon measure to you -- wait! What are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing? Clearly, I’m mashing a banana.” Laughter.

“I don’t know what you’re doing to that banana, but mashing is definitely not the word I’d use. And I don’t think that’s the mixing bowl! I think that’s the microwave! I think the mixing bowl is on your left!” More giggling.

“And stop eating all the pineapple! We only have one can!”

“I’m eating the mashed banana, actually.”

“Then why is it in a can?” A thud.

“Oops.”

“I need a drink. I’ve never appreciated corrective lenses so much in my life.”

Harry fumbled for a cabinet with his flour-covered hands. Had her vision been restored, Nadia would have berated him immediately for the streaks of white powder left in the wake of his touch; however, neither of them could see the current wreckage of the kitchen. Nadia could imagine it, of course, but for some reason, she could summon no anger, only mirth. The kitchen would eventually be cleaned up, she assured herself.

“Ouch!” Harry yelled, too close to her ear. “I stepped on whatever you dropped earlier!”

He stumbled backwards, straight into Nadia, and the breath left her lungs as his elbow met her diaphragm. She toppled, and they collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor, covered in flour and sugar and something sticky.

“I… I think we broke an egg,” Nadia said breathlessly as she attempted to untangle her limbs from Harry’s and stand up. They rose a few feet before tripping over one another and falling back down on top of each other. They dissolved into laughter once more; Nadia clutched her stomach as she distinctly heard Harry snort.

Nadia wasn’t sure who initiated it, but in the next moment, she was wrapped in a tangled embrace and pulled into a sticky kiss. She felt flour on Harry’s lips and eggshells in his hair -- how had that happened? -- and something lurched in the pit of her stomach. Just as the kiss began to evolve into something deeper and more passionate, Nadia’s arm, on which she had been propping herself up, slipped on the mess on the floor and gave out beneath her. Her head shifted, and Harry’s teeth slammed into hers awkwardly and painfully. They pulled themselves apart, panting in confusion.

After a few moments, Harry broke the silence first. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Nadia paused. He wasn’t apologizing for the spoiled kiss, she knew. And neither was she -- “I’m sorry, too,” she said softly. She rose shakily to her feet and extended a hand to pull him up.

They stood in silence for a moment, and Harry’s voice once again cut through the quiet, this time to Nadia’s slight annoyance. “Nadia.”

“Shh,” she muttered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No,” Harry replied, more insistently, disbelief in his voice. “Nadia.” He grabbed her hand and guided it along the kitchen counter to where his other hand was grasping something. For a minute, Nadia didn’t realize what she felt under her fingertips; suddenly, though, it became abundantly clear.

There were two pairs of glasses sitting neatly on the kitchen countertop.

Harry and Nadia grabbed them up and shoved them on their noses clumsily, hands still covered in ingredients that would never become hummingbird cake. Looking back, Nadia remembers avoiding Harry’s eyes as she busied herself cleaning the mess they had made. Harry had followed suit. Nadia recalls the uncomfortable, vibrating air between them as she announced, as casually as she could, that perhaps she shouldn’t be driving to her sister’s that night, and maybe she would just go the next morning. They went to bed without further conversation, each awkwardly huddling on one side of the bed.

The next morning, as Nadia rolled her suitcase out into the hall, she found the divorce papers signed and ready on the coffee table. Something swelled in her chest -- was it heartbreak or relief? -- but as she walked out of the house that had been hers and Harry’s, she felt more free than she had in a long, long time.