Through a Glass Eye, Lightly

In the laboratory waiting room containing one television actor with a teary face trying a contact lens; two muscular victims of industrial accidents; several vain women—I was one of them— came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye. It was a long day: Deborah waiting for the blood vessels painted on her iris to dry. Her mother said that, holding Deborah when she was born, “First I inspected her, from toes to navel, then stopped at her head ...” We wondered why the inspection hadn’t gone the other way. “Looking into her eye was like looking into a volcano: “Her vacant pupil went whirling down, down to the foundation of the world ... When she was three months old they took it out. She giggled when she went under the anaesthetic. Forty-five minutes later she came back happy! ... The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face (you know, it never bled?), stayed happy, even when I went to pieces. She’s five, in June. “Deborah, you get right down from there, or I’ll have to slap!” Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap of one vain lady, who had been discontented with her own beauty. Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily in the empty eye.