Dorothy Parker was wrong
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
--Dorothy Parker
I got my first pair of glasses when I was 10. I'd been having trouble reading the blackboard in school, which contributed to my painful shyness since I was too afraid to admit it. Whenever I was called on in class, I would instantly complain of a stomach cramp and ask to see the school nurse. "What seems to be the trouble, Sonny?" the nurse would ask. "My stomach hurts," I'd say. Whether it was a cramp or an arm hanging by a thread, the nurse could always be relied on to dispense the same remedy: "Have a peppermint."
My teachers eventually put 20 and 20 together and suggested to my mother that I might need to have my eyes examined. They'd noticed a correlation between my squinting and my trips to the school nurse...and my declining grades. My father's health insurance plan included vision, so off we went to an optometrist somewhere on Church Avenue in Brooklyn.
I dreaded any kind of doctor's visit, especially to my Nazi dentist, whose idea of bedside manner was screaming at me when I gagged on the film he used to take X-rays. Although I was 10 I held on to my mother's hand extra tight the minute we walked into the optometrist's office.
Dr. Brautman, an old man with thick specs himself, was nice enough, and the exam started off well. He put me in a dark, cool room with a low buzzing sound. He asked me to read the Snellen chart, and I got down to about the fourth line before everything looked blurry--just like on the blackboard at school! Then, without warning, Dr. Brautman stuck mydriatic drops in each eye and told me my pupils would get really, really large. Cool, I thought, I'll look just like Speed Racer. But the instant my eyes hit daylight outside the room, the pain was searing. I screamed, but no sound came out. I was not allowed to scream. God did not like it when Irish Catholic boys screamed.
The relentless pain from the light did not subside. I had no sunglasses to shield my eyes. My mother, who'd been wearing glasses since she was 7, didn't seem fazed by the cruelty of this torture. "You'll adjust," she said matter-of-factly. I hid my face in her dress and did my best Helen Keller impression until we got home.
My first pair of glasses was a brown tortoise-shell pattern with thick, squarish, narrow frames. Now my classmates had yet another insult to hurl at me. Carrot Top ("carrot tops are green," I'd remind them), Bowmar Brain (a somehow derogatory remark for people who could add without drooling), and Queeran (for obvious reasons) were the usual epithets; now they could call me Four Eyes too. My glasses made me look even more studious and geeky than without them, so against my better judgment, I didn't wear them as often as I should have.
In junior year of high school, on a class trip to Spain, my friend
Mark and I were peering down into the ruins of the Roman city of Italica, just north of Sevilla. It was very windy and I had to use both hands to hold on to an outcropping to keep from falling over. I made it; my glasses didn't. Some archaeologist years from now will unearth my glasses and be disappointed when carbon-dating puts them at 1978.
In senior year I inadvertently went through a Preppy phase, when preppiedom was ostensibly in vogue (sometime betwen 1980 and never). In my experience ivy was poisonous, Eton was something I did not attended, and the only mummy I'd ever seen was in the Brooklyn Museum--so my association with preppiness was not only circumspect but downright fake. To me plaid belonged only on stamps. I think I may have draped a cardigan around my neck once.
The irrefutable evidence was my glasses. I had unwittingly chosen a pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses with huge, teardrop-shaped, tinted lenses--they made
Gloria Steinem's glasses look like
John Lennon's specs. One little detail I'd neglected to notice when picking out the Lacoste frames were the green metal alligator emblems soldered on where the arms meet the frames. I was the only one who hadn't noticed. "Well, Chip," one friend said, handing me a birthday present, "here's the
Official Preppy Handbook to get you started at Choate." Another friend gave me stationery with a crocodile on it (she was a city kid). And another gave me a hideous Kelly green shirt, which shortly thereafter I "lost."
That summer I'd had enough ribbing and decided to trade in my glasses for contacts. Rigid gas permeables, or RGPs, had become available to the public a year earlier, and I would be one of the first myopics to wear them. There was no such thing as disposable or extended wear lenses, and my doctor advised against softs because the RGPs provided an orthotic effect that softs did not.
Accompanied by my mother, I went to my optometrist in Bay Ridge and got fitted for the contacts. Tinting was not available yet, so the lenses were clear plastic that, if dropped, would blend in with just about anything, especially water. It took me a while to adjust, but vanity trumped comfort.
A month after I got my lenses I stayed overnight at my friend Mark's mother's house. Before bed I took out both my lenses in the bathroom sink to store them. I squeezed the bottle of saline hard and it came gushing out into the wells of the case. Just then I heard a tiny little clink in the sink. I looked in the right well, and my contact lens was gone.
I froze. I didn't know what to do. Those lenses had cost my mother the GDP of the Kerguelen Islands. If I moved I risked letting it fall where I couldn't find it, or, worse, stepping on it and pulverizing it. Tired and hyperventilating, I crawled around on all fours scouring the tile floor, the light and my unfocused eyes playing tricks on me at every turn.
"Mark!" I yelled as though I was having a heart attack, which I sort of was. "MARK!" Mark ran into the bathroom, where I explained what happened. His solution was to take apart the drain and put a strainer over a bucket to see if the lens fell out. Neither of us was handy, but we managed. Half an hour later, miraculously, the lens fell into the strainer, covered in hair and gunk, but at least I hadn't lost it.
Twenty-four years later I still wear contact lenses. For many of those years I didn't own a pair of backup glasses. The Lacoste debacle had left me second-guessing myself about the ability to choose a suitable pair of frames. The last pair I'd bought were gold-rimmed titanium frames that were virtually indestructible. "Yeah, uh huh," Luis said when he saw me wearing them. "Those have to go." I couldn't argue with him. They were ugly, but they were unbreakable.
Last year I dragged Luis to the optometrist to pick out a pair of frames. I was apprehensive as we looked at the staggering range of shapes, sizes, styles, and colors. But after only 10 minutes of trying on different frames, I had the perfect ones. Luis smiled when he saw me put them on, and even my disheveled, absent-minded optometrist mustered a smile. They're black, squarish, and frame my eyes well. Emporio Armani. Luis said that the dark frames complement the irreversible translucence of my Hibernian flesh. I couldn't disagree.
"Wow! You look hot!" one of my colleagues said the first time I wore my new glasses to the office. "
I'm lovin' it!" said another, echoing
McDonald's latest ad campaign. "Did you get a new haircut?" said a third. He still hasn't figured it out, but that's nothing new for him.
When I first got contacts, I felt like
Molly Webber, the shy, homely, bespectacled girl, transformed by
Marcia Brady into a swan, who ends up competing against Marcia to be junior banquet night hostess. Now I feel like Molly's come into her own.
Lately my eyes have been irritated by my contacts, so I've been wearing my glasses more often. Again I've been getting compliments, which, at my age, is nothing to sneeze at. So I'll stick with glasses, for a while at least. I plan to get Lasik surgery in the next few months, but maybe I'll wear the frames...just for effect.
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