by Jenny Morelli
Looking down is dangerous.
I learned this when I was two years old. I’d just gotten my first pair of glasses, and they were heavy. I’d left the doctor’s office holding Mom’s hand and looked down to watch where I stepped, and the large-framed contraption fell from my face onto the gritty sidewalk with a crunch.
I gasped, Mom cried, and when we got home, Dad yelled. My broken glasses were reinforced with Scotch tape and a stern warning, ‘Don’t look down.’
I was imprisoned by those things, forever stuck in a macabre beauty school class like the I Love Lucy episode Mom and I loved so much. But instead of balancing a book on my head, I had to balance my new eyes on my face. Each morning, I descended the long flight of stairs, hoping the next stair would be where it was the night before so I wouldn’t fall down the whole flight.
Not long after I was sentenced to this hell, my aunt sat with me on the top of the stairs, and I braced myself for another adult lecture on how to be careful with my very expensive frames. But that lecture never came.
Instead, she folded me into her lap, enveloping me in her lavender scent. And then we shared a conversation I would remember forever, after years of forgetting.
She lifted my chinch, so our eyes met. ‘You, my dear, do not look happy, but it can’t possibly be these beautiful frames on your face.’
I lowered my head, and my glasses slid down. I pushed them up and they slid again. My aunt caught them before they tumbled down the stairs.
She lifted my chin again. ‘Do you know what a doe is, sweetheart?’
I nodded and started to sing my favorite song. ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer…’
She rocked my small body and sang with me the rest of the song and by the time we finished, I was smiling.
And then she hugged me tight. ‘Well, you, dear Jennifer, have doe eyes. And you must keep them framed like a beautiful picture. Hold your head high and never look down.’
From then on, I spent my days, head held high, proudly admiring my beautiful framed doe eyes in the mirror, because I believed my aunt.
*
When school began, Doe Eyes became Four Eyes, and I wasn’t beautiful anymore and I blamed my aunt for lying to me. I was an outcast, a chew toy for bullies. I started a different school in second grade, and no one knew me, so when Mrs. Meaney assigned a group project, no one chose me. Was it because I was new or because I wore glasses? I didn’t know, but I hid behind the rolling chalkboard the day the project was due. I glimpsed my reflection in the glass-enclosed bulletin board and saw nothing but failure, heard nothing but echoed whispers follow me…Four Eyes.
There were one hundred and sixty-two- floor tiles between that class and my next.
*
When I was nine, Mom enrolled me in the local summer theater program, and after weeks of grueling, un-air-conditioned practices and rehearsals, the director told me I couldn’t wear my glasses on stage because they might blind the audience. Some mean kid joked that good performers only needed two eyes.
After the show, my mom and brother made me feel special with flowers and praise, but when Mom wanted a picture, she pulled off my glasses so they wouldn’t ruin the photo.
When the picture was developed, I explained that I’d spotted a shiny penny on the floor.
Damn you, Aunt Anne.
*
On my first day of sixth grade, my neighbor, Jonathan Hinkus and I were waiting for the bus. We were awkward eleven-year-olds, both pudgy with glasses, and we got along well. He was nice. Until he wasn’t. He talked and joked and laughed with me while we waited, new backpacks sagging with new school supplies, and then we boarded the bus, and he became someone else. He darted to his friends and tore off his glasses, then turned and taunted, pointed and laughed and called me Four Eyes.
I spent the bus ride resenting my aunt and reading the graffiti on the empty seat next to me, cautionary tales for bullies and their victims.
*
In high school, the boys I liked didn’t like me because I wore glasses. They never told me, but others did, so I begged Mom for contact lenses. And then I endured a different kind of misery.
I physically battled those terrible awful horrible contact lenses. More than once, my persistent allergies ejected the unfamiliar floating objects from my pollen-swollen eyes, even tore a lens one time, leaving half of it inside my head until I dug it out with a fingernail.
My dating record improved dramatically. I became a new person, and got comments that I was ‘pretty now.’ I thought I’d be happy, but I wasn’t, because I was no longer me. I’d become someone else and when I looked in the mirror, a stranger stared back at me. There was doubt behind those contact lenses and I cursed those bullies for making me hate myself, for turning me into someone I wasn’t.
And then one night my aunt returned from the grave. She appeared on the stairs, rocking back and forth and humming. She looked up at me and smiled. Her words kicked in and out like a bad radio signal.
‘Doe Eyes …beautiful…must keep them framed.’
I blinked and she was gone, but I woke the next morning with a new clarity. I put on my glasses and kept them on and for the first time in sixteen years, I saw the sun and the sky and the stars. I was myself again.
After too many years, all the no-good very bad teen ones that shape us into the adults we’ll become, I concluded that four eyes really were better than two. They brought my truth into focus and allowed me to see myself for who I am, and who I was meant to be.
For years I blamed my glasses for ruined friendships, ruined grades, ruined confidence, when instead, I should have been focusing on my aunt’s kind and sacred words.
I realize now that looking down is dangerous because it keeps you down. I know the ground is beneath me with floor tiles or graffiti or a steep flight of stairs, but I haven’t seen it in years. And I thank my aunt for that.
***
Jenny Morelli is a high school English teacher who lives in New Jersey with her husband and cat. She is often either inspired by her students or else they're triggering memories in her of when she was young and struggling with her self-confidence. She has been published in a number of literary magazines, including Spare Parts for a novel excerpt, Spillwords for several themed poems, and Bottlecap Press for her own chapbook This is Not a Drill.
Commentaires