The eye specialists call to say my new glasses are ready. Heading over to pick them up, I buzz my wife – out to dinner with friends – to let her know where I’m going. Dinner is done, she says, so she’ll meet me there. I am mildly astonished not to find her waiting when I arrive.
She has – how to put this? – a strong stake in my spectacles. Knowing I was picking out new ones, a few days earlier, she rushed through a doctor’s appointment and sped across town to lobby intensely for the frames of her choice. I’d known in five minutes which frames I wanted. She knew in five seconds that those frames would only be used for looking over her dead body.
Apparently, my taste in these things compares unfavorably with that of, say, Benjamin Franklin, whom she accused me of trying to emulate. Properly chastened, I submitted to a solid hour of “try-these-on,” “take-those-off,” “let-me-see-those-again,” amid a flurry of transcontinental text exchanges between her and my sister, in which snapshots of me in sundry frameworks were analyzed with brutal frankness, resulting in the strong (and in fairness, irrefutable) suggestion that the shape of my face might be ultimately unsalvageable.
Sales clerks, of course, offer no re-enforcements. They can’t tell who might be making the final purchase, so they have to look at you with steadily affected awe, as if Brad Pitt could only dream of waking up with your rugged features and warm eyes, so perfectly accented.
In the end, after trying on 28 pairs or so, I really couldn’t tell one frame from another anymore, which means I’m returning now, a few days later, with more than a little curiosity about what I’ll be looking out of – and the world will be looking into – for the next three years or so.
I pull into the optician's parking lot and am halfway to the door when what looks to be my wife’s car swings in behind me. I pause on the volcanic asphalt to let her catch up. “Hi!” I call, as she hops out. “How y’ doin’?”
“Hi!” comes the reply. “I’m fine. How are you?”
I squint with suspicion. My old eyeglasses are wedged in my pocket, but I wouldn’t know that voice anywhere.
“You’re not my wife,” I declare.
“No, I’m not,” she laughs, coming into focus as she walks by.
“Now you know why I’m buying glasses,” I tell her, and she giggles again, walking on into the store as my actual wife pulls up beside me.
Minutes later, we are waiting with trepidation for the clerk to fetch the new spectacles. I’m just curious, not really having any idea what eyewear has been chosen for me.
My wife, though, is worried, because she’s always worrying – having made a final, definitive, absolute decision about anything – that she might somehow have been out of her right mind at the time.
But the glasses, brought forth, turn out to be fine. Something I can bear to stare out from behind – something she can bear to look upon and look for, during the coming daily hunts for where I’ve misplaced them. I look through clear, unscratched lenses for the first time in a year, to see my favorite face, smiling my favorite smile.
This week marks 33 years I’ve been gazing on that sorriso, constantly marveling at her untiring efforts to save me from my oft-wretched taste, wondering at her ability to make the thousand-and-one complications of my daily life smoother, more bearable, more fun. She has changed, in more than one way, how I look at the world. And helped me to see so many remarkable things much more clearly.
We’re still gauging the glasses when the lady from the parking lot walks by, heading back out the door.
“It was fun being married to you!” she calls back, cheerily.
But I am looking, still, at the lovely face beside me … beaming with satisfaction at her ocular handiwork.
Hope she’ll able to say the same, some far, far-off day.
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