I didn’t want to see it.
I recalled a story I’d read, about a man who recovered his sight after nearly thirty years of blindness. This man had functioned just fine in the dark, had even become an abstract artist of some renown. He eventually married. One summer evening as he sat on his back porch with his wife, he sensed a shadow cast lengthwise near his feet. Soon, the shadow turned to a fog. By the time he went to bed, he could see blurry images of items he held in front of him: a cup, a toothbrush, his slippers, simple things he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. The world came into sharp focus. His sight had miraculously returned.
It should have been a happy story, to see things you couldn’t oncesee—but it wasn’t. The man wore sunglasses indoors. Too much looking made him tired. He was overstimulated. Anxious. His paintings did not look like they had in his head, which led to a total creative block. Darkness had given him the freedom to imagine; his vision had come at a cost. “This is not the life I thought I was living,” the man said.
All these years later, I finally understood how the blind man felt, how when he looked around his own living room he wanted to cry because suddenly he did not recognize anything. I sat at my kitchen table and felt the weight of my empty house. A couple of years ago we’d repainted the kitchen, and now I could see the outline of the pie chest we’d been too lazy to move at the time. I rested my cheek on the sticky surface of the table. My eyes were level with that notebook, that ledger, whatever it was. I ran my thumb along the spine. I remembered what became of that man who didn’t want to see.
He’d gouged his eyes out.
IN STELLA I FOUND COURAGE,and in turn, I projected my own emotions into her character. I became someone else. Some might call this necessary dissociation, but in theater we call it the Strasberg method. Ratings were up forStars and Shadows. Stella now recovered at Port Middleton Memorial. The trauma she’d suffered underground induced amnesia, and she didn’t recognize Vincent or Bianca or Celeste, who now wavered on the cusp of death. Vincent had been tricked into falling in love with Bianca Dupont. The script called for Stella, with her natural antibodies to the mystery illness, to regain her memory and save her aunt. Drama. Chaos. A last-minute blood transfusion. A doctor who looked like Adonis in scrubs. The gift of life.
The security guard waved as I passed the booth on my way to the set in the morning. “Hi, Stella!” he said, as usual.
“Hi, Mr. Security Guard,” I said. This was our shtick. I knew his name was Mike.
Inside the production assistant—a new girl—blocked the door. “I can’t let you in,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Nona Dixon,” I said.
My name wasn’t on the call list. She checked her clipboard and checked it again. She was wearing denim overalls with an oversize sweater underneath that made her seem both large and small at once.
“I play Stella.” The curtness of my voice surprised me.
“Oh, I know who you are,” she said. Despite her mass of clothing, I could tell she was young, an intern, the kind of girl who might have been an RA in her college dorm and believed this small power extended to the wider world. A bureaucrat in training.
“Let me talk to Elliot,” I said.
“Look, Mrs. Dixon,” she said. “All I can tell you is you’re not on the call sheet. If you’re not on the call sheet, I can’t let you in.” I hated her for it, for doing her job.
“Just tell him I’m here,” I said.
“I always wanted to be an Earthshine Girl,” she said.
“Everyone did.”
“Must be embarrassing now, with what all those women out there are saying.” Indeed, on the way into the studio this morning, the crowd numbered in the hundreds. When a group of women noticed me pull up, they began yelling my name, calling me a traitor—and worse. One of them carried a cardboard cut-out image of me with devil horns. TheEARTHSHINE BITCH. A police officer escorted me from my car.
“Look, there’s some mistake. Please,” I said, then hated myself for saying it, hated the way the corners of her mouth curled inward in the slightest recognition of her power.
“I like your sweater,” I added, so she’d know I was trying to be nice.
“Thanks,” she said. “I suppose I can go ask once more.”
“Yes. Yes, please. Would you do that?”
“Do you think it’s poisoned?” Her voice softened. “I use it all the time. Used to.”
I didn’t know how to answer. What could I say? Halley had left me a book of medical formulas and Opal Doucet was a witch who dabbled in pharmaceuticals, and now my doctor wanted my uterus, and Mr. Longworth left threatening messages on my machine, and my yard was littered with toilet paper and signs, and I was afraid my phone line was bugged, and someone out there knew about John Dale, and I was terrified Wyatt would find out? That seemed like a lot to drop on her at once.
“You’ll be fine,” I assured her. Everyone was still learning about class- action lawsuits, about how they can accumulate. The tobacco lawsuit hadn’t happened yet, and certainly that was given more national coverage because it impacted not just women. “Everyone uses it,” I said.
I thought of the images my doctor had shown me, of my womb, of the masses on it that looked like blackened, shriveled fruits. I’d relented and scheduled my surgery for late spring, telling myself I could always reschedule. What were my options—bleed forever? I don’t know why, but the thought of losing an organ—thatorgan—made me feel like I’d be less of a woman. I realize how stupid that sounds now. How naïve. As much as I didn’t want to be controlled by my body, here I was arguing for my own limitations. Or, maybe—maybe I believed a miracle might occur before then, shaped like a baby, like Mary and her immaculate conception, without all the religion. Women are supposed to want these things. But then again, an angel ordered Mary to have that child.
I waited while the intern disappeared between the folds in a cloth partition. Behind it, someone was doing a sound check.One. Two. Three. Check. One. Two. Three. Check.The hammering of the set designers could have been the baseline of a rock song.
The production assistant came back a few minutes later. “They decided to go in a different direction,” she said.
“Stella just dug herself out of a freakin’ grave!” I said. “She’s saving Celeste’s life with that blood transfusion. Even after Celeste’s amnesia made her who forget who Stella was!”
