Four Eyes

At dinner last week, seated in the farthest recesses of Avatar, I could no longer disregard the obvious fact:  I have the vision of a young Morocco Mole.  In the first of many humiliations no doubt to come, my sidekick, Secret, read me the menu out loud so I didn’t blindly order curried goat testicles. It was very sweet, but I was quite aware there’s a fine line between being treated like a princess and being treated like a toddler.  It was unclear on which side of the rope I was teetering, so off to the optometrist I went. 

The doctor was very kind.  He offered me the opportunity to steal the Sunset magazine I was perusing in the lobby.  Free gift with purchase, just like at the makeup counter.  And it was only four months old.  Score! The appointment was uneventful. My eyes are clearly failing.  He handed me a prescription and nonchalantly sent me down to the eyewear department, failing to prepare me for the horrors that awaited.

Innocently I meandered down, excited to select my new glasses.  I’ve been to the eyewear department with Secret to select his frames. On those forays, I could have spent all afternoon there.  It was all fun and games, like a goddamn carnival.  Try on ridiculous frames and laugh and laugh and laugh. Hours of fun for the whole family. Carnivals are not so enticing when you’re alone and start noticing the seedy underbelly.  Turns out one of those hideous frames will soon be my identity. It was like I took a wrong turn at the House of Mirrors and became a sideshow freak. I tried frame after frame after mother cussing frame.  Turns out I’m much uglier than I imagined.  Huge nose.  Red skin.  And angry.  Oh, so angry.

Like with eyewear, they say the eyebrows are the frame to the face.  For practical purposes I’ve been living without them all my life.  My eyebrows maintain the downy golden hue of my infant self, rendering them essentially invisible.  My one foray into dying left me looking eerily like Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo. That should have been my first clue as to what my future held. As the tech got increasingly impatient, I painfully resigned to the fact that any eyeglass I wear will present the picture of a drunken angry Scotswoman and there’s no getting around that. So I altered my expectations – the best look I could hope for was still crimson, but only slightly peeved and maybe just a wee bit tipsy.  After extracting one pair from dozens of frames, the “one” was declared inadequate by the technician.  Due to complications of my prescription, the lenses were too narrow.   My second choice –too wide for my face.  And so there I was, left with my second safety frame.  It’s like I hoped to attend Brown, but ended up at Cal State Stanislaus.

I get them in a week.  If you would care to mock me, I’ll be the angry woman at the end of the bar downing vodka gimlets to maintain my rosy glow.