Eyes of a Woman by Melissa Carter

"There's nothing on my mind...that's the problem", she thought. This was immediately followed by, "yet I'm so troubled I can barely catch my breath."She looked out the window and watched the traffic. Mazda, Subaru, Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, Subaru, big fat Denali, equally large Expedition, Honda, Toyota..."these people", she thought, "they’re all so busy. So busy in fact, they're troubled with nothing on their minds."

She lived on a highway. Most would find that unappealing but she loved it. The highway freed her from the bond of neighbors. She despised neighbors. To the left about a hundred yards down was a Gulf station and a junkyard to the right. She lived in one of those old houses you see sometimes on a busy highway, a relic from another time sandwiched in between strip malls...a slice of real estate not yet gobbled up by Quick-Check, Exxon or Taco Bell.

She lived a full life but succumbed to morphine addiction, suffered terribly through the Franco-Prussian war and eventually died from syphilis. On her deathbed she bequeathed her entire ceramic doll collection, which did not exist, to her daughter Camille, whom she did not have. She closed her eyes and in a final breath rested easy in the knowledge she had been a loyal servant to France.

The sound of a truck rattled the floor and brought reality back to the foreground. That was not her life. It seemed at this moment her life was interchangeable with anyone’s. She grew up in the 50’s in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. At the age of twelve she developed an interest in a black boy who lived cross-town. His name was Willie and she would often pass him on her daily walks to school. He had a crush on her. Willie wrote poems on wrinkled paper and would quickly run out from his porch stoop, silently delivering his latest ode to love. She saved every one of them. At night, when the family was asleep, she would light a candle and quietly pull the poems out from under her mattress. She read each one over and over, each time bringing new meaning to Willie’s prose. The words seemed to lift off the page and wrap around her heart.

At sixteen she finally found the nerve to talk to Willie. They both knew this was dangerous. People were killed for less. She was already in love and had not yet even kissed him. Meanwhile the white boys from high school lined up for a chance to date this beautiful young woman. She could not have been less interested. They just didn’t understand the depth of feeling a man could express. Willie had found an entrance to her heart through his words. How he even learned to read and write was a mystery. There was no school for black children in the district. They began secretly meeting in the evenings at the playground behind her school. He treated her like a princess, showed up with wild flowers plucked along his route to the schoolyard. They would spend hours kissing and holding hands. They would rock back and forth on the swings in perfect unison, talking about their life together; a home, a car, a flower garden and a swing in the back. He once said that in her eyes was an endless world. They never made love but each knew that time was coming.

The following Monday she walked to school. She looked to Willie’s porch but he was not there. She went to the playground that evening but Willie never showed. On Tuesday she again saw an empty porch. Throughout the week she looked for him, but he was gone. She knew what had happened but could not confirm anything; she could not even make inquiries. She was careful to keep her grief a secret. At night, she would carefully sneak out of the house a safe distance so no one could hear her cries. She would stare into the night sky. Her pain wailed into the darkness, so piercing her cries scared animals nearby. Two months later there was a story in the Montgomery Independent about a young black man’s body found hanging from a tree in the backwoods between Springford farm and the Wallace Estate. Her heart turned cold. She never shed a tear. The tear-making mechanism in her eyes was forever broken.

She lived her life on automatic thereafter. Married the high school quarterback. Bore three children and raised them to be God-fearing nigger-hating respectable young men. Allowed her husband’s occasional beatings that came as a natural result of his alcoholism. Smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and downed tranquilizers. Watched her precious face wrinkle and sag over the decades. Watched that endless world in her eyes flatline to colorless shapes. Dutifully played her role as homemaker and grandmother to her children’s children. And then, in 2004, after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, surrendered her body physically to match the soul that died fifty years earlier. She had little energy left. But enough so to make a trip to the garage on her last day. In her bathrobe and slippers, weighing less than ninety pounds and fighting to take a single breath, she reached up for a box labeled “recipes”. She opened the box and rifled through the cookbooks. In between loose sheets of paper she found a small shoebox sealed heavily in scotch tape. The tape had yellowed to the point where it was no longer transparent, a strip of dry opaque plastic so brittle it cracked at the touch. She pulled the tape away watching it fall to pieces. She held her breath for a moment, thought about leaving it and walking back in the house, but then quickly opened the box. There were Willie’s poems, hundreds of them on torn and wrinkled paper, yellowed and brittle. Some fell apart in her hands. The brittleness of the paper matched the wrinkled hands that held them. In the middle of the batch she found a poem written on the back of a “No Trespassing” sign typically found posted to telephone poles. The words lifted off the page encircling her heart, embracing an iceberg that had not felt warmth in years:

To the girl that he sees

If a cat wants to fly
We should let that cat try
For the cat wants to be
Like the bird in a tree
If a bird wants to walk
We’ll be still and not talk
For the bird wants to be
Like the cat that he sees
~~~
If a man sees a girl
And she brightens his world
Is it okay to stare
Will she permit his glare?
If a boy loves a girl
In this cold separate world
And he crosses the line
Like the cat wants to fly
Like the bird wants to walk
The boy wants to talk
To the girl that he sees
Bringing beauty with ease
~~~
Each walk past my porch
Lights my heart like a torch
For the girl who walks by
With the beautiful eyes
She’s the picture of grace
She has brightened my place
But the rules of the game
Tell us we’re not the same
~~~
So I sneak you my words
Like the cat and the birds
I am crossing the line
To that girl who’s so fine
To the cat who can fly
To the bird who can walk
This may cause me to die
But to you I must talk.
~~~

She felt something. That broken duct, the tear machine that stopped working so long ago, seemed to repair itself. For fifty years those eyes saw nothing, for fifty years those eyes were blind. She felt the first drops roll down her cheek. It was like rain pouring over a dry desert plain. They flowed freely forming two small wet spots on the cement floor at her slippers. The cancer was suffocating, squeezing the life out of her by the minute. She held herself up by nearby metal shelving. She took the brittle poems and carefully put them back in their box. She weakly shuffled to the front of the house, box under arm, and found the porch. It took all her energy to climb the three steps. She set the shoebox down on the porch floor and pulled out a book of matches from her bathrobe pocket. She crouched down and struck the match to the flint. It did not work. Her hands were shaking. She took another match and again struck the flint. All of this had exhausted her. She had almost no energy left. She found the energy to tear one last match from the book and again struck the flint. The match lit and the flame glowed bright orange in the early morning light. She watched as her trembling hand moved to the shoebox. As the box burned she sat in a rocking chair and watched fire do what it does best- consume all it touches. She felt the warmth of the burning paper and watched it turn into weightless black carbon. She listened to it crackle, closed her eyes and gently floated to her destination.

She stared out the window, tears rolling down her cheeks. The sounds of the highway, the repeated passing of cars, the sound of air-filled rubber tires rolling over pavement…it was peaceful. Her life could be anything she decided. Her history could be anyone’s, she could fabricate any story and call it hers. She felt the pain of others so deeply. People who didn’t exist. People she imagined. Yet the pain was real. Martasia reached for the coffee pot and washed it out in the sink. She softly took the filter and knocked it against the inner side of the garbage can, cleaning out the used coffee grinds. The filter was washed out like the pot; she filled it with new grinds, poured fresh water into the coffeemaker and clicked the brew button. Coffee was cathartic for her. A fresh cup of coffee was like a fresh new start. A cup of coffee and a cigarette was a timeout in life, a chance to step back and mull things over.

The highway was busy as usual. She thought about all the gasoline in those cars. All that fossil fuel. What a silly little plan we have devised. We are visiting a casino with a quarter in our pockets. We are heading off to sea with a raft made of twigs. We are gobbling up our planet like termites eat a house. She took a sip off that fresh brewed coffee. Mmm, yum. And now it’s time for that cigarette. It was a Sunday, a time to think about the upcoming week. But it seemed there was so much more than the week on Martasia’s mind. It was the upcoming decade. It was the past thirty-nine years. She had lots of preparing for her workweek. Martasia was a regional manager for a large property management company. It was impossible to think about all that just now. “I have nothing on my mind”, she thought…”and yet I’m about to cry.” What was it? What was it that was not on her mind? That much she knew; she was troubled by the emptiness. While most feel relief at the freedom of an untroubled mind, Martasia sensed there was something she ought to be thinking about. “What is really troubling me about my past? What am I missing?” She tried again to look back into her history.

The nineties…the eighties…the seventies…It was 1977. She was on a flight to Israel. It was an El Al plane departing from JFK in the midst of its ten-hour flight to Tel Aviv. She was sitting next to a young Israeli man, dark hair, dark eyes with a slight beard stubble around his face, just enough to be sexy but not enough to look bummish. He was clearly taken by her. As most men will do he looked for some excuse to start the conversation. He started with the magazines stuck in the back pockets of the seats in front of them. “Smooth enough”, she thought, “I’ll play along.” In no time they were discussing everything from Jimmy Carter to New York City traffic to the best restaurants in Israel. His name was Avi. He was a dual citizen, spending time in Israel and in Manhattan where he had a loft in Soho, at the time a not so chic place to live. She was a Jersey girl, growing up in Plainfield and now living in Elizabeth, a fairly large city about twenty minutes from New York. She was in her second year of college, going to a state school where she could not decide between a degree in art or business. Her father insisted on business while her mother pushed her to live her dream, which was art. She loved art history and grew up with books and books of great art, her favorites being Rembrandt and Vermeer. Avi was a businessman, in the textile industry, thirty-two years old and married to an Israeli woman who kept house in Haifa, a picturesque city overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He owned a beautiful home on the main Tel Aviv-Haifa-Naharia road at beach level. Shoshona was a dutiful wife who led a wonderful life afforded by her husband’s success. They had no children but she was now pregnant with their first. Martasia found herself enjoying this man’s conversation. He was witty, charming and extremely confident. She also knew he was married and felt a strange excitement mixed with anxiety over his very clear interest in her. Martasia was visiting Israel for the first time. She was staying with distant relatives in Tel Aviv, second cousins of her father. They agreed to meet during her two-week stay and exchanged phone numbers. She knew this was dangerous, and she knew what he wanted. She was a beautiful young lady, full bodied but slim, long brown hair and deep green eyes. She had been an ugly girl throughout childhood but Nature was kind. At nineteen she had developed into a truly stunning woman. She received lots of attention from guys but up to this point they were generally boring. They were lost in Jersey Land, rock n' roll, drugs and mindless adolescence. Avi was different. This guy was important, or so it seemed. He was busy all the time, responsible to and for dozens of people. He was beaming with success. More important to Martasia, he was beaming with charm.

They met on her second night in Israel. He made no excuses and told no lies. She knew he was married and cheating. Yet she couldn’t wait to be taken. And he took her. It was even better than she could have imagined. He ravaged her like a possessed demon, devouring every inch of her body, not missing a spot. She could orgasm just from the foreplay. It swelled up from her belly to her breasts. The moment he touched her she would shudder in ecstasy. He made her feel like the hottest bitch on the planet. At these moments, she was the hottest bitch on the planet. Her original plan had been to stay with relatives and make one and two-day journeys to different museums and historical sites. She very much wanted to see Masada, one of the Jewish people's greatest symbols. It is the strategic perch where 960 Jewish soldiers committed suicide in the first century rather than submit to the looming Roman attack. It is a symbol of Jewish survival, reflecting the courageous and tragic fate of the last Jewish rebellion against Rome. Martasia never saw it. In fact, she never saw much more than the luxurious interior of the Dan Hotel and it’s opulent service. Avi and Martasia spent most of her two-week stay entwined in each other, rolling across a landscape of satin sheets. They ordered room service morning, afternoon and evening and only left for an occasional dinner or night swim. She fell in love the first day. But she knew she was setting herself up for a fall. The day before she was due to fly back she schemed in her mind for ways to stay longer. But it could not be. There was no way to change flights and Avi had exhausted all excuses for not spending time with his pregnant wife. He promised to see her again upon his return to New York. He swore his love for her and his eventual parting from Shoshona so they could make a life together. She went through all the stages, first denial, then anger and finally an outpouring of sadness. She spent that final morning crying on his shoulder. It was the first and only day they did not have sex. She went home shattered and broken. She never mentioned Avi to her parents, as the knowledge that she’d had an affair with a married man would be scandalous. But she held out and waited for his call. She knew he would be back in New York in a few months.

She returned to her classes that fall but was preoccupied with her hopes. She was expecting a call from him soon. He would be coming back to New York in October, he said. She tried in vain to find his phone number in Haifa but it was impossible. She even called the Dan Hotel to get his personal information, all to no avail. He had promised to call her a week before he arrived. November came and there was no call. Martasia felt they were destined to be together. She knew it. She felt it. But he was not there. She never heard from him again. As the New Year approached she realized she was holding air. She had built a future in her mind with this man. It was a fantasy. It was nothing. She simply had to let go. 1978 turned out to be a good year for her. The winter was a world of darkness and sadness. The fact that she could not tell her parents about her affair and her ridiculous hopes and dreams, made it even worse. She reached out to friends and fought hard to find a new hope and a new dream. She got on with her life and began dating again. She quickly learned the power of her beauty and used it to build an incredible life with a husband and children. She moved on but a part of her heart had been scarred. She learned a valuable lesson about giving all of herself. That would never happen again. She would always save a small slice for herself. Just for her. That is what women do. That is why we’re so strong.

Martasia smiled lightly. A little twinkle in her eye. “Hmm, that was a good one”, she thought. Her imagination amused her greatly. She looked out the window to see a police car with flashing lights. There was a red Nissan Altima pulled over in front of the cop car. “Speeding ticket”, she thought. The daydreaming was coming to a close. Now it was time to get to her true history. She was born a boy. She lived a boy’s life. She tried to be a man. But she could not pull it off. She thought about her dreams looking through the eyes of a man. Then she thought of the dreams seeing through the eyes of a woman.

She gently put her hands on her breasts and felt their soft fullness. They felt so warm, so round. Her fingers gently encircled her nipples through the light t-shirt. She slid her hands down her belly feeling the soft skin and moved onto her thighs. They were firm but soft. They jiggled slightly at the touch. She loved that feeling. She thought of her old boyfriend and how he would manhandle her body. She always loved that. She could cum just thinking about it. But not any more. She was alone now. With nothing on her mind. She took a deep breath, that satisfying breath that seemed to elude her all morning. She put on a pair of jeans, brushed her hair and added some lip-gloss. She looked in the mirror and forced a smile until it was unforced. Staring back at her were the eyes of a woman. She knew what to do. Yes, that was it. It was the perfect thing. It was something she had always wanted to do with her boyfriend but never did.

“Today I’m gonna ride a horse", she said. Martasia got into her car, put on her sunglasses, lit a cigarette and headed for the stables.