Missing the Barn Door
I was scanning through the latest list of eligible young ladies the dating agency had sent me: one in particular caught my eye. Her name was Marie Standage, 26 years old, medium build and height, who said that she was athletic and good-looking. I wrote, sending my photo, and asking for one in return. The reply was much more than I could have hoped for: she seemed more than keen to correspond, and the photo that fell out of the envelope was a joy to see. She’d obviously done her best to look good for a full frontal head and shoulders shot: her blonde hair she’d arranged in an appealing long fluffy style, which surrounded her angelic face like a perfect yellow cloud. She wasn’t thin, but looked as if she kept herself fit and healthy. But her blue eyes were the most interesting feature: they seemed to be slightly dreamy, and by looking closely at the picture I could see two little red marks on each side of the bridge of her little nose. Therefore I was not surprised to read in her letter “oh, by the way, I wear glasses.” That was music to my ears. Or eyes, or something like that.
We wrote to each other a few times, but although she seemed very pleasant and jolly, she didn’t mention meeting. She did say she used to be an athlete, but had to give it up, artfully sidestepping my question about why this had happened. Then I chanced my arm, as I did quite often in those days, and asked for a picture of her wearing glasses. She wrote back and told me she couldn’t find one. I couldn’t quite believe that someone with such obvious signs of regular glasses wear never had their picture taken whilst wearing them, although I’d seen people who regularly took off their “double glazing” for photos. Anyway, the next letter came and with it a picture. On it, she wore her glasses, with a neutral expression on her face: at the sight of them, my mind said “wow!” They had lovely big roundish plastic frames, with a sort of strange mottled green-blue colour; the lenses were myodisc, they must have been about minus twenty five in my estimation. She wrote to me “well, I did find a picture of me in glasses.” Upon reading that, I thought “fibber!” She’d quite obviously had the pic taken recently. She made a comment along the lines of having appalling vision, which I could well believe. Then she said “if you don’t want to know, please send my pictures back.” Of course I didn’t, and I told her that I liked the way she looked, and thus would not send the pics back unless she asked for them.
My reply evidently went down pretty well, because her next letter was the one where she asked to meet me: in a pub, of all places, which was fine by me. I also obtained her phone number too; she was kindly and honey-voiced on the phone. I went to the pub, having being told to expect whereabouts to find her rather explicitly and precisely: downstairs, she said, in the open area. I walked through the wide open doorway, then I saw someone with blonde hair sitting exactly were I was supposed to find Marie: could that be her? All I could see was the back of her head, so I walked around the partition to get a better look.
And then I saw her. She looked up at me through her thick myodisc lenses, squinting, uncertain, then asked
‘Puffin?’
She asked, her voice equally uncertain. I had a bit of a surprise during that moment of my life: Marie was sitting wearing a slinky, shiny black catsuit that covered her up, but left little doubt what was going on beneath it. She was to me slim, shapely, curvy, utterly lovely. She pushed her hair back behind an ear, then pressed her glasses firmly against her face, squinting heroically almost to the point where her eyes were fit to burst, but to no avail. This was the only way she could even attempt to make out my facial features, being as she couldn’t get up from her sitting position: she sat in a wheelchair.
She smiled, gave up squinting and said,
‘well, sit down where I can see you.’
She maneuvered her wheelchair forward then back to give me room, then I sat down and faced her. She said brightly,
‘I can see you better now. Mmmm, your photo doesn’t do you justice. Or is that my eyesight?’
She smiled, then shrugged, then said a little guiltily,
‘sorry… I forgot to tell you about this.’
She pointed at her wheels, and continued rather more firmly,
‘I’m a wheely girl as well as being high myope. Hope that’s not a problem for you.’
As I continued to take it all in, I stuttered out,
‘Err - rr - no…’
She sat chattering away, during which I sat in silent rapture - it was a gloriously lovely thing to be snared by that beautiful, fascinating gaze; now I knew how a mouse felt when charmed by a snake! She told me more about herself, with me partly distracted by the way light played across the plano fronts of her lenses, oh the sight of those lenses was a marvellous thing! The bowls of the myodiscs were quite large, but the lenses had a lovely chunk of unused lens to each side and a bit more below, all skilfully ground in an earnest attempt to make them appear less thick; although there was not much chance of that, the result being something like 15 mm.
She told me that she had always had poor vision, even from when she was a small child. She remembered getting her first glasses at the age of 3, with a prescription of around minus 5. She regaled me with her tales of being a little kid wandering around in plastic specs, which was really cute, I thought. Then at school she told me that she had trouble reading the blackboard from the back of the classroom. Her RX went up to minus 10 by the time she hit her teens, and then, as I’d expected her to say, it went ballistic. She found she could not get full correction to 20/20 by the time she was fourteen: she couldn’t read the board from the back, with or without her minus eighteen lenses. By then she’d decided that she wanted to be an athlete, concentrating on middle distance running. She had got herself to a high state of fitness, and was pretty good. But just after her fifteenth birthday she was involved in a car crash: she was thus rendered paraplegic, and despite the best medical care, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, having lost the use of her legs.
She’d responded positively to this miserable luck, keeping herself fit and learning archery. She was obliged to do this from a sitting position, and again started getting on well with that. She wanted to get into the Paralympics, but by the time the possibility came up, her vision had worsened to minus twenty-two, and her VA to 20/80, which meant that she couldn’t see the rings very well on the board. That made aiming increasingly difficult, and knocked her score down to the point where she couldn’t compete. She still really enjoyed the sport, so she kept at it, but her scores got worse and worse as her vision declined to minus 24 by the time she was nineteen. Eventually at VA 20/100 she required someone tell her up or down, left or right: all she could see of the target was a fuzzy white lump; without guidance it was a matter of luck what she hit. Now her VA was 20/150, and thus aiming was more a matter of luck without someone to help. She asked me hopefully,
‘perhaps you’d like to come one day and help me? My last helper wasn’t much good.’
I eagerly took up her suggestion: soon after, I picked her up from her home and took her, wheelchair and all, to the local archery club where she practiced. Once there, she quickly got herself ready and wheeled herself to one end of the practise field with a target at the other. I casually asked,
‘can you see the target?’
She squinted her finest squint, then said,
‘sort of. There’s a white smear over there that looks suspiciously like it.’
She started fitting and shooting arrows, and I helpfully told her up or down or left or right. Yeah, she was quite good, better I was, but nothing special. In an attempt to keep her spirits up, I started telling her that they were on target, when they plainly were not. She said to me, mock seriously,
‘you’d better not be playing around, I can always wheel over and check for myself.’
This girl seemed bright and breezy enough, and fun to be with. She dearly wanted to compete, however. The only way she could practically do so was to compete against fellow partially-sighted and blind archers - which there were few of.
But one day we went to just such a competition: Marie did OK in the first round with my guidance, but then they had a pause during which the targets were put farther away. This sort of archery is just like any other, except the archers can’t see very well. While they did this, I went to the toilet, which for reasons unknown to me, happened to be at the other end of the field, beyond the targets. I had to wait in a small queue for a while, and after that I wondered whether the next round had started. I hoped that surely Marie wouldn’t start without me, or else perhaps she’d find someone else to help her. I went out, and saw an arrow near her target. Looking at her, I saw her with another arrow in her bow, poised and ready to shoot. I yelled, but, alas, it was too late. She had no idea which way I’d gone, and certainly not that I was standing near enough the targets to be in danger.
Her arrow hit me in the stomach below my ribs: it was painful, as you can guess, and quite embarrassing. As soon as Marie realised what she’d accidentally done, she was so sorry and so remorseful. She couldn’t even come in the ambulance that took me to hospital. I sat in a private room, hoping that Marie would come: it took her a long time to get a lift there, and another long time to get herself up to the eighth floor where I was. I was laying there, feeling a bit woozy from the painkillers I’d been given, so didn’t it completely register when she pushed herself over to me, then said rather brokenly, ‘Hello, Puffin, are you… Okay?’ I nodded, numbly. She bit her lip, then continued, ‘Oh, it’s all my fault, I was… Getting bored waiting for you, so I stupidly tried a practise shot, I forgot that I shouldn’t have been practising then.’ She started to weep, a tear running from behind her left lens, then her right: she paused to wipe them away with her fingers, then said bitterly, ‘Oh, I’m so stupid, I find a decent bloke at last, and then I go and shoot him! I bet you don’t want to see me again!’ She began to push herself away, then turned to go, whilst trying to keep from sobbing.
I called out to her as best I could, the effort hurting my chest ‘Marie! Come back!’ She stopped, then turned back to me, staring at her blurry view of my face, made more so by her tears. It was a bit of a struggle to wave her over, but she got the message and came back. Her expression was one of frail semi-belief. I murmured to her, ‘come back, please, come back. I want you.’ She pushed herself back to my bedside: once she was within my reach and had stopped, I reached out and grasped her hand, saying, ‘silly girl, I want you.’ She gave me a little smile, then wiped away her tears with her other hand.
Our relationship blossomed from then on, and we even went to more archery competitions, but I made sure I knew exactly what Marie was doing, and absolutely certain that I was behind her when she did it!