Binoculars

A Finalist in the (First-Ever) 2008 SER Narrative Nonfiction Contest, From The Southeast Review Volume 27.1

There’s something uncomfortable and intrusive about them, easing them out of their cracked leather case, the cool hardness of them in my hands like something stored in the dank basement—chilled jars of pickles or plums or pears, no, more like a Samsonite suitcase brought up from the bowels of the house and into the light. A long black strap attaches to the squat case for portage in the fields. The Velcro patch is remarkably fresh given its age and makes a loud scratchy sound when I lift open the upper flap. Made by Jason, the name is emblazoned on the two remaining eyelids for the lens. Jason Empire, model 219. No matter what time of day or year I reach for them, they’re cold to the touch, and unforgiving, my binoculars.

I didn’t buy them in a fit of birdwatching zeal, nor were they given to me brand new. Ten years ago an old friend who lived in San Francisco undertook a massive housecleaning in his efforts to sort out his life. Or that’s what he said to my husband and me. He was a pack rat, like his father whose garage stored rotting newspapers from three decades past. Joel wasn’t as bad as his father—his hoarding compulsions were mercifully curtailed by living in an apartment. A certain tight economy was forced upon Joel. But he didn’t part with things easily. He had kept things like telescopes and microscopes from when he was a child even though he hadn’t used them for twenty years and they were missing crucial parts. We initially thought his housecleaning grew out of a final acknowledgment that he wasn’t going to have children and it was pointless to keep these child’s things around for a day that would never come. Joel didn’t ask us if we wanted any of his things, he just sent them, package after package. One week we received a box of books, another week the microscope, two boxes of worthless stamps he couldn’t bear to throw away, a box of sundry tools, and the binoculars. We didn’t know what to do with most of the bestowals. My husband unpacked the boxes, set up the equipment and in most cases found they were broken or missing a part no longer manufactured. He took the stamps to a stamp collector and found they were worth less than the postage Joel had spent sending them to us. Yet, we couldn’t throw them away. We packaged them back up into their boxes and hauled them upstairs into our attic.

That’s where they remained untouched for the better part of ten years until we moved last summer. Now it was our turn to houseclean, and we once again confronted all the things Joel had sent to us. We hadn’t dealt with those “things” for a decade because we couldn’t separate the things from the man who gave them to us and what had followed  his housecleaning, his bestowals. Living in Michigan, a far distance from San Francisco, we had been unable to discern the real nature of Joel’s housecleaning. Or, more darkly, we didn’t want to look closely into what turned out to be Joel’s last acts. Shortly after receiving the final package from Joel, he killed himself. When the police discovered his body, they reported that his apartment had been emptied except for a telephone and a gun. That’s why for ten years we hadn’t disturbed the cargo we had buried in the attic. Part of moving out of our house required our working through what we were going to do with his stuff.

Once again my husband set up the telescope and ascertained it  didn’t work. He dragged it to the curb in front of our house and affixed a sign saying Free in hopes that someone who knew about telescopes would rescue it. The telescope was gone within an hour. He mixed in Joel’s tools with his tools, Joel’s silverware into our silverware, boxed the books he wanted to keep with our books. On and on the reckoning went: throw away, keep, throw away, keep. He pulled out the binoculars from the wreckage and moved them with us to our new house.

They aren’t very good binoculars. Nothing Joel gave was us worked well. In their day they might have been fine and adequate for a child, which was what Joel was when he received them. They’re small, to fit a child’s narrow face and eye span. Too small for my husband’s broad face, they fit me perfectly.

We moved out of the house we had lived in when Joel last visited, an old moldy house sitting in the middle of the 500 block of Orchard Street, in the Bailey neighborhood adjoining the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. Five houses abutted ours—to the right if I wanted, I could see Mrs. Gifford balancing her checkbook in her small study, and to our immediate left, I could see Chris Hartman flipping burgers in her kitchen. Straight out the back, the Froehke brood was gathering around the big oval table for dinner. Before Mr. Gifford died, I heard the beginning of an aggrieved speech Mrs. Gifford made when she came home from church and wanted to tell her husband all about the morning’s sermon. He was lying down in their bedroom which was directly across from our kitchen. She said after receiving no response, “You’re not listening to me” in a loud angry voice. I left the room. Whenever I stepped onto our back deck, I felt I was on a reality TV show called The Back Deck and should wave to my watching neighbors. It was that kind of house, an exposed house, a house in the middle of things where privacy was hard to find, hard to keep. Over time we wanted to substitute trees for students, wildlife for human life, bird call for recrimination, and moved into a house nestled in trees, just above the Red Cedar River. From every window we can see the river and beyond to the undeveloped woodland on the other side. Surrounded by natural lands owned by MSU, the area can’t be developed further. Not a game preserve by any means, still it’s a place where humans and animals coexist.  

I keep the binoculars in their case to protect them on a shelf with my cookbooks in the family room. The whole house is made of glass, and I often catch something in my eye outside the windows and run for my binoculars. By the time I stop fumbling and manage to remove them from their cozy case, get the two lids off the lens and fit the glasses to my eyes, I’ve lost whatever I fleetingly saw. Usually birds are on the move; they don’t linger as subjects of portraiture, and I only have seconds to see them. But sometimes the great birds of prey will survey the scene from their perch for long enough that I can train my glass upon them. I have watched a hawk remain motionless for five minutes except for rotating his head in a occasional flicker. From my study I see the river through a maze of trees. Once looking up from my computer, I saw a dark and large shape land on a tree across the river downstream from us. I could see the branch bounce with the weight and knew it was a large bird landing.  But it was too far away and too obscured by trees for me to see what kind of bird it was. I wanted to name it. I ran for the binoculars. By the time I reached them and got them out, the bird had moved on. Still scanning the area, I spotted the bird straddling a branch in another tree closer to us. A bald eagle. If you’ve never seen a bald eagle, you will be stunned by their size. This one was so large that his purchase upon the branch of the robust fir tree was precarious. He didn’t stay long but hop-scotched his stellar way from tree to tree up the corridor of the river in a midnight zigzag of color until he straightened out and flew up the center and out of sight. I ran out on our balcony and tried to follow his white-tipped head as far as I could, ecstatic with the rare sighting of the eagle just passing through on his way to somewhere else.

When we bought the house we had no idea what we might see outside our windows. We knew we’d see the river, we knew we’d see trees, but we didn’t know what lived in these trees, this river, what would pass through. Soon after moving in, standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes I looked out the big bay window and spied a deer grazing in the wooded area on the other side of the river, nearly camouflaged in the tall autumnal grass. The deer just munched on grasses in a calm steady way and yet I felt compelled to watch. In this wooded area, away from houses, the deer seemed at ease. I watched her eat, focusing on the motion of her mouth chewing for thirty minutes. This was the third time I’d reached for the binoculars in the six weeks we’d lived in our river house. The first time was to zoom in on what turned out to be a great blue heron balanced on a floating log in the middle of the river smack dab by the banks directly in front of our house. From the distance of our house and through our window, the heron looked chalky white, but seemed too large for a white heron. Up close, through the eyes of the binoculars I saw swatches of blue-grey streaks tufting into the milky blue that had looked like white chalk. I saw, too, how he was at himself cleaning, pecking at the gnats and what have you in his plumage. I began looking for him—standing in the shallows of the river, tucked into the banks, and when I didn’t find him through my glass, I became concerned.

More recently a doe and her two fawns crossed the river and scrambled up the banks into our yard. They stayed a half hour and ate the hostas to the ground and much else.  I let them.  I could have walked out on the back balcony and disturbed them. But I had never been so close to deer for so long before. The doe was alert at all times, ears pricked at any sound or movement, absolutely still, still as a snake, standing outside my study windows in the middle of the woods. Her two fawns were less vigilant, relying on her for their watch, and free to scour the brush. Occasionally they looked to where I was, face obscured behind my binoculars. I couldn’t tell if they could see me through the windows; I didn’t see any signs that they could. I felt like a detective hired to sniff out adultery or the other woman eavesdropping on the easy dinner banter of a husband and wife, but all the analogies are wrong because they portray humans trespassing humans. This was different; I was entering where I hadn’t been invited.   

“Deer coming through,” my husband calls out from the kitchen. A line of eight deer walk slowly through the snow-filled yard out back at 6:50 in the morning. The dark is lifting, and the scene is lit by the night’s fallen snow heavy on the trees and shrubs. I’ve just gotten out of the shower; my head is wrapped with a towel. I rip the towel off so I can put on my glasses to see, grab my bathrobe off the hook, and run downstairs to get my binoculars from their shelf. The last deer in the procession, a fawn, and the smallest, isn’t moving like the others, although none of the deer are moving fast this early morning at the end of a long and cold February. It’s been one of the coldest and snow-filled Februaries on record, so cold we haven’t seen the deer much. They tend to huddle somewhere in the woods—I imagine them burrowed into hollows together to collect their heat against the winds. When it begins to warm up, the deer appear across the river. The hind legs of this fawn are reed thin and they seem to be stiff and dragging compared to the more elastic movements of the others. And he’s falling behind. It’s my birthday, and after wishing me a happy birthday my husband says, “I bet five years ago you didn’t think you’d be watching a herd of deer passing through your back yard on your birthday.” He says it to mark the occasion as happy. And it is, but it is also disturbing and unsettling because these deer are not perfect figurines standing in my yard like statues. They are not picture postcard deer, not decoration to my new rural life, exhibits for observation. They are real deer who are emaciated from months of little food, and they are cold deer from living in conditions we humans devote ourselves to avoiding. And they are moving haltingly.

I don’t feed the wildlife, not the ducks, not the deer. I want to feed the deer in the winter, I want to spread wheat on the snow, sprinkle corn and apples. Our neighbors feed the ducks. We watch the ducks struggle up the icy banks of the river and scrape across the snow to the feeder in our neighbor’s yard. And when there’s a rare warm winter day, an old warrior raccoon, whose back legs have incurred some challenge, wearily eases his way down one of the trees by the river. Then he painstakingly drags across our yard to our neighbor’s feeder where the ducks gather. My husband thinks it’s wrong to interfere with the ecosystem here, that we humans do more harm than good wading into matters we don’t understand, and I restrain myself.

I don’t blame my husband for not knowing what I see. It’s another example of how different my husband and I are. When Joel began his divestiture, I thought something was amiss. Richard did not. He took Joel at his word and what Joel said was he wanted to clean house. No change of life course, no mid-life correction accompanied his radical cleansing, and I worried that his actions meant something different from what he was saying. How differently we all see from each other. When each of us looks at a scene, we don’t see the same things. Each of us zeros in on some detail while we don’t notice others. My husband usually has difficulty seeing a hawk I’ve identified in a tree. I point and point, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the hawk in the landscape, the third tree to the left of the fire circle, on the branch above the crux. But he never can follow my directions—he never can push the branches aside to see the bird. When we’re walking through the natural preserve along the Red Cedar River, I can sense there are deer across the river watching us. Sure enough, when I look up, there they are. It’s as if I possess some weird radar. But even after telling my husband to look across the river, he can’t see them. He can see fine when eight deer walk across our back yard illuminated by newly fallen snow. But he doesn’t notice more than the fact of them. Maybe he doesn’t want to see more deeply. Maybe he protects himself from what he might see. Because what follows seeing is a dilemma. What are we going to do about what we see.

If we had seen that Joel was planning on killing himself, what would we have done? If I see that the last fawn is dragging her legs, what am I going to do about it? We did not see the subtext beneath Joel’s extraordinary behavior. What would we have done if we had confronted his impending suicide? Would we have tried to haul Joel back into living, reattaching the broken chords? Is that why Joel visited us that last time, dangling binoculars before us through which we still couldn’t see? Confronting Joel’s last acts, we confront not only the limits of our knowledge, but the limits of our remedies. If we had probed more deeply, would we have made Joel alter his plans? I think yes, but not in the direction we might have wanted, steering his course back to the living. He was sailing the black seas, full speed ahead, no turning back. Joel wanted no preventive measures, no intervention. The most we would have accomplished would have been to hasten his suicide, make him commit it differently than he planned, a plan he believed was the most humane way to die.

When we first moved to our river house, I was purely excited by what I saw. The birds and deer did not speak words I didn’t want to hear or leave things behind that I didn’t know what to do with, or so I thought. But along with the ecstasy of watching a bald eagle race down the corridor of river or spotting wild turkeys nesting in our treetops or a deer grazing leisurely across the river, there was also death and the premonition of it.

These are the binoculars I reach for when I want to see what’s going on where we’ve moved. But when I pull them out of their case and feel their cold weight in my hands, I think these are a dead man’s binoculars, these are a dead man’s eyes. I can’t help it. When I scan the landscape, searching out some live thing, I feel I am looking through Joel’s eyes, through the lens of death.

I have become expert at washing dishes without looking at them, putting things away while keeping my eyes pinned to the windows. At first, I don’t see anything unusual. I note how high the river is, that it is flooding the banks and seeping into the woodland, encroaching on the abandoned canoe perched on its side in the tall grass. Only after looking steadily for awhile do I begin to see what is materializing out there. On this winter morning of mixed rain and snow, I stare out across the river, to the other side, to an area of soggy woodland. A hawk, a broad winged, red tailed hawk appears out of nowhere and is plunging down from the sky for something. Now it has something in its beak and talons on the ground and it has spread its wings and is thrashing something over and over, rhythmically, ceremonially until it clatters apart. The dance of death  goes on a long time, enough time for me to retrieve my binoculars and raise them to my eyes.  I can’t see what the hawk has gotten—its back is to me, its wings spread and obscuring what it has in its talons. It has to be big enough to require prolonged killing—no one, two, three and its neck is snapped. No rodent this. And then I can’t watch anymore. I drop the binoculars on the counter by the sink on their side. I leave the hawk to its killing. I have known this moment was coming, have seen it coming towards me for years, the day I would hold the binoculars of the dead man and watch death happen, and we would be one.

Marcia Aldrich teaches in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover New Authors book. She has just completed a follow-up collection titled The Making of The Mother and Other Portraits. She is the senior editor of Fourth Genre.