"It is an accepted teaching of physiology that all sense perception is never pure passivity, but reaction to a received stimulus... I will call the eye's characteristic reaction to an external stimulus its activity, and more specifically that activity of the retina, since the retina is undoubtedly the seat of sensation during vision. What stimulates this activity, immediately and originally, is light. The eye, receiving the full impression of light, responds with the full activity of the retina. With the absence of light, or total darkness, the inactivity of the retina comes about." On Vision and Colors
The optometrist has a cardboard placard of a photograph of her and her husband on a wooden side-table in the waiting room. The table is overcrowded with books and magazines. Each room where the eye-examinations take place contain framed university degrees: Yeshiva University, NYU.
Maya Angelou died, the radio said, and, for a moment, the optometrist felt deeply emotional.
She didn't have time for lunch.
She wore patent-leather loafers.
Her hair was shorn short: with straight clean bowl-shaped lines, with some flare, for you could see that it was dyed, and she had chosen, in one parallel spot, to let the hair go light brown, while all the rest was dark.
Her slim body walks with assurance: this doesn't change.
Her parents were free and open in their advice to her throughout her childhood: when she came home with questions about sex, they answered them, and her mother, despite her father's dalliances with other women, and their subsequent divorce, so trusted him as a doctor that she wouldn't want anyone else to operate on her body.
(Mary, as an old woman, wears black boots with metal studs. Her brother has a stable of horses.)
(John is buying leather by-the-pound and cutting up the jackets and suede dresses to make zippered pouches. The zippers are cheap.)