The Gunners. Rebecca Kauffman
never left the area, or his job at General Mills, although he did receive two promotions over the course of a decade. He never left the ranch home either; he was shocked to find that Louise had actually left the house, and all that it contained, to him when she eventually passed. He hadn’t realized she was so serious about those weasels.
Mikey took Louise’s impressive accumulation of Redbook magazines, erotic novels, and cookbooks to the Salvation Army, except for The Joy of Cooking, which he kept for himself. He paged absently through this book, many of its pages stained with sauce or textured with crumbs, until one day it began to interest him. He learned to baste and blanch and caramelize, poach and macerate and emulsify, learned the quick mental math of dividing recipes into a portion for one. He pored over Louise’s collection from the classical repertoire on cassette tapes, listening to this music while he cooked and late into the evening.
Friday became a dear and happy companion. He was a cat of the highest caliber. He purred when Mikey touched his head, while leaning and arching his back into Mikey’s legs and walking figure eights through them as Mikey cooked, purred in the morning when he moved from the foot of the bed, where he slept every night, to Mikey’s chest, happily and dutifully kneading at Mikey’s neck with his little black paws, purring so rapturously that he gasped and wheezed fishy breath into Mikey’s face. Mikey wondered what had brought him the great fortune of having such a merry and contented cat, who, unlike Mikey, never seemed to slip into dark, pensive, and ungenerous moods.
It was not long after Mikey left his father’s home that his vision in his right eye began to grow worse. Faraway road signs, individual leaves on trees, and tiles on roofs were the first things to go. The change was so gradual that it wasn’t until years later that he finally went to see an optometrist.
The optometrist performed tests and gave Mikey a prescription for his right eye. He inquired as to when Mikey had lost vision completely in the left.
“I never had it,” Mikey said.
“I see.” The optometrist stared back and forth between both of Mikey’s eyes and shone a bright blue light into the right one.
Mikey picked out a pair of wire frames, and reiterated to the receptionist ordering the glasses that he would only need the proper prescription in the right lens.
Several months later, Mikey returned to the optometrist when he could tell his vision in his right eye had already grown worse. He was retested and given a stronger prescription.
A year later, he was back again, for the same reason.
This time, the doctor asked about blind spots. Mikey confessed that he had several and asked what this meant. The doctor explained that he was undergoing early-onset macular degeneration.
Mikey asked him directly, “Will I go blind?”
The doctor answered directly, “Probably.”
“When?”
The doctor compared Mikey’s new prescription with the previous one. “A few years most likely. Although you never know what might happen with technology between now and then.”
Mikey felt an angry and fearful indignation shiver through the cold organs in his belly. He said, “Why is this happening?”
“Are you asking if it’s hereditary?”
“I guess.”
“Possibly,” the doctor said.
Mikey was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “There was one time I looked directly at the sun when I was a kid.”
The doctor smiled gently. “They warn you about that. But it’s almost impossible to cause permanent damage that way. You didn’t do this to yourself, I can assure you of that.”
Mikey started to learn Braille. He started practicing to cook and clean and clothe himself with a piece of tape over his right eye. He also started to catalog images, colors, memories, and he created associations that would make sense to him when—if—he lost his sight. The color red = the smell of cinnamon. Blue = fingers under running water. White = the taste of cream. A full moon is Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 2. The first snowfall looks exactly the way sugar tastes. A tree-lined street with lampposts is Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One.”
Excluding Sally, the rest of The Gunners started up a group email thread within a year or two of graduating high school and going their separate ways. Any ill will among the rest of them caused by Sally’s absence seemed to have been forgotten. Although this was never formally acknowledged between them, they reconnected easily over email, the ongoing thread coming to life every few months, and their contact was warm, often containing a happy childhood memory or an ancient inside joke. With all of them now around thirty, the past decade had seen a great deal of movement and change, all documented through these emails.
Jimmy had come into great wealth since moving to Los Angeles at age nineteen and making wise investments. Sam had been married at age twenty-one in a family-only ceremony, and was now deeply involved with the church he and his wife attended in Georgia. Lynn had attended a music conservatory in New York City, but now lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, where she and her boyfriend ran the local AA chapter. Alice had attended the University of Michigan, eloped with a graduate student who she referred to as “The Saint,” been married to him for a year and then divorced him; she now dated women. She currently owned a small but successful marina on Lake Huron. Sometimes, Mikey felt embarrassed by how little his own life had changed since high school compared to the rest of them. In their emails, the others described marriage and travels and concerts. In Mikey’s emails, he described renovations to their high school gym, a new recipe he had attempted, and minor updates to Friday’s health.
On occasions when Mikey saw Sally Forrest out in Lackawanna, he had to fight his urge to report back to the others. As far as Mikey could tell, Sally remained in her mother’s home after high school and he continued to see her out from time to time, standing in line at the CVS pharmacy, massaging peaches at Tops, or walking up Ingram with a cell phone at her ear, although Sally always seemed to be listening, never speaking into that phone. Mikey did not know if she worked. He did not know if she had new friends, or who spoke to her from the other end of that phone.
With high school behind them and the others far away, Mikey had initially been hopeful that he and Sally might be able to reconnect, that she might finally reveal to him what had caused her to abandon the group, and that he might have the opportunity to apologize if he’d had any part of it. But when they encountered each other in public, Sally continued to look past Mikey with the same cold disdain she had when they were still in school. As though she’d never known him, as though they’d shared nothing. When he saw Sally, Mikey was filled with a dense, aching emptiness, one that contained so much.
He longed to report to the others that their old friend Sally was still so, so thin, perhaps had even lost weight since the last time he’d seen her. She always wore sunglasses, so he could not see her eyes. She carried a canvas bag with a fruit basket embroidered on it, and there was a large, bright yellowish stain on the strap. He still missed her, wondered about her, wondered what had gone wrong, and whether the others did, too. But he always reasoned with himself that if the others cared, they would ask. No point picking at a sore and drawing fresh blood if everyone else was content to leave it be.
There was often talk of a reunion between the five of them, but plans never came together. Even so, with brief and infrequent face-to-face contact, and all these years later, Mikey still considered Alice, Jimmy, Sam, and Lynn his dearest friends. He had trouble connecting with peers at work, and despised social events. He had not grown less shy over the years. He couldn’t bring himself to start social media accounts because he hated all photographs of himself: left eye always a bit creamy and strange and faraway, right eye focused but never quite meeting the camera’s lens, as though he feared its judgment. Cheeks always flaming, freckles overlaid with red. Cowlick always wild, as if it had an ax to grind.
Mikey therefore always read the emails from The Gunners with great interest, and felt deeply invested in their lives. He went on soaring Google Earth explorations through their towns, zooming around parks