A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [27]
“The problem,” she had begun uncertainly, “is just that I can’t ever classify touch, can’t seem to understand degrees of contact. All accidents, all injuries, involve contact, impact, don’t they? What is the difference, really, between touch and collision?”
“But, of course, there’s a difference,” Julia had said.
“I know that, but often it doesn’t seem that way to me.”
Julia’s hands had moved across the surface of the pine table as if testing the familiarity of the grain. Her irises were soft, opaque, as beautiful and distant as planets. “There is being touched, and then there is touching, and attached to both of these things there is intention.”
“But how do you know for sure what is intended?” As a child Sylvia had been certain that her mother’s few attempts at embraces had been meant to restrain her, to cause her to stop doing something, or to move her in a direction other than the one she had wanted to take. “I like,” Sylvia began, “to count on things being the same way they were the last time I saw them. Sometimes I think that the world is just too crowded, too full of people rearranging things, touching each other, making changes.”
“It’s like that for the newly sighted,” Julia said quietly, then added, “or so I’ve heard. They are sometimes unable to cope with the profuseness of whatever is out there in the perceived world. Many of them apparently want to go back … back to blindness.” She paused, thinking. “Perhaps there is something comforting about being able to choose a view rather than having it thrust upon you, to choose a view and then to touch a map. Maybe I’m more fortunate than I know.”
Sylvia had watched as Julia sat back and relaxed in her chair. How wonderful she had looked right then, sitting beside the kitchen window, her blond hair and translucent skin and eyes making her seem ageless despite her forty-some years. She had been the first person Sylvia had wanted to spend time with, the first person, apart from Malcolm, with whom she had felt safe.
When Sylvia stood at the door that day preparing to leave, Julia had lifted one of her pale arms and had asked Sylvia to touch it. “Put your hand there,” she had said, “just above my wrist.” Sylvia hesitated. Then she placed her palm on the milk-white skin. “See how naturally your fingers curl around the shape?” Julia continued. “Human beings were made to touch one another.”
Sylvia was surprised by the smoothness and warmth of her friend’s arm. But then everything about Julia was soft, pliable. As she walked away from the farmhouse she thought about how Julia navigated through life. There were the maps, of course, and the cane, the tools she used for unfamiliar places. But the way she moved around the furniture, the obstacles in the rooms of her house, was so fluid, so filled with grace it was as if the structure of her body were made of some other substance altogether, something more forgiving than bone.
Malcolm had taught Sylvia about conversation. The introduction of a new piece of information usually requires that a question be asked, he had explained, even if the information comes about as a result of a previous question. This was an idea that the then much younger Sylvia had found to be absurd in theory and exhausting in practise. She had never let go of her fear of questioning but tried, anyway, to follow Malcolm’s advice when they were in social situations. Later, when she had been with Julia, or Andrew, she had learned about the pleasure of conversation, the comfort of listening and being listened to, and in time she’d been able, quite naturally, to choose one path or another into long episodes of talk. There must have been questions, but she couldn’t