About a Girl
She can barely see, she doesn't like to be hugged, and she's already forgotten most of what happened last winter. Which is why, just maybe, Audra Thomas has such a strong sense of the world around her—and of herself.
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For two days last March, I went to school with Audra. It's common for people with visual impairments due to brain injury to be able to see familiar things better than unfamiliar things; accordingly, Audra charged through the halls of her high school with the assurance of someone who knew exactly where she was going, barely using the skinny white cane she carries with her. Because she'd taken courses at the local community college over the summer and had only a few scheduled classes during her last semester, she spent much of the school day in the computer lab, at a desk in the corner where she would set up her laptop. For the past year, Audra had been in charge of maintaining the school's Web site. She would code away, or else work on a project for another class, as other students came and went from the room. None of them greeted Audra, who told me, "I'm kind of in my own little world a lot of the time."
Before the accident, says Audra, she had a few really close friendships. "I'm starting to get those again now, but it'll take awhile. It's like I'm missing out on something, things that we've done together, different things. If it's something really important to remember, I have told myself, repeated it over and over so that it's in there."
It used to be that Audra would have to meet all her schoolmates again every fall, having forgotten everyone over the summer, but this year, "I started keeping in touch with people somewhat, and I started keeping a database. If it's someone I know I'll meet in the future, but not for a while, I'll write down and keep information on them." This is something she has resolved to do more as she prepares to leave for college—"create a list of people, with what their relationship to me is, what I like about them, what I dislike about them, if they have siblings, and if they like my siblings. I think I used to have some more of those files, but then my computer crashed." This year Audra's two closest friends at school were Ashlee and Chris, and in her database of people, Audra has entered the fact that Ashlee has an allergy to pork and that she can cheer you up because she's always smiling and happy. As for Chris, Audra has noted that he's not afraid to talk about anything and that he has brought her out of her shell.
The only real class I went to with Audra was Spanish, where, two days before spring break, the mood among the students was lethargic. It was a small group: just Audra and a handful of pretty girls with blank expressions. They all watched part of a Spanish-language DVD of the first Harry Potter movie, and then the teacher, Mrs. Franco, asked them to open their books to a vocabulary list. Suddenly, the pretty girls all wanted to go somewhere in great haste:
"Can I go talk to Coach Jones real quick?"
"Can I run to my locker and get my notebook?"
"Can I use the restroom really fast?"
A couple of them dashed off, and Mrs. Franco implored the remaining few to read the vocabulary words aloud; when that didn't work, she pronounced the words herself and asked the students to give their English meanings. Although everyone but Audra could see the translations, which were provided on the list, no one said anything. Except for Audra. "Disolver," said Mrs. Franco, and Audra said, "Dissolve." "La negociación," and Audra said, "Negotiation." "Encabezar." "Ocultar." "Irreverente." Finally one of the girls returned from the restroom and chimed in with a couple of definitions, and then class was over.
Observing all of this, I remembered that I myself had been careful to keep relatively quiet in my high school classes, having learned that it wasn't cool to pipe up too often. That was an unspoken rule, and to break it was to risk embarrassment. So I wondered, did Audra know such rules and just not care? Or had she simply forgotten them?
This year Audra was accepted by her first-choice college, Mount Holyoke, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, but her parents decided she should go to Austin College, in Sherman, some thirty miles from Celina, which was a big disappointment for her. (Afterward, Audra refused to speak to her mother for weeks. "She and I go at it big time," says Nancy. "I know I'm her least favorite person right now, and that's okay.") One reason for the decision was that Austin College costs less, but other factors weighed heavily. I asked Nancy whether she'd worried that if Audra went far away to school, she would forget her home. "Partially, yes. We wouldn't see her until Christmas. I think she would lose it. But it's also how she handles things. I'm just not sure she can help herself yet. Later, when she shows me she can live on her own, then we'll see." The college decision followed close on the heels of another disappointment—in this year's UIL current-events competition, Audra didn't qualify for state.
Around her family members, Audra blows up easily. After Adam watched TV in her room, lying on top of her brand-new comforter, she badgered him about it and then spent all night washing her sheets. When Katie borrowed some of her clothes without asking, it made Audra so mad that she yelled and argued and eventually started crying. "That was the first time I'd cried in, like, two years," Audra told me. Of course, she doesn't remember most of those two years, and I wondered whether this could be true. When I pressed her on it, she admitted that she did cry sometimes in private but never in public. In general, she said, "I don't have as many emotions as other people. And when I do have them, it's, like, rage."
ONE SUNDAY IN APRIL, AUDRA and I went to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth because she is interested in art and art history. None of the other visitors seemed the least bit surprised to see a blind girl with a cane making her way through the galleries, but I was still trying to figure it out: How is it that a person who can't see colors except as varying shades of gray, who can make out forms only from very close up or through a magnifying viewer, likes to look at paintings?
A new exhibit had just opened, a retrospective of the work of Philip Guston, and we proceeded through it as follows: Audra would walk right up to a canvas and eyeball it, sometimes tracing a contour in the air with her finger, because tracing helps her to see things better. "Oh, hello," she'd say when she came across a new figure or a change of color. She asked questions: "Okay, there's a big splotch here where it's lighter?"
"Yeah, it's pink there, and the paint's applied really thickly," I said, trying to help her and feeling inadequate to the task. Every so often a museum guard would tell us we were too close to the canvas. "Hey, cut us some slack, will you?" I'd think. "The girl can barely see!" Audra would back off and look at the painting again through a little black telescope she'd brought, which helped her see the picture in its entirety.
After a while I thought I was beginning to understand Audra's way of looking. She didn't care for busy or complex paintings, in which it was hard to connect all the pieces, or paintings without much color contrast, in which she couldn't tell different sections apart. "I like stuff more on the abstract side, stuff that's simpler," she said. "I like to look until it clicks with me." She seemed to be actively assembling the images in her head, laboring to perceive each painting in a manner superficially different from how a sighted person would look at anything, but perhaps not entirely different. To some degree, we all create what we're looking at and imagine what we remember.
Guston's later works are cartoonish and obstinately strange, full of big round heads and disembodied legs and figures wearing Klansman-like hoods, and as Audra was surveying one such painting with her scope, going along from part to part, I was attempting to describe the whole: "It's two of those Klan-type guys sitting in a tire and smoking, and there's some sort of junk in the tire, and the name of the painting is Edge of Town."
"Maybe they're in a junkyard," she said. "A junkyard is at the edge of town. They're sitting in the junkyard and smoking."
"You're probably right," I said.
Then, having made sense of the painting, Audra moved her scope away from her eye, turned her head toward me, and said, mischievously, "See, I'm smart!" It was the first time I'd seen her without her glasses, and her bared eyes were bright and sly. It was unnerving: In that instant I was sure Audra could see me perfectly.
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