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stairs to the church she stops, confused—she thought she was heading in the other direction.
    “Are you going back in?” Aunt Bea asks.
    Terry doesn’t know. She starts crying again—high, puppy-like whimpers that plunge Julie into grief and start her crying, too.
    “Here we go,” Aunt Bea sighs, walking over to Terry.
    “Julie is stupid,” Terry says.
    “Oh, now,” Hazel Gordimer admonishes.
“Julie has rocks in her head,” Terry says.
    Two days later Terry goes into the hospital. She is supremely confident. At the admission desk she asks if anyone knows a blind girl who needs an almost brand new cane.
    Aunt Bea is confident, too. The same doctor has been monitoring Terry ever since she was born, and he says she is the optimum age for the operation. He calls it a delicate but routine procedure with an extremely high success rate. “The only real worry I have,” he says, “is how Terry will react to suddenly being able to see. There are always adjustment problems.”
    “You mean the birthmark,” Aunt Bea says, getting down to brass tacks. Even though the doctor has explained to Terry how next year a plastic surgeon is going to erase the birthmark with a laser beam (“erase”—that’s the word he used, as if somebody had spilled purple ink on her cheek), Aunt Bea doesn’t exactly expect Terry to jump for joy the first time she looks in a mirror.
    But the doctor says, “Spatial problems. An inability, in the beginning anyway, to judge depth and distances.”
    “Oh, well,” Aunt Bea says. She has spatial problems herself, if that’s the case. When she used to drive she had an awful time pulling out into traffic.
    The church has arranged for a private hospital room, and members of the congregation have already filled it with flowers. Terry is exhilarated, Aunt Bea is touched, but when Aunt Bea has to go home, and Terry is lying down waiting for her dinner tray, all those bouquets surrounding that little body on the bed make Aunt Bea uneasy. Right after supper, leaving the dirty dishes on the table, she rushes back. She brings Julie this time, plus a big bag of chocolate-chip cookies, which, despite the flowers, Terry immediately smells. “I can’t eat those!” she cries.
    “You can’t?” Aunt Bea says.
    Terry gives her head the single nod that, for her, means absolutely not. “I can’t eat anything till the operation. I have to have an empty stomach.”
    “Oh, that’s right,” Aunt Bea says, annoyed with herself. You’d have thought that after all of Norman’s operations she’d have remembered.
    Julie is still in the doorway. Although she hasn’t said anything yet, Terry is aware of her. “Why are you just standing there?” she asks.
    “Come on, honey, come over here and help me wolf some of these down,” Aunt Bea says, dropping onto the chair and digging into the bag of cookies.
    “Can Penny see?” Julie asks in her loud voice.
    “Of course not!” Terry cries. “I haven’t even had the operation yet!”
    “In a week, Penny will be able to see,” Aunt Bea says. She hoists her sore feet onto the radiator.
    Julie scowls and sticks a finger in her ear. She pushes so hard that she groans.
    “What’s the matter?” Aunt Bea says. “Come on over here.”
    Julie stays where she is. She is mentally scanning Aunt Bea’s apartment. She sees the hammer and nails in an apple basket on the broom-closet floor. She sees the two screwdrivers in a juice can. She moves to the bedroom and sees the hangers in the bedroom closet, and she lingers there as she remembers her mother straightening out a hanger and poking it up a hash pipe once.
    Despite her bandage, Terry is sure that she is already detecting the colour red. “It’s very bright,” she says. “It could hurt you, even.”
    Colours are all she talks about. For the first time in her life she wonders what colour writing is.
    “Black,” Aunt Bea says. “Nine times out of ten.”
    Terry can’t understand how it is visible in that