Jeanne Malmgren is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
This should be a quick in-and-out, I’m thinking.
As we walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I’m cheered to see the line isn’t too long. We’re here for a simple errand, to change our driver’s licenses from Florida to South Carolina. It’s as mundane as any of the other chores related to moving to a new state.
This DMV office is home turf for me. It’s just down the road from the country hospital where I was born. This is the town where I injured my eye when I was two—an accident that took my sight in one eye and left me half-blind. This is the community that flooded my family with cards, telegrams and offers of help while I was hospitalized. This is the place where all three churches in town were praying for me.
Now, forty-five years later, I’ve come back here to live because my husband and I want to escape the traffic and heat of Florida. We want to live in a smallish, friendly town. We also want to be near my parents, who are getting older and could benefit from our presence nearby.
It feels good to be back. I’m eager to get the driver’s license that will identify me as a South Carolina resident once again.
Braving the DMV office is never particularly pleasant, but my first challenge comes at the check-in desk, where they want you to peer into the little machine and read the letters you see on the screen inside. I always preface the vision test with a disclaimer—something like “I can’t see out of my right eye, so I’ll only be reading half the line.”
That announcement usually inspires a quizzical look, but the embarrassment is fleeting. The check-in clerk scribbles something on the paper they hand me, and I end up with a license that has an extra restriction on it. Call it the Monocular Special. I am required to have outside mirrors on any vehicle I drive, to augment my less-than-stellar peripheral vision. (I’ve never in my life driven a vehicle that didn’t have outside mirrors, but I guess that’s beside the point.)
The problem is that I don’t look half-blind. I have this $4,000 piece of plastic covering my blind eye. It’s called a scleral shell and it’s painted to match my other eye, the seeing eye. It hides the ugliness of a disfigured eye. There are these wonderful people in the world, ocularists, who make artificial eyes for people like me. Without their artistry, the intense skill it takes to make one of these prostheses, I couldn’t face the world. I couldn’t have done half the things I’ve done in my life—interviewed for jobs, given speeches, acted in community theater, looked people in the eye as I shake their hand. Wearing my beautiful scleral shell, I can pass for two-eyed. Most people don’t even know I’m half-blind. Which is utterly fantastic. Until I get to the DMV and “fail” the vision test.
As we check in today, I’m expecting the usual brief set-to at the front desk. Hopefully it will resolve quickly. I make my half-the-line announcement to the clerk. She peers at me over the top of the vision testing machine, which is screwed onto her desk.
“What do you mean?” she says.
I swallow. Here we go.
There are several people in line behind me now. Suddenly I’m back in third grade, not wanting anyone to know I’m different from everyone else. Trying not to draw attention to myself. Wishing I could disappear.
For a moment, I consider faking it. Telling her I was kidding, then making up letters as I’m “reading” the other half of the line. Of course, that wouldn’t work. So I repeat my announcement. I’m trying to keep my voice low. The clerk leans toward me, frowning.
I can feel the trouble coming. It’s a thunderstorm rolling in from a far horizon.
She says something about my needing a letter from an eye doctor. My ears start to buzz. The warning light in my amygdala has blinked on. It’s flashing red.
I try to tell her I just moved here. I don’t have an eye doctor yet. It would take weeks to get in to see someone as a new patient. And I want to get my license today. I want to get this simple errand done.
She’s not having it. She hauls herself out of her chair and, without a word to me, lumbers over to one of the “customer support specialists” stationed at the high counter spanning the other side of the room. They huddle in conversation for a minute or two, as sweat breaks out in my armpits.
She comes back, and I hear the words “low vision” in the stream of what she’s saying to me. I can’t hear much else. I’m now in full-blown fight-flight-freeze, with an emphasis on freeze. The line of people behind me is growing longer. I hear the door repeatedly swinging open, as more customers come in.
Somehow my brain, despite its rising distress, dredges up a fact.
“I’ve been driving for thirty years,” I tell the woman. “I’ve been licensed in four states. Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida. This was never a problem anywhere else.”
She’s blinking at me, unimpressed.
“You’ll have to get a letter from your eye doctor,” she says. “You need to come back later.”
I can feel the dismissal. She wants this problem standing at her desk to move along. She wants to go back to processing people who aren’t problems. Normal people.
In a lightning-like flash, my freeze switches to fight.
“I want to talk to your supervisor,” I say.
I’m acutely aware of my husband’s physical presence next to me. He hates confrontation. I know he’s wishing we could leave. Walk outside, sit in our car in the parking lot, strategize, maybe come back another day. Anything but this escalating situation.
He’s acquainted with my temper. He knows it can flare when someone blocks me from what I want to do. I don’t deal well with being controlled, never have.
The woman behind the desk sighs. I have messed up her nice, uncomplicated morning. She glances at the lengthening line behind me, her lips pursed. She gets up again, and shuffles across the room. Disappears into an office behind the high counter.
“I’m sorry,” I say to my husband.
He smiles at me, that smile he wears when he’s hoping things won’t boil over but knowing they probably will. Jim is a peace-loving person. If he were in my shoes this morning, he’d probably say something like, “Okay, this is all very inconvenient. But we’ll get a doctor’s letter and come back.”
He’s not in my shoes, though. I am. And inside me a voice is chanting a command: Fight this! Fight! Fight!
I turn and smile at the people behind us in line. I murmur an apology. They don’t smile back. I am now everybody’s problem.
A few minutes later, we’re out of the check-in line and standing near the chairs where people sit when they’re waiting to be called to the counter—those lucky two-eyed people who pass the vision test with ease and are green-lighted to the next step of the process.
I’m listening to a woman who identifies herself as the manager of this DMV office. She’s wearing a nametag. I memorize it. She talks to me slowly, deliberately, as if I’m stupid.
“This is a new policy this year,” she says. “If someone can’t pass the vision test, they need to bring in a letter from an eye care professional that vouches for their ability to drive safely.”
She’s reciting from a training manual, I’m pretty sure. She sounds like a robot.
I repeat everything I told the check-in clerk: I just moved here. I don’t have an “eye care professional” yet. It would be inconvenient to go find one and wait to see them. The South Carolina driver’s manual says I have ninety days after moving here to get my new license. So here I am, trying to do just that. And besides, I have been licensed in several other states. They certified me as safe-to-drive, even as a monocular.
She listens, but her face is a blank slate. It seems clear they don’t get a lot of monoculars at this DMV. Like, maybe never.
“You say you’re blind in one eye?” she says.
I’m confused. Didn’t we already establish that? Didn’t I explain that I can read only one half of the line in the machine? And, more importantly, that I can read the other half perfectly fine?
“Yes,” I say. “I wear an artificial eye over my blind eye.”
I feel like a balloon emptying of air, shrinking into a withered heap of latex.
She ponders for a moment.
“Well, you’ll have to prove that to me,” she says.
My brain explodes in something that feels like a mini-burst of fireworks. What did she just say?!
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Actually, I do know what she means. And now I’m scared. Really scared. I’m in a dark alley and I hear footsteps behind me. I’m about to be assaulted. My body tenses into a fetal position, even though I’m still standing.
“If you will take out your eye and show me that it’s blind . . . ” she starts.
I look at my husband. He’s helpless. I see it on his face. He wants to empower me to decide what to do. He has given this situation over to me. But he’s standing close. I feel his support, even through the mounting heat inside me.
Now the fear is morphing into white-hot anger. I am suddenly pissed beyond words. And just as suddenly, I am standing here representing all disabled people everywhere, in every moment when we’ve been marginalized, inconvenienced, made to feel like a problem, separated from the herd.
Where are our accommodations? Where are my accommodations?
I’m disabled, dammit, and I want my accommodations!
I look at the manager and I’m not sure I can get any words out. My throat is clogged with a thick mucus of rage.
“Okay,” I sputter. “But I’m not gonna do that out here in public.”
She motions us toward the office behind the high counter. I follow her, feeling like I might vomit into any nearby trash can. My husband is right behind me. I feel his hand on the center of my back. The touch of love.
How can this be happening? Why isn’t my own word good enough? It always has been, for three decades of driving, in four different states. But somehow, right now, these people in this little town where I was born don’t trust me. Somehow, right now, I’m walking into an office where I’m going to do something I would never ever do in public. I’m going to remove my artificial eye in front of a stranger who has no right to do this to me.
The sense of unreality wraps around me like fog. I’m walking, but I don’t quite feel it.
The office is a large open space where three women sit at randomly spaced desks. They look up with curiosity as the director leads me to a spot in the center of the room. Clearly, customers are never brought back here.
A window on the far wall overlooks a paved lot out back with two wooden barricades set a few feet apart. It’s where driving test examiners have people demonstrate their parallel parking skills. I don’t know why my brain registers that small detail. Except for the fact that when I was a teenager, I struggled to learn how to parallel park. I delayed going for my first driver’s license until I was seventeen because I was so nervous about the parallel parking segment of the test.
Right now I’d love to be out there, showing an examiner what a great parallel parker I am. That would be a breeze compared to this.
“Okay,” says the manager. “Take out your eye.”
I look around. The three workers are staring at us, slack-jawed. They have a front row seat.
I’m stunned. I thought this woman was going to take me in the ladies’ room, for gods’ sake. Or maybe a storage closet. Nope. She wants me to do this right here, in front of her and three other people who know nothing of my situation, who have no idea what’s going on.
My head starts to pound like someone’s whacking it with a sledgehammer. I’ve never in my life felt such a powerful surge of fight-flight-freeze. But none of those three options are available in this moment. I can’t fight. I can’t run. I can’t freeze.
I lift my hand to my right eye. In a sweep of the index finger across my eyelid, the scleral shell is out and in the palm of my hand. I am naked in a way that’s a million times worse than if I were standing here with no clothes on.
I look at the manager. I stare at her, full on, with the horror-movie ugliness of my blind eye unveiled. I want to burn a hole in her forehead with my gaze. I want her to feel pain. Embarrassment. Guilt. Anything, everything. I want her to remember this moment for a very long time.
Way back in some remote corner of my mind I’m aware, just for a second, that this is awful for her, too. That she probably hates ending up in this bizarre situation she didn’t think would go this far. That she feels as trapped as I do. The two of us, standing here face to face, entangled together in a web of shame and regret.
She doesn’t say a word. Not that I can recall, anyway. Maybe she did say something. My husband later tells me
she apologized. I didn’t hear it. My entire nervous system was on fire. I couldn’t hear anything but the roar in my ears.
Five minutes later, my new driver’s license is in my hand. The photo is the first one I’ve ever had on a license where I’m not smiling. My face, caught in the camera’s flash, doesn’t look angry. It doesn’t look sad. Just blank and expressionless.
Like the face of someone dead, her eyes wide open.
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