The Bead I Kept Threading Onto the Wrong Hole

I have been doing beadwork since I was a girl in the Eastern Cape, and I am now sixty one years old, living in a small flat in Kensington, Johannesburg. My grandmother taught me on a stoep with a tin of glass beads that caught the sun, and I have never really stopped. For decades my hands knew the work better than my eyes did. I could thread a needle in the near dark, feel the bead settle, feel the tension of the cotton, and keep going while I talked to whoever was in the room. It was the one thing in my life that never asked me to concentrate. It just happened.

So when it stopped just happening, I did not notice it as a problem. I noticed it as a mood.

When I started blaming everything but my eyes

It began last autumn. I would sit at my table by the window in the afternoon, which is where the light is best, and I would find myself leaning in closer and closer to the tray. I told myself the beads were a bad batch, that the holes were smaller than usual, that the factory in China was making them cheaper. I actually complained to the woman at the shop in Bruma about it. She looked at me a little strangely and said the beads were the same as always.

Then I started blaming the cotton. Then the needle. Then the globe in my lamp, which I changed twice. I bought one of those daylight bulbs that is supposed to be like the sun, and for a week I thought it had fixed everything, and then it had not.

What I was really doing was threading the bead onto the space next to the hole. I would push, and it would not go, and I would feel with my thumbnail and realise I was a whisper off, every single time. On a good day it was funny. On a bad day I put the whole tray down and did not touch it for a week, and I am not a person who leaves work unfinished.

My daughter noticed before I admitted it. She came for supper and watched me reading the electricity bill with my arm stretched right out, holding the paper as far from my face as it would go, tilting it toward the light. She did not say anything that night. The next morning she phoned and said, Ma, when did you last have your eyes checked properly. And I said, ag, everyone needs reading glasses at my age, it is nothing.

The glasses that did not fix it

I did the sensible thing and I did the wrong thing. I went to the pharmacy at the shopping centre and I tried on the reading glasses off the rack, the ones in the little spinning stand. I held a magazine and worked my way up the strengths until the words looked sharp, and I bought the pair that seemed best, and I felt clever for saving money.

For a while they helped with the fine print. But they did nothing for the thing that was actually bothering me, which was that the world had started to look as if someone had breathed on it. Streetlights at night had a soft halo around them, like a photograph taken through a stocking. Oncoming headlights on the way back from my sister in Edenvale turned into great smeared stars, and I began to make excuses not to drive after dark. Colours went flat too. My beadwork uses a lot of reds and deep blues and I found I could not always tell the navy from the black anymore, which for my kind of work is not a small thing. It is the whole thing.

The reading glasses could not touch any of that, because none of it was about the distance from my eye to the page. My daughter said the sentence that finally moved me. She said, Ma, glasses off a shelf are for a tired eye, they are not for an eye that has actually changed. Go to someone who can look inside.

Sitting in the dark chair

I want to be honest that I was frightened, and the fear was not really about my eyes. My mother went blind slowly in her last years from something nobody named properly at the time, and I had spent my whole life quietly assuming the same road was waiting for me and choosing not to look down it. Booking the appointment felt like looking down it.

I asked around before I went, because I did not want to end up with just anyone. A friend from church who had been through her cataract operation told me plainly that there is a difference between the optometrist who checks whether you need glasses and the doctor who is trained as a medical eye specialist, and that for what I was describing I wanted the second kind. She was the one who used the word properly for me. She said the ophthalmologists are the ones who can actually examine the lens and the retina and tell you what is going on inside, not just measure you for spectacles. I had heard the word my whole life and never once thought hard about what it meant.

The examination itself was calmer than I had built it up to be in my head. They put drops in that made everything blurry and bright for a couple of hours, so my daughter drove. I sat in a dark room and rested my chin on a little bar and looked into a light while the doctor looked back at me through the machine. There is something strangely intimate about a stranger studying the inside of your eye while you both stay very quiet.

What it actually was

It was cataracts. Both eyes, the left worse than the right. The lens that is supposed to be clear had slowly gone cloudy, which was the breathed-on window, the halos, the flat colours, all of it explained in one plain word. It was not my mother's illness. It was not the road I had been dreading. It was a common thing that happens to a great many people as they get older, and it was fixable.

I nearly cried at the desk, and not from bad news. It was relief, the specific relief of finally having a name for a thing that had been quietly stealing my afternoons.

I have since told half the women in my beading group, because it turns out I am not the only one who spent a year blaming the beads and the bulbs and the cotton. If you are in the north of the city and you notice the world going soft and haloed, do not do what I did and lose a year to the pharmacy shelf. See an ophthalmologist in Johannesburg who can look inside the eye and tell you what is really happening. I even learned to spell the word, which is a mouthful. People write it a hundred ways, and I have seen it spelled opthalmologist on more than one note passed around our group, missing the little h that hides in the middle.

Threading again

My left eye has been done now. The colours came back first, and it was almost too much, like turning the saturation up on a television. The navy is navy again. The halos around the streetlights have gone, and I have started driving to my sister after dark without inventing reasons not to.

The first evening I could see properly, I sat at my table by the window, even though it was night and the good light was long gone, and I threaded a needle first try, and then another, and then a red bead onto the actual hole instead of the space beside it. My hands had known how to do it the whole time. They had just been waiting for my eyes to catch up.