My Boss Took My Brush And Gave Me A Polishing Rag

Quentin put the polishing rag on my iris brush while Mrs. Bell was still in the hall.

"From now on, you handle stock pieces," he said. "No impressions. No custom work."

Through the door, I heard her ask our clerk why her new eye turned when she looked down.

"She needs a fit check," I said.

"She needs confidence. So do you."

I was a white woman of forty-three, with pale freckles, a blunt brown bob, and a white streak above my left ear. My name was Meredith Shaw. I had worked as an ocularist in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for nineteen years.

I made artificial eyes. That meant taking a careful impression, shaping a wax pattern, checking how the lids closed over it, and building an eye that belonged to one face.

When I painted an iris, I bent over each fine line with the care other people gave to prayer.

That morning, Quentin folded my brush into the rag.

Quentin Redd was a white man of forty-nine, with swept silver hair, a pink face, and cuffs that showed below every jacket. He owned Juniper Ocular Studio and called every patient his dear friend until their bill needed a second look.

"Seven complaints in five weeks," he said. "All under your name."

"I haven't delivered seven eyes in five weeks. You've moved my patients to your afternoon list."

"We have a shared practice."

"Then share the complaints with me."

He smiled toward the hall, where Mrs. Bell could see him.

"Meredith needs a little rest from detail work," he called.

After she left, he gave me a paper. My hourly rate would fall from $34 to $22 on Monday. He had typed DECLINING MANUAL SKILL under the reason.

There was a line for my signature.

I wrote, Received, disputed, and added the date.

"You always make things harder," he said.

He tapped the office computer.

"Everything that matters is in here. You won't even learn the schedule screen."

I still used a paper appointment book. Screens tired my eyes, and Quentin had made that small fact into a whole life story about me.

He thought I could not keep up.

Behind my bench stood a locked cabinet full of narrow boxes. Each held a dated wax pattern or a firm copy of an approved shape. Blue thread went around each box, with a signed paper band beneath the knot.

The old owner had called them clutter.

I called them the work.

When Quentin bought the studio six years earlier, I had insisted on a signed rider. My coded technical masters stayed mine. I kept them in the clinic for patient care, and neither party could discard them without the other's written consent.

The clinic kept the patient charts. I kept the shapes and the paper trail for each shape.

Quentin had signed because he wanted the sale finished before lunch.

Now he glanced at that cabinet.

"We'll clear this room soon," he said. "Stock work needs less space."

"Read your rider first."

"Nobody cares about old wax."

At noon, I walked past the brick storefronts near Central Avenue with my lunch untouched. Warm mist hung near the springs. A tourist held a jug under a public fountain while I stood there wondering how I would pay my mortgage on $22 an hour.

Then my phone rang.

"Meredith? Paloma Ruiz. Can I see you somewhere quiet?"

I remembered her green iris, the small brown mark near its edge, and the way she sat straight without looking stiff.

Paloma was fifty-eight, a Puerto Rican woman who had retired from managing stages. She had lost an eye years before we met. During fittings, she watched every hand in the room as if someone might miss an entrance.

She had stopped coming to our clinic after months of visits that led nowhere.

We met at a bakery a block away. She wore a cream coat and carried a flat paper envelope.

She tapped it three times with one finger.

"My old cue," she said. "Three taps meant we were ready to begin."

"How is the eye?"

"The same temporary eye he told me to wear until you finished mine."

I put down my cup.

"He said you approved a final fit in June."

"I approved nothing in June. He said you had trouble with your hands."

My fingers lay still beside the cup.

"Did you keep your fitting slips?"

She gave me a long look.

"I kept cue sheets for shows that closed in 1987. Of course I kept them."

Inside her envelope were three dated receipts and an insurer's payment notice. The notice listed $4,680 for a custom ocular prosthesis. Her share was $680.

The last receipt carried Quentin's initials beneath a line written in black ink.

Loaner S-14 remains in use. Permanent custom pending.

The payment notice said the permanent eye had been delivered that very same day.