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  • Secret Identity
  • Eric Gansworth (bio)

I didn't finish elementary school the way I was supposed to. I missed the party, cupcakes, and Hawaiian Punch cut with 7UP in Dixie cups. Our desks were covered in those fibrous bathroom paper towels in case we spilled. After three years of my complaining that I couldn't see the chalkboard, my ma finally considered my claims were not a desperate desire to look like Clark Kent. She seemed not to get that looking like Clark would have been undesirable—that he removed his glasses to hit his stride in the skies above Metropolis, not put them on. Even Marvel Comics knew that glasses were a dead end for a superhero, so Stan Lee wrote them right out of Spider-Man's life in his first year of stories. It was as if Peter Parker had never worn them, or he'd gotten LASIK. Glasses were such bad news Stan and Steve Ditko flushed them from the collective Marvel Universe memory.

"Hey!" a lunchroom lady stage-whispered, as I walked the hall with an early dismissal pass. "Where you going? Party's gonna start in a few minutes." It was the last day of fifth grade, the last day before we left the Reservation elementary school for the white junior high. I explained I was on my way to my first optometry appointment. "Well, I want to see your name on the honor roll and the merit roll every year," she said, and I nodded, though I had no idea what those were, or that I would never achieve either, despite my current straight-B standing. "You know, we need to show them what Indians can do. And it's up to you!"

Why was this task my job alone? Like so many other things I'd leave behind, elementary school, decent grades, and my old identity were just a few shifts of perspective away. I'd struggled to maintain my math B this last year, and I knew that things were only going to get harder. Its abstractions and unknown variables were of little consequence where daily unknowns had more relevance in my life than worrying about the remainder at equation's end.

I was supposed to meet my ma at the road. I didn't know what car [End Page 40] to look for, who she'd borrowed one from this time. I stepped outside and, since there were several cars in front of the school, I waited for the honk and the blurry person waving. For the whole drive to the city, my ma reminded me that once you went with glasses, you almost never went back, still convinced this was some private fad, another attempt at super-hero trappings.

At the optometrist's, I eyed up frames lining the walls and on spinner displays and on the end-table mannequin heads. I leaned toward the perfectly round gold frames with photo-gray lenses that changed into shades when the sun was too bright, but I was willing to consider other possibilities. Once inside the exam room, the optometrist surrounded my face with a massive headset like Lex Luthor might use to grill Lois Lane about Superman. The optometrist told me to look at the wall chart through little holes burrowed out of the cold gray metal. He turned dials and flipped switches, asking if I saw with more or less clarity, until finally we were done.

"OK," the optician said, after the optometrist left, holding up rulers to my eyes, nose, and ears, to get the perfect fit. "So let's pick out a frame," she said, and I headed for the showroom to point out my best scenario. "Where are you going, honey? I have the kinds you can choose from here," she said, revealing a case the size of a portable record player. She flipped the lid on a box of maybe thirty frames strewn on top of each other, arms linked from the jostling they'd received, like the shirts we scavenged through at the Goodwill. "How about these?" She pulled out a pair of sky-blue cat eyes with rhinestone butterflies in the points. "These...

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