Free A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart Page A

resumed writing.
I’ve gone on a little trip, myself
, she wrote,
thanks to you
. Then remembering the worn, echoing floorboards of the farmhouse where Julia and her aging parents lived, she added,
Where I am there is carpet everywhere except in the bathrooms. I have the materials with me, however, and intend to work on the map. I’ll use something else (haven’t decided what… any suggestions?) for the water this time because it’s quite exposed out there. The lighthouse is on the end of a point so the water can be quite rough. And the air smells different as well, or at least it will smell different by the time you get there later in the spring.
    Sylvia could not finish the letter. All that she would have to talk about later in the day was gathered like humid weather in her mind. This intensity of focus was not new but saying what was on her mind was something she had shied away from most of her life. She had almost confessed, however, to Julia, she’d felt so desperate the first time she had lost Andrew. But in the end she had lacked the courage. All that she had permitted herself to tell her friend was that she knew a man whose profession allowed him to explore not only geological phenomena but also the traces of human activity that were left behind on the textured surface of the earth. Julia had been delighted by this. “I understand that,” she told Sylvia. “The whole world is a kind of Braille, if you consider things from that perspective.”
    “I’m a curious person,” Julia had once said as they sat facing each other on either side of the kitchen table at the farm. “I want to know exactly what you look like.”
    Sylvia hadn’t replied, but hadn’t stood to leave either as she might have had she been elsewhere.
    “I’ll never learn your face because I know you don’t like to be touched.” Julia was smiling as she said this.
    “How do you know I don’t like to be touched?” Sylvia had been somewhat taken aback, though Julia’s smile had told her that the remark was not an accusation. On the wooden table between them lay the tactile landscape Julia had wanted: a view across Barley Bay from the wharf at Cutnersville; that and a tactile of the route from the bus station to the end of the wharf. It had only been recently that Julia had explained that, in spite of her blindness, she was interested in views, in vistas. “Panoramas,” she had said, motioning Sylvia to follow her into the parlor where she ran her hand across the glass that covered a narrow framed picture of cows grazing near a river. She not only wanted to know how to get to a place, she had explained, she wanted to be able to see what was in the vicinity.
    “I know by the sound of your footsteps coming up the stairs,” Julia said, “and by the way you place your teacup in the saucer. By the way you remain stiff, motionless in your chair. I know that you are one of those people who don’t like physical contact. You’re shocked,” she continued, laughing. “You had no idea how much of yourself you give away.”
    Julia had been the only person whom Sylvia had made an effort to visit, until Andrew. At first she had driven out to the farm at Malcolm’s suggestion, to deliver the maps that he had encouraged her to make, maps that described the things in the physical world that Julia couldn’t see. Later, she made the trip simply because Julia interested her and because she had felt so comfortable in the company of someone who was unable to look at her. These had been her first purely social encounters and she was surprised by how much she enjoyed them.
    “The problem,” she had begun uncertainly, “is just that I can’t ever classify touch, can’t seem to understand degrees of contact. All accidents, all injuries, involve contact, impact, don’t they? What is the difference, really, between touch and collision?”
    “But, of course, there’s a difference,” Julia had said.
    “I know that, but often it doesn’t seem that