So You Think You’re Smart

by Lee Martin

“Where are my specs?” my mother asks me. “Junior, I can’t find my cheaters.”

I tell her they’re here on her dresser, right where she left them when she went down to the dining room for supper. This is what I do. I explain things. I stay patient.

“I knew that.” The glasses rest on her book of brain teasers, So You Think You’re Smart. “I just forgot. I expect you’ll say it’s the what’s-a-hootchie, that Al Heimers. Well, mister, I don’t have Al Heimers. I knew where I left my glasses. I just didn’t dwell on it.”

What she does dwell on is the notion she has that I’m stealing everything she’s got. “Cabbaged on to my car,” she tells people. “Hoodwinked me out of my house. Locked me up in the looney bin.” She has a standard spiel. “I wasn’t having any trouble on my own. I paid my bills. I kept my house spick and span. I was happy there. Very happy.”

Very happy, she says in a small, pouty voice, and my heart breaks.

“Those aren’t mine.” She picks up her glasses and studies them. “No, mine have more brown in the frames.”

"Those are yours,” I tell her.

“Nope. Those belong to someone else.” She snatches my glasses off my face. “Here, let me see these.”

The answers to her brain teasers are encrypted—written backwards, slantwise, upside down, legible only when held to a mirror.

I can make out her shape, but not her features. This is only the beginning, I tell myself. I touch her lips, trace her coy grin.

Now, we’re whispering.

“Give me my glasses. Please, Mother. I’m blind.”

“Hold your horses, wise guy. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”