New York Ear and Eye Infirmary

On the way home from the Palace, something fell into her eye, and stayed there. It happened while she was waiting at the red light on the corner of Cortelyou and East 7th. She got off her bicycle and walked the balance of the way home. "You were talking too much," her husband told her. "That's how it got in." She tried to cry to wash it out, but for once, she could not summon any tears.

The next morning she went to the New York Ear and Eye Infirmary. The peanut gallery in the waiting room held its own theories. "You shoulda worn goggles," said one woman. "You weren't thinking, were you." Later she thought of a comeback. She should've asked, "Do you wear goggles when you walk?"

But by then the doctor had already taken the black speck of road out from under her eyelid. He showed it to her on the swab: a devil on the head of a pin. It seemed unlikely that something so tiny had caused so much grief. She did not ask to keep the speck. Instead she told the doctor that his name, Nezgoda, means "discord" in Polish. "No, it doesn't," he joked. He'd heard that before. He was missing some instrument. "You take your eyes off something for a minute and it disappears," he said. "Isn't that the truth," she said.