Seeing Is Believing

By Doris Betts

 

Carol Anne was almost 30 before she realized she possessed an odd talent.

From a distant room, hearing television, she had all her life been able to picture correctly every face long before she came in to check the screen, but she had assumed these familiar actors were merely remembered from other programs.

Or there might come the float of women’s voices over fitting room cubicles in the dress shop where Carol Anne worked but, again—though she knew in advance exactly how each emerging customer would look—she told herself that she must have noticed their faces earlier. Maybe she had a photographic memory with a narrow range.

Even using the telephone did not reveal more than that since either she spoke with friends whose features sprang into familiar mental view as they talked, or else she would be speaking to telemarketers she never expected to meet.

No boyfriends called her. She had sworn off them after the last heartbreak.

Her two best girlfriends commented on how easily Carol Anne recognized on the street the host of a local radio show, or how she would nod to a speaker and call his name, even if she’d only seen him once from far back in the auditorium.
She shrugged off this minor skill without exploring it. “I’ve always had a good memory for faces.”

The other two women wanted to change the subject anyway, to bachelors and how to snare them. Carol Anne said louder, “It could be some find of photographic memory.”

But she was wrong.

Carol Anne might never have known the truth about that crossed wiring inside her head that connected ear to eye had she not stood second in line at Raleigh First Bank one April afternoon, holding the leather pouch full of the day’s receipts from Ina’s Fine Fashions. As cashier, Carol Anne had checked up early and was also making Thursday’s deposit early, since Easter weekend lay ahead and the sales clerks had wanted to get home. Ina herself had left after lunch carrying her own new dress in a clear plastic bag that magnified every pastel flower. Ina was engaged to be married, not that Carol Anne cared.

The small branch bank, located near Ina’s in the same shopping center was crowded. Almost all its interior, Carol Anne observed as she waited, was false. The floor was imitation terra cotta, the service desks faux wood with perfect, symmetrical grain, and the marble shelf under each teller window was actually lightweight plastic, the cage bars more aluminum than brass and thin as chopsticks.

In a fire, she thought, we’d all die from breathing a hot fog of chemicals.

She felt a squeeze on her arm, then hands shoved her roughly aside so she banged into a tin waste-can and by reflex stepped inside it to keep from falling. A woman ahead of her in line was flung the other way.

“This is a robbery, don’t anybody move!”

She had to, though, just to lift her shoe since she stood up to her shin in wadded papers in the can.

“You!” The robber seemed too small for his oversized gun. His pistol swung too close now, became too real, with a barrel mouth that opened wide as a cannon’s. Carol Anne fought down the urge to plug it with one finger.

She said, “Yessir,” and kept balancing one-footed.

He wore a red ski mask despite the April weather. He gripped his large silver revolver in pale fingers with chewed nails. Before she could catalog his clothes, the man shouted, “Everybody down!” and people dropped heavily onto the tile as if already shot.

“This, uh, wastebasket?” she asked meekly as it dragged alongside.

He watched her lift a weighted shoe, poise awkwardly in place, then sink to her knees. Both stockings tore.

In all four teller cages, hands had flown high with palms open. He growled something to those women. Drawers slid out. “Just the bills.” Small stacks appeared in the gap beneath each flimsy cage and, with the gun, he began raking them into a paper bag.

Carol Anne was glad she still had tight hold on Ina’s money. The bank robber kept snapping out fast instructions: Don’t sound any alarm, after you set the money out keep your hands in sight; not a word, not a sound, and hurry! The rest of you stay flat on the floor I mean it! He repeated similar orders he must have learned from television, now shouting personally to Carol Anne, “Get all the way down!”

She folded herself as if toward Mecca. The bow was only partial because she had gained a little weight. At lunch today her girlfriends had asked if she planned to go back to Weight Watchers. They’d remember that nervy question, she thought, when standing over her coffin.

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