Chapter 1

Melody Malone remembered in great detail her earliest years.

Those years when everything was normal and she could see things even if they were a bit blurry.

Then the doctor ruined her parent’s hopes forever with the dreaded words,

“I am afraid your daughter is losing her vision.”

She was only eight years old at the time and it was so long ago that she barely remembered her initial reaction. It seemed to her that she was not overly concerned because the problem of not being able to see anything at all was not likely right at that moment. In fact, it took almost four long years for the lights to go out forever for Melody and when the moment arrived, she was already accustomed to such dim vision that the final stage was a bit anticlimactic from her point of view.

The twelve year old girl was now officially totally blind and she was sent to a special school in downtown Manhattan to acquaint her with the tools and tricks she needed to learn in order to survive in a sighted world.

Strangely, it was the following weekend that Melody joined the ranks of nubile young ladies with all the consequences of such matters. In a way, she was happy that she did not have to see her own blood because it was something that really concerned her to the point of becoming faint and off-balance. Just the fact that she was being told all about it was yucky enough for her to absorb fully. Melody’s special school was one of the best in the world and when she finally graduated four years later, she was ready to join the ranks of unsighted fellow travelers with some degree of competence in meeting the test of surviving in the midst of sighted normal citizens.

At the ripe young age of sixteen, Melody was blind, happy and still a virgin, although not entirely by choice in the matter. She had a boyfriend of sorts in the special training school that had some degree of sight better than hers and he relished the opportunity to “see” her up close and personal whenever they found a place for private conversation. As her sight slowly diminished, she found her primary pleasure in simply touching him in places that sent signals to her brain allowed her imagination to do all the work in triggering those delicious urges to discover more about life and love in the now unseen and terribly confusing world around her. She never fully understood the lure of pornography for either the dirty-minded boys or the giggling sense-deprived females in the school. The world was increasingly touch-oriented to her in a certain manner that was in a way a lot more pleasurable. She found that she was no longer in the least bit visually dependent on the restrictions of sight for her breathless satisfaction.

Her parents wanted her to move back home for reasons of safety. Young Melody decided it was time for her to join two other girls with almost total loss of vision in a group home near the special school. It was a program for the unsighted sponsored by a State college grant. She could have the benefit of promoted independent living and earn college credit at the same time.

One of the girls in the residence was actually a grown woman of almost thirty.

Her name was Doris and she was a mixed-blood Puerto Rican and Irish girl born in the Bronx and abandoned by her single parent Irish mother after her father decided he liked the stress-free life style of Puerto Rico a lot better than the responsibilities of fatherhood and being a good husband.

He was not a bad man all things considered, but he wanted to have a bit more fun out of life before he got too old to enjoy the happiness of being a single man. Besides, in his own native tongue, he hit the nail on the head by telling his daughter,

“The food is much better.

The girls are a lot prettier. They open their knees and don’t make a big deal out of it. Don’t you ever do anything like that or I will come back and give you a good spanking.

Don’t tell your mama. She has no sense of humor, the poor thing.”

Doris spoke Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent because he insisted on her speaking in their “native tongue” at home and it drove her poor mother to distraction because she couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

The pretty girl with failing sight worked in a candy factory down on Fourteenth Street and the invasive odor of the sugar made her swear she would never eat the stuff ever again. She did take a single bag of the broken pieces home each evening, but it was to give to the neighborhood children that didn’t have to put up with the all-day exposure to a sugar-laden environment for eight straight hours each day. They all looked for her coming up from the subway entrance with greedy looks on their candy-deprived faces like she was a “candy fairy” come to tend to their watering mouths.

She was the “mother” of the group home.

At least, she was the oldest and had been there the longest, so that put her in charge without any election or appointment to certify her authority.

The other girl was Mary.

Melody never remembered Mary’s last name because it was Polish and she got completely tongue-tied after the third syllable making her feel a little bit foolish.

Mary was not really pretty like Melody or Doris, but she had a sturdy frame and strong legs that helped her get around wherever she was a mind to go. She was lucky because she had one eye that had limited vision with the help of thick-lensed glasses. It was Mary that did the cooking and double-checked the denomination of the dollar bills before the others put them in their purse or pocket. Still, she was legally blind and none of them had any real use for television or a newspaper, unless it was a Braille edition with the raised bumps that spelled out the words. She was recently twenty and it seemed like a major turning point for her because she was now officially no longer a virgin. She was a fully certified “woman” in every sense of the word and when Melody came into the home, Mary bombarded her with questions to determine her status in the game of love.

She quickly determined that the newest member of the group home was truly a virgin and not a real woman like Doris and her. It gave her a certain sense of superiority like she had passed a test that poor Melody had yet to even study. In Mary’s mind, it was a required course to be completed before graduating in the school of life.

The apartment was small, but adequate.

The furniture was sparse and they all knew nothing was to be moved from the appointed place without unanimous consent. They each had a separate room. Well, at least Mary and Doris had a bedroom and Melody had her corner with the pull-out sofa.

The first thing Melody noticed in her perpetually darkened world was that both Mary and Doris had their “boyfriends” over for “private time” on a regular basis and she wondered how she would manage such an arrangement considering the public placement of her sleeping quarters in the living room. It was such a delicate subject that she would die of mortification just thinking about posing the question to head mistress Doris.