Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  They will burn this way all evening and then the festival will be over. Janet, reasonable child, will consign her pumpkin to the garbage, clearing the decks, ready for the next thing. Nancy, if last year is any indication, will protect hers, keeping it on her dresser until it sags and rots, unwilling to throw it away.

  They've made her turn out the light and sit in darkness, with only one candle; she wasn't able to explain to them why she doesn't want to do this. The light flickers on the walls, on the dirty dishes waiting to be scraped and put into the dishwasher, on the sign she herself tacked to the kitchen cupboard over a year ago:

  CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS!

  Sensible advice. It's still sensible advice, but the kitchen itself has changed. It's no longer familiar, it's no longer the kind of place in which sensible advice can be followed. Or at least not by her. On the refrigerator there's a painting, curling at the edges, Nancy's from last year; a girl smiles a red smile, the sun shines, bestowing spokes of yellow; the sky is blue, all is as it should be. A foreign country.

  A dark shape jumps at her from the doorway. "Boo, Mum."

  "Oh, darling," Elizabeth says. "Let me see."

  "Am I really scary, Mum?" Nancy says, clawing her fingers menacingly.

  "You're very scary, love," Elizabeth says. "Isn't that wonderful."

  Nancy has made yet another variation of her favorite costume. She calls it a monster, every year. This time she's pinned orange paper scales to her black leotard; she's modified Janet's old cat's head mask by adding silver tinfoil horns and four red fangs, two upper, two lower. Her eyes gleam through the cat eyes. Her tail, Janet's former cat's tail, now has three red cardboard prongs. Elizabeth feels something other than rubber boots might have been more suitable, but knows it's fatal to criticize. Nancy is so excited she might start to cry.

  "You didn't scream," Nancy says reproachfully, and Elizabeth realizes she's forgotten this. An error, a failure.

  "That's because you took my breath away," she says. "I was too frightened to scream."

  Nancy is satisfied with this. "They'll all be really scared," she says. "They won't know who I am. Your turn," she says into the hall, and Janet makes a prim entrance. Last year she was a ghost, the year before that she was a cat, both standard. She tends to play it safe; to be too original is to be laughed at, as Nancy sometimes is.

  This year she wears no mask. Instead she's made her face up, red lips, arched black brows, rouged cheeks. It isn't Elizabeth's makeup, since Elizabeth doesn't as a rule use any. Certainly not red lipstick. She has on a shawl made from a gaudy flowered tablecloth someone gave them - Nate's mother? - and which Elizabeth promptly donated to the play-box. And underneath it a dress of Elizabeth's, hitched and rolled around the waist to shorten it, belted with a red bandana. She looks surprisingly old, like a woman shrunken by age to the size of a ten-year-old; or like a thirty-year-old dwarf. A disconcertingly whorish effect.

  "Wonderful, darling," Elizabeth says.

  "I'm supposed to be a gypsy," Janet says, knowing with her usual tact that Elizabeth can't be totally depended on to figure this out and wanting to save her the embarrassment of asking. When she was younger she explained her drawings this way. Nancy, on the other hand, was hurt if you didn't know.

  "Do you tell fortunes?" Elizabeth asks.

  Janet smiles shyly with her bright red lips. "Yes," she says; then, "Not really."

  "Where did you get my dress?" Elizabeth asks carefully. They're supposed to ask before borrowing things, but she doesn't want to spoil the evening by making an issue of it.

  "Dad said I could," Janet says politely. "He said you weren't wearing it any more."

  It's a blue dress, dark blue; the last time she wore it was with Chris. His hands were the last hands to undo the hook at the back, since, when she put the dress on to go home, she didn't bother to do the hook back up again. It's upsetting to see her daughter wearing it, wearing that invitation, that sexual flag. Nate has no right to make a decision like this about something of hers. But it's true, she isn't wearing it any more.

  "I wanted you to be surprised," Janet adds, sensing her dismay.

  "That's all right, darling," Elizabeth says: the eternal magic words. It's somehow more important to them to surprise her than to surprise Nate. Occasionally they even consult him. "Has your dad seen you yet?" she asks.

  "Yes," Janet says.

  "He pinned on my tail," Nancy says, hopping on one foot. "He's going out."

  Elizabeth goes to the front door to see them off, standing in the lighted oblong as they negotiate the porch steps, carefully because of Nancy's mask and tail. They're carrying shopping bags, the biggest ones they could find. She's been over the instructions: Only this block. Stay with Sarah because she's older. No crossing in the middle of the street, only at corners. Don't bother people if they don't want to answer the door. Some of the people around here may not understand, their customs are different. Home by nine.

  Voices other than theirs are already calling: Shell out. Shell out. The witches are out. It's a revel, one of the many from which she once felt and still feels excluded. They weren't allowed to have pumpkins and they weren't allowed to dress up and shout in the streets like the others. They had to go to bed early and lie in the darkness, listening to the distant laughter. Her Auntie Muriel hadn't wanted them running up dentists' bills by eating a lot of candy.

  Sunday, October 31, 1976

  NATE

  First, Nate washes his hands carefully with the oatmeal soap Elizabeth favors these days. There's something harsh about it, Scottish, penitential. Once she'd indulged herself in sandalwood, cinnamon, musk, Arabian fragrances, pastel and lavish at the same time. That was when she was buying lotions with exotic names and the occasional bottle of perfume. She hadn't rubbed these lotions on him and it wasn't for his benefit she dabbed herself behind the ears, though he could dimly remember a time when she might have. He could remember it vividly, he knows, if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to think about it, those odors, that fragrant moth dance performed for him alone. Why tease those nerves? Everything is gone, the bottles are empty, things get used up.

  So now it's oatmeal soap, with its hints of chapped skin and chilblains. And, for the hands, nothing fancier than glycerine and rosewater.

  Nate applies some of this to his own hands. He doesn't usually dip into Elizabeth's cosmetics; only when, as now, his hands feel clumsy and raw, abraded by the Varsol he uses to get the paint and polyurethane off them. There's always a brown line left though, a half-moon around the base of each nail; and he can never quite rid himself of the paint smell. He welcomed this smell once. It said, You exist. Far from the abstractions of paper, torts and writs, the convolutions of a language deliberately dried so that it was empty of any sensuous values. That was in the days when physical objects were thought to have a magic, a mysterious aura superior to the fading power of, say, politics or law. He'd quit in his third year of practice. Take an ethical stance. Grow. Change. Realize your potential.

  Elizabeth had approved of this move because it was the sort of thing that would infuriate her aunt. She'd even said they could live on her salary till he got started. Her indulgence proved that she wasn't at all like Auntie Muriel. But as time went on and he did little more than break even, she'd been less and less approving. Supportive, as they said. This house, too small really, the tenants on the third floor, the workshop in the basement, were supposed to be temporary, she'd reminded him. Then stopped reminding.

  It's partly her fault. Half of her wants a sensitive, impoverished artist, the other half demands a forceful, aggressive lawyer. It was the lawyer she married, then found too conventional. What is he supposed to do?

  Occasionally, though by no means all the time, Nate thinks of himself as a lump of putty, helplessly molded by the relentless demands and flinty disapprovals of the women he can't help being involved with. Dutifully, he tries to make them happy. He fails not because of any intrinsic weakness or lack of will, but because
their own desires are hopelessly divided. And there's more than one of them, these women. They abound, they swarm.

  "Toys?" his mother said. "Is that useful?" Meaning: all over the world people are being tortured and imprisoned and shot, and you make toys. She'd wanted him to be a radical lawyer, defending the unjustly accused. How to tell her that, apart from the sterile monetary transactions, contracts, real estate, most of the people he'd had to deal with at Adams, Prewitt and Stein had in fact been accused justly? She would have said it was only training, an apprenticeship he had to undergo to make him ready for the big crusade.

  The Amnesty International newsletter still arrives every month, his mother's copy, marked with asterisks to show him where to send his courteously worded letters of protest. Children tortured in front of their mothers. Sons disappearing, to surface months later, fingernails missing, skins covered with burns and abrasions, skulls crushed, tossed on roadsides. Old men in damp cells dying of kidney problems. Scientists drugged in Soviet lunatic asylums. South African blacks shot or kicked to death while "escaping." His mother has a map of the world taped to her kitchen wall, where she can contemplate it while drying the plates. She sticks little stars on it, red ones, the kind the teacher used to dole out for second-best in printing. These innocent grade-school stars mark each new reported case of torture or mass murder; the world is now a haze of stars, constellation upon constellation.

  Nevertheless his mother crusades, dauntless astronomer, charting new atrocities, sending out her communications, politely written and neatly typed, unaware of the futility of what she is doing. As far as Nate is concerned she may as well be sending these letters to Mars. She'd brought him up to believe that God is the good in people. Way to fight, God. Nate finds these newsletters of hers so overwhelmingly painful that he's no longer able to read them. As soon as they arrive, he slips them into the wastepaper basket, then goes to the cellar to pound and chisel. He consoles himself by thinking that his toys are the toys the tortured children would play with if they could. Every child should have toys. To remove all toys because some do not have them is not the answer. Without his toys, surely there would be nothing to fight for. So he will let his mother, worthy woman that she is, compose the letters; he will make the toys.

  Tonight he's been finishing rocking horses; five of them, he finds it easier to do them in lots of five. He sanded them yesterday. Today he's been painting eyes. Round eyes, expressionless, the eyes of creatures made to be ridden for the pleasure of others. The black eyeliner of the girls on the Strip. This isn't how he intended the horses to look: he intended joy. But more and more, recently, the toys he makes have this blank look, as if they can't see him.

  He no longer tells people he makes handmade wooden toys in his basement. He says he's in the toy business. This isn't because cottage industry has ceased to be viewed as charismatic or even cute. He never thought of it as charismatic or cute; he thought of it as something he might be able to do well. To do one thing well: this was what he wanted. Now he does it well enough. He has a monthly balance sheet. After supplies and the gouge the stores take are deducted, he has money left to pay half the mortgage interest and to buy groceries, cigarettes, enough liquor to coast on. Elizabeth isn't supporting him. She just acts as though she is.

  Nate begins to shave. He lathers his throat, meaning only to trim around the edges of his beard, free his neck and the underside of his jaw of bristles; but he finds the razor moving upwards, circling the edges of his beard like a lawnmower circling a lawn. He's shaved his beard half off before he knows that it's his intention to destroy it. From behind the coarse dark hair his face emerges, the face he hasn't seen in five years, pallid, blood-speckled, dismayed at this exposure. His hands have decided it's time for him to be someone else.

  He rinses his face. He doesn't have any after-shave - it's so long since he's used it - so he rubs some of Elizabeth's glycerine and rosewater over his new-mown skin. The face that looks back at him from the bathroom mirror is more vulnerable, but also younger and grimmer, the jaw clearly visible now, its furry wisdom gone. A man stroking his beard is one thing, a man stroking his jaw is another.

  Before leaving the house he goes into his own room and scrabbles through the piles of coins on his bureau, looking for dimes. Then he changes his socks. He doesn't expect to be taking his socks off this evening; it's highly unlikely that he will. However. His feet are white and rootlike, the toenails greyish yellow from the cellar life they're forced to lead. He sees his feet for an instant, browned and running, on sand, on sun-warmed rock. Far from here.

  Sunday, October 31, 1976

  LESJE

  Lesje and William are having a game of cribbage. They sit at a card table, the same card table on which they eat meals when they eat together, beside their picture window, which has a breathtaking view of the picture window in the apartment building opposite theirs. This window is lighted, since it's dark, and two people are sitting behind it, eating what Lesje takes to be spaghetti. On the streets below, Lesje assumes, it's all happening. That was why she wanted to live here, at the crux, in the heart: because it would all be happening. "It" and "all" are words that have, however, retained their abstractness. She hasn't yet found either of them.

  Lesje has stuck a paper jack-o'-lantern, purchased at Woolworth's, to the inside of their own picture window. Last year she bought some candy, hoping to be visited by a parade of little children in costumes; but no children, it appears, can penetrate to the fourteenth floor of this apartment building. The people who live here, whom she sees only in the elevators, appear to be young and either single or childless.

  Lesje would like to be out roaming the streets herself, watching. But William has suggested cribbage, which relaxes his mind.

  "Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and a pair is eight," says William. He moves his plastic toothpick. Lesje has a mere fifteen two in the crib, a pair of aces she put there herself. She shuffles and cuts, William deals. He picks up his cards and his lips purse. He's frowning, deciding what to set aside for himself.

  Lesje's hand is so bad there's not much choice. She permits herself a walk by moonlight, along a path trampled by the giant but herbivorous iguanodons; she can see the three-toed prints of their hind feet in the mud. She follows their trail until the trees thin and there, in the distance, is the lake, silvery, its surface broken here and there by a serpentine head, the curve of a plunging back. That she should be so privileged. How will she ever convince the others of what she has seen?

  (The lake, of course, is Lake Gladys, marked clearly on the chart on page 202 of The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Lesje read this book at the age of ten. It was filed in the school library under Geology, and she'd been doing a project on rocks. Rocks had been her big thing before dinosaurs. Her friends at school read Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames the stewardess. Lesje hadn't cared much for those stories. She didn't as a rule like stories that weren't factual. But The Lost World was different. They'd found a plateau in South America on which the life forms of the Upper Jurassic had continued to survive, along with other, more modern forms. She can't remember which came first, her passion for fossils or this book; she thinks it was the book. No matter that all those on the expedition had been men. She'd fallen in love, not with Professor Challenger, the loud-mouthed assertive one, or even the young reporter or the sharpshooting English lord. It was the other one, the dry, skeptical one, the thin one; Professor Summerlee. How many times has she stood at the edge of this lake, his thin hand in hers, while together they've witnessed a plesiosaur and he's been overcome, converted at last?

  She still has this book. She didn't exactly steal it, she just forgot several times to renew it and then was so embarrassed by the librarian's sarcasm that she lied. Lost, she said. The Lost World is lost.)

  The lake glimmers in the moonlight. Far out, on a sandbar, a mysterious white shape flickers.

  William has moved his toothpick again. She hasn't been paying attention, he's at leas
t twenty points ahead of her. "Your go," he says. Satisfaction rosies his cheeks.

  "Fifteen two," she says.

  "It's your next crib," William says, consoling her, as he can well afford to.

  The phone rings. Lesje jumps, dropping the jack of diamonds. "Could you get it, William?" she says. She suspects it's the wrong-number man; she's not in the mood for a monotone serenade.

  "It's for you," William says, puzzled.

  When she comes back, he says, "Who was it?"

  "Elizabeth's husband," Lesje says.

  "Who?"

  "Exactly," says Lesje. "Elizabeth's husband Who. You've met him; at the Christmas party last year. You remember Elizabeth, sort of statuesque-looking; she's the one who ..."

  "Oh, right," says William. The sight of his own blood makes him queasy, so he didn't much appreciate hearing the story of Chris, though Lesje had to tell it to him, she'd been upset. "What did he want?"

  "I'm not sure," says Lesje.

  Sunday, October 31, 1976

  NATE

  Nate is running. His bicycle is behind him somewhere in the darkness, parked against a bench. The air is cool, strange against his new scraped face.

  He runs for pleasure, taking it easy, jogging over dying grass grey in the street lights, through fallen leaves whose colors he can barely see but guesses: orange, yellow, brown. They collect the leaves in green garbage bags and truck them away now, but once they raked them into piles and burned them in the streets, the smoke rising wispy and sweetish from the centers of the mounds. He used to run with the others along the street, making sounds like a dive bomber, and then jump, clearing the mounds of leaves like hurdles. Forbidden, but if you missed it didn't matter, the leaves were only smoldering. Men shaking rakes, telling them to bugger off.