Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  But she couldn't call this place Aliceland; it wasn't right. One of her reservations about The Lost World concerned the names of the topographical features. Lake Gladys, for instance: too goyish. And the whole primitive plateau was called Maple White Land, after the artist whose sketches of a Pterodactyl, found clutched in his delirious and dying hand, had first put Professor Challenger on the track. Lesje was sure - though it didn't say so in the book - that Maple White must have been a Canadian, of the pinkest and most frigid kind. With a name like that what else could he be?

  Lesjeland, though. That sounded almost African. She could picture it on a map: seen that way, there was nothing ludicrous about it.

  Once, after she was grown up, she'd gone to the Odessa Pavilion during the Caravan Festival. Usually she avoided Caravan. She distrusted the officially promoted goodwill, the costumes nobody wore any more. There were really no Poles like the ones in the Polish Pavilion, no Indians like the Indians, no yodeling Germans. She's not sure why she went, that time; perhaps she was hoping to find her roots. She'd eaten foods she remembered only vaguely from her grandmother's house and had never known the names for - pirogi, medvynk - and watched tall boys and auburn-braided girls in red boots leap about on a stage decorated with paper sunflowers, singing songs she couldn't sing, dancing dances she'd never been taught. According to the program, some of the dancers were named Doris and Joan and Bob, although others had names like hers: Natalia, Halyna, Vlad. At the end, with that element of self-mockery she recognized too in Marianne when she said schwartze, imitating her mother's views on cleaning ladies, they sang a song from Ukrainian summer camp:

  I'm not Russian, I'm not Polish,

  I am not Romanian,

  Kiss me once, kiss me twice,

  Kiss me, I'm Ukrainian.

  Lesje admired the bright costumes, the agility, the music; but she was an outsider looking in. She felt as excluded as if she'd been surrounded by a crowd of her own cousins. On both sides. Kiss me, I'm multicultural.

  She hadn't been sent to Ukrainian summer camp or to Jewish summer camp. She hadn't been allowed to go either to the golden church with its fairy-tale onion dome or to synagogue. Her parents would have been happy to send her to both, if it would keep the peace, but the grandmothers wouldn't allow it.

  Sometimes she thinks she was produced, not by her parents in the usual way, but by some unheard-of copulation between these two old ladies who never met. They'd existed in an odd parody of marriage, hating each other more than either hated the Germans, yet obsessed with each other; they'd even died within a year of each other, like an old devoted couple. They'd infested her parents' house in relays, fought over her as if she'd been a dress at a bargain. If one baby-sat for her the other must be given a turn or there would be histrionics: weeping from her Grandmother Smylski, rage from her Grandmother Etlin (who'd kept her name, who'd refused to scurry for cover with the rest of them). Neither of them had ever learned English very well, though Grandmother Etlin had picked up some scatological curses from the neighborhood children who hung around her store, which she'd used in garbled versions when she wanted to get her own way. "Jesus asshole, dog poop, I hope you die!" she would scream, stamping her black boots on the front doorstep. She knew the front doorstep was the best place to do this: Lesje's parents would do almost anything to get her inside, away from the observation of the street. English people. These bland clones of their imagination did not have tiny black-booted grandmothers who screamed, "I hope your bum falls off!" on the front doorstep; or anything remotely equivalent. Lesje knows better, now.

  The strange thing about her grandmothers was how much alike they were. Both of their houses were small and dark and smelled of furniture polish and mothballs. They were both widows, they both had sad-eyed single male boarders stashed away in upstairs rooms, they both had fancy china and front rooms crowded with silver framed family photos, they both drank tea in a glass.

  Before she was old enough to go to school she'd spent half the week with each of them, since her mother had to work. She would sit on the kitchen floor, cutting pictures out of magazines and folders from the small travel agency where her mother worked, arranging them in piles - men in one pile, women in another, dogs in another, houses in another - while the grandmothers drank their tea and talked to the aunts (her father's sister, her mother's brothers' wives), in languages she couldn't understand and which her parents never spoke at home.

  This should have made her trilingual. Instead she was considered bad at English, plodding, a poor speller, lacking in imagination. In Grade Five she'd been asked to write about "My Summer Holiday," and she'd written about her rock collection, with technical details of each rock. She'd been given a D and a lecture by the teacher. "You were supposed to write about something personal, something from your own life," the teacher said. "Not out of the encyclopedia. You must have done something else during your summer holidays."

  Lesje didn't understand. She hadn't done anything else during her summer holidays, not anything she could remember, and the rock collection was something personal from her own life. But she could not explain this. She couldn't explain why her discovery that rocks were different from each other and had special names was so important. The names were a language; not many other people might know it, but if you found one who did, you would be able to talk together. Only about rocks, but that would be something. She would walk up and down the stairs murmuring these names, wondering if she was pronouncing them right. "Schist," she would say, "magma, igneous, malachite, pyrite, lignite." The names of the dinosaurs, when she found out about them, were even more satisfactory, more polysyllabic, soothing, mellifluous. Though she could not spell receive or embarrass or career, she spelled Diplodocus and Archaeopteryx from the beginning without a hitch.

  Her parents thought she was becoming too wrapped up in these things and tried to give her dancing lessons to make her more sociable. Too late, she was not sociable. They blamed, silently of course, her Grandmother Etlin, who'd first taken her to the Museum, not because she had any interest in the things inside it but because it was cheap and out of the rain. Because her Grandmother Smylski had Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Grandmother Etlin insisted on having three days as well, all in a row, even though it meant violating the Sabbath; which didn't bother Grandmother Etlin all that much. She kept kosher out of habit but was not in other ways visibly reverent. After Lesje started school they'd kept this Saturday custom. Instead of synagogue Lesje attended the Museum, which at first did look to her a little like a church or a shrine, as if you were supposed to kneel. It was quiet and smelled mysterious, and was full of sacred objects: quartz, amethyst, basalt.

  (When her grandmother died, Lesje felt she should be put into the Museum, in a glass case like the Egyptian mummies, with a label where you could read about her. An impossible idea; but this was the form her mourning took. She knew better than to say it though, at shiva, sitting in a corner of her aunt's huge pink and white living room while they all ate coffee cake. They'd finally let her into the synagogue, too, but it hadn't been mysterious at all. Neither the bright, clean-lined synagogue nor the pink living room seemed at all like her grandmother. A glass case in a shadowy corner, with her black boots standing at the bottom and her few pieces of gold jewelry and the amber beads spread out beside her.)

  "Explain me," her grandmother would say, holding her hand tightly, for protection Lesje decided much later; and Lesje would read the labels to her. Her grandmother understood not at all, but nodded wisely, smiling; not because of the impressive rocks, as Lesje thought at the time, but because her granddaughter seemed able to negotiate with ease in this world she herself found so incomprehensible.

  In the last year of her grandmother's life, when Lesje was twelve and they were both getting a little old for these mornings, they'd seen something at the Museum which upset her grandmother. She'd long ago got used to the mummies in the Egyptian gallery and she no longer said Gevalt every time they went into the dinosaur galle
ry, which was not at that time dark and equipped with voices. But this was something different. They'd seen an Indian woman, wearing a beautiful red sari with a gold band at the hem. Over the top of the sari was a white lab coat, and with the woman were two little girls, obviously her daughters, wearing Scottish kilts. They all disappeared through a door marked STAFF ONLY. "Gevalt," her grandmother said, frowning, but not with fear.

  Lesje stared after them, entranced. This, then, was her own nationality.

  "You'd look good in that," Marianne says. She sometimes gives Lesje advice on how she ought to dress, which Lesje ignores since she doesn't feel capable of following it. Marianne, who has to watch what she eats, thinks Lesje should be stately. She could be stately, Marianne says, if she wouldn't lope. They're looking at a long-skirted plum wool dress, subdued, exorbitantly expensive.

  "I'd never wear it," Lesje says; meaning, William never takes me anywhere I could wear it.

  "Now here," says Marianne, moving to the next window, "you have your basic Elizabeth Schoenhof little black dress."

  "Too goyish?" Lesje says, thinking Marianne is being derisive, and oddly delighted.

  "Oh, no," Marianne says. "Look at the cut. Elizabeth Schoenhof isn't goyish, she's haute Wasp."

  Lesje, deflated, asks what the difference is.

  "Haute Wasp," says Marianne, "is when you don't have to give a piss. Haute Wasp is when you have this tatty carpet that looks like hell but cost a million bucks, and only a few people know it. Remember when the Queen picked up a chicken bone with her fingers and it was in all the papers, and suddenly it was done? That's haute Wasp."

  Lesje feels she'll never be able to master nuances like these. William with his wines: full-bodied, bouquet. It all tastes like wine to her. Maybe Nate Schoenhof is haute Wasp, though somehow she doesn't think so. He's too hesitant, he talks too much, he looks around the room at the wrong moments. He probably doesn't even know what haute Wasp means.

  Maybe Elizabeth doesn't either. Maybe this is part of being haute Wasp: you don't have to know.

  "What about Chris?" she says. Surely the fact of Chris does not fit in with Marianne's definition.

  "Chris?" says Marianne. "Chris was the chauffeur."

  Thursday, December 23, 1976

  ELIZABETH

  Yes, I know I've suffered an unusual shock. I'm quite aware of that, I can feel the waves. I realize it was an act directed ostensibly at me though not really at me, childhood imprintings being what they are, though I can't say I know of any in his case that would account for it. He had a bad childhood but who didn't? I also realize that my reactions are normal under the circumstances and that he intended me to feel guilty and that I am not really guilty. Of that. I'm not sure whether or not I do feel guilty. I feel angry, from time to time; otherwise I feel devoid. I feel as though energy is being constantly drained out of me, as though I'm leaking electricity. I know I'm not responsible and that there's little I could have done and that he might have killed me or Nate or the children instead of himself. I knew that at the time, and no, I did not phone the police or the mental hygiene authorities. They wouldn't have believed me. I know all these things.

  I know I have to keep on living and I have no intention of doing otherwise. You don't have to worry about that. If I were going to take a carving knife to my wrists or do a swan dive off the Bloor Street Viaduct I'd have done it before now. I'm a mother if not exactly a wife and I take that seriously. I would never leave an image like that behind for my children. I've had that done to me and I didn't like it.

  No, I don't want to discuss my mother, my father, my Auntie Muriel or my sister. I know quite a lot about them as well. I've already been down this particular yellow brick road a couple of times, and what I found out mostly was that there's no Wizard of Oz. My mother, my father, my aunt and my sister did not go away. Chris won't go away either.

  I am an adult and I do not think I am merely the sum of my past. I can make choices and I suffer the consequences, though they aren't always the ones I foresaw. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

  No thank you. I don't want pills to help me through. I don't wish to have my mood changed. I could describe this mood to you in detail but I'm not sure that would be of any benefit either to you or to myself.

  Elizabeth sits on the grey bench in the Ossington subway station, black leather hands folded in her lap, feet in their boots placed neatly. Her tone, she knows, is slightly belligerent and she isn't sure why. The first time she ran through this conversation, sitting in her office that morning, she was totally calm. Having thus concluded that the psychiatrist Nate has so kindly decided she ought to see has nothing either to give her or to tell her, she phoned and canceled the appointment.

  She's using the time she's freed to go home early. She will wrap Christmas presents, hiding the packages under the bed before the children get home from school. Already she knows the crackle of paper, the brightness of the ribbons, will be almost more than she can bear, those stars, blue and red and white, burning her eyes as if there's no atmosphere. It's the hope, the false promise of hope she can't tolerate. Everything is worse at Christmas; it always has been. But she'll get through it, she can depend on Nate to help in that, if in little else.

  Perhaps this is what they're heading for: companionship, a thin arm extended, leaned on, two old people carefully descending from the front porch, one icy stair at a time. She'll make sure he takes his stomach pills and will monitor his intake of booze, he'll ask her to turn up her hearing aid and will read her amusing anecdotes from the daily papers. Military coups, massacres, that sort of thing. On weeknights they'll watch American sitcoms on television. They'll have photograph albums and when the children come over on Sundays with their own children these albums will be dredged out and they will all look at the photos, beaming; and seeing the picture of herself as she is today, this very instant, sitting here in the Ossington subway station waiting for the northbound bus, with the dim light filtering through the film of ash and oil on the plate-glass windows, she will sense again this chasm opening in herself. Then they will have a lunch of creamed salmon on toast, with eggs grated on top, a dish suited to their limited budget. Nate will play with the grandchildren and she will do the dishes by herself in the kitchenette, feeling Chris's breath as usual on the back of her neck.

  Almost better to think of herself alone, in a small apartment, with her bowls and a few plants. No, that would be worse. If Nate were with her, at least there would be something moving. Keep moving, they said to those almost frozen, those who had taken too many pills, those in shock. U-Haul, An Adventure in Moving. I want to be moved. Move me. We are the numb. Long years ago/We did this or that. And now we sit.

  The evening before, she knocked at the door of Nate's room, holding a pair of socks he'd dropped in the living room, presumably because they were wet. When he opened the door, he had no shirt on. Suddenly she, who hadn't wanted him to touch her for over two years, who'd found his long sparse body mildly repellant, who had chosen instead the thick, matted, richly veined flesh of Chris, who had rearranged time and space so that this torso she was now confronted with need never confront her, closeted as it was in an area clearly marked off from hers - she wanted him to wind his arms around her, string on bone but warm bone, press her, comfort and rock her. She wanted to say: Can anything be saved? Meaning this wreck. But he'd stepped back and she'd merely held out the socks, wearily, mutely, as usual.

  Once she was always able to tell if he was in the house, whether she could actually hear him or not. Now she no longer can. He's absent more often now, and when he is there his presence is like light from a star that moved on thousands of light-years before: a phantom. He no longer, for instance, brings her cups of tea. They still give each other Christmas presents, though. The children would be disturbed if this ritual were omitted. She's finally bought him something for this year. It's a silver cigarette case. She thinks perversely of the contrast: the silver case emerging from his frayed pocket under the
raveling sweater. Once he'd given her nightgowns, always a size too large, as if he thought her breasts were bigger than they were. Now it's books. On some neutral subject he assumes will interest her: antiques, pressed glass, quilts.

  "Ready for Christmas?"

  There's a man sitting beside Elizabeth. He's been sitting there for several minutes; she saw him as a brownish blur to the left, registered the shift as he crossed and recrossed his legs. Movement like rustlings in a hedge, furtive, almost not there. She turns her head, slightly, briefly, to look at him. He's wearing a brown topcoat, a little too small for him - it must pinch under the arms - and a brown hat. His eyes shine at her, brown also and small, like raisins. His hands, gloveless, dark hair on the knuckles, rest on the thick suitcase he holds across his lap.

  She smiles. A long time ago she learned to smile easily, graciously, it takes no effort. "Not quite. No one ever is, are they?"

  The man nudges closer to her, his buttocks inching along the bench. She feels a slight pressure at her side.

  "You look as if you're waiting for someone," he says.

  "No," she says, "I'm not waiting for anyone. Only the bus."

  "I think we must be neighbors," he says. "I'm sure I've seen you on the street."

  "I don't think so," Elizabeth says.

  "I'm sure I have. I wouldn't forget." He lowers his voice. "A woman like you."

  Elizabeth shifts away from the pressure against her thigh. Her other thigh is now against the arm of the bench. She can always stand up. But he begins immediately to talk about real estate values. This is harmless enough, and Elizabeth knows something about it. They both bought around the same time, it seems, both experienced the tortures of renovation, though he's done his living-room floor in cork tile, a choice Elizabeth herself would not have made. He tells a story about his contractor, the lies, the failures to show up, the deficient wiring. Elizabeth relaxes, leaning back against the bench. He's ordinary enough, but it's a relief to talk with someone practical, someone who can accomplish things. Simple competence, feet on the ground. Bedrock.