Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  He owned a dress business, true, but reluctantly: his mother almost forced him into it after his father died. Little Nell Dresses, it's now called; once it was called Tinker Bell. Her grandfather once had a partner who got these names out of books he'd read. The dresses are for small girls; Lesje grew up wearing them and resenting them. For her, luxury was not the pique and lace collars of the Little Nell line, but the jeans and T-shirts the other girls wore.

  Little Nell neither expands nor collapses. It doesn't even make the dresses; they're made in Montreal. It merely distributes them. It's just there, like her father; and like him the methods of its existence are unknown to her.

  She sat at the table covered with her mother's good linen cloth, watching her father with a certain sadness as he swallowed down the turkey and cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes, the mince pie dictated by a religious holiday he would never have observed in the natural course of events and which her mother would have observed fourteen days later. At Christmas they always ate Canadian food. A capitulation, that turkey; or perhaps one more piece of neutral ground for both of them. Every year they chewed their way through this dinner, proving something or other. Elsewhere, one set of cousins was recovering from Hanukkah, another set was getting ready to sing the songs and dance the dances they'd learned at Ukrainian summer camp. Lesje's mother, in the kitchen putting hard sauce on the slabs of mince pie, sniffled with quiet stoicism. This too happened every year.

  She could never ask William to this meal or even to this house. Don't irritate your father, her mother said. I know young people are different now but he still thinks of you as his little girl. You think he doesn't know you're living with someone? He knows. He just doesn't want to know.

  "How's the bone business?" her father asked, the usual joke, his way of reconciling himself to her choice of job.

  "Really great," she told him. He didn't see the attraction for a pretty girl, crawling around in the dirt, scratching for buried bones, like a dog. After first-year university, he'd asked her what she was going to be. A teacher, maybe?

  "A paleontologist," she'd said.

  A pause. "So what are you going to do for a living?"

  Her Ukrainian grandmother had wanted her to be an airline stewardess. Her Jewish grandmother had wanted her to be a lawyer and also to marry, another lawyer if possible. Her father wanted her to make the most of herself. Her mother wanted her to be happy.

  Lesje is uncertain about her choice of wine, since William fancies himself a connoisseur. He tends to condescend. He once sent back a bottle in a restaurant, and Lesje thought, He's been waiting a long time for the chance to do that. She dug out from the garbage the bottle they shared the night before he left and copied down the name on the label. He chose that one. If he sneers, she'll tell him. But this thought fails to cheer her.

  She sees Nate Schoenhof in front of her in the line. Her breath jumps; suddenly her curiosity is with her again. For a month and a half he's been invisible, she hasn't even seen him waiting for Elizabeth at the Museum. For a time she felt, not rejected exactly, but disappointed, as if she'd been watching a movie and the projector had broken down partway through. Now she feels as if she has things to ask him. She says his name, but he doesn't hear her, and she can't step out of the line to touch his sleeve. But the man behind him notices and pokes him for her. He turns, sees her.

  He waits for her at the door. "I'll walk you back," he says.

  They set off, carrying their bottles. It's dark now and the snow is still falling, clumps of wet flakes drifting windlessly down, the air moist, the sidewalk mushy underfoot. It isn't cold. Nate turns onto a side street and Lesje follows, even though she knows it's out of her way, this is east and she should be going south. Perhaps he's forgotten where she lives.

  She asks him if he had a nice Christmas. Terrible, he says, how about hers?

  "Pretty awful," she says. They laugh a little. It's hard for her to say how bad it was or why it was that bad. "I hate it," she says. "I always have."

  "I didn't used to," he says. "When I was a kid I kept thinking something magic would happen; something I didn't expect."

  "And did it?" she says.

  "No," he says. He thinks for a minute. "Once I really wanted a machine gun. My mother absolutely refused. She said it was an immoral toy, why did I want to play at killing people, there was enough cruelty in the world and so on. But there it was on Christmas morning, under the tree."

  "Wasn't that magic?"

  "No," Nate says. "By then I didn't want it."

  "Do your kids like it?" Lesje says.

  Nate says he thinks so. They liked it better when they were too young to know what presents were, when they just crawled around in the paper.

  Lesje notices that one of his eyes is puffy and dark, with what looks like a healing cut above it. She doesn't want to ask what's wrong with it - it seems too personal - but she does anyway.

  He stops, looks at her mournfully. "Someone hit me," he says.

  "I thought you were going to say you bumped into a door," Lesje says. "Were you in a fight?"

  "Not as far as I was concerned," he says. "A woman hit me."

  Lesje can't think of a good thing to say, so says nothing. Why would anyone want to hit such a man?

  "It wasn't Elizabeth," Nate says. "She'd never hit anyone physically. It was someone else. I guess she had to."

  He's letting her in, letting her listen in. She isn't sure she wants this. Nevertheless her hand moves up, drawn to his mysterious wound, touches his forehead. She sees her purple and white-striped mitten silhouetted against his skin.

  He stops, looks down at her, blinking, as if he can't believe what she's just done. Is he about to cry? No. He's making a gift of himself, handing himself over to her, mutely. Here I am. You may be able to do something with me. She realizes that this is what she's been expecting from him, ever since his first phone call.

  "It isn't fair," he says.

  Lesje doesn't know what he's talking about. She opens her arms. One of his arms goes around her; in the other he holds his paper bag. Her wine bottle falls to the sidewalk, the sound muffled by the snow. As they're walking away she remembers it and turns, expecting to see it cracked, the snow around it red; it's too late to go back for another. But it's intact, and suddenly she feels very lucky.

  PART THREE

  Monday, January 3, 1977

  ELIZABETH

  It's the third of January. Elizabeth is sitting on the slippery rose-colored chesterfield in her Auntie Muriel's parlor, which is truly a parlor and not a living room. It's a parlor because of the spider and the fly. It isn't a living room, because Auntie Muriel cannot be said to live.

  Auntie Muriel is both the spider and the fly, the sucker-out of life juice and the empty husk. Once she was just the spider and Uncle Teddy was the fly, but ever since Uncle Teddy's death Auntie Muriel has taken over both roles. Elizabeth isn't even all that sure Uncle Teddy is really dead. Auntie Muriel probably has him in a trunk somewhere in the attic, webbed in old ecru lace tablecloths, paralyzed but still alive. She goes up there for a little nip now and then. Auntie Muriel, so palpably not an auntie. Nothing diminutive about Auntie Muriel.

  Elizabeth knows her view of Auntie Muriel is exaggerated and uncharitable. Such ogres don't exist. Nevertheless, there is Auntie Muriel, sitting opposite her, large as life, the solid bulk of her torso encased in two-way stretch elastic with plastic boning, the jersey of her mild blue beautifully tailored dress stretching across her soccer-player's thighs, her eyes, like two pieces of gravel, cold and unreflecting, directed at Elizabeth, taking in, Elizabeth knows, every disreputable detail of her own appearance. Her hair (too long, too loose), her sweater (should have been a dress), the absence of a lipstick-and-powder crust over her face, all, all are wrong. Auntie Muriel is gratified by this wrongness.

  She's just a friendless old lady, Elizabeth thinks, trying out this excuse. But why? Why is she friendless? Elizabeth is aware of the way she ought to be thinkin
g. She's read magazines and books, she knows the lines. Auntie Muriel was thwarted in youth. She had a domineering father who stunted her and wouldn't let her go to college because college was for boys. She was forced to embroider (embroider! with those stumpy fingers!), a torture she later imposed on Elizabeth, who however turned out to be somewhat better at it and whose cutwork tea cloth with pink French knots still lies folded in a trunk in Elizabeth's closet, testament to her skill. Auntie Muriel had a strong personality and a good mind and she was not pretty, and patriarchal society punished her. These things are all true.

  Nevertheless, Elizabeth can forgive Auntie Muriel only in theory. Given her own sufferings, why has Auntie Muriel chosen to transfer them, whenever possible, to others? Elizabeth can still see herself, at the age of twelve, writhing on her bed with her first menstrual cramps, nauseated with pain, Auntie Muriel standing over her holding the bottle of aspirin out of reach. This is God's punishment. She never said for what. In Elizabeth's view, no mere career would ever have satisfied Auntie Muriel's lust for slaughter. She should have been sent into the Army. Only in a tank, helmeted, gauntleted, her guns directed at something, anything at all, would she have been happy.

  So why is Elizabeth here? More importantly: why has she brought the children? Exposed them to this malignancy. They sit beside her, subdued, wearing the white knee socks and Mary Janes they won't willingly put on for any other occasion, little mouths carefully shut, hair clipped back from their faces with tight barrettes, hands in their laps, goggling at Auntie Muriel as if she's a wonder, a mammoth or a mastodon, say, like the ones at the Museum, recently dug out of an iceberg.

  In fact the children like to visit Auntie Muriel. They like her big house, the silence, the polished woodwork, the Persian carpets. They like the little crustless sandwiches Auntie Muriel sets out, even though they carefully take only one each; and the grand piano, though they aren't allowed to touch it. When Uncle Teddy was alive, he used to give them quarters. Not so Auntie Muriel. When Elizabeth's own mother had finally succeeded in frying herself to a crisp in that last tiny room on Shuter Street, setting fire to her mattress with a dropped cigarette and too drunk to know she was burning, Auntie Muriel drew up a list after the funeral. It contained all the items she'd ever lent, given or donated. One light bulb, 60 watt, over the sink. One blue plastic shower curtain. One paisley Viyella housecoat. One Wedgwood sugar bowl. Miserly gifts and chipped discards. Auntie Muriel wanted them back.

  They smelled the smoke and broke the door down and got her out of there, but she already had third-degree burns on half her body. She lived for a week in hospital, lying on the mattress wet with drugs and the body's futile defenses, white cells leaking into the sheets. Who knows what she was remembering, whether she even knew who I was? She hadn't seen me for ten years, but she must have had some dim idea she'd once had daughters. She let me hold her hand, the left one that wasn't burned, and I thought: She looks like the moon, the half-moon. One side still shining.

  Elizabeth has always considered Auntie Muriel responsible for this death. As for others, her sister's, for instance. Nevertheless, she is here. Partly because she's a snob, which she admits. She wants the children to see that she grew up in a house with a dinner gong and eight bedrooms, not in one like the diminutive row-house (though charming, and what a lot she's done with it) where they now live. Also, Auntie Muriel is their only close living relative. Elizabeth feels that this is because Auntie Muriel has either killed or driven away all the others, but never mind. She is their roots, their root, their twisted diseased old root. Other people, such as those in Buffalo, think that Toronto has changed, shaken off its blue-law ways, become chic and liberal, but Elizabeth knows it hasn't. At its core, where there should be a heart, there is only Auntie Muriel.

  She has exiled Auntie Muriel from Christmas, having said no, finally, four years ago, to the dark table with six insertable leaves, the symmetrically arranged crystal dishes of pickle and cranberry sauce, the linen tablecloth, the silver napkin rings. Nate refused to come with her any more; that was why. He said he wanted to enjoy his children and his dinner and there was no point going to Auntie Muriel's if Elizabeth was going to collapse into bed with a headache as soon as they got home. Once, in 1971, she'd thrown up onto a snowbank on the way back: turkey, cranberry sauce, Auntie Muriel's selection of relishes, the works.

  At first she'd resented Nate's refusal, interpreted it as a lack of support. But he'd been right, he is right. She should not be here.

  Auntie Muriel is continuing her monologue, which is directed ostensibly at the children but actually at Elizabeth. They should never forget, she says, that their grandfather owned half of Galt. Great-grandfather, Guelph, Elizabeth thinks. Perhaps Auntie Muriel is going senile at last; or perhaps this family mythology is only a mythology after all, and, like any oral history, its details are undergoing mutation. Auntie Muriel does not correct herself, though. She has never been known to correct herself. She is now saying that Toronto is not what it was, and for that matter neither is the entire country. The Pakis are taking over the city and the French are taking over the government. A shopgirl (implied: foreign, dark-skinned, accented, or all three) was rude to her in Creeds just last Wednesday. And as for Creeds, it has gone completely downhill. They used to put fur coats in the windows and now they put belly dancers. She supposes that Elizabeth, with her attitudes (implied: degenerate), thinks this is all right, but she herself will never get used to it. She is old, she remembers better things.

  Elizabeth doesn't know which is worse, this conversation or last year's, in which Auntie Muriel subjected the children to an account of the trials and tribulations she'd undergone in her attempt to gather the entire family together in one corner of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. In the story, she'd made no distinction between the living and the dead, referring to her own plot as though she herself were already in it and to the others as if they were guests at a picnic she was throwing. Uncle Teddy was already in the right place, of course, but Elizabeth's mother and sister had to be moved from St. James and her grandfather from the old Necropolis. As for Elizabeth's father, there was no telling where he'd wandered off to.

  Elizabeth could probably have interfered with these operations if she wanted to, but she didn't have the strength. She knew what Auntie Muriel was like when thwarted. If Auntie Muriel wanted to play chess with her dead relatives, let her. Luckily they were all in urns rather than coffins. They had no idea, Auntie Muriel said, how cheeky certain lawyers and cemetery supervisors could be. Of course these days a lot of them had foreign accents. She'd then described an intricate series of real-estate dealings that seemed to concern the trading-off of one plot in exchange for another. Her ultimate plan was to acquire a large block of holdings and then exchange it for a mausoleum. Elizabeth refrained from asking whether or not Auntie Muriel had reserved a spot for her.

  Going home in the taxi, Nancy says, "She's funny."

  This view of Auntie Muriel has never occurred to Elizabeth before. Funny in what way, she wants to know.

  "She says funny things."

  And Elizabeth realizes that, for them, this is all Auntie Muriel is: a curiosity. They like going to see her for the same reason they like going to the Museum. She cannot touch them or harm them, they are out of her reach. She can touch and harm only Elizabeth. Because Auntie Muriel once had all power over her, she will always have some. Elizabeth is an adult in much of her life, but when she's with Auntie Muriel she is still part child. Part prisoner, part orphan, part cripple, part insane; Auntie Muriel the implacable wardress.

  She goes to visit her, then, out of defiance. Look, I've grown up. I walk on two legs, unsteadily maybe, but you haven't got me into one of those urns of yours, not yet. I live my life despite you and I will continue to live it. And see, these are my children. Look how beautiful, how intelligent, how normal they are. You never had children. You can't touch them. I won't let you.

  Saturday, January 15, 1977

  LESJE
/>   Lesje is doing something seedy. If someone, one of her friends, Marianne for instance, was doing the same thing and told her about it, she would think: seedy. Or even tacky. Very tacky, to be having an affair with a married man, a married man with two children. Married men with children are proverbially tacky, with their sad stories, their furtive lusts and petty evasions. Tackier still to be doing it in a hotel, of necessity a comparatively tacky hotel, since Nate is, as he says, a little broke. Lesje hasn't offered to pay the hotel bill herself. Once, long ago, her women's group might have sneered at this reluctance, but there is a limit.

  Lesje doesn't feel tacky. She isn't sure whether Nate does or not. He's sitting in one of the chairs (there are two, both cheap Danish Modern with frayed corners, to match the blue frayed bed-spread which is as yet undisturbed), telling her how terrible he feels that they have to be in this hotel instead of somewhere else. The somewhere his tone implies is not another, more acceptable hotel. It's a summer field, a deserted sun-warmed beach, a wooded knoll with breezes.

  Lesje doesn't mind the hotel, even though the hum from the air conditioner is beginning to get to her. It's spewing out thick hot air which smells of upholstery and cigar butts, and they haven't been able to find the switch that turns it off. If this hotel had been a choice, she'd feel differently about it, but it's a necessity. They can't go to Lesje's apartment because of William, who was out when Lesje left but who may reappear at any moment, to find the note Lesje has thoughtfully propped on the card table: Back at 6:00. They can't go to Nate's, ever, unless Lesje takes time off work during the week. She works the same hours Elizabeth does, though Elizabeth probably has more flexibility. But today is Saturday and Elizabeth is at home. Not to mention the children. Nate hasn't mentioned the children, but even so he's managed to convey to Lesje that although he respects her, admires her and desires her, to his children she represents an evil from which he must protect them.