Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  If he's right, if he's been brought here on (he now sees) the shabby pretext of a chess game, just to witness this object, this hostage which may or may not belong to Elizabeth, his options are limited. Chris knows he knows. Chris is expecting Nate to hit him. Then Chris will hit Nate and they'll have a fight. Smashing the chess table, rolling among the light puffs of dust that colonize Chris's floor.

  Nate deplores this solution. The question is: Is Elizabeth a female dog or a human being? It's a matter of human dignity. Why fight over Elizabeth, who presumably can make her own choices? Has made them. Whoever wins, the fight would settle nothing.

  Nate could pretend he hasn't seen the silver fish, but it's gone too far for that.

  Or he could ignore it. Even to himself this would look like cowardice.

  "Made your move?" Nate says.

  Chris captures the queen's knight, stares at Nate, his chin out, tensed, ready. Any moment he may spring. Nate thinks: Maybe he's crazy. Maybe he's crazy enough to have bought another fish and planted it there. Maybe he's fucking insane!

  Instead of taking the white knight, Nate tips over his own king.

  "You win the game," he says. He stands up, scoops the fish off the table.

  "I'll return this to Elizabeth for you, shall I?" he says, gently, affably.

  He walks to the door, expecting at any moment to feel fists on his back, a boot in his kidneys. He takes a taxi back to the house; the driver waits outside while he gathers enough loose change from the surfaces of their room to pay him.

  He places the silver fish carefully on the night table, beside his scattered pennies. She should have told him. It isn't friendly, the fact that she hasn't told him. The first time, she told him and they both cried, holding each other closely, consoling each other for some violation they felt as mutual. Then they discussed their problems, sitting up till four in the morning, whispering across the kitchen table. They promised reforms, repairs, reparations, whole new sequences of events, a new order. And the second and the third time. He isn't a monster, he's always stifled his outrage, he's forgiven her.

  The fact that she hasn't told him this time means only one thing: she doesn't want to be forgiven. Or, put another way, she no longer cares whether he forgives her or not. Or, it occurs to him, she may have decided it isn't his right to forgive.

  Wednesday, February 16, 1977

  ELIZABETH

  Elizabeth is sitting at the black-topped table in Fran's. Opposite her is William. In front of her is a waffle with a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on it, and on top of the ice cream is a tentacled formation of partially congealed cinnamon-colored syrup. She watches the syrup run down and hopes the waitress won't comment on the untouched waffle when she brings the check.

  Across the table from her William is eating a club sandwich and drinking draft beer. Elizabeth is only half-listening to the conversation, which consists of an account, by William, of recent research on carcinogenic substances to be found in smoked meats. She's more relaxed now. William doesn't seem to notice that they're in Fran's instead of some recherche little hideaway. The first two recherche little hideaways they tried had been full, and according to William they were the only ones in the area. An area Elizabeth no longer knows well.

  Under ordinary circumstances she would have reserved in advance, but she needed to seem impromptu. She happened to be passing by the Ministry of the Environment on her way to do some shopping (false; she never shops at Yonge and St. Clair) and remembered their recent conversation (also false). She thought how fascinating it would be to pop in on William and hear a little more about the work he was doing (totally false), and if William wasn't busy for lunch, she'd love to have him join her (true, but not for the reasons William may have suspected).

  William was even more flattered than she intended him to be. Even now he's swelling visibly, expounding with fervor on degenerate hams and the evil secret life of bacon. She prods at her waffle with her fork and wonders whether she should press his knee discreetly under the table, or is it too soon? She hasn't yet decided exactly how she'll go on from here. Either she will seduce William, to create some balance in the universe, a tit for a tat, or she'll tell him about Lesje and Nate; or perhaps both.

  She cuts off a piece of waffle with her fork, lifts it. Then she puts it back on her plate. She remembers why this is something she can no longer eat.

  It's May; Elizabeth is coming to life again. Two weeks ago her mother finally died, after smoldering in the hospital bed for longer than anyone could have expected. Elizabeth sat through that death, watching clear fluid drip from a bottle into her mother's good arm, holding the good hand, watching the good half of the face for any movement, any sign. For two days she didn't eat or sleep, despite Auntie Muriel and the doctor, who said that her mother would not regain consciousness, which was all for the best, and Elizabeth should save her strength. She walked through the funeral step by step, listened to the service, watched her mother float for the second time into the flames. She allowed her hand to be shaken and pressed by the friends of Auntie Muriel. Auntie Muriel planned the whole funeral down to the last detail as if it were an important tea party. She can't tell whether Auntie Muriel is mourning or gloating; there's a pleased fatalism about her. She has the flowers from the funeral around the house in vases - why waste them? - and the house stinks of death.

  Auntie Muriel can't seem to stop talking about it. Elizabeth wants to stop talking about it. She wants to stop hearing about it, thinking about it. She never wants to think about her mother again. In two months, less than that, she'll be finished with high school and then she'll get out. Auntie Muriel wants her to go to Trinity College and continue living in the house; she says it will be better for Caroline, which Elizabeth sees as a ruse to trap her.

  Elizabeth herself has no such ambitions. She wants only one thing: escape. She can't yet see what form this will take. She can see herself planning, finding a job through the Star want ads, hunting a furnished room, packing; making provisions. She can also see herself running out the front door in her nightgown and vanishing forever into a ravine. Both of these things are equally possible.

  She can't bear to be inside Auntie Muriel's house with its greyish chrysanthemums, its festering gladioli. The room she shares with Caroline is papered with small blue roses, their stems bunched into doilies, Auntie Muriel's version of girlhood; the furniture is painted white. On her bed Caroline keeps a blue fake-fur pyjama bag in the shape of a cat.

  Elizabeth picks up a boy in a drugstore. It isn't the first time, but it's the first time since her mother's death; and in a drugstore. Before it's been street corners, the entranceways to movie houses. This is forbidden: Auntie Muriel allows only formal dances at private schools with the sons of her acquaintances. Elizabeth has no taste for these dances or for the pink-cheeked, short-haired boys who attend them. She prefers boys like this one. He has a ducktail and a red leather jacket with the collar turned up; his black eyebrows almost meet, his chin is cut where he's scraped it shaving. His shorter friend gets out of the car, muttering something to him and laughing, as Elizabeth gets in.

  The car is festooned with plastic dice and feather kewpie dolls. Elizabeth likes such cars. There's danger in them but she knows she can control it. She enjoys the latent power of her own hands; she knows she can always stop in time. It excites and gratifies her to be able to do this, go to the edge and almost jump. (There's something else, too. The boys, any boys, any mouth and pair of arms, contain a possibility; some quality she can only guess at, some hope.)

  They drive around for a while, then go to Fran's for a waffle. Food is always part of it. Elizabeth gobbles her waffle as if she's never seen one before; the boy smokes, watches her through narrowed eyes. His name is Fred or something and he goes to Jarvis. She tells him where she lives and he tries not to be impressed. Elizabeth feels she knows exactly what Auntie Muriel and her pretensions are worth. This doesn't stop her from displaying them. Auntie Muriel has her terrors, which are
real enough to Elizabeth, but increasingly she also has her uses.

  They drive around some more, park on a quiet side street. The smell of Old Spice shaving lotion fills the car. Elizabeth waits for the leather arm to arrive, across, over, down. She has no time right now for preliminaries, fumbling with hooks, inching around the rib cage; she does not want to dole herself out. She's filled with energy, she can't tell what it is, anger, fury, denial. What she has in mind is more like a car crash, time squeezed together. Violence, metal on metal.

  He's tangled in the steering wheel. Impatient, more reckless than he is, she opens the car door, pulls him down onto the wet grass. Somebody's front lawn. "Hey," he says. He's nervous, he glances up at the curtained windows.

  She wants to shout, a huge raucous shout that will startle the darkness, bring the cold crab eyes in these stone houses hurrying to their windows; something that will unlock her throat. She wants to let go of the dead hand she's still holding.

  She kisses this mouth that exists only now, does not stop or pull away when the hands move over her, twists to allow him. He groans, hesitates. Then for a minute she almost does scream: she expected pain, but not this kind or this much. Nevertheless she is grinning, teeth set; she exults. She hopes she's bleeding, a little anyway; blood would make this an event. When he goes limp she reaches down to see.

  He doesn't understand, he's on his knees beside her, doing himself up, pulling down her skirt, apologizing! Awkwardly; he's really sorry, he couldn't help it, he didn't mean to. As if she's a foot he's stepped on, as if he's merely sneezed.

  She gets out of the car a block from the house. It's later than she thought. The back of her coat is wet and she brushes at it ineffectually before getting out her key. She's convinced Auntie Muriel will be standing on the bottom step of the staircase in her powder blue dressing gown, accusing, malignant, triumphant. Elizabeth has fed her a story about evening choir practice, which, unbelievably, has worked several times before. But she's never stayed out so late. If Auntie Muriel is there, if she knows, Elizabeth can't imagine what she'll do. She can't imagine any actual punishment - rage, banishment, disinheritance - equal to her dread. When she's at a distance from Auntie Muriel she can think of derisive and vulgar things to say to her, but in her presence she knows she would be mute. If Auntie Muriel were roped to the stake she'd be the first to jeer; but who has the power to put her there? Auntie Muriel terrifies her because she doesn't know where to stop. Other people have lines they won't step over, but for Auntie Muriel such lines do not exist. Elizabeth's other fear is that these lines do not exist in herself, either.

  But when she unlocks the door the hall is vacant. She walks along the carpet and up the stairs, making it past the inlaid grandfather clock on the landing, past the Chinese vases on their spindly stands at the top of the stairs, pressing her thighs together, blood seeping gently in her clothes. She'll have to wash these clothes herself, privately, dry them in secret. She wants Auntie Muriel to know, wants her to see the evidence of this violation; at the same time she'll do everything to keep her from finding out.

  She opens the door of the room she shares with Caroline. The overhead light is on. Caroline is lying on the floor between their beds. She's spread out the plaid mohair blanket from the foot of her bed and is lying on it, arms folded across her breasts, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. Above her head and at her feet are the silver candelabra from the mahogany buffet downstairs. Beside her there's a bottle of lemon furniture polish. The candles in the candelabra have burned to stubs, gone out. She must have been like this for hours.

  Elizabeth knows as soon as she sees her that she's been expecting this, or something like it. Caroline would not go to the hospital; she said she didn't want to see their mother. She refused to attend the funeral, and Auntie Muriel, strangely, did not force her. Elizabeth noticed all this, but only from the corner of her eye. Caroline had been so silent lately it was easy not to notice her.

  Once, a long time ago, Elizabeth strode through the girls' half of a schoolyard at recess, her arms linked in a chain of other girls. We don't stop for anybody. That was the game: you couldn't stop for anybody. Elizabeth kept Caroline's arm gripped firmly under her own; she had to have Caroline with her in the chain so she wouldn't get run down. Caroline was younger, she had trouble keeping up. She was Elizabeth's responsibility. But Elizabeth has been concentrating all her energy, for years now, on saving herself. She hasn't had any left over for saving Caroline.

  She drops to her knees, smooths Caroline's hair back from her forehead above the unblinking eyes. Then she moves one folded arm and puts her head on Caroline's chest. Caroline is still alive.

  Once the ambulance and the stretcher had come and gone, but not until then, Elizabeth had knelt on the mosaic tiles of the second-floor bathroom beside the claw-footed tub and thrown up her Fran's Special, ice cream, cinnamon syrup and all. Her penance. About the only one she'd ever been able to make. If she'd been religious, one of the Catholics so detested by Auntie Muriel, she could have lit a candle for the repose of Caroline's soul. But Caroline seemed to have already taken care of that herself.

  At the hospital they said she hadn't drunk any of the furniture polish. The open bottle was a sign, Caroline's last message; an indication of where she'd gone, since for all practical purposes she was no longer in her body.

  Elizabeth watches while William finishes off his club sandwich and orders apple pie with cheese and a cup of coffee. She dislikes his tie. Someone with William's choirboy complexion should not wear beige and maroon. If Lesje lives with a man who has such poor taste in ties, she's hardly worth defeating.

  William doesn't seem to have noticed that Elizabeth isn't eating; he's explaining why colored toilet paper is so much worse than white. Elizabeth knows she will take scant pleasure in sleeping with him or even in making the revelation she's come here to make. Perhaps she won't bother. She's amazed sometimes at the lengths to which people will go to distract themselves. She amazes herself.

  Wednesday, February 16, 1977

  LESJE

  Lesje is cataloguing giant tortoises from the Upper Cretaceous. REPTILIA, she writes. Chelonia, Neurankylidae. GENUS & SPECIES, Neurankylus baueri, Gilmore. LOCALITY: Fruitland, New Mexico, U.S.A. GEOLOGY: Upper Cretaceous, Fruitland shale. MATERIAL: Carapace & plastron.

  How ignominious to be dug up in Fruitland, Lesje thinks, after so many million years of peace. She's never been to Fruitland but she pictures little souvenir stands where plastic fruits are sold: grape lapel pins, magnetic tomatoes. Or probably, since it's the United States, college students dressed up as giant peaches and apples strolling among the crowds. Like Disneyland.

  There's a number in black-ink figures on the slip of paper attached to the carapace, and she adds this number to the filing card. When she's finished with the larger specimens, she knows there's a whole tray of carapace fragments awaiting her. She'll cart it from the storage shelves up to her office, past the sandblasters and dentist's drills they use for cleaning fossils; when she's finished with it she'll cart it down again and slide it into the storage rack. After that she'll start on the fish earbones from the Miocene. There are hundreds of fish earbones, hundreds of tortoise fragments, hundreds of assorted vertebrae, knuckles, claws, hundreds of teeth. Thousands of pounds of rock, locked into the patterns of the once-living. Sometimes she wonders whether the world really needs more fish earbones from the Miocene. On days like this she wonders whether her job isn't, really, just glorified filing.

  When she's settled in her cubbyhole of an office with the shell fragments and her clean cards, the phone rings. It's another school group, wanting a tour. Lesje slots them into her calendar. She no longer anticipates school tours with much pleasure. Once she thought she could teach them something. Now she knows there will be at least one child who will want to throw something at the dinosaurs - a bubble-gum wrapper, a pop-bottle top, a pebble - to show he isn't afraid. Mammal cubs, jeering their old enemies. Don't walk on the ledge, she will
say. If you push all the buttons at once you won't be able to hear.

  Should she make a cup of instant coffee in the wet lab, bring it back to her windowless cubicle, and stay late to finish the tray? Or should she, for once, leave on time?

  She peers through the door of the large office adjoining the wet lab. Dr. Van Vleet has already gone, shoehorning his damp rubbers on over his scuffed black shoes and paddling off like a stooped tweed duck into the February slush. Lesje has always been compulsive about her job - she wants very much to do it well - but she's become irritable with it lately. No one, probably, will ever look at the Miocene fish earbones again, once she slots the tray into place. Except her, surreptitiously easing it back out some day to admire their symmetry and size and to imagine the gigantic fish with their bony sheathing, sliding like huge knees through the ancient oceans.

  She completes one more card, then closes the filing-card box and goes for her coat. She slips her arms into it, bundles her head, checks her shoulder-bag for money. She'll stop at Ziggy's on the way back to the apartment and pick up something nice for dinner, something nice for William. Ever since she's come to suspect that she may eventually leave him, she's been very solicitous about William. She buys him surprises, tinned sardines, clams, things he likes. When he sniffles she gets him pills, lemons and boxes of Kleenex. It's as if she wants to make sure he's in good condition when she passes him on, trades him in. See, she'll say to him. Look how healthy you are. You don't need me.

  She doesn't know how she'll tell him, though; or even when. Nate doesn't want to make any sudden moves, because of the children. He thinks he will rent an apartment or, better still, part of a house, so there will be room for his machines, and move into it a little at a time. He'll tell the children it's a workshop. He hasn't yet indicated when he would like Lesje to join him, just that he would. Eventually. When the children get adjusted. Sometimes they look at the want ads, trying to decide where he, or possibly they, will finally live.