2) Why is it called the Mesozoic
3) Trace the geological developments that took place in this Era in North America, please include Maps
4) what is a Fossil
5) Why were no Dinosaur fossils been found in Ontario
Please send the answers very soon as my Project is due on June 15.
Yours truely, Lindy Lucas
Everything about this letter is familiar to Lesje. She knows it's been sent by a wily child, bent on shortcuts, who would rather copy out a ready-made answer than condense one from a book. She even recognizes the questions, which have been rephrased slightly, first by the teacher, then, more drastically, by the student, but which are still almost identical to some of those in the Museum pamphlet on dinosaurs which she herself helped to prepare and edit. The teacher takes shortcuts too.
Ordinarily she would simply clip several mimeographed sheets together and attach a form letter. Thank you for your interest. We hope these fact sheets will help you to find the information you require. Today though, looking at the round ingenuous printing, she realizes she's angry. She resents the implications of the letter: that dinosaurs are too boring to be worth much time, that she herself exists to be exploited. She resents the absence of a stamp and a return envelope. DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK, she wants to scrawl, in red crayon across the neat blue printing. But she can't do that. Answering these letters is part of her job.
She reads the letter again, and the words float. Why is it called the Mesozoic? The correct answer, the one the teacher wants, is on the fact sheet. Meso, middle, zoos, life. After the Paleozoic, before the Cenozoic. But does the Mesozoic exist? When it did it was called nothing. The dinosaurs didn't know they were in the Mesozoic. They didn't know they were only in the middle. They didn't intend to become extinct; as far as they knew they would live forever. Perhaps she should write the truth: The Mesozoic isn't real. It's only a word for a place you can't go to any more because it isn't there. It's called the Mesozoic because we call it that. And risk an outraged letter from some beleaguered teacher: What sort of an answer is that?
Her hands are shaking, she needs a cigarette. She can't deal with this letter at all, right now she's devoid of answers, she knows nothing. She would like to crumple the letter and chuck it into the wastebasket, but instead she folds it neatly in two so she can't see the printing and lays it beside her typewriter. She puts on her raincoat and carefully does up the buttons and the belt.
There's some bread and cheese in her desk drawer which she intended to have for lunch but instead she'll walk up to Murray's. She'll find a single table and watch the office workers bolt their food, and the breathless, soup-spotted waitresses. She needs to get out of the Museum, if only for an hour.
Last night she fought with Nate, all-out for the first time, after the children were asleep upstairs, or possibly not asleep. That was another thing: the children were there, and it was a weeknight. They'd agreed that the children wouldn't come on weeknights, but Nate had a last-minute call from Elizabeth. Recently all her calls have been last-minute.
"Her aunt just died," Nate told her when she came in the door and found the children eating macaroni and cheese and playing Scrabble at the kitchen table. "Elizabeth felt it would be better for the children to spend the night here. She doesn't want them to be upset by her own reaction."
The children did not appear unduly traumatized, and Lesje didn't believe Elizabeth was either. This was just another flank attack. She said nothing until after the children had washed the dishes and Nate had read to them and tucked them in. They were old enough to read to themselves, but Nate said it was a tradition.
When he came downstairs, he announced that he felt he should go to the funeral.
"Why?" Lesje said. The aunt was Elizabeth's, not Nate's; the funeral was none of his business.
Nate said he felt he should give Elizabeth some support. She would be brought down by the funeral, he said.
"From everything you've told me," Lesje said, "she hated that aunt."
Nate said that although this was true, the aunt had been important in Elizabeth's life. In his opinion the importance of something to someone had nothing to do with its positive qualities but only with its impact, its force, and the aunt had been a force.
"I've got news for you," Lesje said. "Elizabeth doesn't need any support. Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits. I've never seen anyone who needs less support than Elizabeth."
Nate said appearances were deceptive and he felt that after twelve years of marriage to her he was perhaps in a better position than Lesje to judge how much support Elizabeth needed. Elizabeth, he said, had had an unhappy childhood.
"Who didn't?" Lesje said. "Who didn't have an unhappy childhood? What's so special?" If he wanted unhappy childhoods, she'd tell him about hers. On second thought, she probably wouldn't, since the unhappiness in it had been without event. She could not, she knew, match the almost flamboyant melodrama of Elizabeth's, which Nate had conveyed to her fragment by fragment. In any competition for unhappy childhoods she would lose.
Nate said he thought they ought to keep their voices down, since they had to think of the children.
Lesje thought of the children and saw a blur. The fact was that though the children were in her house almost every weekend she could hardly tell one from the other, she so seldom looked directly at them. She did not dislike them; she was afraid of them. On their part, they had their own oblique methods. They borrowed her belts and shirts without asking, which Nate said meant they had accepted her. They mixed themselves drinks of milk and chocolate powder and ice cream and left the unwashed glasses around the house, brown scum hardening in them, for Lesje to find on Mondays or Tuesdays after they had left. Nate said she should speak to them about anything they did which she objected to, but she wasn't such a fool. If she ever really did that he would hate it. Though they were always scrupulously polite to her, as she knew they'd been told to be. By both parents no doubt. The children were not individuals, they were a collective, a word. The children. He thought all he had to do was say the children and she would shut up, like magic.
"To hell with the children," she said recklessly.
"I know you feel that way," Nate said, with patronizing resignation.
She ought to have backed down, explained that this wasn't what she meant really. She'd done it often enough before. But this time she said nothing. She was too angry. If she tried to say anything at all, it would come out in the form of her grandmother's curses: Jesus asshole poop! I hope your bum falls off! I hope you die!
She ran up to the bathroom, her boots crashing on the uncarpeted stairs, not caring if the children heard, and locked herself in. On the spur of the moment she'd decided to kill herself. She was amazed by this decision; she'd never considered anything remotely like it before. People like Chris had merely puzzled her. But at last she could see why Chris did it: it was this anger and the other thing, much worse, the fear of being nothing. People like Elizabeth could do that to you, blot you out; people like Nate, merely by going about their own concerns. Other people's habits could kill you. Chris hadn't died for love. He'd wanted to be an event, and he'd been one.
She knelt beside the tub, clutching the knife she'd snatched from the counter on her way past. Unfortunately it was a grapefruit knife. She would have to saw rather than slash, which wasn't the effect she'd had in mind. But the end result would be the same. Nate would break down the door, when he got around to it, and find her floating in a sea of pink. Warm water, she knew, made it come out faster. He'd smell the salt, the dead bird smell. What would he do then? With her effigy, waxen and staring.
But this wasn't really what Lesje wanted to do. After a while of thinking about it she stashed the grapefruit knife in the medicine cabinet. Nate hadn't even seen her take it; otherwise he'd be up there pounding at the door. (Wouldn't he?) She was still angry though. With some deliberation, she flushed the remaining pills in her green plastic dial-a-pill dispenser down the toilet. When Nate came to b
ed she turned to him and put her arms around him, exactly as if she'd forgiven him. If children were the key, if having them was the only way she could stop being invisible, then she would goddamn well have some herself.
In the morning she was unrepentant. She knew she'd committed a wrong and vengeful act, an act so vengeful she could not have imagined herself doing such a thing a year ago. Surely no child conceived in such rage could come to much good. She would have a throwback, a reptile, a mutant of some kind with scales and a little horn on the snout. It's long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent. But only theoretical. Really she believed that if people could see how they were acting they would act some other way. Now she knows this isn't true.
She would not recant. Nate, ignorant of what was in store for him, ate corn flakes and made conversation. It was raining, he noted. Lesje, gnawing a bran muffin, hair falling over her face, peered out at him like Fate, sullen, gauging. When would her body strike?
"I'd just like you to realize," she said, to let him know she was still at large, had not been caged and propitiated, "that if you die Elizabeth gets your body. I'll have it sent to her in a crate. After all she's still your wife."
Nate treated this as a joke.
Winding down the stairs, hands held quiet in her raincoat pockets, she vacillates. She has a narrow pelvis, she'll die in childbirth, she knows nothing about children, what about her job? Even with Nate working part time they can't afford it. It isn't too late, nothing can have happened so soon. She'll crack open another package, take two pills and a hot bath, and everything will go on as before.
But then she thinks: Not this time. She wants no more encounters, spurious or otherwise, with the grapefruit knife.
Under the golden dome, head down, steering for the door, she feels a touch on her arm. Nate, she hopes, bringing reconciliation, capitulation, a graceful way out. But instead it is William.
"I just happened to be in the Museum," he says, "and I thought I'd look you up."
Lesje knows perfectly well that William never just happens to be anywhere, much less the Museum. Wonderful, transparent William, easy to read as a phone book, everything in alphabetical order. He has something to say to her, therefore he's come to say it. He didn't telephone first because he knew she might refuse to see him. Quite right, she would have. But now she smiles, she grins.
"I was just going up to Murray's for some lunch," she says. She will not alter anything for William.
William, although he thinks Murray's is grubby and the food will give you cancer of the colon, says that in that case does she mind if he joins her? Not at all, Lesje says, and it's true, she doesn't mind. William is now safely in the past. She walks beside him, air filling her bones. It's pure joy to be with someone who cannot affect her.
Lesje has a chopped egg sandwich and a cigarette. William has a Western. What he feels, he says, dabbing buttery crumbs, is that enough time has gone by and he would just like her to know that he realizes he didn't behave very well, at the end, if she knows what he means. His blue eyes regard her candidly, his pink cheeks glow.
Lesje does not mistake this verbal construction of William's for true repentance. Rather it's an entry on William's balance sheet, that balance sheet required by London, Ontario, that little page William carries around in his head on which everything must eventually tot up right. One attempted rape, one apology. But Lesje by now is willing to accept a convention of decency. Once she would have demanded sincerity.
"I guess nobody behaved very well," she says.
William is relieved, and glances at his watch. He will stay another ten minutes, she calculates, doing the thing properly. He has not really wanted to see her. Right now he's thinking about something else and she finds, trying to guess, that she does not know what it is.
She cups her hand across her face, watches him through the smoke. It dismays her that she can no longer judge William as easily, as glibly as she once could. What she wants to ask him is: Have you changed? Have you learned anything? She herself feels she has learned more than she ever intended to, more than she wants. Does he find her different?
She studies his face: perhaps it is thinner. She can't remember. And those sky-blue eyes, they are not the eyes of a Caucasian doll, a hat mannequin, as she'd once thought.
William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray's glass with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.
Saturday, June 3, 1978
ELIZABETH
Elizabeth, hatless but with gloves, is standing in one of the more desirable districts of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Near the old family mausoleums, Eaton's Department Stores, Weston's Biscuits; not, heaven forbid, in the newer parts with their adolescent trees or in the strange suburban areas of square flat stones with Chinese markings or ornate monuments with plastic-encased photos beside the names.
Two men are shoveling earth onto Auntie Muriel, who, although she's incinerated all the members of her immediate family she could get her hands on, has chosen to have herself lowered more or less intact into the earth. A roll of green pseudo-sod stands ready to cover the unpleasantly exposed brown earth once Auntie Muriel is safely tamped down.
Elizabeth's hair blows in the warm breeze. It's a fine spring day, which is too bad; Auntie Muriel, she is sure, would have preferred a heavy drizzle. But even Auntie Muriel cannot arrange the weather from beyond the grave.
Though she's managed to arrange almost every other detail of her own funeral and interment. Full instructions were in her will, composed before her death, when she was finally, irrevocably dying. Her coffin and plot had been bought and paid for. Her wardrobe, including the underwear, had been meticulously selected and laid aside, Scotch-taped in tissue paper. ("It's an old dress," Elizabeth can imagine her saying. "No sense burying a good one.") She'd vetoed beautification of her corpse as a waste of money and had opted for a closed coffin. She'd even selected the hymns and Bible readings for the service. They'd been enclosed in a separate sealed envelope, addressed to the church. Elizabeth, knowing this, felt she was hearing Auntie Muriel's own voice, intransigent as ever, projecting itself through the mouths of the gathered mourners.
Timothy Eaton had found itself embarrassed by Auntie Muriel. In death as doubtless in life, Elizabeth thought, listening to the diffident voice of the young man who had phoned her. "It's about the service," he said. "I'm wondering whether you might consider some changes. The selections are a little incongruous."
"Of course," Elizabeth said.
"Good," said the man. "Perhaps we could meet and go over ..."
"I mean, of course they're incongruous," Elizabeth said. "Didn't you know her? What did you expect? Let the old reptile get what she wants. She always did in life." They were inheriting the loot; the least they could do was go through with it, whatever it was.
She thought the man would be offended - she was intending to be offensive - but she was almost sure she heard a snicker at the other end of the line.
"Very well, Mrs. Schoenhof," the voice said. "We'll charge ahead."
Nevertheless, Elizabeth had been unprepared when the organ burst forth with the opening hymn: "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today." Was it the old beast letting everyone know she considered herself immortal, or was it just something Auntie Muriel had stuck in because she happened to like it? She glanced around at the surprisingly large group of mourners, old fellow-parishioners, distant relatives: they were singing, gamely though uneasily. After the hymn the minister cleared his throat, rotated his shoulders like a diver warming up, then launched into the Bible reading.
" 'How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no w
idow, and shall see no sorrow. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.'' "
He was doing his best, rolling the r's and acting as if he knew what was going on, but a puzzled whispering rose from the congregation. Auntie Muriel was verging on bad taste. She should have chosen something more conventional, grass withering and passing away, everlasting mercy. But fornication, at a funeral? Elizabeth remembered the young minister they'd sacked, with his hot-coal eyes and his fondness for blood-hued suns and rending veils. Perhaps they suspected Auntie Muriel of being one of the same kind, hidden all these years in their midst. Possibly not entirely sane: look at the sister, the niece.
Elizabeth had little doubt that this was a personal message aimed directly at her: Auntie Muriel's last word on the subject of her mother, fiery death and all, and probably on herself as well. She could imagine Auntie Muriel poring through the Bible, bifocals on the end of her nose, searching for the right verses: scathing, punitive, self-righteous. The joke was that the congregation didn't realize this. Knowing their habits of mind, Elizabeth felt it was likely they thought Auntie Muriel was repenting, even confessing, in some bizarre way. To a secret life of delicious living.
" 'Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.' " The minister shut the Bible and looked up apologetically, and everyone relaxed.
Auntie Muriel had not composed her own eulogy, which laid heavy stress on the words dedication and generosity. Everyone knew what that meant. Elizabeth let her eyes wander, over to the familiar bronze dead of World War One, then to the other wall. READY TO EVERY GOOD WORK. Some female Eaton or other.
But at the final hymn Elizabeth nearly disgraced herself by laughing out loud. Auntie Muriel had chosen "Away in a Manger," and the faces around Elizabeth shifted rapidly from bewilderment to panic. Voices faltered and stopped, and Elizabeth dropped her face into her cupped hands and snorted. She hoped these snorts would be mistaken for grief.
Life Before Man Page 28
