The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  But the bones ... Diana didn't know her daughter's bones the way she knew her skin. When Emma was a baby, her bones had seemed soft and lost inside her skin. Impossible to imagine. Like the skeleton of a cloth doll, like scaffolding inside a cloud.

  But now Emma was more like a toy poodle than a baby. A softness full of edges. Muppet ... who was Muppet? Diana remembered, suddenly, someone's dog in her lap, quivering and full of bones.

  Muppet.

  Muppet was Maureen's dog. He had gray fur and smelled like corn chips. Maureen used to take him in her lap and press her face into the fur. The dog had brown tearstains in the corners of its eyes, and when it wasn't quivering in Maureen's lap, it was lying on the floor and licking its penis or growling at the crack under the front door when people passed in the hallway of the apartment building where Maureen lived with her mother.

  Something ran into the road fast, and on four legs, and Diana swerved. A red blur—

  Fucking squirrel.

  Though she swerved, the squirrel ran straight under the minivan, and Diana instinctively closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the squirrel dash straight up a skinny sapling on the other side of the street. The tree shivered with the frantic weight of it, and the squirrel seemed to turn in the branches and watch Diana drive away. That squirrel's death. It would be back.

  Diana exhaled, put her hand to the side of her face, and looked at Emma.

  Fucking squirrel.

  At least Diana hadn't said it out loud.

  "Squirrel," Diana explained. She was shaking. Her heart was beating hard.

  "Did we kill it?" Emma asked.

  "No," Diana said. "It made it to the other side."

  Emma nodded.

  She hadn't seen it. Maybe she didn't even believe that there had been a squirrel. Emma was the kind of child who would weep if she saw a dead raccoon at the side of the road. She'd never been in a vehicle that had actually struck and killed an animal. Diana could only guess what her reaction would have been.

  She drove a little slower.

  Her palms were sweaty on the steering wheel, and the green light hurt her eyes.

  Again she patted her daughter's cold knee.

  Emma didn't look at her.

  "Sweetie?" Diana said. "Look at me."

  Emma turned obediently to look at her mother. Those blue eyes.

  Whose were they?

  Hers?

  Her mother's?

  Diana felt she was being appraised by them, dispassionately but with clarity. The swearing, the swerving, it must have made quite an impression on little Emma, who had never sat so still and quiet on the drive home after school.

  Diana cleared her throat, still looking into her daughter's eyes, which were a paler blue than the sky, but made of the same substance as sky.

  "Honey," Diana said, "I'm sorry if I was acting funny, and said bad words. I don't know what was the matter with me!"

  She smiled at her daughter, and Emma smiled back. It was a small smile, but it indicated forgiveness. Diana felt a rush of something as fast and reflexive and helpless as that squirrel in the road. It had to do with love, of course, but love for her daughter didn't come in rushes. This had to do with the great, unexpected mercy of love. That tiny, unemotional but infinitely pardoning smile on her daughter's face...

  She swallowed, and the feeling passed.

  "Mommy," Emma said with her usual brightness. "Don't forget about the zoo. You're driving aren't you? Remember? The whole third grade is going to the zoo."

  "Oh, my gosh," Diana said. "I almost did forget. When?"

  "Not tomorrow," Emma said. "The next day. Friday. Our last day of school."

  Emma leaned over and pulled a Xerox of a permission slip out of her Snow White backpack. Right under her name, Emma McFee, which Diana had written on her backpack in indelible black ink, Snow White had a little bluebird perched on her finger. It was an image that was burned into Diana's brain from her own girlhood. It had seemed to her, at Emma's age, the very image of purity, of girlhood ... to be able to hold a bird that close to your face and to speak to it in such a hushed sweet voice that the bird would be enchanted, that the bird would lean closer to hear your soft song instead of flying away.

  Even then it had been an old image. It had already endured much, but here it was on her daughter's backpack, born again.

  At the bottom of the permission slip, which Diana had already signed—she recognized her own handwriting, loopy and girlish, which hadn't changed since she was in junior high—it said I can drive beside a box that was to be checked off by the willing parent, who was, in this case, Diana.

  Always Diana checked off those boxes, even if it meant canceling a class at the community college where she taught. Her daughter (how well she knew it!) would only be a child for a short time, and Diana wanted to be involved in her life in every way and at every stage before that childhood was over. She remembered, vividly, her own eight-year-old self wearing a tinfoil crown, standing on a stage, scanning the crowd of parents for her mother's face, knowing her mother wouldn't be there because she couldn't afford to take time off from her job as an administrative assistant to come to her daughter's class play.

  But still Diana stood there with that weightless crown on her head, hoping.

  It was something, she'd long ago vowed, that would never happen to her own daughter.

  "Well, now I remember, Emma-o," Diana said. "Of course I'll drive."

  "Great!" Emma said. "I want Sarah Ann and Mary to ride with us."

  Diana smiled and nodded. She said, "If that's okay with Sister Beatrice, it's okay with me."

  Sarah Ann and Mary were Emma's best friends, and she'd been fiercely loyal to them, to the exclusion of all other girls, since kindergarten. The spring before, Emma's second-grade teacher had pulled Diana aside at a school open house to say she thought it would be nice to encourage Emma to make friends with some of the other girls, that maybe those three girls had become a bit too close for their own good.

  The teacher had been a thick-ankled woman in her mid-twenties.

  Mrs. Adams.

  She wore smocks and jumpers, and for at least eight months Diana had assumed it was because the teacher was pregnant. But the teacher never grew larger, and she never gave birth. Her hair was so straight and white blond it seemed transparent, and she spoke in the voice of a child herself—a kind of silly singsong that seemed peculiar to the elementary-school teachers Diana had met at her daughter's Catholic girls' school, the ones who weren't nuns.

  The nuns, in contrast to the other women, spoke to the children as if commanding a small, restless army. An army of cupids.

  Diana had stood in the large shadow of that teacher at the school open house that night, with a cocktail napkin full of sugar-cookie crumbs in her hand, smiling politely. But she'd disregarded the teacher's advice.

  It seemed to her—and to Paul, when she discussed it with him—that as long as they were polite, honest girls, it was none of their business who their daughter chose to befriend or how close those friendships became.

  Too, it had been the spring that Timmy died, and both Paul and Diana speculated diat one of the reasons Emma clung so tightly to her two friends just then was because of the loss of Timmy. He'd been only a cat, but Emma had loved him, as she loved Sarah Ann and Mary, with a true and exclusive passion.

  Diana could already tell that Emma, at only eight years old, was the kind of girl capable of passionate love, the kind of passionate love that might have caused an older girl, like a character in a tragedy or an old Scottish ballad, to throw herself from the cliffs onto the rocks, to allow herself to be tied to stakes, to rise from the dead to haunt the place where she'd lost the one she loved.

  But Emma was only eight.

  After Timmy had died, she simply refused to eat anything other than Cheerios and toast for a week, woke up screaming in terror for several nights, wept through the rooms of their house, looking under the couch and the chairs for Timmy long afte
r Paul and Diana were sure their daughter understood that he was dead, and what dead meant.

  Diana had brought Timmy's body in a cardboard box back from the veterinarian, and Paul had buried him in the backyard. Although they decided it would be too traumatic for Emma to actually watch her beloved cat being placed in a dark hole in the ground, they showed her where his grave was, and she and Diana had planted pale blue violets there. The violets had little human faces and seemed to crane their necks toward the world fearlessly, full of good humor, blown around gendy on their thin green stems, fed by Timmy's moldering.

  Still, whenever they mentioned the possibility of getting a kitten, Emma would say simply, "Timmy doesn't like other cats."

  ***

  For two weeks, Mr. McCleod. laughs easily in class.

  He closes his book and speaks to the class from his heart about his love of biology, about the difficulties of finding a teaching position, about how he almost gave up and got a job in the auto-parts plant before he found this job, about the deep satisfaction he finds in coming to work at Briar Hill High every day.

  The girls try not to look at one another.

  It would only lead to laughter.

  Laughter might hurt Mr. McCleod's feelings.

  But they can feel one another thinking and full of laughter, a sea breeze across the biology classroom.

  One day, a few weeks before the end of the school year, they come into the classroom before Mr. McCleod gets there. Ryan Haslip is at the blackboard. He writes SLUT on it with a piece of chalk the color of Mr. McCleod's teeth. He draws an arrow from the word to the skeleton, and then he takes his seat.

  No one makes a sound when Mr. McCleod comes in.

  It is a moment in which a small good could triumph over a small evil. The world is always poised, waiting before such moments. In this one, someone could jump up from his or her seat, take the eraser, and erase the word before he sees it.

  But the silence is full of static....

  A light rain begins to tick against the windows, although it's perfectly sunny outside, like an admission of guilt.

  The word on the blackboard is the first thing Mr. McCleod sees, and he picks up the eraser himself and wipes it away.

  He wipes furiously.

  There's a pale yellow cloud of chalk in the air around him when he's finished.

  When he turns to look at the class, his face is terrible, but he says nothing.

  The next day, the bikini and the rose are gone from the skeleton, and Mr. McCleod gives the class an impossible, damning pop quiz on the three different types of the six hundred and forty muscles of the human body. One of them—the body's strongest—is the heart, and though he'd told them this fact over and over, not a single student gets it right.

  Too young, too young.

  REMEMBERING THAT—TIMMY TURNING TO VIOLETS IN the dirt—Diana turned the minivan onto Maiden Lane, and there was a moment in which a space parted between the tree branches overhead, and she caught a glimpse of the sky through the windshield.

  It was absolutely clear and without a center.

  The transparent vacuum of it startled her, and then the trees bent together again, blocking the empty blue, and she pulled into her own driveway and saw her husband sitting on the front porch in a white wicker rocking chair, waiting.

  There were two of them—two rocking chairs. One was rocking emptily in the breeze beside the one in which her husband sat. They'd been part of the dream of the life she'd someday have. For years those very same rockers had sat on the front porch of a house down the block from the apartment building where Diana lived with her mother. Every winter they'd disappear, but every spring they would return, freshly painted. And even though Diana never actually saw anyone sitting in them, as she and her mother sped past them, the rockers spoke to her gracefully about the nature of home.

  By coincidence she and Paul had just bought their home, many years later, when Diana drove by that same house on a Saturday morning and saw a sign out front that said ESTATE SALE.

  She bought the rockers.

  Now her husband was sitting in one of them. The intricate wickerwork rose above his shoulders and settled into gentle curves behind his back, exactly like a pair of wings. He was drinking from a can of Mountain Dew and waved hello with great exaggeration for Emma's benefit, an absurdly happy clown smile on his face.

  Diana drove past the vision of her husband sitting in a white wicker rocker and into the garage, where she parked beside Paul's beat-up Schwinn. The minivan was their only vehicle because Paxil rode that dust red Schwinn to his office and classes at the university, and the sight of him every morning rolling down the driveway into the road was one of Diana's favorites:

  The gray-bearded philosophy professor in a tweed jacket and jeans, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, pedaling furiously into the sun, the rain, even the snow.

  Diana opened the driver's side door and stepped out of it into the garage, which smelled of oil-soaked rags. It was narrow as a coffin, and she could only just squeeze herself out of the minivan because the door wouldn't open all the way. Stepping down into the darkness, for just a moment she remembered being a child, easing her way into a lake, and how the silt and seaweed under her bare feet had given way suddenly to nothing and she'd found herself floating in shadows. Someone had been urging her forward... Come on, Diana, don't be a chicken ... and then she was swimming.

  Emma jumped quickly out of the minivan and hurried out of the garage, and Diana followed her, blinded by the late afternoon sun bouncing off the house and its bone-white clapboard.

  "Hi, honey," she called into the glare in the direction of her husband.

  "Hi, sweetheart," he called back from behind the wall of light.

  Daisies

  ROUNDING THE CORNER TOWARD HER HUSBAND, DIANA noticed that the daisies she'd planted years before off the sunny side of the porch were already flourishing wildly in the warm weather, smelling like a musty salad and spreading like ... like what?

  A cancer?

  She stopped to look at them.

  What would make her think, she wondered, suddenly of something like cancer, and find the fusty-earth smell of those daisies suffocating?

  "How are my gals?" Paul asked, and Diana was startled away from the daisies and whatever ugly message they might have been trying to send. She could see that on the porch Emma was giving her father one of her mighty hugs. She was sitting on his lap. It was a picture of perfect father-daughter familiarity. Family, Diana thought as she stood and watched their embrace. Her daughter's small arms were flung around his neck. His eyes were closed. A crack of light broke through the green leafiness of their front yard, and it shone all over the two of them. The brightness of it caused her eyes to fill with water.

  Family ... famine ... mine...

  The words trailed across her eyes as if they were moving along one of those neon bars they used to have on buses, telling you what the next stop would be. STATE STREET ... MAIN STREET ... WESTLAND PLAZA ... Until that moment, it had never occurred to Diana that the words bore any relationship to one another. Strange, she thought then, how associations came and went, making their odd revelations, as if thoughts were independent of their thinkers. Freud could have explained it, she supposed. Or Mr. McCleod, her high school biology teacher. Everyone else just let them come and go.

  After school the girls walk to Burger King.

  There, they'll lock themselves in the one-stall bathroom and change into the cutoffs they've crammed into the bottoms of their backpacks.

  Winter lasted a long time, and now that the sun has finally risen once more over the slush and frozen grass of early spring, the heat of it seems closer to the earth than it's ever been....

  A burning, benevolent presence above them. At school even the teachers seem giddy. They start classes late because they're standing in the hallways talking to one another long after the bell has rung. In the hallway there's a cool, snaking breeze that winds from one end of the tunnel of it to the ot
her, skimming over the gold-flecked linoleum and past the gray metal lockers.

  Outside, the birds roll around in the puddles, and the squirrels dash down the green hill that slopes away from Briar Hill High into the street. They are trying to chase one another into the branches of the trees on the other side of the road. Usually they make it, but occasionally one of them is made into a small bloody rug under the wheels of someone's mother's station wagon or SUV.

  Crossing the parking lot on their way to Burger King, they see Amanda Greenberg sitting on the trunk of her father's BMW, swinging her long legs, which are bare beneath the short black skirt she's wearing. She's a senior. She's just been elected Mayqueen, which is Briar Hill High's version of prom queen ... the girl who'll wear a white gown and preside over the last dance of the year in the high school gym....

  Four boys are standing around the Mayqueen in a semicircle. She throws her head backward with laughter, fast and hard, the way you'd swallow a big pill.

  She is terrifyingly beautiful. An arrow of beauty. Her mother is black and her father is Jewish, and the union of those two has produced a face that is at once ancient and entirely new—long pitch-black hair, dusky skin, and eyes so blue and acute they're hard to look at.

  She never notices the two younger girls walk by.

  Next year one of those younger girls will be Mayqueen, but no one has even begun to dream of that yet.

  ***

  "I HAVE GOOD NEWS," PAUL SAID, LOOKING AT DIANA over their daughter's bright head.

  The sun numbered each one of Emma's golden hairs.

  Diana stepped up onto the porch, and her shadow fell on her family.

  "What?" Diana asked.

  Paul looked excited. His eyes were wide. It was comic and adorable, that look of a happy child on the face of this professor. Her love for him, welling up, made her chest hurt. She put her hand flat against her ribs, and behind them she could feel her heart like a wingless bird in that cage.