The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  She narrowed her eyes, looking through that screen, then rubbed her eyes and Miss Zena was gone.

  The backyard was scattered with Emma's toys—a Frisbee, a red wagon, a plastic pony on wheels, which had been bought at a garage sale when Emma was three and which she'd ridden wildly around the house for years, scuffing up the hardwood floors.

  Then it was abandoned in the front hallway, near the coat closet, where it grazed absently for a long time ... a stiff, blank-eyed thing they had to step around on their way to other places, a toy in a kind of limbo between rummage sales.

  When Diana and Paul had suggested that they give the pony to the Salvation Army with some old bicycles, Emma had squinted at her parents as if they were people she barely recognized, people she wasn't sure she wanted to know better.

  The pony was kept, although it was eventually sent out to the backyard, where it spent its days staring expressionlessly into the side of the garage. If it ever thought of them, of the lives they led inside the house without it, it could not have been with fondness. It had a few wet leaves stuck to its saddle and in its mane that morning.

  Already the lilacs that grew in wondrous profusion near the back of the garage had gone brown. They'd bloomed fiercely throughout May, sending out a perfume that made Diana think of a funeral parlor or a prom dance.

  One afternoon in the first week of July, they run into Nate Witt outside Big Mama's CDs & Tapes.

  There are small yellow leaflets at his feet. He's looking at the back of the CD he's apparently just bought.

  "Hi, Nate," one of them says.

  Nate Witt looks up and says hi to the air, but he doesn't seem to see the girls.

  They start to laugh, hurry past him, pushing each other and covering their mouths with their hands.

  One of the girls is wearing an ankle bracelet, which makes the sound of jewel-box music as she runs.

  They don't stop laughing until they're back at the apartment where one of the girls lives with her mother. There they turn the radio up loud. WRIP is playing a song by Nirvana.

  They try looking up Nate Witt's telephone number in the Briar Hill phone book—paging through the thin, pulp-soft pages of tiny names—but there are eleven Witts listed there, and who knows what Nate Witt's father's first name might be, or even if Nate Witt has a father? The phone book makes a dusty sound when it's tossed back into its place on the coffee table next to the phone.

  The girls lie around in the bedroom, which is full of stuffed animals and dolls—expensive ones, the ones that last past childhood because they were never dragged to day care or to the park or left at Daddy's house by accident on an overnighter.

  At Daddy's house that doll might have been ruined by Daddy's other kid: a little boy who looks exactly like his mother and doesn't seem at all like a brother. He's shy, especially around strangers, but he'd have played hard with that doll's arms and legs, snapped her neck trying to bend her head backward so she could look up at the stars....

  The dolls—one of them a perfect baby girl with blue glass eyes—and stuffed animals regard the girls stiffly, but without judgment, accumulating dust on the shelves. They never consider the future, which for them can't last much longer. What mother would keep such things around a small apartment after her grown daughter has moved out?

  Outside there's the sound of traffic swooping by on the busy street.

  Only half the day is over.

  Not even half the summer.

  It's a hot and odorless afternoon.

  The blossoms of May and June have dried up or fallen out of the trees, but girlhood goes on and on.

  "Why the hell didn't we stop and say something, ask him what CD he bought or something?"

  "Because we're idiots?"

  "Well, why are we idiots?"

  One of the girls is lying on her back on the bed, balancing a lacy white pillow on her bare foot.

  The other sits cross-legged on the floor.

  "Because he's Nate Witt," she says.

  THE SMELL OF FLOWERS. IT WAS THE VERY ESSENCE OF the month of June—the suffocating sweetness of flowers, the loose pastel scarves of scent slipping through the air, riding over the dampness and rot of spring.

  By June she'd grown used to the smell of flowering. Though the flowers continued to bloom, they ceased to surprise. But in May, the lilacs had come on like a light in a cave. The scent of them brought back the scent of every flower she'd ever smelled. A little shock. A pin stabbing her just above the heart, a spray of baby's breath and pink roses pinned to her white prom dress. And she could remember, too, standing at the edge of her grandmother's white coffin, looking in, the smell of violets rising from the powdered hands.

  Only a month ago the lilacs in the backyard had bloomed, then dwindled, and now they were brown corsages stuck into the shrubs near the back of the garage. New flowers—the peonies, rustling through the backyard in their tutus and toe shoes, and a wild vine of roses trained to climb the white fence that separated their yard from the neighbors'—had taken their place, accompanied by small and golden clouds of honeybees circling them, humming.

  Humming

  DIANA MCFEE WAS NO GARDENER, BUT SHE LOVED HER little garden.

  Every year she'd buy a few things at the nursery and plant them, and now they'd lived in the house long enough that those few things had accumulated and spread, taking on the appearance of a real garden, the kind she used to gaze down on from the sliding glass patio doors of her mother's third-floor apartment.

  From that patio Diana could see the backyards of the houses all over the neighborhood, and the little tended Edens behind them. That apartment was only a few blocks from this very house. Perhaps one of the gardens she'd looked down on had been this very one.

  Someday, she'd think...

  And now she had her very own garden.

  She didn't even mind the weeds. Occasionally she'd go out there with a scythe, which had never been sharpened, and whack something down that had begun to choke out the hollyhocks, but that was the extent of her war against weeds. Paul only mowed the lawn, or paid one of the neighbor boys to do it, about half a dozen times a year. It wasn't neglect, Diana wanted to believe. It was a form of respect. She didn't want to prune and fertilize and mow and weed her piece of the world until it no longer bore any resemblance to the world. She'd seen plenty of that kind of garden, and the women who tended them.

  From where Diana stood at her back door that morning, she could see into the backyard of the Ellsworths, the neighbors who were separated from them by the white wooden fence on which the roses made their slow ascent.

  The Ellsworths had neither lawn nor flowers, but had instead a swimming pool surrounded by cement. The otherworldly aqua blue made a strange backdrop to the bloodred of the roses, though the two colors didn't exactly clash.

  The Ellsworths were the only people in the neighborhood with a pool. It had been just the weekend before that they'd taken the winter cover off of it and filled it with water, but Diana thought she could make out someone swimming in it already.

  So early in the season, who could it be?

  She knew that Sandy Ellsworth worked at the hospital, in the business office she thought, and Diana had always assumed that it was a nine-to-five thing. Sandy Ellsworth was about Diana's age, but the husband looked older. Diana had never actually spoken with him, but she'd never seen him outside on a weekday, and he looked a bit too young to have retired. The couple had no children, at least none Diana had ever seen. Just a poodle with a human name—Ann; or was it Helen?—which escaped a few times every year. The Ellsworths would walk around and around the block calling her name frantically.

  Day off, Diana guessed. Sick day. Personal day. One of the first really warm days of the year. Why not stay home and use the pool, which, in their climate, was only really usable for about ten weeks out of the year?

  Diana admired them for it. They'd seemed too stern for such a dalliance. Their pool had always appeared mainly to serve the purpose of providing
something around which the two of them could sit and have a drink together between six and seven o'clock on summer evenings. It had been an annoyance to Diana, the pool. She felt she had to be extra vigilant watching Emma lest she should wander into the Ellsworths' yard and fall into that pool. Diana knew it took only seconds for such a thing to happen. The phone rings, the kettle starts to whistle, you turn your back, and your child slips over that shimmering edge forever.

  Only after Emma learned to swim did Diana begin to relax about that pool, where today someone was swimming, and it seemed like a good idea....

  The sun shone brightly on the surface, and it glinted beyond the foliage and those roses that separated the yards—glinted like a blade, then dispersed, as if brilliant knitting were unraveling there. Then a dark mass surfaced in the aqua blue, rose up out of the supernatural blueness, and shook its head before diving under again.

  Diana watched the figure dive and surface a few more times, and she wondered which of the Ellsworths it was. She was about to turn away when she heard laughter—a girl's—followed by a playful shriek, and then Diana saw the source of the laughter emerge from the Ellsworths' sliding glass patio doors.

  She was naked.

  A young woman?

  A girl?

  She had long blond hair, and Diana could see her pale breasts and a triangle of blond hair between her legs.

  Whoever was swimming in the pool shouted to her, "Get the fuck in here," in the voice of a man. A young man. He must have reached out and grabbed the girl's ankle when she stepped up to the side of the pool, because Diana saw arms flailing as the girl lost her balance and splashed into the screaming brightness.

  Diana took a step backward, back into her kitchen, the shadows of her home.

  Who could they be?

  Diana couldn't imagine the Ellsworths having relatives who would swim naked in their swimming pool in broad daylight, but neither could she imagine a couple of teenagers having the audacity to sneak into a stranger's pool—naked, shouting.

  She watched for a few more minutes, but the giggling and splashing had gone silent. Diana could still see them, though—two figures made of flesh gliding smoothly down the center of the pool, holding on to one another.

  They were kissing, Diana realized, and then she realized they were also—must have been—having sex. The way the girl was rising and falling against the body of the boy.

  It surprised her, the shock and anger she felt.

  She turned quickly from the kitchen door and closed it behind her, then headed toward the stairs, grabbing things as she went—pencils and napkins and coloring books—to return them to the places they belonged.

  Her heart was beating hard. She could hear it in her ears. For a split second, passing by the telephone, she considered calling the police.

  But what if the teenagers in the pool were friends or relatives of the Ellsworths—his grown son from a previous marriage and a girlfriend, perhaps?

  Then it would seem that it was simply the nudity, the sex, that had prompted a call to the police. Diana would seem to be not only a prude and a busybody but a voyeur, for how would she have noticed the nudity and the sex if she hadn't been watching the neighbors' backyard carefully, from behind her own screen door? Had she been outside where they could see her watching, they would most likely have refrained from engaging in such behavior.

  Such behavior, she imagined herself saying to a police officer, and the words made her wince.

  Such behavior...

  What behavior?

  Two beautiful teenagers skinny-dipping, making love, laughing in a pool on one of the first mornings of real summer?

  Even if they'd trespassed to do it, would Diana have wanted to have them arrested for such a crime?

  Briefly she remembered the feel of cool water on her own naked skin, the way it had opened her body like an eye. And if she remembered correctly, she'd been trespassing ... a neighbor's pool ... heat rippling the air overhead ... the sensation of floating outside her body, surrounded by dazzling white and blue.

  She went upstairs, where she opened her closet. The skirts and dresses and sweaters and blouses waited there, wearing their empty shapes and colors, the textures that had become familiar to her skin, the labels she'd squinted over the washing machine to read. Bodiless without her, or like souls without selves. Still, they exhaled the scent of her—her perfume and hair and skin. Diana pulled a summer dress off a hanger—a short white dress she hadn't worn since the year before—and quickly slipped off the sweat suit she'd put on that morning to drive her daughter to school.

  She wasn't going to become that woman.

  The one in the sweat suit, watching.

  The one getting ready to call 9-1-1.

  She remembered only too well what she herself had thought of that woman.

  The sweat suit made a gray lump at her feet, and Diana kicked it into the bottom of her closet, then closed the closet door.

  The hangers made discordant music knocking against one another.

  Diana turned around with the white dress in her hands and looked at herself, naked, in front of the full-length mirror for a moment—she was still thin, her breasts were full and high, her legs and arms were thin and long, and her skin was still smooth—and she imagined herself swimming into the emptiness of that mirror, and the luminous emptiness of it smoothing against her flesh.

  One of the girls keeps the spring 2000 Abercrombie and Fitch catalog on the nightstand next to her bed.

  They look at it together, sitting on the floor with their backs against the twin bed. The metal bar of the bed frame is solid and cold against their spines, but it doesn't hurt. Both girls are so young, so healthy, so well fed ... their bodies are so new to the world, blooming in it, that they've never felt stiff, never had aches, the kind that come from sitting in the wrong position for a long time, or lifting a heavy box without bending at the knees ... the kinds of aches their mothers complain of, take Tylenol for, lie prone with for whole weekends on the couch while their daughters step quickly and lightly out of the thin doors, which close with the sound of an exhalation when they leave, aware of their own teenage bodies as only the vaguest sensations of pleasure ... like new dresses made of silk, chiffon, or tulle, dresses that merely decorate the soul during its passage through the physical world.

  With their spines pressed into that metal bar, they prop the catalog up between them, on their knees.

  They aren't looking at the clothes, which are all the same; they're looking at the bodies of the models wearing the clothes, falling out of the clothes, shedding the clothes at the lakeshore, being pulled out of their clothes during muddy games of touch football.

  Even on the cover of the catalog, the clothes don't matter. A teenage boy is rising naked out of a lake. If he's wearing clothes at all, they're below his waist.

  The image burns itself into both girls' brains.

  The flesh, the muscles, the water splashing between the boy, the camera, and them.

  Inside the catalog, there are more bodies. All of them are perfect, and the clothes on them are unimportant. It's the torso, the arm, the breast that can be glimpsed inside the T-shirt or emerging from it that matters.

  The clothes are ripped.

  The clothes are dirty.

  The clothes are unremarkable in every way, except that the perfection of the young bodies becomes even more apparent emerging from those clothes.

  If it will ever seem alien to them—health, youth, beauty—neither of them can imagine it now, looking at the images in that two hundred-page advertisement for the physical world.

  WEARING HER WHITE DRESS, WHICH SEEMED A BIT tighter than it had last summer, Diana went to Emma's room to make her daughter's bed.

  She started with the bottom sheet, which she straightened and then attempted to tuck more snugly under the mattress. She hated fitted sheets. The corners were always snapping free. She lifted the mattress a little, and the elastic edge of the opposite end escaped from its pl
ace, just as she'd known it would.

  Diana sighed, went to the other end of the mattress, and pulled the fitted sheet tight across it, then tried to tuck the elastic corner under, but then the other end of the sheet snapped loose.

  It was a terrible game—the kind of game you might be forced to play in hell. In a hell for housewives, whores, or wayward girls ... a game called Frustration or Wrestling with the Angel. Diana took a deep breath and felt her ribs strain against the waist of her white dress. Why was the dress tighter? The scale hadn't registered a single pound of new weight. Was her body simply shifting her weight around from one place to another?

  She went back to the other end of the bed to try again.

  When the bottom sheet was finally secured, she pulled the top sheet and the comforter, with its little pink butterflies hovering in a pink sky, over the bed and tucked everything in. It was the way Emma liked her bed. Everything tucked.

  Diana fluffed the pillows and lay them one on top of the other at the head of the bed, then picked Brownie and Pooh and Teddy off the floor, where they'd fallen in the night, and tossed them back on the bed. Then she leaned over to straighten them because they'd fallen awkwardly against one another, lifeless limbs flopping sloppily. With her back turned to her daughter's doorway, leaning over the bed, Diana thought for just a moment that she'd heard someone behind her, in the hallway, and she turned around quickly. No one was there.

  Still there was a constriction in her chest—surprise? The dress? She realized that her head still hurt. Could it still be the headache from the night before? The cold juice in her daughter's cup? The struggle with the fitted sheet?

  It was those things, she knew, but it was also those teenagers....

  Though she hated to admit it to herself, she was still upset about them, and the headache and the fitted sheet and the teenagers making love in her neighbors' pool—it was the same to her. She felt as if she'd been defied by the very morning, the very life, she'd been determined to enjoy. The summer, the dusky leftovers of storm in the air, the quiet virtuality of her home with no one in it but herself ... all of it made of matter, but the matter made of silence, of dreaming.