The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  Diana felt something moving just under her ribs.

  What was it?

  Anger? Panic?

  Guilt?

  It was a crawling sensation similar to the one she'd had when she was pregnant ... something swimming inside her ... something that wasn't violent, something that meant no harm but was kicking with all the strength it had.

  Diana held more tightly to the steering wheel than she needed to and bit her lower lip. It was something she used to do when she was Emma's age—bite her lower lip until it bled. For years she'd had a scab there, which she could never keep from biting or fingering long enough to let it heal. It had driven her mother crazy, that scab. She'd slap at Diana's hand every time it went near her lip. She'd grab her chin and say, "Stop it!" whenever she caught Diana biting it, which was about a hundred times a day. Still Diana hadn't stopped until she was in seventh grade and a boy she liked pointed at the scab and said, "Gross. What's that?"

  Diana inhaled. She reached over and patted the dark dust on her daughter's knees, but Emma moved away from the touch and pulled the plaid skirt down over the dirt.

  Diana inhaled sharply and put her hand back on the steering wheel. "Young lady," she said, "you'd better tell me right this minute what's going on."

  The outburst was a damp explosion. "No!" Emma screamed, burying her face in her hands. "You can't make me! You can't make me do anything."

  Emma started thrashing so violently that Diana was afraid she might grab the door handle and throw herself out of the minivan. It wasn't until that moment that Diana noticed that Emma's seat belt wasn't buckled.

  She reached across her daughter, who fought, thrashing, against her, for the silver buckle of the seat belt. It was cold as a little gun in her hand. She pulled it across Emma, but Emma reacted to this as if her mother were trying to put her in a straitjacket or slip a noose around her neck. She kicked at the glove compartment with the heel of her white canvas shoes until it finally snapped open and spilled its contents—a map, a tampon, an owner's manual—onto the pile of Emma's things that she'd thrown onto the floor.

  Diana glanced down at the map, which had fallen open to what looked like a limb—broken, veined, tangled with freeways and highways.

  California.

  The map had been in the glove compartment since their trip out West the summer before.

  Diana let the seat belt's silver buckle slip from her hand, and she gripped the wheel tightly again, staring straight out the windshield, steering home....

  Death Valley. She'd always remember that...

  The long shadowless drive through its blond dust, and the eerie sense she'd had that she'd been there before. But who wouldn't feel that way? How many movies had been filmed there, and how many of them had Diana seen whether she remembered them or not?

  It was a hundred and twenty degrees outside, but they'd had the air-conditioning on, and inside the minivan they were wearing sweaters. In the rearview mirror mounted at the passenger's side window (Paul was driving) Diana could see the Funeral Mountains sinking blackly into the desert behind them.

  She'd loved Death Valley—the sweeping grandeur of it, the way even the most vivid imagination could not have invented it, not even come close. And as they traveled closer to the ocean, and California began to shift gradually into its moss green lushness, Diana had felt homesick for the endless, soulless expanse of what they'd left.

  One of the girls has never had a boyfriend.

  But years before, she had a vision of Jesus while she was sitting in a pew of the church to which her mother took her. Jesus was kneeling at the altar with his hands folded. His hair was reddish brown, and it hung down his back. He was wearing a torn white robe. The reason she knew it was Jesus was that he appeared out of nowhere and then became more and more translucent as she watched him until he disappeared.

  Not long after diat her mother quit taking her to that church. She didn't like that her daughter was spending so much time with the youth group. She walked into the basement of the church one Saturday afternoon to pick her up and found her with seven other teenagers weeping and clinging to one another on a gym mat on the floor. One of the older girls was speaking in tongues, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

  But lately she's begun thinking about boys. Her body is a bit too warm all the time. Nate Witt, or the boy with one arm at the Burger King, or some college boy she might meet downtown at the French Café...

  But the other girl has not been a virgin for a very long time. She sees her soul as a little pinprick somewhere just above her stomach. Lately she's begun to think about sin. She's had dreams in which an elderly man with leathery skin stands above her bed and weighs her sins on a balance.

  The good deeds are weightless, made of white Styrofoam chips, the kind they use to pack breakable things that need to be shipped.

  But the sins are made of red and swollen fruit. They're overripe, and though there are as many good deeds as sins, the sins are so heavy that the scales tip right over and spill their contents onto the floor of her bedroom, and the old man laughs.

  That girl wishes something would come to cleanse her, baptize her, empty and clean her body like a glass bottle.

  "Let's go to Baskin Robbins," one of the girls says to the other.

  They've spent the afternoon watching soap operas they've never seen before, guessing at what the conflicts and dilemmas of the characters must be. Though the air-conditioning is on full blast, it only cuts a path through the heat in the apartment.

  "Mint chocolate chip!" the other girl says, sitting up straighter on the couch.

  "French vanilla," the other says.

  She points the remote control at the television, and the screen turns black.

  DIANA WAS STILL TREMBLING AS SHE DROVE, BUT EMMA had grown quiet beside her, just the leftover hiccuping of her sobs.

  Pulling the minivan into the driveway, Diana was relieved to see Paul in his usual spot on the front porch. He waved, as he always did, largely and generously, but Emma was still staring out the passenger window and Diana could only bring herself to lift a hand in his direction. The word FOOL flashed through her like some kind of airy bullet, in and out, without disturbing so much as an atom but leaving a sense of itself behind.

  "Go to your room," she said to Emma gently but seriously, and Emma leaped out and ran into the back door of the house, leaving her windbreaker, backpack, and Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth crumpled on the floor of the minivan along with the spilled contents of the glove compartment.

  Diana heard the screen door close behind her daughter like a slap.

  She had to hold her breath to squeeze out because she'd parked so close to the garage wall, and then she had to let her white dress press against the side of the minivan to get out of the garage, though she knew it would probably leave a shadow of dust and dirt against her hip. The darkness of the garage smelled of pine and rot when she inhaled again, and when she knocked over a rake it made a rattling and tinny sound that Diana felt in her teeth. She propped the rake back up against one of the exposed beams of the garage.

  Her eyes watered when she stepped back out into the sun—those sunglasses, she still hadn't bought a pair—and she rubbed them as she walked toward the front of the house, where she knew Paul was waiting. She passed, as she had to, the daisies, which were staring straight into the sun without blinking. Some kind of pollen was hovering around them, and Diana could feel it in her throat and lungs, and she coughed.

  Paul stood up when he saw her. He had his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants, and he was chewing on a corner of his mustache, looking worriedly from his brown shoes to Diana. She knew he'd seen that something was wrong, but rather than looking concerned or curious, he looked ... what? Guilty? Fearful? Diana wasn't sure.

  "Is everything okay?" Paul asked.

  He was looking shyly at Diana, one shoulder raised as if (could it be?) he expected to be slapped, as if he were protecting his face.

  Diana looked at him—t
he expression, the posture—for a moment before she spoke. Then she cleared her throat of the pollen—that sweet and poisonous flower dust—and said, "Something's wrong with Emma. She had ... I don't know ... a temper tantrum in the car."

  Perhaps Paul looked relieved. In any case the shoulder dropped and he met Diana's eyes. He furrowed his brow, stroked his gray beard, and said like an actor comfortable with his lines, "I'll talk to her."

  Diana nodded, still regarding him carefully. After so many years she still found him attractive. More than once while driving downtown near campus, maybe on her way to meet him for lunch, maybe on some other errand, she'd caught a glimpse of a man walking down the sidewalk, briefcase in one hand, the other tucked casually into his pants pocket, and she'd felt an instant tug of physical attraction, a desire to look more closely, before she realized who it was—the stranger she wanted to look at more closely was her husband.

  The gray in his hair and beard hadn't changed anything. And he was still slim. His eyes were pale and blue—the mild eyes of a professor, though his features were chiseled. Ruggedly handsome, she liked to think. He had the face of a man who might have found himself in a younger incarnation out West—climbing mountains, white-water rafting, rustling cattle—if he hadn't been in graduate school.

  Still, as he stepped through the front door of the house they shared, as Diana watched him cross the threshold into the dream house they'd shared for fifteen years, she heard it again...

  Fool.

  She almost looked over her shoulder to see where the word had come from.

  The daisies?

  The lawn?

  It had come from outside of herself. She touched the side of her face, feeling a bit dizzy, but then the dizziness passed and she was left with nothing but the sensation of having been spoken to by someone she couldn't see.

  Only once in her life, more than two decades before, had she heard a voice in the way she imagined people heard voices. And it had terrified her then, because the voice—as with this word—had been so clear. It had seemed to come from beyond her, entering her mind from her ear... a girl's voice, hollow and familiar—though all it had said was her name:

  Diana.

  She was fifteen at the time, lying in her lover's bed. He'd taken her that afternoon to a clinic downtown where she'd had an abortion. The clinic had been very clean. It smelled like floral-scented tissues. There were pastel watercolors on the walls and flutey music piped in from the ceiling. She'd been nauseated for weeks, and the paintings and the music made the back of her neck trickle with cold sweat.

  Her lover, Marcus, held her hand in the waiting room. He had rough hands, the backs of which were covered with coarse black hair, and those hands in that room full of flute and pale pink flowers and sails had seemed obscenely out of place. They had seemed to be the reason for her nausea, that this masculine ugliness had entered and taken root inside her. She wanted it out. It never crossed her mind for one minute to have a baby, or that what had happened to her could possibly end in motherhood.

  She let Marcus hold her hand, but she hated it, hated him, vowed that after this was over and he'd paid the receptionist for what they were going to do to her, she would never speak to him again.

  Marcus was in his thirties. He kept exotic pets in his aluminum-sided house at the end of a street in a bad neighborhood outside of Briar Hill—a lynx in the garage, a panther in a cage behind his house. He had a dog, too, that lived peacefully enough inside, lapping up water and dog food right under the kitchen table, but that dog was almost pure wolf. Its eyes were icy. Sometimes for no apparent reason the dog would lift its head to the water-stained ceiling tile in the bedroom, while Marcus and Diana made love, and howl—a sound full of primitive warning and horror.

  "She's harmless," Marcus always said.

  But he also said this of the panther, who would throw itself snarling against the bars of its cage when Diana so much as looked in its direction. Its teeth were so white against its blackness that they seemed to be made of light.

  The lynx, however, she had only glimpsed through the window of the garage. It was leashed to a beam, and it was pacing, head down, back and forth, back and forth, though Diana could see the crazy tufts of hair near its ears that made it look like no cat she'd ever seen.

  A devil cat.

  A cat that had risen from its ninth life terribly altered.

  Marcus himself had piercingly blue eyes. They were gorgeous eyes and always made more dazzling by the blue work shirts he wore and by the black stubble of his beard against his pale skin. She'd met him at a party, where he was selling marijuana to some boys she knew. After the first time they made love, Marcus said, "I like young girls, but you're the only one I've ever met who isn't afraid."

  It had never occurred to her to be afraid.

  Marcus was the one who'd given Diana Timmy, the cat. Timmy, who lived to be twenty and slept at the foot of Diana's bed for years after Marcus was only the vaguest memory of a beast's hand.

  The procedure had been quick, and the only pain had been a dull cramping, and afterward, when they helped her up from the paper-covered table she'd been lying on, she realized that the nausea was gone. It was as if it had been wiped away with a washcloth. She was so relieved, she wept.

  But afterward, the bleeding went on and on.

  The blood was thick and clotted, and when they called the clinic to ask them if this much bleeding was normal, they had said it probably was, and to lie down, and if it got worse to go straight to the emergency room.

  Diana lay down in Marcus's bed. The ceiling above her was cracked right down the middle, and she stared at the crack, imagining herself slipping into it, disappearing.

  Marcus went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water, and that's when she heard it.

  The voice.

  Right up close to her ear.

  So close she could feel the breath of it enter her with the word...

  Diana.

  She sat up in bed, gasping, just as Marcus came back with a coffee cup full of water for her.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "Nothing," she said.

  "Should we go to the emergency room now?"

  Diana just shook her head and lay back down.

  Eventually the bleeding stopped, but by then Marcus's sheets had been soaked with it. Before he drove her back to her mother's apartment, Marcus had asked her sheepishly if she could please clean it up. He didn't think he could do it himself. He felt very squeamish about blood.

  Marcus, with his wild animals.

  Marcus, with his hairy hands.

  Diana had torn the sheets off the bed and stuffed them into the trash bag for him, and he'd been pathetically grateful to her for it.

  Fool.

  She followed Paul into the house.

  The ice cream is heavy with cold sweetness. It takes the boy behind the glass counter a long time to dig it up with his silver scoop. He's a thin boy, maybe seventeen, with a red rash and a purple-black hickey on his neck.

  Mint chocolate chip in a cup. Vanilla in a sugar cone. They pay him and take their ice cream outside, where they sit on a bench under a tree at the edge of the sidewalk.

  On a bench across from theirs, a little girl is sitting so close to her father it looks as if the two of them are glued to each other. The father is young and handsome, and his daughter has blond pigtails. She's taking tiny nibbles of the blue ice cream in her cone while the father looks at her admiringly, urging her on, his eyes narrowed in the bright light of the summer afternoon and his own adoration.

  The little girl's attention is entirely on her Blue Moon, but her father's physical presence beside her does not seem taken for granted. When he shifts his weight on the bench and his body moves centimeters from hers, the little girl scoots over until she is securely next to him again.

  The ice cream is dense but formless. It has no center, no structure, no bones. Its sweetness slips into them easily, and before long it's gone. They rise from the be
nch and start the walk home, passing on their way the little girl, whose Blue Moon has begun to melt and is dripping onto her father's jeans in bright splashes. He hasn't noticed.

  AFTER PAUL HAD GONE UPSTAIRS TO SPEAK TO EMMA, Diana went to the kitchen and looked in the freezer....

  Maybe she would simply make hamburgers for dinner. It was something Emma usually liked. And frozen French fries. Lots of ketchup in a puddle on her plate.

  But what Diana really had a craving for was steak.

  A bloody one.

  Charbroiled.

  The taste of carbon and salt. A rib eye, or a T-bone.

  But she'd have had to go to the grocery store, and it was getting too late now. She was, she realized, hungry. Famished. They'd have to eat soon.

  Diana took the hamburger out of the meat drawer in the refrigerator. It was fresh in its shrink-wrapped package. Very red, though flecked with fat. She cut a slit in the package with a sharp knife and peeled the edges away.

  The smell of it was sweet. It made her mouth water.

  She set the package on the Formica countertop and pulled the plastic bag of frozen fries out of the freezer, then turned the broiler on and shook the fries onto a cookie sheet.

  They were stiff, furred with frost, and the cold of them burned her hand as she spread them out on the sheet. Then she took the skillet down from where she kept it on a hook over the stove and turned on the gas.

  The blue bracelet sputtered up from the place where it had been waiting.

  The hamburger was cold between her palms, though not as cold as the fries had been, as she clapped it into patties. It left a waxy film on her hands ... the fat; it was always hard to wash away. She'd have to rub her hands under hot water and scrub with soap.

  When the pan was hot Diana slapped all but one of the four hamburger patties (two for Paul) into the skillet. There was the usual angry sizzle when the raw meat hit the hot cast iron.

  The pattie she hadn't tossed into the pan, she picked up. She brought it close to her nose, and breathed it in....