The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  It glinted off the surface of the pool, rippling but jagged, like measured brain waves.

  And the shadows cast by the edge of the Ellsworths' garage were creeping slowly from the teenagers' legs to their torsos, which made the brightness of the sun on their limbs and faces appear even brighter.

  Diana was pleased.

  Then there was a flash of lightning followed by a crack of thunder so loud and close that she gasped. The light in her studio surged and flickered once, and then it went out.

  "Shit," Diana said, louder and more angrily than she'd meant to, and then the headache began again.

  She'd forgotten about the headache...

  Had it ever gone away, or had she simply, for a while, not registered the pain?

  Another flash of lightning, and in the half second of it, Diana saw nothing but her own drawing, which seemed altered in the brevity and brilliance.

  The image.

  The darkness.

  Another flash. Again the image. The cigarette, Diana realized.

  Darkness.

  Another millisecond of brilliance.

  The cigarette.

  She hadn't drawn it.

  This girl didn't smoke.

  Diana rubbed her eyes and started to feel her way backward. She bumped the chair too hard with her foot, and it crashed, and again Diana said, "Shit." Her heart was racing. The darkness became total, and the rain on the roof was deafening. Between the darkness and the muffled drumming of the rain, Diana felt panicked to return to the world of her senses. She couldn't hear. She couldn't see. She felt silly for feeling frightened. It was just a thunderstorm. It was just an image she'd remembered differently than she'd actually drawn it. She was a grown woman. Safe neighborhood. Good life...

  And then another flash of lightning broke into the blackness, and again it was her drawing she saw—the white window of it, and the teenage girl, who'd moved her arm away from her face and was looking back at Diana.

  Glass

  BY THE TIME SHE GOT BACK INTO THE HOUSE, THE LIGHTS had come back on. The clock on the microwave was blinking, and the refrigerator was purring loudly, as it always did after a surge.

  Diana went to it and put her head against it. There was something comforting about the machine noise of it, the soft hum of its motor. It struck her as mysterious, suddenly, the solid reliability of it, the way a machine, without food or encouragement, does one job well until it dies.

  The pain seemed to pass from her head into the refrigerator, though she knew it would come back when she was no longer resting against the solid hum.

  Tylenol. Motrin. She needed...

  Diana wasn't surprised to feel the cat rubbing up against her bare legs, but still she inhaled.

  His nose was cold on her ankles, a familiar sensation. He looked up at her and opened his mouth to reveal his white teeth and hot-pink tongue. He made a noise that was halfway between a cry and a purr ... a growl?

  Timmy.

  Diana moved away from the refrigerator, expecting the headache to return to her suddenly and completely, but it didn't. She exhaled. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of low-fat milk and poured some of it into the emptied bowl. There wasn't much in the house to feed a cat. She'd have to go to the store for cat food and litter and a litter box, since surely they'd thrown Timmy's things out long ago.

  He lapped happily at the milk.

  They have fathers.

  One lives alone in an apartment across town. He works at Circuit City selling entertainment systems during the day, and at night he plays saxophone in a jazz quartet. He looks younger than he is. He has an earring. His name is Robert. It's hard to remember to call him Dad. Everyone else calls him Bop.

  The other girl's father moved long ago to a nearby town. He has a son and a wife and a computer software company.

  Their mothers speak of their fathers with too much intimacy. It's terrible to think that their mothers and fathers were once in love with each other. It means that love is nothing but bitterness, wistfulness, oblivion—although still, for some reason, the girls believe in it. They imagine their own happy marriages vividly, as if they'd been born with an image of it imprinted on their dreams, the way birds are born knowing how to make their species' nests without ever having to be taught.

  They think about their fathers on the second Saturday of every month, on Christmas Eve, their birthdays, and on Father's Day.

  Father's Day.

  It rises out of June like smoke, smelling of barbecue sauce.

  Bermuda shorts, beer cans, and the sound of a lawn mower starting up—that gasping roar, over and over, like a wild animal being trained. Baseball games on the radio, a hushed and imaginary diamond far away. In the aluminum toolshed, the garden hose coiled up like a huge snake, waiting. They are the Hallmark images that are attached to the idea of fatherhood but not to their own fathers.

  Next Sunday is Father's Day.

  The girls go together to a store downtown called Precious Moments, where they buy matching glass beer mugs and have Happy Father's Day engraved on them in a kind of stiff, feminine cursive written by a machine with a very sharp needle at its tip.

  The clerk who sells them the mugs shrouds them in tissue paper and bubble wrap so they won't break.

  DIANA FELT TIRED.

  She lay down upstairs on the bed and tried closing her eyes, but she felt too nervous to nap. What was it? She wondered without knowing what she was wondering about.

  Something was happening.

  Had it just begun in the last few days?

  She was too young for menopause. But something, she felt, was changing. It had to do with her body as well as her mind.

  Was this what happened with middle age?

  An accumulation of experiences and things tumbling toward you?

  Did the past start to bleed into the present, as if the past were red towels washed in warm water with white sheets?

  Haunted.

  Her body. Her mind. Her neighborhood. Her town.

  She'd inhabited these things for a long time now.

  She'd done things she regretted.

  She saw the life she'd lived, the accumulation of its details, like a huge wheel rolling toward her, rolling down a hill.

  She liked to think of herself as the kind of woman who saw the cup as half full She tried to look on the bright side. She had long practiced the art of avoiding morbid thoughts. She rarely read the newspaper. When an accident or murder was reported on the evening news, Diana turned the television off. Paul liked to kid her that her presence at any gathering "cleansed" the atmosphere, that in her presence no one told dirty jokes or relayed disturbing anecdotes.

  She hoped he was right.

  She knew the kind of woman she could have been—ironic, a little angry, a bit too loud. Diana saw those women coming, and when they opened their mouths with some half-decent bit of gossip or some shocking crime report they wanted to talk about as if it were funny, Diana simply looked at them, let them talk, but didn't approve of them, and they knew it.

  Even her drawings were simple revelations of goodness. It was probably why she hadn't gone on to greater success. It was an age in which the shocking image was celebrated, but Diana wasn't interested in making that kind of art.

  She didn't even experiment with line and form. To her those elements were pure. There was nothing sinister about what she drew. The shadows were still shadows and the light was light.

  However, for a while, she'd been someone else. Vaguely she knew it, but only in the way that one knows that nine months were spent in a womb once. There was the evidence to prove it, but the experience itself was as lost as if it had never been.

  She couldn't have been the only one who felt this way.

  The time period in which she'd been a teenager had led to indulgences and excesses no other generation had ever known, and now millions of those teenage girls were soccer moms. Diana had seen those soccer moms when they were teenagers—when they'd been promiscuous,
tattooed, pierced in intimate places. She couldn't be the only one who'd grown up and become a mother and found herself to be a complete stranger to the girl she'd been—but haunted. Definitely haunted. That girl she'd been was her now, although the woman she'd become wouldn't have trusted that girl with her wedding china, with her car keys, let alone her home, her child, her life.

  Diana opened her eyes.

  No sense lying there.

  Every woman had a past.

  She got out of bed.

  She'd dust She'd straighten Paul's study. It would surprise him when he got home. Maybe she'd go to the store before she got Emma, and she'd pick out a nice little gift for Paul, something to celebrate his lecture.

  She turned the light on in his study, and as it always did, the smell of it—musty books and Paul—and the sight of his shelves, the chaos of papers on his desk and on the floor, reminded her of her love for him. That love, the feeling of it, began at her lips and smoothed warmly down her throat and filled her chest.

  It had always been like that.

  She'd start with the garbage can, she decided. It was overflowing with ripped and wadded-up sheets of yellow legal paper next to his desk, but before she took the can out of his study to empty it, she sat in his desk chair and looked around. She ran her hand over the pine drawer in which he kept his pens, his calculator, his rolls of tape and boxes of staples.

  She opened the drawer and looked in.

  It wasn't exactly in order, but there were his things. A tape measure, too. A pair of scissors.

  She closed the door and pulled the chair in to his desk, which was piled high with books. Most of them were tattered, ancient. Some were in Italian. Some in Medieval English. At least three of them were in Latin. One must have been Greek.

  She pushed a book away from the notepad on Paul's desk and looked down at his familiar, beloved handwriting ... loopy and jagged at the same time. He always wrote in black ink.

  ...Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...

  Next to it, he'd written the date at the top of the page, and because it was yesterday's, Diana imagined that this was the beginning of notes for his lecture.

  It gave her an idea for a gift.

  There was a place where they etched names and inscriptions on glass plates or mugs or ashtrays. Precious Moments. She'd had a wine glass engraved for him years before, for his fiftieth birthday: For the man I will always love, on his 50th birthday.

  She'd have a matching one engraved with these words to celebrate his lecture.

  She tore the piece of paper from the pad.

  Glare

  THE SUN HAD COME OUT. THERE WERE PUDDLES OF glare in the garden where the light bounced off the gathered rain, and steam rose from them. It would be a warm and humid afternoon if it stayed clear. One of the first really summery days of the season. Laundromat weather, Paul called it.

  The rain had beaten the daisies down, and they looked weak. Diana couldn't remember why she'd disliked them so much. Perhaps there were just too many of them now that they'd begun to spread. She'd separate them, dig some up, transplant them to the sunny side of the garage, where the tulips had already lived and died for the year. She could work around the bulbs. Next spring one brilliant batch of flowers would follow the other. Diana was no gardener, but she'd been watching flowers bloom and the long enough to have some idea of how she might time them to keep something blooming in any given spot from May to September, if the spot got sun.

  Maybe it hadn't been the daisies that had bothered her. It was just their crowded conditions. Still, slumped from the rain, they already seemed to be stirring, turning their faces toward her, or toward the sun.

  She looked away from them and noticed her neighbor Rita Smith.

  Diana waved, and Rita Smith waved back from over in her own yard, where she was hacking away with a pair of long shears at a forsythia bush. It was something Rita did every year after the yellow blossoms faded. Branches and leaves were littered all over Rita's front yard.

  Neither woman smiled at the other. For years they hadn't spoken more than a couple of words to one another ... since the afternoon Timmy had found and massacred a nest of baby rabbits in Rita's backyard.

  Timmy, Diana had tried to explain, was just doing what cats do.

  Timmy, said Rita—who was not much older than Diana, but childless, husbandless, and at least fifty pounds overweight—ought to be kept indoors, where he couldn't kill helpless and innocent things.

  Keeping Timmy indoors was out of the question, Diana had tried to explain. Timmy was an outdoor cat. And he was old. There was no way such a change in Timmy's lifestyle could be achieved....

  Rita had ended the conversation abruptly by saying, "Please keep your cat off my property," her jowly face turning pink.

  Diana had lifted a shoulder and shook her head, trying to indicate that it was impossible. How could she keep Timmy out of Rita Smith's yard? He couldn't be put on a leash. She couldn't spend every minute of the day monitoring his whereabouts.

  But in the end, it didn't matter. Not much later, as if Rita were some kind of witch, Timmy had begun to age rapidly. His outdoor adventures were limited to lying in the daisies, breathing shallowly.

  And then he died.

  But her neighbor held a permanent grudge against Diana.

  And now Timmy was back. Diana bit her lip. She couldn't help smiling to herself. She thought that she'd noticed Rita Smith glance disapprovingly at the short denim skirt she was still wearing, or maybe she was looking disapprovingly at Diana's long and slender legs, smooth in the sunlight.

  Fuck you, Diana thought.

  They drive to the mall.

  It's the middle of the afternoon, a weekday, and the mall is nearly empty. Outside, the sun is magnificent in the sky—high and fiery and pouring golden light all over the tarry summer streets and the cars, which send up sharp edges and arrows of light as they pass under that sun and the perfectly blue sky it's burning in.

  Inside the mall it's a parody of a summer day. The sound of water splashing against rocks. The breathy music of flutes floating on the air-conditioned air. A fluorescent whiteness cleansing everything as if in preparation for surgery, or burial, or birth—a chemical, medical whiteness.

  In the basement of Briar Hill High, there is a recycle room, and the students have to take turns lugging bins and bundles of recyclable waste there each week. Both girls have taken their turns in that room, which is cold but also sweaty and full of moths—fat brown ones that don't move. They look mummified, or freeze-dried, wings folded up on top of the cardboard boxes and stacks of gray newspaper. It's impossible to tell if those moths are dead or alive, or something else—lost in some sort of deep moth sleep.

  And what would they be dreaming?

  The mall, empty, on a day this bright and sunny might be a dead moth's dream.

  The girls are wearing shorts and skimpy tops and sandals, and they feel coldly naked in the mall when they first enter it Conspicuously out of place. The heels of their sandals sound hard and loud on the linoleum. The mall is so empty, it's hard to know where to walk. They keep veering away from one another accidentally, then back again.

  The mall is full of things they already own—cheap, bright things. Tube tops, tennis shoes, denim skirts, jeans.

  Stuffed animals, board games, CDs, perfume, lipstick, cubic zirconia earrings.

  The salespeople are bored. They want to be outside, in the real sun, the actual world. They stand around and watch the girls passing through the merchandise, fingering a few things, laughing, and they don't offer to help.

  "Let's get out of here," one of the girls says to the other.

  The other laughs and turns around, walking fast in the direction from which they've come.

  They run awkwardly on the slippery linoleum until they reach the glass doors to the parking lot, then hurry back out into the world.

  "That was creepy," one of the girls says, starting the car.

  The
other turns on the radio and says, "God, it's good to be alive again."

  They laugh, and drive off.

  THE AREA OF RESTAURANTS, BOOKSTORES, CLOTHING boutiques, and coffee shops near campus was nearly empty.

  Class had been over for a month, and most of the students had gone to wherever it was they went between semesters. Only the summer school students, and the ones who worked or played in the area, had stayed behind. It was the time of year that Diana liked Briar Hill best A kind of limbo. Beautiful weather, flowers in bloom, but no one there to clutter it up. And she liked the kinds of students who stayed behind. They looked relaxed. The girls wore long skirts. The boys wore cutoffs. They had stringy hair and smoked clove cigarettes. On the commons lawn at that moment, two such stringy-haired boys were throwing a Frisbee. Their naked torsos glistened in the sun. Though those boys were old enough to go to war, they were playing a child's game with total concentration under a sun the color of margarine that afternoon. They ran and leaped, chasing the bright piece of plastic that sailed between them on the breeze.

  The absurdity of it made Diana smile.

  She found a parking spot easily, which was another benefit of summer in Briar Hill, and she fed a few coins to the parking meter, then crossed the street to the Precious Moments store, where she would have the wine glass engraved for Paul.

  She had her page of notebook paper folded in her purse.

  ...Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...

  There was a smell in the air that reminded her of semen. Some kind of tree, she supposed. The leaves on that tree. She'd smelled it a million times before and had often wondered if she was the only person in the world who'd made such an association. To her the connection seemed obvious. In the summer the leaves of that tree—she looked around her but couldn't tell which tree it would have been—shed something clean and physical smelling into the breeze. No one could argue that the flowers smelled like sex, were like sex ... cupped, honeyed, opening themselves to the world...