The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  Near the lion's den she'd seen Mrs. Adams, who'd been her third-grade teacher. Mrs. Adams had been hugely pregnant then, and Mrs. Adams was hugely pregnant now. She was pushing an empty stroller, waddling, and though she didn't seem to recognize her, Mrs. Adams looked disapprovingly at the teenage girl holding the hand of an older man.

  Today the zoo is crawling with children.

  They shout and scramble as their mothers and fathers, looking weary and washed-out in the bright light, hurry after. The parents are carrying things, pushing things.

  The girls are wearing short shorts and have put temporary tattoos on their ankles.

  The fathers of the children look at the tattoos while their wives and children look at the polar bear, who is pacing back and forth along the moat between himself and the zoo visitors, with blood on the white fur around his mouth.

  The girls know, moving through the zoo, that they are closer in kind to the children than to anything else there....

  The animals are nothing like the girls. Dulled, pacing, or swimming in circles in their dreamless sleep.

  And neither are the adults, with their diaper bags and other burdens.

  The girls, like the children, have to hold their stomachs because they're laughing so hard. They want treats—snow cones, candy corn, licorice whips. They are still like children, except that the world, in all of its complexity and implications, is coming into focus for them:

  The hungry boredom of the polar bear, like the fathers; the effect of their own flesh on the mothers who follow their husbands' glances in the direction of the girls, then look away.

  They aren't children. Or animals, or women. Briefly they're in a state between each of these. They are all of these things at once.

  DIANA WOKE UP AT HER DESK WITH HER FACE IN THE crook of her arm, which was sprawled across a piece of blank drawing paper.

  Timmy, who'd stayed outside for only a few minutes before climbing the stairs to her study and scratching to get back in, stood up from the braided rug where he'd slept He stretched, then sat on his haunches and stared at Diana simply. No affection. No judgment. He was just looking.

  The sun was coming up. The smeared peach and gold of it lit up the curtains on the window of her studio. It could only have been about six o'clock in the morning, but Diana heard voices, and she stood up and stretched, and was surprised that she wasn't stiff from having fallen asleep sitting up. She felt well. Oddly rested. She went to the window and parted the curtains, which seemed to be made of dawn, lit up as they were with new sun. She looked out.

  They were back.

  The blond and her boyfriend had come back to the Ellsworths' swimming pool.

  The girl was sitting at the edge of it, naked, dangling her bare feet in the water, which was plum colored in the shade of the Ellsworths' house and the sun just coming up. With one hand she was rubbing the back of her own neck, and in the other she held a joint, which she brought to her lips, inhaled from it deeply. Diana could taste it in her own lungs ... the sweetness, just like dawn ... pollen, flower petals, the smell of the baking supplies aisle, fruit cocktail, sun.

  She held the smoke in her lungs for a minute and then exhaled, but Diana could see nothing escape, not even a plume of it, from the girl, who continued a conversation with her boyfriend. He was floating on his back. Diana couldn't quite make out what she was saying.

  So I was ... anatomy, and he was, like, get your scalpel, there's the sweetheart; don't put your hand on that.

  This time their nakedness didn't shock Diana. She'd seen their bodies before. The slick perfection of them. The shocking youth of them. The boy let out a loud laugh at what she'd said, then sank out of sight—only the waxy vagueness of him under the plum-colored water from where Diana watched—a moving smoothness, like a dolphin, or a cadaver. Then he resurfaced between the girl's legs.

  He shook his head to get the water out of his eyes, then put his face there, between her legs.

  She tossed what was left of the joint into the Ellsworths' pool, then spread her legs farther, inched to the edge of the pool, and leaned backward.

  Before Diana had thought about it, she'd yanked open the window and was shouting through the screen, "What's going on over there? What are you kids doing?"

  The boy splashed backward but came up again quickly, sputtering and shaking his head. The girl stood up and looked straight at Diana, and she called up, "Fuck you, you old bag."

  The boy burst into laughter then and pulled himself up the side of the pool in one muscular movement, and then he ran to a towel hanging over one of the Ellsworths' lounge chairs. He tied the towel around his waist, grabbed his clothes, and ran, still laughing, behind the Ellsworths' toolshed.

  At least he was ashamed, Diana thought.

  But the girl just put her hand on her hip and stared straight up into the window of Diana's studio.

  It scared her, the boldness, but there was nothing Diana could do now but face it. She had to say something. She said, "Do the Ellsworths know what you've been up to?"

  The girl narrowed her eyes and smirked.

  "We are the Ellsworths," she said.

  Steam

  DIANA TREMBLED IN THE SHOWER.

  Though the water was scalding hot and sending up scarves and veils of steam, fogging the shower doors and everything beyond them—though her skin stung from the burning and she could see that her hands and feet were red from it—she couldn't get warm. The cold was too deep inside her. She needed ... what? Hot cocoa? Tea? Whiskey? Something that could get to that coldness.

  We are the Ellsworths....

  Diana had pulled the curtains closed and hurried across her studio to the door. When Timmy tried to follow her, she pushed him back gently with one bare foot In the garage she'd stumbled on the handle of a rake, which was propped upside down, leaning against a beam, and it had fallen on her with its claws. It had drawn blood on her neck and left its paw swipe there.

  She was holding her neck in the darkness of the garage when she saw a silhouette standing in the open doorway, someone blacked out by the sun still rising behind him.

  "Diana."

  Before she recognized the voice—which was husky, insistent, the voice of someone trying to wake her from a very deep sleep, from an ocean of sleep, trying to call her back to the surface or pull her out from underneath the million shining windowpanes of a coma—she screamed.

  And the screaming had been like a cold wind, like a cold broom inside her, sweeping her out, a whole blizzard kicked up by a whisk broom, a deep coldness that even now in the burning shower she couldn't reach.

  "Diana," he'd said, and taken her by the shoulders and shaken her harder than he needed to ... was she still screaming?

  "Diana! Stop it; stop it!"

  She could smell wolf. Clean fur and blood on his breath. Snow White in her glass coffin, devoured by a wolf...

  No, that was Little Red Riding Hood.

  He'd pressed his whiskered muzzle next to her ear and whispered softly, "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay..."

  Paul.

  Her hand, which she'd pressed to her neck, came away with three stripes of blood across the palm. She held it to his face, which was gentle with sadness. He wasn't going to kiss her back to life or eat her like a wolf. This wasn't a fairy tale. How could she have forgotten—as she had forgotten birds, forgotten crickets, forgotten sleeplessness—that this, too, came with middle age?

  The braided daughter ... the clapboard house ... the handsome husband.

  But how could she have forgotten all the rest?

  All those years, all those men walking through the zoos and parks and malls holding the hands of their wives while they looked at the legs of the girls walking by.

  Of course, he was going to leave her for a younger woman. How could she have forgotten?

  And then she'd started to cry, a pure glare filling up her eyes, a brightness like rhinestones or water glistening on the far edge of the horizon, and he held her.

  "I
t's okay," he said again.

  But why was she crying?

  What was she grieving?

  The boy moving between the girl's legs with his mouth, with his tongue?

  The sun rising behind them?

  Her dream life full of cups and curtains, furniture, appliances, walls?

  Her daughter's golden braids?

  Her husband's cool blue eyes?

  Summer, full of roses?

  "Stop," he said, patting her on the back.

  But she couldn't stop. Though it was all still there—the minivan, the rake, the garden, the plastic pony, the dream house, which contained her dreams as well as her things—it was going to be over. She could smell it on him. Her husband was in love with a younger woman ... a girl. She'd known it They'd told her...

  If he'll leave his wife for you, someday he'll leave you for...

  Who?

  A student?

  Or was the girl she'd seen him with even younger than a college student? A girl just out of high school? In high school? A girl who'd seen him walking across the commons ... a girl he'd seen ... toffee and a cup of hot chocolate because she was so young she didn't drink coffee ... a girl he'd glimpsed, and who'd stolen him, as Diana had, with her youth, her fresh beauty?

  Diana's eyes cleared. Over her husband's shoulder she could see the shadows of the trees in the sun coming up and how they projected black and orange tongues on the white clapboard of their house. She blinked, then looked at Paul, who looked old in the morning sun, like a man with fewer years ahead of him than he had behind him, like a man who, out of a desperate fear of death, had decided to leave his wife.

  He held her weakly.

  "It's the last day of school," Diana said. She pushed him away gently. "I have to take Emma and her friends to the zoo. I have to take a shower."

  He let her go, nodding.

  She said nothing else, and he never brought himself to say what it was he'd come to tell her. But in the shower, the coldness wouldn't wash away. When Diana stepped out of the shower, her skin prickled and the bathroom was full of steam, which she stepped into as if it were a cloud, or thought, or the future, and she wrapped a white towel around herself and looked in the mirror.

  There was no reflection there until she'd wiped away a circle with her hand.

  Then, in that circle, Diana saw her own face.

  Flushed but familiar.

  Aged, but her face... the face she wore when she was seventeen.

  ***

  September comes.

  One of the girls picks the other up in the morning on the first day of school. On the drive through Briar Hill, which glows fiercely under the purple velvet of the morning sky, they're quiet. Neither girl has been up this early in the morning since the beginning of June.

  Briar Hill High looks the same, and utterly changed. The bricks look as if they've been washed, and the grassy slope on which it rests is so freshly cut that the tracks of the riding mower's wheels stand out brightly against the bristling green. The windows shine blankly ... no fingerprints, no smudges, no dust. And the students climbing out of cars in the parking lot are wearing new clothes, looking around. The ghosts of those who graduated the year before are still there—Amanda Greenberg swinging her legs from the trunk of her father's BMW; Mark Twitchell, spitting on the sidewalk; Bob Blau, wearing a black sports coat and pink nail polish; Sandy Ellsworth, with her head bowed, taking one last drag from her joint, behind the wheel of her beat-up Thunderbird, her white blond hair full of electricity and light—but in less than a day they'll be gone.

  "Oh my god," one of the girls says, "there's Nate."

  She parks carefully but quickly between a Jeep and a black Buick Riviera.

  "He shaved his head."

  They look at each other with opened mouths, then burst into laughter.

  They look again.

  "Jesus. Am I seeing things, or does he have a stud in his lower lip?"

  "Yes!"

  Again, they laugh. The car window is unrolled and Nate Witt, who's only a few yards away, turns to look in the direction of the laughter, and the stud in his lower lip catches light. The girls quickly swallow their laughter and wave politely at him.

  He smiles ... a dangerous, amazing smile.

  Mayqueen.

  It should have seemed like another lifetime, a century ago, but it didn't. She could still feel the precarious weight of the tiara on her head, held there with bobby pins stuck deeply, painfully, into her blond hair.

  She'd worn Maureen's white dress, the one Diana had helped her choose at Prom World only a few weeks before. She'd had it taken in because Maureen was bustier than she was, but the dress hadn't been shortened, the length was just right. They'd been the same height.

  "No," Diana had said, shaking her head. "I can't—"

  But Maureen's mother had taken her by the shoulders and said, "Please... Do it for Maureen. I can't bury my daughter in her prom dress," and so Diana wore it.

  She remembered how Mr. McCleod's hands trembled as he helped her onto the float, which was a mass—a surreal mass—of real and tissue-paper roses, some of which she and Maureen had made themselves at the kitchen table in her mother's apartment, some of which had been donated from florists all over the country, sent in memory of the victims and in honor of the survivors.

  They shivered in the breeze.

  A sigh rose from the bleachers as Diana stepped up.

  "You're the most beautiful Mayqueen Briar Hill High has ever had," Mr. McCleod whispered to her...

  The sky was perfectly, sharply blue, and the smell of the real and unreal roses drifted in a wave over the football stadium. Diana looked up, and the sun was so brilliant overhead it seemed to light up the very atoms and molecules between them and the rest of the universe—tiny rhinestones. When she looked out she saw her parents sitting next to each other in the bleachers.

  Were they even holding hands?

  Both of them were crying.

  They'd handed the microphone to her, and Diana had let go of the string of white helium balloons she was holding in her hand, releasing them.

  "These are for you, Maureen," she'd said, and they'd all looked up into the sun to watch them float through the air, lighter than the air, lighter than anything else in heaven or on Earth.

  The linoleum is waxed, and its gold flecks are bright under the hundreds of pairs of new shoes hurrying to their first classes as the bell rings...

  The sound of it is shockingly loud.

  Had it always been that loud?

  "Good luck," one of the girls says to the other. They have different first-hour classes, and they have to say good-bye.

  Though they've only been best friends for half a year, it's hard to part in the hallway, to let go of the summer they've spent with each other. For weeks it will still seem like summer, but then the leaves will change and the sun will spin away, growing higher and lighter in the sky over Briar Hill.

  It's hard to part in the hallway, to imagine one of them without the other in the world, taking notes, thinking thoughts, waiting for the bell to ring.

  "See you at lunch,"one of the girls says wistfully to the other. Then she leans in and whispers, "You look awesome."

  "So do you," the other says.

  They hug each other briefly.

  DIANA LEANED IN MORE CLOSELY TO HER REFLECTION IN the mirror.

  But her reflection had become obscured by breath.

  Still she looked unflinchingly at herself.

  It was something she'd been proud of ... proud that aging hadn't come to her as anguished change. She'd known the very moment she'd crossed over the threshold from maid to matron, and she'd done that, as she did this now, as bravely as she was able.

  It hadn't been her wedding day, and it hadn't been when she'd had the baby. It was later. She'd been ... what? Thirty-three? Thirty-four? She was driving to work, having just dropped Emma off at preschool. It was winter. A dusty snow was blowing its feather boas across the street. She'd pulle
d up to a four-way stop. Although there were no other cars at the intersection, there was a girl waiting there to cross the street.

  A redhead. Probably about eighteen. A college student maybe, or a high school senior.

  She was wearing a silver down jacket and headphones, and she was nodding and smiling to some music that only she could hear ... a deeply secret smile, the smile of someone who was young, who'd never been anything but young. Before she stepped into the street, the girl looked up directly into the windshield at Diana, but her expression didn't change.

  Surely their eyes had met, Diana thought. Diana thought she saw a faint flicker of recognition pass over the girl's face, but she was so deeply inside her own music, her own amusing thoughts, that Diana was nothing to her. That was me, Diana thought I was that girl once. I thought no one else had ever been that girl or ever would—

  The past tense surprised her. When she finally passed through that intersection, she was a mature woman.

  She began soon after that to call her younger female students "Honey." She started wearing expensive blouses instead of bright colors. She threw away her small collection of ankle bracelets. She bought a one-piece bathing suit so that when she took Emma to the pool in the summer, no one would see the rose tattooed on her hip.

  The mirror steamed again, and Diana let the white shadow of her own breath creep slowly across her face.

  The cafeteria is deafening....

  Silverware on the linoleum, quarters emptying into the vending machine's silver tray. Someone is pounding a table with a fist, and it sounds like a series of small explosions. The shrieking laughter of a girl. A boy making electric guitar sounds in his throat. Standing in the cafeteria line, Rita Smith, looking larger and more unpleasant than she had the year before, shouts, "Get that away from me," at a boy who's tossed a plastic black tarantula in her direction.