Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  At the time Lesje had not been able to think of her grandmother as having ever been thin, much less young. She seemed always to have been what she was, seamy-faced, melancholy, smelling of underarms and furniture polish. The other grandmother had danced too, or so she claimed. She'd mentioned handkerchiefs; Lesje hadn't understood, so finally she'd pulled a crumpled Kleenex from her sleeve and waved it in the air. All Lesje had been able to picture was her grandmother at her present age, hopping about ridiculously in her tiny black boots, waving handfuls of Kleenex.

  A man, olive-skinned and short, brushes past and says something Lesje doesn't understand but guesses is not friendly. She doesn't know where she is, she'll have to take bearings. The sun is going down so that must be west, towards the golden church she's seen from the outside but was never allowed to enter. She'd never been in a synagogue either, before the funeral. She turns back, trying to retrace her way.

  She didn't listen properly, their stories bored her, she felt them as attempts to convert her, to one side or the other. She was impatient with them and their complaints and bickering, with these stories which were so foreign and which, like their endless stories about wars and suffering and horror, children spitted on swords, had nothing to do with her. The old country, archaic and terrible; not like here. Now she wants these voices back; even the squabbling, even the rage. She wants to dance with flowers on her head, she wants to be endorsed, sanctified, she doesn't care who by. She wants a mother's blessing. Though she can't imagine her own mother doing such a thing.

  This is the problem. She knows by now that people do not behave the way she wishes them to. So what should she do, change wishes?

  When she was ten she wanted to go to the Museum, not with one grandmother on Saturday mornings as usual, but with both of them. One would hold her right hand, one her left. She didn't expect them to speak to each other, she'd heard them say often enough they would sooner die than do that. But there was no rule against walking. The three of them would walk together, slowly because of her fat grandmother, up the stone steps of the Museum, herself in the middle, and in under the golden dome. Unlike the dinosaurs, this was something that might really happen; when she finally saw it never could, she forgot about it.

  As for Nate, it's simple. All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.

  Friday, November 25, 1977

  NATE

  Nate, slumped in a horseshoe booth in the bar of the Selby Hotel, drinks draft beer and watches television. It's Friday night and voices babble, it's hard to hear the sound. Over the past few months more driblets of dirt concerning the Mounties have been trickling in, and these are now being relentlessly scrutinized by a trio of pundits. The Mounties, pretending to be Separatist terrorists, sent violent letters somewhere. They burnt a barn and stole some mail, and there's some suggestion that an erstwhile head of Intelligence was a double agent for the CIA. The Prime Minister claims he knew nothing about it, and furthermore he doesn't think it's his place to know such things. This is old news which is not being treated with any new wisdom. Nate smokes, watching the ghostly heads frown and smirk, skeptical.

  His mother is gathering signatures on a letter of protest, as usual. There will be a lot of talk and nothing will happen. He dislikes the pundits for pretending something will, their earnestness and tired outrage. Right now he'd rather hear about the hockey scores, though the Leafs are fucking up as usual. Around him smoke rises, glasses clank, voices shuffle through their routines, desolation spreads, as far as the eye can see.

  Martha comes in and stands uncertainly at the far end of the bar. Nate lifts his arm to catch her attention. She sees him and strides forward, smiling.

  "Long time no see," Martha says. This is heavy irony, as Nate now sees Martha every day at the office. But tonight he's taking her to dinner. He owes her something. As soon as she sits down he realizes he's made a blunder, he shouldn't have suggested the Selby. They used to drink here a lot. He hopes Martha won't become maudlin.

  So far she's not showing any signs of it. She plops her elbows onto the table. "Jeez, my feet are sore," she says.

  Nate interprets this the way he's always interpreted this bluntness, her insistence on the vernacular: it's a cover-up for other, more delicate things. He thinks she's done something to her hair, though he has trouble remembering what her hair was like before. She's thinner than she used to be. Her breasts rest on her folded arms, she smiles at him, he feels a twitch of desire. Against his will. It can't be the boots, Martha has always had boots.

  He orders two more drafts and reminds himself that this dinner is purely routine. Without Martha, or with Martha against him, he would never have been able to get even the menial job he's doing now. Young lawyers, lawyers younger than he is - it suddenly alarms him to see how much younger - are a dime a dozen now, and why should the firm have rehired him after his desertion? He's rusty too, he's forgotten a lot, things he once thought he'd never again have to remember. But he's desperate for money, he didn't know where else to go.

  He's grateful to Martha for not laughing, not sneering. She didn't even say, I knew you'd be back. She'd listened to him as if she were a nurse or a case worker; then she said she would see what she could do.

  What he's got isn't what he would have chosen. He does the legal aid. Legal Band-Aid. Because of the firm's radical reputation, it feels it has to take on more than its share of legal aid cases; there's more coming in than Adams and Stein and the juniors can handle. Nate is their Office Overload. He takes part-time pay for what has turned out to be a full-time job, shepherding the unimportant cases, the ones no one else wants to take because they're foredoomed to failure, the thugs, housebreakers and junkies, through the courts, into the pen, through the courts again, into the pen. He knows it's a circular process.

  He's resurrected his briefcase and his two suits, wondering as he dug through the trunk at the back of the cupboard in his old room why he had never thrown these things away. He polishes his shoes now and cleans his fingernails; the permanent cuticle of blackened paint has almost vanished. In the mornings, he breathes the antiseptic smell of jails, the smell of coops, caged flesh, sour air breathed in and out too many times; the smell of boredom and hatred. He listens to the lies of his clients, watches their eyes twitch momentarily away from his, knows they're scornful of him and his polished shoes and his belief in them.

  They don't know he doesn't believe in them. He goes to court with them, does what he can, plea-bargains, makes shoddy little deals with the Crown prosecutors. He listens to the shoptalk, the jocularity of the other lawyers, which he once found offensive; lately he's been joining in. Sometimes he wins a case and his client goes free, but not often. Even so it's no triumph. The pettiness of petty crime, the absurd particularity grates on him. There seems to be no connection between what happens to these men and what they've done: two radios and a stereo, shooting up in an alley, the contents of some old lady's bureau drawers.

  His mother would say his clients are products of their environment, which no doubt is true. Culture shock, they suffer from it; the point at which one set of skewed rules collides blindly with another. His mother manages to combine this view with a belief in human dignity and free will, at least as it applies to herself. Nate doesn't feel capable of this logical contradiction. He doesn't judge these people, nor does he feel he's an instrument of justice. He does a job. He might as well be working for the SPCA. He'd like to be in on the Mountie stuff: the firm is acting for a maniac fringe newspaper vandalized at the time. But Stein is taking that, naturally.

  The waiter plunks down their two drafts and Martha sprinkles hers with salt. "So how's it going?" she says. She drinks, leaving a suds moustache on her upper lip. He used to love that, the way she swills her beer. Tenderness floats in him, hovers, is gone.

  On the screen, which he can see but she can't, it's now Rene
Levesque, gesturing, shrugging, explaining, sad eyes peering from his creased mime's face. Something about the economy, from what Nate can catch. These days they're saying they never meant separation, not just like that. Nate is disappointed in him; the whole thing so far has been an anticlimax. Missed chances, compromise and hedging, like the rest of the country. It's a world of unfreedom after all. Only a fool could have believed in anything else, and Levesque is no fool. (Like Nate: not any more.) He looks less and less like a clown. More like a turtle: wisdom has wrinkled him, encased him in a useful shell.

  "Hey, dreamer," Martha says. The first sign she's given that they were once lovers: it's her old word. Nate lowers his eyes to her.

  "Great," he says. "I guess." He'd like to express as much enthusiasm as possible. Martha wants to believe her action, her good turn, has made him happy. He knows she's gone out of her way for him; he doesn't know why.

  Martha gives him no clues. "Down the old rat hole," she says, and empties her glass.

  In the dining room of the Selby, less than he would have liked, more than he can afford, they eat liver and homefries and Martha talks about the office: who's left, who's come, whose marriage is splitting up, who's having it on with whom. As usual Martha knows all about these things; she reports them jovially. "Better her than me," she says, or "Good luck to him." Nate settles into familiar comfort with her, as if he's listening to the breathing of some large, warm-flanked animal.

  He'd like to nuzzle into her, shove his head under her arm and close his eyes; but Martha is treating him like a friend, an old friend, trustworthy and neutral. She acts as if she can't remember ever having cried, ever having hit him or screamed, and Nate reflects once more upon the shamelessness of women. Their lack of shame. They believe whatever they do is justified at the time, so why be guilty? Nate envies this. He himself knows he did not treat Martha as well as he'd intended, but she seems to have forgotten all about that, as well.

  With the canned cherry pie Martha describes her latest interests: she does volunteer fund-raising for Nellie's Halfway House, and on Tuesday and Thursday evenings she goes to yoga class. Nate can't quite imagine Martha, ample but hardly graceful, wearing a black leotard and bent into a pretzel, nor can he picture her identifying to any extent with the battered wives sheltered by Nellie's. She was never much at exercise, and theories, issues as she called them, left her cold. He knows: he once tried to get her to buy a bicycle, and when he would talk about what was at stake in Quebec, in Israel, in Cambodia, she would say she got enough of that on the television news. But here she is now, improbability materialized, sitting across from him, forking in pie crust and talking about the reform of rape laws.

  Nate tells himself that it's just like Martha to take up a cause or a hobby after the peak, during the slow descent into that outmoded trough inhabited by people like his mother: Christadelphians, vegetarians of the autointoxication school, Esperanto-speakers, lecturers on spaceships, Unitarians. This was always Elizabeth's view of her, based, as far as Nate could see, on Martha's wardrobe. According to Elizabeth, women's lib is on the wane; and interest in Eastern cults is not what it was. But none of this seems to bother Martha. She comments on Nate's appearance: he looks oxygen-starved, she says. Very few people breathe properly. He should try a little full breathing and a simple version of the Salute to the Sun. Martha personally guarantees it would do wonders for him.

  Then she veers back to the law. She has pronounced views on the family court system; in fact, if she can save enough money she would like to go to law school and become a lawyer herself, so she can do some specialized work in this field. As far as school goes, it will be a cinch, since she knows quite a lot of the stuff already; God knows she's typed enough of it. Nate blinks. He sees now that he thinks of Martha as not exactly stupid, but certainly not ultra-bright. Though quite possibly she knows more law at this point than he does himself. She might be all right, she might even be quite good. For family court.

  But Nate feels diminished. He's gone for days, weeks, months of his life without thinking once of Martha. His hands retain only a faint memory of the insides of her thighs, her taste has faded from his tongue, he can't even remember her bedroom: what color are the curtains? Yet he's aggrieved that he himself has been so easily, so quickly forgotten. Was he that unimportant? He tells himself that Martha cannot possibly have a new man up her sleeve, someone who holds for her the same significance that he himself once held; otherwise she would not be so interested in law school.

  He pays the bill and they walk towards the door, Martha in front. She's carrying her coat over her arm, and he watches her haunches under the gored tweed of her skirt. Will she perhaps invite him back? They could sit in her living room and have a few drinks. Nothing more than that. He deliberates: of course he shouldn't accept. It's Friday night, the children will be there, Lesje's expecting him. He didn't tell her where he was going; he said he had to do some legal work. Taking Martha to dinner was legal work in a way, but this would have been too difficult to explain.

  On the street, however, Martha thanks him, dismisses him. "See you Monday," she says. "Back at the old grind." She walks towards the corner, in her boots, waving for a cab. He watches her stop one, open the door, get in. He would like to know where she's going, but she'll go there whether he knows or not. The world exists apart from him. He's rehearsed this often enough in theory; he's just never known it with certainty. It follows that his body is an object in space and that someday he will die.

  Now he can remember having had this perception several times before. He stands where she's left him. He doesn't want to go home.

  Friday, April 14, 1978

  ELIZABETH

  Auntie Muriel is in the hospital. That in itself is incredible enough. First, that anything should ever go wrong with her. Elizabeth has never thought of her aunt as compounded of mortal flesh like other people; rather as being, from neck to knees, built of a warty growth, something like gum rubber, impermeable and indestructible. Second, that if something has gone wrong with her, which Elizabeth still doubts, Auntie Muriel could have brought herself to admit it. Nevertheless she's in the hospital, the Princess Margaret to be precise, and Elizabeth has been summoned. Despite her vow never to see Auntie Muriel again she has not dared to refuse.

  She sits in the visitor's chair beside the raised bed, while Auntie Muriel, wearing an ice-blue bed jacket, cranked up and propped up, complains. They put extra chlorine in the water here, she can taste it. She can remember when water was water but she doesn't suppose Elizabeth can tell the difference. At first she could not get a private room. Can Elizabeth imagine? She had to share a room, share one, with a terrible old woman who wheezed at night. Auntie Muriel is convinced the woman was dying. She could hardly get any sleep. And now that she's finally here in her private room, no one pays any attention to her. She has to ring and ring, three times even, before the nurse will come. They all read detective novels, she's seen them. The night nurse is from the West Indies. The food is atrocious. She cannot tolerate beets, she always ticks the other vegetables on the menu but they bring beets. Sometimes Auntie Muriel thinks they do things like this to her on purpose. She will speak to Doctor MacFadden, tomorrow. If she has to stay here for a little rest and some tests, which is what he says, the least he can do is make sure she's comfortable. She's never been sick a day in her life, there's nothing really wrong with her now, she isn't used to hospitals.

  Elizabeth thinks this may be true. She connects her own stays in hospitals with the births of her children, but of course Auntie Muriel has never undergone that. Elizabeth can't imagine her giving birth, much less engaged in the preliminaries. It's difficult to picture weak-chinned Uncle Teddy storming those elastic-sheathed barricades, uncovering those thighs the hue of potato sprouts; difficult to picture Auntie Muriel allowing it. Though she might have done it out of a sense of duty.

  Auntie Muriel has brought her petit-point cushion cover with her to the hospital, the same piece she's been doing
for years: pansies in a basket. In times past it has reposed on various chairs and sofas in Auntie Muriel's house, testimony to the fact that she's not a lazy woman. It looks out of place on the hospital coverlet. Auntie Muriel lifts it as she talks, lets it fall.

  Elizabeth sits in the visitor's chair. She's brought some flowers, chrysanthemums, in a pot rather than cut; she thought Auntie Muriel might like something that was still growing, but Auntie Muriel immediately pronounced them too smelly. Doesn't Elizabeth remember that she can't stand the smell of chrysanthemums?

  Perhaps she does remember; perhaps she conveniently forgot. She'd felt she should bring something, some offering, for Auntie Muriel is going to die; is dying at this very moment. Elizabeth, as the next of kin, was the first to be notified.

  "It's all through her," Doctor MacFadden said in his semi-whisper. "It must've started as cancer of the bowel. The colon. I expect she was in considerable pain for some time before she came to see me. She's always said she was strong as a horse. It was the blood that frightened her."

  Considerable pain, naturally. She'd grit her teeth for weeks before forcing herself to acknowledge that she had a colon and that this portion of her had turned traitor. And Auntie Muriel must have been as surprised as Elizabeth to find she could actually bleed. But frightened? A word surely alien to Auntie Muriel's vocabulary. Elizabeth stares at her, pitiless, unbelieving. Such malevolent vitality cannot die. Hitler lived on after the discovery of his smoldering teeth, and Auntie Muriel too is one of the immortals.