Life Before Man

by Margaret Atwood

  But she has shriveled. The flesh once compact and stolid is drooping on the bones; the powder Auntie Muriel has continued to apply is caked in small ravines of collapsing skin. Her throat is a cavity above the virginal bow of the bed jacket, her prowlike bosom has withered. Her color, once a confident beige, has faded to the off-white of a dirty tooth. Her eyes, once slightly protru-berant like those of a Pekinese, are being sucked into the depths of her head. She's falling in on herself, she's melting, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing it Elizabeth remembers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified.

  Auntie Muriel has not yet been told. Doctor MacFadden doesn't feel she's one of the kind that can benefit from such an early revelation. Elizabeth, as delicately as she could, has pressed for a possible date. How long can Auntie Muriel be expected to, well, hang on? But he was vague. It would depend on many factors. There were sometimes astonishing reversals. They would keep her on analgesics and, if necessary, sedatives, and of course they were hoping that she'd get a certain amount of moral support from her family.

  Meaning Elizabeth, who is now questioning her motives for even being here. She should have told the old bitch to kiss off a long time ago and stuck to it. There's not even a practical excuse for her presence: she knows the terms of Auntie Muriel's will, which are unlikely to change. A few thousand to the children when they turn twenty-one, and the rest to Timothy Eaton's bloated warthog of a church. Elizabeth doesn't care. She's practiced not caring.

  Has she come to gloat? Possibly. Revenges sweep through her head. She'll tell Auntie Muriel she's going to die. Auntie Muriel won't believe it, but the mere suggestion will cause outrage. Or she'll threaten to bury her somewhere other than her own cemetery plot. She'll cremate her and sprinkle her over Centre Island, where the Italians play soccer. She'll put her in a jam jar and plant her in Regent Park; dark feet will walk over her. That'll fix her.

  Elizabeth does not approve of this, this vengefulness she cradles; nevertheless it exists. She stares at Auntie Muriel's hands, which squeeze themselves against the blue bed jacket; which she cannot bear to touch.

  The woman who grabbed her arm that day outside Eaton's College Street, when they'd just come out after seeing the Toronto Children's Players Christmas show, a special concession on Auntie Muriel's part, Toad of Toad Hall. Beside them, the Sally Ann sextet sang and jingled. A scruffy brown cloth coat and that smell on her breath, sweet and acid. The woman had only one glove; it was the naked hand on Elizabeth's arm. Elizabeth was eleven. Caroline was with her. They were both wearing the blue tweed coats with velveteen collars and matching velveteen hats that Auntie Muriel considered the proper thing for downtown excursions.

  The woman was crying. Elizabeth couldn't understand what she was saying; her voice slurred. On her own blue tweed arm the hand convulsed, slackened, like a dead cat twitching. Elizabeth took Caroline's hand and pulled her away. Then she ran. That was Mother, Caroline said. No it wasn't. Outside Maple Leaf Gardens, out of breath. Don't say it was.

  That was Mother, Caroline said. Elizabeth punched her in the stomach and Caroline doubled over, crouching on the sidewalk, screaming. Get up, Elizabeth said. You can walk, we're going home. Caroline squatted on the sidewalk, howling, faithful.

  This is what Elizabeth cannot forgive. She can't forgive her own treachery. Auntie Muriel must not be allowed to get away with it. She must, for Elizabeth's benefit, visibly suffer. At last.

  "You never listen to me," Auntie Muriel says.

  "Pardon?" says Elizabeth. Even Auntie Muriel's voice is different. It's no longer an accusation, it's a whine.

  "You never listen to me," Auntie Muriel says. "I gave you all the advantages."

  Not all, Elizabeth thinks, but she can't argue.

  "I said you didn't know. You think I was hard on her but I gave her money, all those years. It wasn't your Uncle Teddy."

  Elizabeth realizes that Auntie Muriel is talking about her mother. She doesn't want to listen, she doesn't want to listen to another genealogy of her own worthlessness.

  "I never missed a week. Nobody gave me any credit for that," says Auntie Muriel. "Of course all she ever spent it on was drink. I gave it to her anyway; I wouldn't have her on my conscience. I don't suppose you understand what that means."

  Elizabeth can do without this information. She'd prefer to think of her mother as having been entirely destitute, a wronged party, a saint under the street lights. Even when she was older, when she'd known she could find out where her mother was, she had chosen not to. Her mother, like clouds or angels, lived on air, or possibly - when she thought about the more material aspects - on Uncle Teddy. The image of the two sisters meeting, perhaps touching each other, disturbs her.

  "Did you see her?" Elizabeth says. "Did you talk to her?"

  "I left instructions at my bank," Auntie Muriel says. "She hated me. She wouldn't see me, she used to call me on the phone when she was drunk and say.... But I did my duty. It was what Father would have wanted. Your mother was always the favorite."

  To Elizabeth's horror, Auntie Muriel is beginning to cry. Tears seep from her puckered eyes; a reversal of nature, a bleeding statue, a miracle. Elizabeth watches, remote. She ought to be rejoicing. Auntie Muriel is finally tasting the ashes of her life. But Elizabeth does not rejoice.

  "You think I don't know," Auntie Muriel says. "I know I'm dying. Everyone here is dying." She picks up her embroidery hoop again, stabs at it with the thick needle, shutting out knowledge of her own tears, which she makes no effort to wipe from her face. "You knew," she says, accusing now. "And you didn't tell me. I'm not a baby."

  Elizabeth hates Auntie Muriel. She has always hated her and she always will hate her. She will not forgive her. This is an old vow, an axiom. Nevertheless.

  Nevertheless, this is not Auntie Muriel. The Auntie Muriel of Elizabeth's childhood has melted, leaving in her place this husk, this old woman who now drops her blockish embroidery and with eyes closed and weeping gropes with her hands across the hospital covers.

  Elizabeth wants to get up out of the visitor's chair and walk, run from the room, leaving her there alone. She deserves it.

  Nevertheless, she leans forward and takes Auntie Muriel's blinded hands. Desperately the stubby fingers clutch her. Elizabeth is no priest: she cannot give absolution. What can she offer? Nothing sincerely. Beside her own burning mother she has sat, not saying anything, holding the one good hand. The one good fine-boned hand. The ruined hand, still beautiful, unlike the veined and mottled stumps she now cradles in hers, soothing them with her thumbs as in illness she has soothed the hands of her children.

  Sickness grips her. Nevertheless, nevertheless, she whispers: It's all right. It's all right.

  Saturday, April 15, 1978

  NATE

  Nate on the subway hurtles eastward through the familiar tunnel, his face cadaverous in the dark window opposite, topped by a poster depicting a brassiere turning into a bird. He's going to his mother's to collect the children. They've been there overnight; he's spent the morning alone with Lesje, who has intimated more than once since he returned to what everyone else calls work that they haven't been seeing much of each other lately. She means alone.

  This morning they were alone, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. They ate boiled eggs and then he read the Friday night papers, sitting in the front room in the sunlight, among the idle machines and the unfinished rocking horses. He'd thought he would be able to continue with the toys, in the evenings and on weekends, but he's too tired. It isn't only that. He can't put the two things together in his head, assault and battery back of the warehouse on Front Street East, Jerry the Giraffe with its oblivious smile. Reality is one or the other, and day by day the toys fade, lose blood. Already he sees them as museum pieces, quaint, handmade, a hundred years old. Soon they will vanish and this room will fill with paper.

  Lesje had wanted the whole weekend, but he could not refuse Elizabeth, who is ada
mant these days about needing time to herself. Nate wonders idly what she does with it. He hopes she's seeing a man, which would make life easier. For him. In any case it would not have been Elizabeth he'd be refusing, but the children. Put that way it's impossible, which Lesje cannot quite grasp. Her obtuseness, her refusal to see that their predicament is theirs, not his or hers, infuriates him. It's a simple and obvious fact that he's doing much of what he's doing for her, or, to rephrase it, if it wasn't for her he wouldn't have to do it. He's tried to explain this but she seems to think he's accusing her of something. She stares out the window, at the wall, at any available space except the one between his ears.

  Luckily there's his mother. Nate feels his mother is always willing to take the children, always waiting in fact for chances just like these. After all, she's their grandmother.

  Nate gets off at Woodbine, climbs the stairs, emerges into weak April sunlight. He walks north to the street of jerry-built boxes that contains his childhood. His mother's house is a box like the others, covered with the dingy beige stucco that never ceases to remind him of certain radio programs: The Green Hornet, Our Miss Brooks. The woman in the house next door to it has a statue on her lawn, a black boy dressed as a jockey and holding a coach lamp. This statue is a source of perpetual irritation to Nate's mother. Nate sometimes teases her by equating this statue with the soulful painting of the black boy at the front of the Unitarian church. Lower-class Catholics, he says, have plaster Marys and Jesuses on their lawns; maybe the woman next door is a lower-class Unitarian. Nate's mother has never found this particularly funny, but Nate would be disappointed if she did.

  He rings the doorbell, lights a cigarette while he waits. His mother, wearing the frazzled turquoise bedroom slippers she's had for at least ten years, finally opens the door. The children are downstairs in the basement playing dress-ups, she says as he takes off his pea jacket. She keeps a cardboard box down there for them. In it are the few garments she hasn't found suitable for giving away to service organizations: evening gowns of the late thirties, a cut-velvet cloak, a long magenta slip. Every time he sees them, Nate is freshly amazed by the fact that his mother once went to parties, danced, was courted.

  His mother has tea made and offers Nate some. He wonders if she might have a beer in the house, but she doesn't. She buys beer only for him, he knows, and this was short notice. He doesn't complain or press the point; she seems a little more tired than usual. He sits at the kitchen table with her, drinking tea and trying to avoid looking at her map of world atrocities, on which the stars are multiplying like mice. Soon the children will finalize their costumes and come upstairs to display themselves, which is the point of the whole game.

  "Elizabeth tells me you've gone back to Adams, Prewitt and Stein," his mother says.

  Nate feels conspiracy roping him round. How does Elizabeth know? He hasn't told her, he hasn't wanted to admit that defeat. Is it Martha, is that network still in operation? Elizabeth never used to phone his mother; but perhaps - treachery! - it's his mother who phones Elizabeth. It's the kind of thing she would do on principle. Though they've never been close. She's been slow to accept the fact that he and Elizabeth have separated. She hasn't said so, but he can tell she considers this bad for the children. For instance, she never mentions Lesje. He wishes she would protest, criticize, so he could defend himself, tell her what a termite's life Elizabeth led him.

  "I'm so glad," his mother says, her china-blue eyes shining as if he's just won something: not a lottery but a prize. "I always felt that was what you were really suited for. You must be happier now."

  Nate's throat is gripped by fearful anger. Can't she tell, couldn't any idiot see that he's compelled, forced, he has no choice? The weight of her ideal son presses on his chest, a plaster mannequin threatening to enter and choke him. Angel of the oppressed. She'll absolve anyone of anything, any crime, any responsibility, except herself, except him.

  "I'm not," he says. "I am goddamned well not suited for it. I'm doing it because I need the money."

  Her smile does not fade. "But it's the right thing," she says brightly. "At least you're doing something with your life."

  "I was doing something with my life before," Nate says.

  "There's no need to raise your voice, dear," his mother says with wounded complacency. He hates it, this tone, which is supposed to make him feel, does make him feel as if he's jumping up and down like an ape, swinging a club and thumping his chest. Years of her moral smugness, burying him like snow, like layers of wool. Intolerable smugness of all of them, Elizabeth, his mother, even Lesje. She complains but her complaints are smug, hedged bets. He knows that silent equation, he's been well schooled: I suffer, therefore I am right. But he suffers too, can't they see that? What does he have to do, blow his head off before they'll take him seriously? He thinks of Chris, lying shattered on the bier of his mattress, mourned by two policemen. Serious. Not that he would.

  "If you want to know," Nate says, nevertheless lowering his voice, "I hate every minute of it." Wondering if he actually does, he's good at it, as good as you can be at something like that.

  "But you're helping people," his mother says, baffled, as if he's failed to grasp an elementary geometrical axiom. "Isn't it legal aid? Aren't they poor?"

  "Mother," he says with renewed patience, "anyone who thinks they can really help people, especially doing what I'm doing, is a horse's ass."

  His mother sighs. "You've always been so afraid of being a horse's ass," she says. "Even as a child."

  Nate is startled. Has he? He tries to remember manifestations of this.

  "I suppose you think I'm a horse's ass, too," his mother says. Implacably she smiles on. "I guess I am one. But I guess I think everyone is."

  Nate is unprepared for this degree of cynicism, coming from his mother. She's supposed to believe in the infinite perfectibility of man; isn't she? "Then why do you do it all?" he says.

  "All what, dear?" she asks, a little absentmindedly, as if she's had this conversation with him several times before.

  "The Korean poets, the crippled vets, all that." He sweeps his arm, taking in her red-starred map, her mushroom cloud.

  "Well," she says, sipping her tea, "I had to do something to keep myself alive. During the war, you know. Right after you were born."

  What does she mean? Surely this is metaphorical, she's only talking about housewifely boredom or something like that. But she leaves him no doubt. "I thought of several ways," she continues, "but then I thought, what if it doesn't work? I could have ended up, you know, damaged. And then you start thinking about whoever might find you. It was right after your father, right after I got the cable, but that wasn't the only thing. I guess I simply didn't want to live on this kind of an earth."

  Nate is horrified. He can't, he cannot see his mother as a potential suicide. It's incongruous. Not only that, she hasn't once mentioned him. Could she have abandoned him so easily, just left him in a basket and stepped blithely off into the unknown? His father is unforgivable enough, but at least he died by accident. Irresponsible, a bad mother, she couldn't. Potential orphan, he sways at the lip of the abyss which has suddenly gaped in front of him.

  "At first I did knitting," his mother says, with a small laugh. "I knitted socks. You know, for the war effort. But it didn't keep me busy enough. Anyway I guess I felt I would rather do something more useful than just knitting. When you were old enough I started with the veterans, and one thing leads to another."

  Nate stares at his mother, who however looks just the same as she has always looked. It's not only the revelation but the unexpected similarity to himself that appalls him. He has thought her incapable of such despair, and he now sees that he's always depended on it, this incapability of hers. What now, what next?

  But his children intervene, clumping up the cellar stairs in toeless high heels, wrapped in cut velvet and satin, their mouths reddened with some long-discarded lipstick of his mother's, their eyebrows penciled black. He applauds
boisterously, relieved by their presence, their uncomplicated delight.

  Nevertheless he thinks: Soon they will be women, and that recognition runs through him like a needle. They will demand brassieres and then reject them, blaming both needs on him. They will criticize his clothes, his job, his turn of phrase. They'll leave home to live with surly, scrofulous young men; or they'll marry dentists and go in for white rugs and hanging sculptures made of wool. Either way they will judge him. Motherless, childless, he sits at the kitchen table, the solitary wanderer, under the cold red stars.

  At the front door he kisses his mother as usual, the obligatory peck. She acts as if nothing has happened, as if they've been talking about something he's known all along.

  She starts to close the front door and suddenly he can't handle it, this closing of the door. He vaults the low iron railing of the cement porch, hurdles the short hedge onto the neighbors' lawn. He leapfrogs the black jockey and takes the next hedge and the next, landing on grass yellow from winter, mushy with melted snow; his heels sink, mud splatters his legs. Behind him he hears the chorus, the army of tired female voices: childish. To hell with them. He soars, over dog dirt, into soggy beds of someone's crocuses, up again. His children race along the sidewalk, laughing, calling: "Daddy! Wait for me!"

  He knows he will land soon; already his heart is pounding. But he aims again for it, that nonexistent spot where he longs to be. Mid-air.

  Tuesday, May 30, 1978

  LESJE

  Lesje is holding a piece of paper. She's tried to read it four or five times, but she can't seem to get it into focus. Which is stupid, since pieces of paper exactly like it arrive in her mail almost every day. It's a letter, printed with a blue ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, addressed to Dinosaurs, care of the Museum.

  Dear Sirs:

  I am in Grade Six and our Teacher has made us do a Project on Dinosaurs and I was wondering if you can give full answers with examples.

  1) What does Dinosaur mean