The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  It was part of the perfect life, the life Diana never for one second took for granted.

  Perhaps when she was younger than she now remembered being, she'd imagined the perfect life to be that of a movie star, a lounge club singer. Or maybe she'd imagined a millionaire husband and a penthouse in Manhattan, a limousine taking her from one glamorous party to another. A closetful of sequins. Flashbulbs snapping in her face.

  But even then she must have known that that wasn't it—

  This was it.

  Love. Family. Security.

  Tonight they'd drink tea that tasted sweet and bitter at the same time, and in the morning she'd scramble eggs for Emma, drive her to school. A little later she'd go to the community college where she taught. It was the same community college her mother had attended when she was newly divorced and trying to imagine a life for herself, a life with improved computer skills and an associate's degree in something marketable, and bearable.

  The irony of that never escaped Diana when she pulled up and parked her car in the faculty parking lot and carried her books and drawing pens into the college.

  All those nights she'd been left alone or with her mother's boyfriend or a teenage baby-sitter while her mother went off to night classes at the mysterious college, which was going to change their lives ... Diana was a teacher there now.

  The computer skills and the associate's degree, of course, hadn't changed their lives. Diana's mother had stayed in the same low-paid clerical position in the philosophy department at the university until she retired.

  But those nights...

  The teenage girls who baby-sat would let her eat Pop-Tarts for dinner. They'd talk on the phone until Diana fell asleep in front of the television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer would turn the material world into a place full of magical evil. Diana dreaded that place while understanding too fully that she was already in it.

  The baby-sitters would toss the blankets over her, and then she would be wide awake in the dark. When she'd hear her mother's keys jangling outside the apartment door, a hot fluid would spill inside her chest.

  "Why do you always cry when I come home?" her mother would ask. "Other kids cry when their mothers leave."

  Diana always knew, as she parked her minivan in the shadow of that college, that something had happened to her for which she needed to be eternally grateful. Something having to do with luck, with grace. She knew, too, that she'd done things to get this life, to have it ... choices she'd made, words she'd uttered ... images of them in her mind, faded like newspapers left on the front porch of people who'd left town without notifying the paperboy, left in the rain and the sun. Most of the time she couldn't even remember what these sins were, only that they'd been, and now they weren't, and now this life—this perfect life—was hers.

  The kettle began a piercing scream, and Diana hurried to the stove and turned the gas off under the water, snuffing the crown of blue thorns and the scream at the same time. But then she heard above her another cry. This one was weaker, farther away. A cry followed by, "Mama."

  "Paul?" Diana called. "Emma?"

  She hurried out of the kitchen. The sponge she'd handed Paul was on the dining room table, but he was gone.

  She ran to the stairs and hurried up them. She stumbled, grabbed the railing, which was polished and slippery in her hand.

  "Emma?" she called again.

  Her daughter's bedroom door was open, but Emma wasn't in it.

  The bathroom door was open, too, and Diana could see Paul's shadow in the hallway, a long shadow cast by the bright fluorescent light—a feature left over from the seventies, that unearthly tube above the sink. They kept meaning to change that fixture but never got around to doing it.

  "Oh, honey," she heard her husband mutter. "Oh, sweetheart."

  Diana could hear Emma whimper beyond him, a whimper that came from the painful brilliance....

  She pushed past Paul into the bathroom, where she saw her daughter crumpled near the toilet, head resting against the porcelain tank, her white blouse and plaid skirt splattered with blood. Blood gushing from her mouth. Blood soaking her blond pigtails.

  Diana lurched forward, unable to scream, dropped to her knees beside her daughter, thinking, I have to stop the bleeding, I have to stop the bleeding—

  Then Emma reached over and touched Diana's hand with hers.

  It was cold and clammy, her daughter's hand, and Diana gasped and pulled her own away.

  That hand—it felt like clay.

  There was a smell—cinnamon, nutmeg, curry, or?—

  "She's sick," Paul said, looking at Diana pointedly. "Poor thing," he said. "All that linguine."

  "Oh," Diana said. "Oh no," she said. She put her hand to her own neck. It seemed to her that the fluorescent tube above the sink surged, briefly, then became even brighter.

  "Let's get you cleaned up, honey," Paul said to Emma, reaching past Diana to help his daughter to her feet.

  Diana was still on her knees. Frozen in time, in place...

  But what time? What place?

  It seemed to her that her skin was slipping around on her like that light. Like a gown that was too large, shedding itself brilliantly down her arms. She put her hand to her forehead and tried to pull herself together.

  It was just a headache. She recognized it then. It was the way her headaches arrived. It had been months since she'd had one, but now she remembered ... the sense of being lifted by pain and brightness away from her body. If she took codeine now and lay down with an ice pack on her temple, by morning she'd be all right.

  Emma reached out again and grabbed her mother's hand.

  "I don't feel good, Mommy," Emma said weakly.

  Diana opened her mouth but couldn't speak. Her own pain was shocking, an electrode at the base of her brain, at the tenderest place, the place where she felt love, had pleasant dreams, stored all the small happy moments of her childhood. A hot white branch inserted into that vulnerable place.

  Her daughter's hand gripped her own too hard. It also hurt. Diana tried to pull her hand away, but her daughter just held on more tightly.

  "Mommy," Emma said. "I'm sorry I threw up."

  "It's okay, baby," Paul said to Emma.

  He put the plug in the bathtub drain and started to run warm water into it.

  "It's okay, Emma. Isn't it, Mommy?" Paul asked.

  He looked at Diana with what she thought was disapproval.

  All Diana could do was nod and move her lips as if she were saying yes.

  Part Two

  Thunder

  BOTH EMMA AND DIANA FELT FINE IN THE MORNING. There'd been a brief but violent thunderstorm in the middle of the night, and it had left the earth wet. Although Diana told Emma that she could stay home from school, Emma insisted on going. There were only two days of the third grade left that year, and it was Emma's "share day." She'd written a story about one of her dolls—Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth—and was going to take the doll to school and read the story to her class.

  On Sunday Diana had typed the story for Emma on Paul's computer, then printed it up on Monday in big bold letters that Emma could read easily. The story Emma told was that Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth had been an orphan living in a convent until Emma found and adopted her. Emma loved Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth, the story professed. The doll's favorite food was Froot Loops. The story ended, She wants to be a mommy when she grows up.

  The only part of the story Diana had changed was a sentence that read, "Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth HATES math tests and BORING science."

  It had seemed a bit inflammatory to Diana. Already Diana felt that Sister Beatrice was a bit suspicious of Paul and herself—the academic and the artist—although Emma was certainly not the only non-Catholic at Our Lady of Fatima Elementary School, the only all-girls school in the area. As the Briar Hill public schools had grown larger and wilder over the years, with regular drug busts and a few isolated but stunning acts of violence, more and more parents were sending their childr
en to the few private schools in town, and Our Lady of Fatima had had a boom in enrollment the likes of which it hadn't seen since the fifties. Emma was certainly not the only non-Catholic, but she might have been one of the few with no religious affiliation at all.

  Paul had no interest in religion. He was interested in thought. Where does the brain stop and the mind begin? If there is such a thing as evil, can there be such a thing as free will?

  And although Diana had interest in religion—a vague sense she'd always had, especially at dusk, that there was a presence she might have been able to communicate with if she knew the right words or could find the right place—she had no direction in which to point the interest. Her own mother had never even mentioned religion, and if she'd held any beliefs about what happened beyond this world or what happened after it, she'd kept them to herself. Church, the Bible, Jesus—from the distance at which Diana had caught the occasional glimpse of them—had seemed exotic and vaguely threatening. Secrets. Rituals. Mysteries. She imagined fog, red velvet, the smell of the baking aisle at the grocery store—black pepper, brown sugar, oregano. Those scents were ones she'd associated with the strangeness of religious belief ever since she'd seen, on one of those Sundays, a little girl in a white lace dress and veil in that aisle at the grocery store, holding the hand of her mother, who was picking out spices.

  The girl was no older than Diana herself. But Diana was wearing overalls and a checkered blouse. She'd been going through a farm-girl phase because of a Disney video her mother had bought for her and which she watched every night while her mother read magazines. The heroine of the movie wore overalls, milked cows, and chewed on long pieces of grass, and Diana wanted to be her...

  Until she saw this other girl in the baking aisle.

  Diana must have been staring, because the little girl looked at her from behind the veil and said, "I had my first communion today."

  Diana had no idea what communion was but felt something slide open like a window inside her. A bit of the mystery slipped in along with the smell of cloves before her mother told her to hurry up and the window slammed shut.

  She didn't think about religion much again until high school, when she became best friends with a born-again Christian. By then (and by then she was only sixteen) Diana had slipped far into the world, done many things for which she was sure she could not be forgiven by even the most merciful of divinities. She had only the vaguest concept of what constituted a sin, but Diana knew she ought to keep her head low, that if there were a god watching, the god didn't smile when he looked down on her.

  Maureen never tried to convert Diana, but she used to talk about Jesus, how he loved everyone, forgave everyone, died for everyone. She talked about it in such a private, inward way—with total supernatural understanding—that Diana felt fearful and jealous at the same time. Maureen's eyes were very dark and long-lashed, and when she talked about Jesus, whom she'd actually seen, Diana could see why Maureen's mother had forbidden her to go to the church where she'd been reborn.

  Now, as a grown woman, the confusion Diana felt when she thought about God was made of that fear, along with the fog and red velvet she used to imagine. She carried it inside her like a small candlelit church right behind her ribs—a place full of muttering and blood, a place she didn't feel comfortable going even though it belonged to her.

  And sometimes Diana suspected that Sister Beatrice, in her strange black robes—only her pasty white hands and face exposed to this world of the flesh—saw the flaw, as well as a catalog of sins. That didn't frighten Diana, necessarily, or make her feel ashamed. It made her feel, instead, as though some private moment or place of her own had been glimpsed by a stranger from a disinterested distance.

  If there were a word for what it made her feel, Diana guessed the word would have been hopeless. It was similar to the emotion she felt when, on the nightly news, she saw a corpse being taken out of a car wreck or out of a bombed building on a stretcher.

  There was no use trying to hide yourself then.

  If the world wanted to see your secrets, stare at your corpse, it could.

  But it was also because Sister Beatrice had this effect on Diana that she changed the provocative, anti-math-and-science sentence in her daughter's story to read, "Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth does not like math tests or science as much as she likes ice cream!"

  Then Diana folded the typed story into fourths and tucked it into Emma's backpack.

  They go to a boutique downtown and have extra ho/es pierced in their ears....

  Three small red-glass rubies in the left and three fake but dazzling little diamonds in the right.

  They take turns looking at each other in the sunlight when they step out of the boutique into the brilliant sun bouncing off the chrome and glass of the clean cars parked up and down the street.

  There are bright silver streaks of light on the sidewalk, sent out like arrows from those cars, and the girls step into that shower of arrows wearing sandals, shorts, and tank tops. They hold each other's hair away from the new jewels, which shock and spark like miniature and glittering thoughts around their heads.

  "Great," one of their mothers will say wearily when she sees them. "Just what you girls needed. A few more holes in your heads."

  It's the first day of summer vacation.

  IT WAS A DARK MORNING. THE THUNDERSTORM OF THE night had left the sky cloudy and the streets slippery with green leaves. Emma sat quietly, still half asleep, next to Diana in the minivan; Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth sat on her lap. The doll had been a gift from Paul's mother—an expensive blond baby girl with bright blue eyes that shut when she was put down on her back for a nap or when she slipped from Emma's bed onto the floor while Emma slept. That doll wore a lacy white dress and had a fixed rosebud smile—or was it, Diana wondered, a bit of a smirk?

  She pulled up in front of the school, into the semicircular drive. Little girls were being let out of cars, skipping up the concrete steps to wait at the orange double doors for the bell to ring, to be let into the school.

  Diana felt homely in the gray sweat suit she'd pulled on that morning. She wore it often in the mornings but never without feeling like a fixed target in it. Fervently Diana believed that women didn't need to get dumpy when they got older, but here she was in a baggy sweat suit, without makeup. It was only to drive her daughter to school, she always thought, but by the time she was actually a few miles from her home, wearing this middle-aged mother's uniform, Diana felt conspicuous, ashamed.

  But it didn't matter to Emma.

  "I love you, Mommy," she said.

  "I love you, too. Have a good day, Emma-o," Diana said, leaning over to hug and kiss her daughter good-bye.

  Emma's breath smelled of chocolate milk. Her hair smelled of dreams and damp dirt. As she always did, nuzzling her daughter before bedtime or kissing her good-bye before parting, Diana felt a moment of physical longing like terror, like the moment she sometimes had just before sleep, not wanting to slip out of the sensual world no matter how sweet the dream that was waiting beyond it might be.

  "What about Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth?" Emma asked.

  "Good-bye, Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth," Diana said animatedly to the blank face of her daughter's doll.

  "But she wants a kiss," Emma said, holding the doll up.

  Diana leaned over and kissed the doll, whose cheek was cold.

  Emma jumped out of the minivan and, with her Snow White backpack on, her pink jacket, her doll held like a real baby carefully over her shoulder, supported in the crook of her arm, Emma ascended the concrete stairs. Above her, at the orange double doors, the other little girls waited, pacing, looking pale in their plaid skirts and knee socks in the wavering dampness that had begun to warm and rise steamily up from the cement.

  For a second Diana felt the urge to hurry after her, pull her back, keep her apart from that group, which looked somber to her from this distance—too serious, like sick girls. Too, they seemed to be watching Emma climb the s
tairs too closely, too anxiously, and Diana felt a terrible pang of possessiveness (mini) just before she heard the mechanical wildness of the school bell ringing and saw her daughter start to run. The orange double doors opened, and the little girls began to disappear into the shining darkness of the place where they spent their days.

  Diana glanced one more time toward those doors before she pulled out of the semicircular drive, thinking she saw Sister Beatrice—in her black habit, smiling—take Emma by the hot-pink arm of her summer jacket and pull her through the open doors.

  June.

  It's still just June.

  But time begins to slow down and the summer afternoons become palpable, made of warm laundry and canned air freshener.

  Their mothers go off to their jobs in the morning, and the girls never hear them leave. They sleep until noon, then rise and watch talk shows while eating bowls of cereal. The milk in their spoons is sweet even after the Froot Loops or Cheerios or cornflakes have been eaten.

  One of them always calls the other by the middle of the raunchiest of the talk shows.

  "Are you watching?"

  "Can you believe it?"

  They agree on a place to meet. Downtown in a coffee shop or a bookstore or the boutique where their ears were pierced.

  They would rather go to the mall, but a bus would have to be taken to get there.

  Downtown will have to do.

  They can walk there from their mothers' apartments. In summer most of the students are gone, and what they've left is a humid breeze blowing the dry dirt and trash around by the curb, along with the street people playing their busted guitars, and the empty emerald beer bottles in the bushes.

  Also in summer the restaurants and stores along East Main Street and University Avenue prop their doors open. The smell of incense mingles with the smell of moo shu pork. There are always a few young men—graduate students? Young professors?—sitting at outdoor tables eating egg rolls and reading library books.