The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  The girls watch these men, speculate about them, but in the end those men are always joined by young women wearing wire-rimmed glasses and slim black jeans.

  Still, now and then, one of them will look up from his library book and say hi in a way that might be an invitation for the girls to join him.

  The girls say hi back in a way that lets him know they won't, and he returns to his book, angry or embarrassed.

  IT WAS A QUIET MORNING....

  Only the squirrels and the mailman were out.

  The squirrels were arguing among themselves—Get over here, No, you get over here—from opposite sides of the road, and Diana felt jumpy, watching them from behind the wheel of her minivan.

  The apple and pear trees were in bloom. They looked ecstatic. Shot through with pleasure, from their green blood to their exploded blossoms. They looked like virgins about to be sacrificed, happily, martyrs—pagan, or prom queens, or brides of Christ—and they trembled in the cool and anticipatory breeze.

  The mailman, crossing the street at the corner, took his cap off by the bill for a moment and wiped his forehead with his hand. Already it was warming up. His blue bag was stuffed with packages and letters. Something in there, Diana knew, had her name on it.

  He'd been the mailman in this neighborhood ever since Paul and Diana had moved in. His name was Randall, a fact she knew only because Emma had asked him one Saturday morning and had promptly reported the information to Diana.

  Diana thought Randall turned and looked at her as she drove by, still with his hat in his hand, but when Diana waved, he only looked blankly back at her.

  He was a handsome man—middle-aged but very fit, deeply tanned, with a full head of curly dark hair. And although he was still blocks from Paul and Diana's house, she knew he'd be on their front stoop soon. He moved through the neighborhood with otherworldly swiftness.

  Turning the corner Diana saw that the house was for sale in which Mrs. Mueler had lived, and died, recently, of pancreatic cancer. It was a bungalow—an unusually modest home in that neighborhood—and it was painted light green. It had a large picture window that faced the street. A few times, walking around the block with Emma, or in search of Emma after she learned to ride a bike, Diana had seen Mrs. Mueler standing at that large window, looking out at the street—perhaps this was before the cancer, or while the cancer was still a secret kept deep in the pancreas of Mrs. Mueler—and Diana had waved brightly.

  Mrs. Mueler waved back without smiling.

  Once, Diana saw her in her front yard, kneeling. Diana said hello, and Mrs. Mueler turned around, startled, and said, "Good afternoon," although it was early dusk.

  Diana was sure that Mrs. Mueler didn't recognize her or remember that she'd tried, in what seemed like another lifetime, to have Diana kicked out of Briar Hill High for carrying a Baggie of marijuana to school in her purse...

  Still, Diana felt as though Mrs. Mueler, on her knees with a ball of roots and dirt, poised over a dark hole growing darker as the sun set, had looked at her suspiciously. And even though Diana held no grudge—why should she, knowing that she'd been more than deserving of the punishment Mrs. Mueler wanted to mete out?—she'd felt relieved of something, some small burden from the past that weighed no more than crushed leaves in a plastic Baggie but which had been weighing her down nonetheless for more than two decades, when she read in the paper that Mrs. Mueler had died "at home, after a long batde with pancreatic cancer."

  FOR SALE, the sign in her front yard said now. The curtains in the picture window had been opened for the first time in years, and Diana saw someone move beyond them—a realtor? a relative?—as she drove by. A quick glimpse of a thin face.

  When she pulled onto her own block, she was surprised to see Randall the mailman standing on the front steps. He was stuffing a large manila envelope into their box.

  How could it be? Hadn't she just seen him five or six blocks over?

  "Hi!" Diana called, rolling down her window as she pulled in the drive.

  "Hello, ma'am," Randall said, but he didn't look at her. In the past he'd been friendly—not overly so, but friendlier than this. He'd never called her "ma'am." He knew, of course, her name.

  "Didn't I just see you a few blocks over?" Diana asked.

  Randall the mailman must not have heard her. He crossed the lawn between their house and the neighbor's without looking back, and Diana felt embarrassed, her mouth left hanging open for a moment until she consciously shut it and swallowed, watching him walk away, slipping between the shrubs quickly.

  But not quickly enough to have walked five blocks in under sixty seconds.

  A mistake.

  Another mailman.

  Or maybe she had never seen any mailman at all, only thought she'd seen one. Maybe she'd seen a memory of having seen Randall on some other summer morning—the morning before, or the year before. Randall had always been their mailman. How many times had she seen him walking through the neighborhood, carrying a bag full of envelopes and catalogs? Maybe it was a simple synapse misfiring ... a moment of confusion between one hemisphere and the other. It must have happened all the time. How often did people burn down their houses because they'd left something boiling on the stove, something they cleady remembered removing from the stove?

  Diana rolled up the minivan window and pulled all the way into the driveway and parked in the garage, the door of which she always left open when she went out on a quick errand. It was probably not the best idea, since there was a key to the house hanging on a hook in there, right above the trash cans, where any thief would probably look first for a key to a house. And there was also a short flight of rickety plywood stairs that stretched straight from the garage to a room above it, the room which was her studio. The door to the studio didn't even have a lock.

  But it was a neighborhood with so little crime that it was impossible to stay vigilant and not feel neurotic. The safety of the neighborhood encouraged complacence, and probably made them more vulnerable because of it. Yet Diana couldn't understand how a person could prepare for something that couldn't be imagined, something that had never been experienced, and could not have been expected...

  Like a stroke, or a bomb, or a flash flood, or death.

  Maybe some people could think that far ahead—like the emperor who'd had a whole army of terracotta soldiers and horses made to accompany him to the grave.

  Maybe Mrs. Mueler had. Maybe she'd cleaned out her closets when she was diagnosed with cancer, so her relatives wouldn't have to. Some people, Diana knew, wrote the services for their own funerals, picked out their own cemetery plots. And those people would have shut and locked their doors even in the safest of neighborhoods, even in a neighborhood in which there hadn't been even an act of vandalism in half a century.

  Those people could have imagined it and prepared for it But Diana couldn't.

  Before she went in the house, she walked around to the front, to retrieve the manila envelope she'd seen Randall stuff into the box.

  The sun had already made its way to the daisies, which looked crushed from the hard rain of the night before, but stirring, lifting themselves out of the damp dirt.

  The front yard was littered with apple blossom petals, as if there'd been a wedding there in the rain, or a fight between two flower girls. On the lawn those petals looked like cool candle flames, or polished fingernails.

  "Hi, Mrs. McFee!" a boy yelled as he rode his bike past their house, but by the time Diana turned to see who it was, the boy had blurred halfway down the block.

  Who had it been, and why wasn't he in school?

  She lifted the manila envelope out of the mailbox.

  DIANA was written in large block letters with black Magic Marker on the front of it, and her address, in smaller letters, underneath:

  1740 Maiden Lane

  The handwriting seemed vaguely familiar. It reminded her of her own. She walked back around the side of the house, tearing open the gummed flap as she walked.

  S
he glanced at the daisies as she passed. Not even nine o'clock in the morning and they were already stretching, lifting their big eyes to the sky....

  Inside the envelope, in the yellow shadows, there was nothing.

  Diana held the empty envelope in her hand a long time.

  The daisies, from the corner of her eye ... she could almost see them writhing, trying—

  She looked more deeply into the envelope, but still there was nothing. She looked at the front of it again. Her name, but no return address. Then she shook her head, crumpled the envelope up and took it into the garage, removed the lid from the trash can, which was empty but smelled of decay, and threw the envelope in. The trash can made no sound as the envelope dropped into the bright aluminum, but it shuddered when Diana put the top back on. She stepped back into the light, and then she thought about it again.

  Envelopes contained letters. Envelopes did not arrive in mailboxes empty.

  She went back and retrieved the envelope, turning her face away from the sweet stink of years of garbage gone but still lingering in the brilliant container, and pressed out the wrinkles as best she could, then looked inside it again.

  This time she noticed a small scrap of paper at the very bottom of the envelope. A tiny piece of notebook paper folded into fourths. She took it out, pressed it flat, and walked with it out of the garage, where she could see it more clearly in the light.

  In black ink, in big block letters: SLUT.

  Something ran through her like a knife blade, but made of cool air, and she inhaled, turned the paper over, looked at it again.

  That word. A word she hadn't heard or used in years but which used to mean something to her ... about her.

  She put her hand to her forehead, and it felt hot.

  High school.

  It hadn't been since high school that she would have cared whether or not she'd been called a slut. In high school that word was the worst thing a girl could be called, and that word was everywhere. It was in the water that came out of the drinking fountain, in the whisper of the paper-towel dispenser in the girl's bathroom—and the word had to do with her, with her body and its curves, with her dreams and desires ... something having to do with the very essence of her, the sexual essence of who she was and was becoming—a physical creature, all five senses poised, bared, laid open, and condemned.

  And then, simply, she went to college, where everyone had sex, everyone had sexuality—bisexuality, homosexuality. They gave you condoms with the key to your dorm room.

  Slut.

  Miraculously, suddenly, the word had evaporated from the world. The word meant nothing. And then she'd gotten married.

  And now ... now it was almost a compliment, Diana realized, half smiling.

  To be a forty-year-old woman in a gray sweat suit standing out behind her clapboard house having just dropped her daughter off at school, breakfast dishes waiting to be washed, the hood of her minivan still warm in the garage....

  To be a soccer mom someone might have taken the time to think of as a slut.

  She didn't laugh out loud, but she smiled.

  There was no sting in it, no life, and the realization came as a strange relief, a strange relief out of nowhere, like finding out you didn't have a disease you'd never suspected you'd had.

  But who would have sent her such a note?

  She looked at the handwriting again, but the more she looked, the less familiar it became. Finally she crumpled it all back up and again tossed it in the trash can in the garage, closing the lid tightly, walking away from it, still smiling.

  It was certainly not worth worrying about.

  Some crazy student of Paul's. Some student of her own from the community college, someone she'd failed for poor attendance, or someone who remembered her from high school—some old boyfriend she'd dumped.

  She was forty years old. She'd lived in Briar Hill her whole life. The number of people she'd hurt or rejected, the number of times she'd said something cruel (though never intentionally—could she ever remember a time she'd intentionally hurt another person?) was unfathomable by now. It made her dizzy and sick to think of it, like looking into an abyss full of stink and flies. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Some inexplicable message intended to—what? Unnerve her? Disarm her?

  She wouldn't let it.

  Life was short.

  Her life was perfect.

  And it was hers.

  Peonies and Lilac

  ALWAYS WITH EMMA OFF AT SCHOOL, THE HOUSE SEEMED empty to Diana—though not unpleasantly so.

  All the life that had taken place in it only an hour before—the toast, the coffee, the scrambled eggs, the pajamas tossed on the bedroom floor—all that life had accumulated a silence that seemed made of whatever dusty particles thought and memory sent out of the mind in the process of passing.

  Nothing had happened there in the brief time between Diana's leaving with Emma and returning without her, and nothing would change now until Diana chose to change it.

  The house was a still life....

  A still life you could walk into and observe with all of your senses, the stationary images of your things, the silence and the material that made up your life.

  Paul's spoon lying where he had left it beside his bowl of Grape-Nuts.

  Emma's Pooh cup half full of Sunny Delight.

  Diana stopped at that image and took a sip from the cup. The strange breakfast beverage in it—what was it made of, the juice of some hallucinated fruit?—tasted oddly cold, and the frozen sweetness of it opened a bright eye of pain at Diana's temple, and the pain of it placed her securely back into her body. She poured what was left of the juice into the sink and put the cup upside down in the empty dishwasher, then opened the back door and looked out into the yard.

  A damp violet fog poured in through the screen door, filtered into a million little microscopic squares. But there was heat in the breeze. The sun was rising higher in the sky, and it was burning away the cool storm of the night before.

  Diana stood very still, trying to remember something ... Who?...What?

  There was something (someone?) standing just outside of the reach of her thoughts, someone she needed to recall, who had been brought in on the warmed breeze but then been turned to molecules passing through the back door's screen. It was something that bothered her, some detail that was out of place in her dream-perfect life, something that, if she could reach it with her recollection, she might be able to return to its right place.

  Miss Zena?

  Miss Zena.

  It must have been the peonies in their crisp tutus, just bloomed, that had reminded her—the ribbons and lace, the girly purity of it. Then, a little black cloud passing over the prettiness of her backyard. Diana never thought of ballet, of her pink satin toe shoes, without feeling shame.

  For years she'd taken ballet lessons at Miss Zena's School of Dance, a studio owned by a French woman in a strip mall outside of town, and she'd loved it ... loved the French woman, who was all grace and bones, loved ballet ... but then she'd quit taking the lessons after ninth grade, after she'd gotten caught smoking marijuana with six or seven other ballerinas in the dressing room just before they were to go onstage for their end-of-the-year recital.

  They were wearing black leotards, flesh-colored tights, hot-pink tutus that circled their hips and waists with stiffness. The auditorium was in one of the oldest buildings in Briar Hill. Heavy velvet curtains. Radiators knocking, leaking boiling water onto the dressing room's cracked ceramic tiles.

  It was spring. The heat was unnecessary, especially with all those girls perspiring in their leotards, and it steamed up the dressing room mirrors.

  They'd gathered in a circle and passed the joint around, the smell of cotton balls and the sickly sweetness of those burning leaves.

  It hadn't been Diana's joint, and it hadn't been her idea, but there she was in the circle when Miss Zena, who must have been standing in the doorway for a while by the time she wa
s noticed, said, crying a little, "It ees time for you to dance, you leetle beetches, you beetches who half broken my heart."

  There was no time to talk then. Whoever had the joint tossed it away somewhere, and Miss Zena hurried them out to the back of the stage, which was dark and hung with ropes and discarded ballet shoes, sequins and tinsel scattered on folding chairs, and the heavy dust-smell of velvet.

  The accompanist started to bang out their cue, then stopped, and the girls drifted into the stage lights. There were chalk circles drawn on the floor, and each girl moved into her own circle, the swish-swish of tutus in the silence.

  All Diana remembered was the sensation of floating, a starburst in her eyes, and then it seemed as though there were little bits of glitter attaching themselves to her eyelids and arms. She had never smiled before with such unselfconscious joy. When she looked out at the audience of parents and siblings, she saw electric beach grass blowing in a breeze.

  Wild applause when they were done.

  Her heart was beating hard.

  "That was beautiful," her mother said when she came to the dressing room to get her. "You girls are so talented," she said, speaking to them all.

  They didn't look at one another.

  Miss Zena never told any parents what had happened, as far as Diana knew, but none of the girls who'd gotten caught in the dressing room signed up for ballet lessons the next year. When her mother asked her why she was giving up ballet, Diana had simply said, "It's for little girls."

  And even all these years later it still filled her with remorse and a terrible stab of loss to think about it. All those years of ballet lessons—Miss Zena scolding her about her derriere, her pliés and relevés, maneuvering her thin feet into satin shoes with cardboard toes, the tautness of ribbons around her ankles.

  All that sweetness and grace had turned into one false and brilliant performance in her mind, a few fleeting and hallucinatory minutes of fraudulent bliss.