The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  She didn't seem to be breathing, though her nostrils were flared and there were tears in her eyes.

  They never hear the door to the girls' room open.

  They never hear his footsteps.

  One of them is whispering the Lord's Prayer ... forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those... when the other says under her breath, "Maybe he's gone. Maybe we ought to go for help."

  The other nods yes, then opens her eyes. She opens them slowly, looking up first, then down at the linoleum floor and the space between the floor and the stall door, and then she cries out.

  It's so brilliant, that cry, that the other girl looks down at her hands and sees her life like a small marble roll out of them, tinder the stall door, past the shoes Michael Patrick's wearing—white Nikes with blue lightning bolts on the sides, laces untied—too far and too quick to get it back.

  THE WOLF BARED HIS TEETH.

  He was about twelve feet away, but Diana could see and smell him. He was a wild animal. No one's pet. She'd seen him before—the blue eyes, the howling in the next room—but that was something else, that was before he became this, before he began this life.

  His teeth were white. His gums were pink But he'd never been bathed except by the rain that fell on his cage. He'd lived his whole life in that cage. He smelled like salt and breath, and his fur was matted, especially on his back. There was blood on the fur on his face. He lifted up his muzzle and sniffed the air, sniffing them—then took, in their direction, one slow gray step, then crouched.

  "So," he says too loudly, and both girls flinch...

  "So," he says more softly, as if sorry to have startled them. "Which one of you girls should I kill?"

  "MOMMY," EMMA SAID AGAIN, AND THEN SHE WHIMPERED.

  And it was the sound of her daughter's voice that woke Diana up to herself.

  "Mommy..."

  For a second Diana could actually see the light from the sun pouring itself into the air, floating in front of her in fluid strands, weightless as hair.

  This was the moment she'd been born for. The moment she'd been allowed to grow into the martyrdom of middle age for, and become a mother. The moment in which she gave up herself—the bells and the bracelets, and the pyramids and planets, all the things of the world she'd seen and never see...

  One of the girls swallows. "Please," she whispers, "don't kill either of us."

  She keeps her eyes open. For a moment, she smells her dog, Muppet Muppet just in from the rain, quivering against her chest like a muscle made of affection.

  Michael Patrick smiles.

  "Oh, but I'm going to kill one of you," he says, "so which one should it be?"

  The other girl sobs. It's warm, and foil of water. She remembers Mr. McCleod telling the class that the heart is 95 percent water and that the brain...

  She can't remember, but she knows it's water, too. Warm water. Salty water. The mind, the soul, memory ... all of it floating in that water. Time, and love, and terror, swimming through a body made mostly out of tears.

  She swallows the tears, closes her eyes, sees her mother standing in the doorway, wearing a white nightgown. Her mother's eyes are wide. Her face is creased from sleep. She's half awake but ready to run through the doorway, to shake her daughter awake, calling out her name. Then she sees her father at Circuit City selling a stereo to a student. (Briefly, without knowing why, he thinks of her.)

  Behind Michael Patrick the mirror, which the two girls only moments ago stepped out of, shines clean and empty, except for his back reflected in it.

  All these years, they both marvel, they'd never even really noticed him—an ugliness moving among them. A darkness opening doors, locking his bike to the bike rack, wearing a backpack full of more darkness, closing his spiral notebook on the words inside it.

  All those years, that ugliness hadn't even touched them, hadn't changed them, hadn't hurt them, hadn't even occurred to them until now.

  That's the real surprise, one of the girls would say to the other if she could speak to her now, if she could call her best friend on the telephone from her bedroom, if she could lean over and turn the radio down as they drove together into the weedy green of June, and say something, anything.

  If she could glance at her friend's reflection beside her in the girls'-room mirror, put down her hairbrush, and smile, she'd say, That's the miracle ... the real miracle ... all the goodness all our lives....

  Then one of the girls says it in a whisper. He doesn't hear her at first. He leans closer. "What?" he asks. "What did you say?"

  She clears her throat and says it louder, voice shaking, but very clear, "If you're going to kill one of us, kill me.

  "Kill me," she says, "not her."

  "EMMA," DIANA WHISPERED INTO HER EAR, "TURN around, Emma, and run."

  Again, the growling, but when Diana looked back, the place where Emma had been standing was empty. Nothing but shining, a perfect space scissored out of the air, a freedom full of little stars and powdered sugar and forgiveness and affection.

  Then Michael Patrick says in a softer voice, almost as if he's sorry to have to ask, but having to ask, "And what do you have to say?"

  The blond girl bows her head.

  Of course. Of course he would want to know. And now, she realizes for the first time, she has never really been afraid—never, not even once before in her whole life...

  This is what it is to be afraid:

  The skeleton and the muscles and the blood pumping through her heart, willing her to live ... all that water, trying to stay afloat in all that water.

  No jealousy. No hatred, no anger, no spite or resentment. Nothing...

  Just this terror, which is everything.

  Michael Patrick puts the gun nearer to her ear. It touches her temple, and its blue blackness is a terrible, intimate whisper. She has to answer it. She opens her eyes and sees how empty the mirror on the girls'-room wall is except for Michael Patrick's shoulders. Still, in it she can see herself twenty years from now, driving a silver minivan into middle age, with a daughter strapped into the seat beside her. On the bumper of that minivan as it drives away, she sees a sticker. It says, CHOOSE LIFE. There will be no punishment for choosing to live, her terror tells her, except to live with this.

  "Kill her," she says, "not me."

  WHEN DIANA GLANCED BEHIND HER, JUST BEFORE THE darkness separated them, she cried out with joy to see her daughter darting into a row of pine trees...

  Running into the fairy-tale distance, running as fast as her little legs could carry her, not looking back, not slowing down for a moment, making it safely to the other side.

  And when the wolf sprang in her direction, Diana spread her arms wide to take him in.

  The first shot causes a warm rain to fall on Diana's arms from the sky. The second plants a mirrored jewel in the left temporal lobe of her brain ... a place she could have named on a quiz but which now seems to be the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is.

  Epilogue

  May

  Diana was Mayqueen. The whole hospital hummed like a white gown around her. An air conditioner rattled near the windows, which were blank and brilliant. Someone had wrapped her face in light to keep the darkness from draining out of her into the world. They were saying her name in whispers and screams—

  Diana.

  Diana.

  Do you know your name?

  Do you know where you are?

  A man was pounding on her chest. A woman breathed into her mouth. Something was poured into her eyes, and then the eyes were taped shut, and Diana was taken away on a stretcher, which seemed to her to be circled by birds—one of every kind of bird she'd ever known in the world.

  Sparrows, seagulls, robins, doves. She could have touched them, but her hands were tied. She could have named them, but she'd forgotten about words.

  They flew up like dreams, then wafted away.

  She's dead, someone said.

  "Who? Who?" she asked.r />
  Not you, sweetheart, he said.

  She was raised, sung to, carried. A crowd gathered to watch, and then a door slammed shut behind her, and then it began...

  The decades of dreaming.

  The centuries and lifetimes of mirrors and dreaming.

  Someone put a jar of lilacs on the tray beside her bed.

  A black crow landed on the windowsill calling, You, you, staring into the glass, in her black habit, angry.

  But Diana stared straight at her, and the bird rose, beating into the blue, and disappeared.

  Machines breathed for her. There were songs. A radio. Sweetheart, sweetheart. She could hear her mother sobbing somewhere beyond her.

  Was she being born? Born again? She can't hear you, she heard her father say.

  But she could.

  And she could see them. She could see them where they sat together in the bleachers full of grief and love. Were they even holding hands?

  When Mr. McCleod settled the crown on her head, there was a tear like a tiny rhinestone in the corner of his right eye.

  "You're the most beautiful Mayqueen Briar Hill High has ever had," he said.

  And then the float full of real and paper roses began to shiver, and to move.

  It was pulled by a long white limousine, out of the football stadium and into the high school parking lot and onto the streets of her hometown, which were lined up with people holding bouquets and chanting her name.

  Diana. Diana.

  Before she was pulled out of their sight, Diana turned to wave to her parents... Good-bye, good-bye. They were mouthing the words to her, throwing kisses in her direction, holding tightly to one another as they must have done when she was made.

  She could hear music—flutes and trumpets and violins—being played for her somewhere, somewhere ahead of her, rising from the whole town, the whole world, wrapping it in clear weather. It was, after all, spring, and the breath that rose from the world was made of flowers. The street was scattered with petals.

  There were so many people lining the street!

  They were waving and crying and laughing as she passed.

  She saw Mrs. Mueler, who was holding the red suede purse that belonged to Diana, and a ring of keys. She was smiling. She was sorry. Was she trying to hand the purse to Diana?

  Diana leaned over, but the purse and the keys were out of her reach. She just laughed, and Mrs. Mueler laughed, waving... Later, later...

  Diana saw, in the crowd, a little girl she'd known in elementary school ... a chubby little blond with glasses, a girl Diana had once watched fall to her knees on the concrete steps outside their school and hadn't bothered to stop to help. The girl had cried out, and her glasses had broken, and there was blood on her face, but Diana had just kept running.

  Now that girl was skipping, smiling. She was happy to see Diana. She forgave her. She was fine. She would never fall again, her smiling and waving seemed to say.

  Then, over the shining heads of children—little girls holding small white crosses, wearing clean uniforms and bright pigtails—Diana saw Miss Zena in a black leotard. She had Diana's toe shoes, pink satin and ribbons, and she was running gracefully behind the crowd, mouthing Diana's name. Miss Zena whirled the toe shoes by the ribbons like a lasso in the air, then threw them over the heads of the little girls, and they flashed toward Diana and landed at her feet. Diana could see that Miss Zena was laughing and crying at the same time, and Diana waved to her as she passed, Thank you, thank you...

  As the float turned the corner, passing the Burger King, a boy with one arm sprinted across the parking lot, holding up a bouquet of bloodred roses. He ran fast. He caught up with the float and reached up to Diana with his one arm, holding the flowers for her, and Diana was able to take them from him—and he stopped running but waved his hand wildly in the air, growing smaller and smaller as Diana passed into the crowd and the float turned the corner onto Maiden Lane. She glanced behind her then and saw a man with a gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses pedaling a red bike furiously behind the float. Professor McFee. He was crying, out of breath. He couldn't catch up. He had something to say. Something about good, about evil, about her. He, too, was carrying a bouquet of red roses.

  Then the long white limousine that pulled the float she was riding on sped up and the houses on Maiden Lane began to flash by her faster, but Diana caught a glimpse of a little girl on the front porch of a pretty clapboard house. She was sitting in a white wicker rocker and Timmy was in her lap!

  He was sleeping. The little girl was happy. The daisies off the side of the porch, growing wildly in their sunny spot, were harmless and full of joy. The little girl didn't wave, but when the float passed by, she looked up.

  Randall, the mailman, turned on the front steps and smiled.

  The float turned the corner at the apartment building where Diana lived with her mother. There she saw the blurred image of Sandy Ellsworth standing in a bikini near the curb, dragging on a joint, and Diana shook her head and couldn't help but laugh...

  And then the long white limousine began to pull her even fester, past the town and the houses and the apartment buildings and the churches and the schools.

  Everything was in bloom.

  The whole world was an arrow of beauty.

  Birds zipped by her in the air. Squirrels dashed under the tires of the float, then hurried safely to the other side of the toad and into the branches of the waiting trees, which bowed lower and lower in their greenness, hunching over the toad, making a small dark tunnel around the float, like hands folded in a prayer, through which Diana passed.

  Lilac, sparrow, sunlight, dust...

  "Look," she heard her mother say.

  And then the float stopped at the end of the leafy tunnel, and Diana stepped down slowly from its roses, wearing her white gown, and looked.

  I would like to thank Ann Patty, Lisa Bankoff,

  Bill Abernethy, and Antonya Nelson for the friendship

  and assistance that made the novel possible.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. How did you react to Kasischke's alternating scenes from Diana McFee's fortieth summer with scenes from her high-school years? How does this technique contribute to our understanding of Diana's life, personality, and behavior? Why are apparent past events recounted in the present tense, and apparent present events in the past tense? What effect might this discrepancy of tenses have on our appreciation of Diana's stories?

  2. Why does the narrative turn so frequently to Mr. McCleod, Diana's high-school biology teacher? What is the significance of his appearance at the zoo on the day of Emma's school outing? What is the importance to each of us of what Mr. McCleod tries to impress on all his students—"the enormity, the complexity, of themselves"?

  3. "It is a moment in which a small good could triumph over a small evil," Kasischke writes of Mr. McCleod's not yet noticing the world SLUT written on his blackboard. "The world is always poised, waiting before such moments." Why do you agree or disagree with the possibility of small goods triumphing over small evils? How might we know that the world waits before such moments? What kind of small good might have prevented Michael Patrick's attack on his fellow students? What evils, small or large, occur in the novel for which there is neither explanation or identifiable source?

  4. What parts "of the dream of the life she'd someday have" contribute to the quality of the adult Diana's life, and what parts contribute a distinctly dreamlike quality to that life? Which elements and events seem part of a credible actual life, and which suggest that Diana's life is not what it appears to be? At what point in the story did you suspect that the adult Diana's life is a "dream" projected instantaneously into the future from a fear-filled Briar Hill High girl's room?

  5. Forty-year-old Diana's rush of feeling for her daughter, Emma, "had to do with the great, unexpected mercy of love." What do you think Kasischke means by the "mercy of love"? What other instances of the mercy of love occur in the novel, and how do they contribute to
our understanding of the role of love in all our lives? What failures of love's mercy occur, and what is their significance?

  6. What does the novel indicate about the fragility and the tenuousness of life, even young life? In what ways might we understand the sentence, "Her daughter ... would only be a child for a short time..."? What images of and references to insubstantiality, transitoriness, and the ephemeral occur—for example, Diana's feeling that "her hand could pass right through the furniture and walls" of her dream home? How do these images and references affect our understanding of Diana's life and our own lives?

  7. What is the importance of intentional evil and of intentional good, as Professor McFee presents the concepts? What instances of intentional evil and intentional good do you find in the novel, and how would you explain the circumstances of their occurrence? Do we always have a choice between the intentional and the unintentional in relation to evil and good? Why might "all the goodness all our lives" be "the miracle ... the real miracle"? In what ways does The Life before Her Eyes celebrate the exuberance of life in the face of death and the glory of good in the face of evil?

  8. Why should Diana McFee feel "as if she'd been punched" or feel "a bright flash at the side of her face" when she hears the "unnaturally bright" voice on the radio say, "I am in hell"? What does Diana, as high-school student or as forty-year-old mother, know of hell? What other instances are there of the adult Diana feeling blows to the side of her face, feeling out of breath, or developing sudden and intense headaches, and what might be the significance of those instances?

  9. What significance do physical beauty, sensuality, and "the blatant sexuality" of life have for the teenaged Diana and for the adult Diana? What roles do beauty and sexuality play in the lives of the novel's characters and in all our lives? How successful is Kasischke in conveying the young woman's and older woman's sexual awareness and experience?