The Life Before Her Eyes Read online

  Emma was standing there beside Diana, looking from Diana's face to the sky.

  "What are you looking at, Mommy?"

  ***

  Asleep on the air mattress on her friend's floor, she dreams she's buying peaches again from the old Mexican couple in the country.

  This time her friend isn't with her.

  The old woman stands behind the old man, and her black shawl flaps in the breeze. Overhead, crows are circling the rusty pickup truck, but they don't scream.

  The old man weighs, on a silver balance, the peaches she's picked out. He places them one by one on the scales, then he looks up at her angrily.

  It's not until then that she notices that on the other scale, weighed against the fruit she wants, there's a baby.

  A baby no larger than her hand.

  It's bloody and naked, and it opens its mouth, but instead of a cry, what comes out is the screaming of a crow.

  THE THUNDERSTORM OF THE EARLIER PART OF THE day had brought new life to everything—a steamy, groping greenness.

  Flowers that had put off blooming—roses, rhododendrons—had bloomed with sticky brilliance as the day went on. In their heaviness, their sudden fullness, they seemed out of place, as if they'd arrived at the lawn party too desperate and overdressed. Like aging beauty queens. The air, humid and thick with their perfume, made Diana feel as if she might choke. She told Emma to roll her window up, and Diana turned the air-conditioning on.

  "Who was that girl who fell?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Emma said, and she shrugged. She was looking at her hands in her lap, not at Diana.

  "Did you see her?" Diana asked.

  Emma shrugged again. "I guess," she said. "I don't know."

  "The girls were running right past her. No one was going to help."

  "She was okay," Emma said. "She didn't need help."

  Diana looked sharply at Emma and snapped, "I don't like that tone of voice, young lady."

  Her daughter's rosebud mouth fell open, and she flushed, then muttered something under her breath and turned away from Diana.

  But Diana reached over and took Emma's chin in her hand. "Look at me," she said.

  Reluctantly Emma allowed her face to be turned toward her mother's.

  "Listen, Emma, I don't want my daughter to be the kind of brat who won't stop to help a little girl who's fallen down. Do you hear me?"

  Emma struggled to get away from Diana's grip.

  "Do you hear me?" Diana asked again, more harshly.

  "I hear you!" Emma said, and burst into tears. "I didn't! It wasn't my fault she fell down. I don't even know her. I wasn't anywhere near her!"

  Diana let her daughter struggle free. She put her hand back on the steering wheel. "I know," she said, calming down, breathing deeply, but Emma continued to sob. Diana let her. She drove.

  On the windshield a wand of light passed back and forth, changing colors as they slipped under the trees and telephone lines. Now blue, now pink, now green. Diana tried not to watch it in front of her. She knew she needed to keep her eyes on the road, not on the hypnotic sunlight on the glass. She glanced out the driver's side window at the sidewalk, where she saw a sparrow fluttering in a puddle. It must have been bathing, unless it was injured, drowning. It was gray, dull, and soft, like a dirty-star.

  They were already half a block past the sparrow in the puddle when Diana felt her breath leave her body again—an exhalation that felt as if the air had been yanked from her lungs.

  That sparrow. How long had it been since she'd seen a sparrow? How long had it been since she'd seen any bird?

  She inhaled hard and fast, catching the breath back, but she felt weak and dizzy with it. The air-conditioning was brutally cold inside her body, and it entered her like the realization that she had, somehow, forgotten about birds.

  Where had they been?

  Until that moment, that sparrow in the puddle, she hadn't seen a bird in ... how long?

  Surely they hadn't all gone south for the winter, come back late.

  But where had they been? Why hadn't she thought of birds until this moment—birds in the backyard, birds on the phone lines, birds perched on the roof of the garage?

  Surely she'd seen birds, but as hard as she tried she couldn't remember the last ... when the hell was the last time she'd seen a bird?

  Diana rubbed her eyes and again felt the place where the sharp wind and mirror of the minivan had grazed her, a place where she felt no pain whatsoever.

  It was a mistake. Birds were everywhere. They had been all along. Now that the idea of them had returned to her, she saw them on the electrical wire, dashing through the air. She could hear them singing in the trees. A robin hopped along the sidewalk mechanically, like a parody of a robin. It had been precisely at the moment that Diana had noticed that birds were missing that the world had filled up with birds again.

  Cold

  WHEN EMMA HAD QUIT CRYING, DIANA PUT A HAND ON her daughter's knee and said, "Let's go have an ice-cream cone. It seems like ice-cream-cone weather to me."

  Emma nodded, but she didn't look at her mother and didn't smile.

  Diana parked the car in front of Baskin Robbins, and they went inside.

  Behind the ice-cream counter, there was a boy with red hair and freckles. To Diana he looked like a caricature of a teenage boy working at an ice-cream parlor. When she was a teenager herself, this was exactly the kind of boy she would have despised—too cute, too clean, too polite. She'd preferred boys who didn't smile, who didn't work. She'd preferred boys with a bit of the devil in them. Boys with tattoos. Motorcycles.

  But then she'd changed.

  And now she loved this boy.

  She loved the freckles, and the eagerness with which he smiled and said, "Hi. How can I help you?"

  And she loved the ice cream behind the glass—such a pure and simple pleasure!

  Emma stood on tiptoe and put her face against the glass, peering in at it, and the boy watched her patiently. He radiated patience, kindness. He was wearing a white apron over his red T-shirt and jeans, and the apron was immaculately clean.

  Diana didn't need to look. She knew exactly what she'd have. The same thing she always had. "A scoop of vanilla in a sugar cone, please," she said.

  The boy smiled. He said, "We're out of vanilla, ma'am."

  "Out of vanilla?" she asked.

  He was still smiling. Was Diana mistaken, or did he seem to be making fun of her? Did he seem to be laughing to himself as he smiled at Diana?

  "French vanilla?" Diana asked. "Vanilla yogurt. Soft-serve vanilla? Nothing?"

  The smile stayed, but it grew thinner. His eyes were very pale and cold, as transparent as the glass between Diana and the ice cream. He was laughing at her. "No vanilla," he said.

  Diana felt a hot flush of blood spread from her chest to her neck, and she stepped away from the boy, away from the counter.

  "Emma," she said, "what do you want?"

  "Blue Moon, please," Emma said to the boy, "in a cup, please."

  "One scoop or two?" the boy asked Emma sweetly.

  "One scoop, please," Emma said.

  The boy looked from Emma back to Diana, and he was no longer smiling.

  "Nothing for you, ma'am?"

  Diana shook her head.

  She looked away from him. In the glass, she could see her own reflection, and it was without substance, or dust. It was as clean and transparent, itself, as glass...

  Without flesh, without wrinkles, without details, she looked like a girl again to herself, the kind of girl who'd taunted boys like the one who was taunting her now.

  And on the other side of her own face, she could see the tubs of ice cream lined up cold and waiting for other customers. She saw that the one labeled VANILLA was utterly empty behind the glass.

  It's the birds that wake the girls, scratching and singing outside on the sill and in the trees right outside the window....

  Pigeons, sparrows, robins, and other birds whose names
the girls don't know.

  The sun is very yellow ... a garish yellow, the yellow of a school bus. It bounces around on the shiny spoonlike surfaces of the leaves. Even with the shades pulled, it's too bright to sleep with those spoonfuls of yellow light in the room.

  The girls get up, and each one tucks her own mussed hair behind her ears and rubs her eyes. They go to the kitchen in the oversized T-shirts they've slept in and drink Sunny Delight and eat yogurt, granola bars, Cap'n Crunch, and whatever else there is to eat that doesn't need to be cooked.

  One of the girls tells the other about her dream.

  The fruit.

  The baby.

  The old man and woman.

  The abortion.

  She doesn't mean to tell her friend about the abortion. It just slips out. She's never told anyone about the abortion. Suddenly it's real, and she starts to cry.

  Not loudly. No sobbing. She keeps eating her Cap'n Crunch as she cries. The sugary milk in her cereal bowl tastes like tears. Her friend, the one who is a virgin, who has a bumper sticker on her car that says IT'S NOT A CHOICE, IT'S A CHILD, stands up and walks to the other side of the table, puts her arms around her, and holds her tightly until the one who is crying lets her spoon slip soundlessly into the milk.

  EMMA'S LIPS WERE BLUE, BUT SHE LOOKED HAPPY WHEN she'd finished her ice cream.

  They walked back to the minivan together and got in.

  "I forgot to tell you," Diana said, trying to sound more cheerful than she felt. "I think we might have a new cat."

  "What?" Emma said, then squealed and looked at Diana with wide astonished eyes. Diana had to look away from her blue lips.

  "Yep," she said. "I think a cat found us today."

  "What kind of cat? Mommy! Can we keep it?"

  "Well," Diana said, "it's a shorthaired black cat—"

  "LikeTimmy!"

  "Just like Timmy. And ... if no one comes looking for him, I don't see why we shouldn't keep him."

  "Yes! Yes!" Emma cried, clapping her hands.

  They turned the corner onto Maiden Lane.

  "Does Daddy know?" Emma asked.

  "I called Daddy and told him this afternoon."

  "Does Daddy say it's okay if we keep the cat?"

  Diana glanced over at her daughter knowingly and said, "What do you think, Emma-o."

  Emma smiled.

  It was a joke between them: Daddy says yes if Mommy wants him to.

  But just as Diana glanced over at her daughter—the blue against her pink lips had turned them to a kind of deep magenta, a parody of painted lips, the lipstick of a whore on Emma's sweet mouth, or a terrible death mask, the face of the child found floating in the neighbor's pool—a bird flew fast and hard into the driver's side window. Diana only saw it out of the corner of her eye. A black, feathered fist knocking once, then dropping into the road.

  Instinctively she swerved, and the front tire of the minivan ran up over the curb, then thudded back down into the road when she corrected. Diana's chest hit the steering wheel, but it didn't hurt. Just a light punch that didn't knock the air out of her this time. Emma was bounced, but her seatbelt held her in place.

  "Jesus," Diana said. She could feel springs underneath them, softening the jolt.

  Emma said nothing. She had her hands folded tightly in her lap as if she were ready to say a prayer.

  "Did you see that?" Diana asked.

  "What?" Emma asked. She didn't look at Diana.

  "A bird flew into the window."

  Emma raised her shoulders and shook her head but didn't unclasp her hands.

  Diana pulled slowly, with exaggerated care, into the driveway, past the front porch and the empty white rockers, then past Paul's bicycle, which had slipped into the daisies from the place where he'd propped it against the house. She parked the minivan outside the garage. She was shaking. She could hardly see in the bright afternoon sunlight. She didn't want to risk scraping the side of the minivan against the garage walls, something that was hard enough not to do when she was feeling fine and seeing clearly.

  Emma jumped out quickly.

  "Daddy?" she called to air.

  Diana got out slowly, then went over to her husband's fallen bicycle and pulled it up by the handlebars. A mass of daisies, caught in the chain and spokes of the front tires, came with it, ripped up by their roots. The noise sounded like hair being torn out, and Diana felt sick and regretful at the sound of it. She let the bicycle fall back into the daisies.

  "Hi, little miss blue lips," Paul said, stepping out of the garage. There was a rag in his hands.

  "Daddy!" Emma cried, and threw herself into his arms.

  He patted her hair.

  Diana looked over at the two of them, at her husband's dirty hand in the gold silk of her daughter's hair...

  "Don't," she said sharply. "You'll get it in her hair."

  Paul took his hand off Emma's head and let it hover just above her. He looked at Diana. Then, full of false cheer, he said to Emma, "Sweetie-pie, can you go inside for a few minutes? I have to talk to Mommy."

  Emma looked reluctant, but she went. The screen door slammed behind her lightly.

  Paul stepped over to where Diana stood beside the daisies. He looked as though he might touch her, but he didn't.

  What was it about him that she was, even now, so thoroughly and physically in love with?

  The arms—which were muscular, but not overly so?

  The beard, which grew grayer every year?

  The eyes? They were blue, but so were her own, so were so many other eyes. She had seen many other pairs of blue eyes in her life.

  But even the first time she saw him, his blue eyes might as well have been the first ones she'd ever seen. She felt she'd seen them before, that she'd dreamed them into being.

  Philosophy 360: Medieval Sources of Modern Thought.

  In it they'd read St Augustine's Confessions, Apuleius, some Dante, some Boethius and Aquinas, The Song of Roland, Beowulf...

  Diana had understood almost nothing.

  She'd been a freshman in a class full of seniors, an art major in a class full of literature majors. She'd stumbled into registering for the class because her mother had told her she thought Professor McFee was the best teacher in the philosophy department Her mother even confessed that she had a crush on him, but Professor McFee was many years younger than her mother, and married.

  In class Diana had taken notes dizzily, trying to listen to Paul's lectures as she jotted down scraps of what he said. But she couldn't do both, couldn't listen and take notes at the same time. Finally she quit taking notes.

  The lectures were delivered quickly, casually. He occasionally glanced at a yellow legal pad, but the lectures never seemed planned. He never wrote on the board. He never seemed to be talking directly about whatever it was they were studying at the time—but about, instead, the myriad issues that arose out of it.

  Diana supposed this was the modern-thought part of the medieval sources, but she knew nothing about the Middle Ages and, oddly, even less about modern culture—at least not the modern culture in which Professor McFee and the other students seemed to be living, a culture full of foreign films and experimental novels and surrealist poets.

  But every once in a while some piece of what was discussed reached out to her, lifted her, as if she were an injured person lying on her back ... a hand at the back of her neck, repositioning her head, which would change her perspective entirely....

  "Sin?" he'd asked. "What is sin? What is evil? What does St. Augustine tell us about sin and about evil?"

  No one raised a hand.

  St. Augustine, she remembered from the reading, had committed one. As a boy he and another boy had stolen peaches from an orchard. They'd picked as much fruit from the trees as they could, and then they'd thrown the fruit away.

  "Why did the boys steal the peaches?"

  "Because they wanted the peaches?"

  "No," someone answered, "they threw the peaches away."
<
br />   "Exactly. They stole the peaches simply to be sinful. That is St. Augustine's definition of evil."

  Her eyes had opened. It was as if she'd been very thirsty and been given a sip of cold water through a straw.

  But most of the time in that class she felt as if she were standing between the Middle Ages and modern thought, trying to watch a movie that was being projected directly onto her face. Luckily they'd begun sleeping together before the midterm, which she never took, and by the end of the semester he'd left his wife and she'd moved into the apartment he'd rented for them at the edge of town.

  Still, Diana kept her notes, what there had been of them before she'd quit trying to jot them down—a souvenir—and sometimes she'd take them off the bookshelf in her studio, where she kept them, and looked at them and wondered what it was she'd been trying to capture from Paul's lectures, in her strained, girlish writing. Some days she had even taken notes in pink ink....

  "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" he'd asked.

  Each soul is a mystery only penetrable by God.

  They'd crossed the street from Angel Hall to a coffee shop where candy was sold by the pound ... cappuccino, cucumber sandwiches.

  Diana wasn't a coffee drinker yet, so he bought her a bag of toffee and a cup of hot chocolate. A few days later, in her dorm room, his hands had shaken as he tried to unbutton her blouse, and finally she had to do it herself. Then, Professor McFee dropped to his knees and kissed her nipples, her torso, the firm muscles of her stomach, her belly button ... he laughed at her gold ring there ... and then he unzipped her jeans and slipped them down to her knees, kissed the rose at her hip.

  Diana lay back on the single bed in her dorm room, which was decorated with stuffed animals and posters of ballet dancers, and as he slid the blouse completely off her shoulders and down her arms, he asked if she was a virgin.

  "Yes," Diana said, and suddenly she was.

  August is the awful, smothering sister of July....

  Even the air-conditioning in their mothers' apartments can't keep August out of their beds at night. It slows down their blood. They don't want to go downtown because of the hot wet blanket of air in the streets. The stink of it. The fat hand of it across their mouths.