The Life Before Her Eyes Read online

  "Tell me, sweetheart," she said.

  Paul cleared his throat and tried to sound serious, though he was smiling widely. He said, "Your faithful servant here has been asked to give the Arthur M. Fuller lecture at the university in the fall."

  "Oh, Paul," Diana said. She moved her hand from her chest to her mouth in a gesture of wonder and enthusiasm, but there was a chemical smell on her palm—something cleaner than soap—and she moved the hand away fast, wiping it on her black pants.

  "Oh, Paul," she said again. "I'm so proud."

  It was an incredible honor. The Arthur M. Fuller lecture was usually reserved for celebrities, dignitaries, or famous and elderly scholars from abroad. It was almost unthinkable that it would be given to one of the university's own. It was, certainly, the highest honor of Paul's career, which had been studded with prizes and awards.

  "What are you going to talk about, Daddy?" Emma asked.

  Emma knew that lecture meant talking. She'd already sat, fidgeting, through a few.

  "Well, honey-bunny, I'm not sure yet, but you'll be the first expert I consult, okay?"

  Emma jumped off Paul's lap to chase a black butterfly, which had fluttered out of the daisies and into the late-afternoon stillness sliding over the McFees' front lawn.

  The Burger King smells like burning flesh and French fries, and the boys behind the counter smile at them when they step out of the bathroom in their cutoffs....

  There are paper Burger King crowns lined up near the cash registers, and one of the girls takes one, settles it precariously on her head.

  "Mayqueen!" the other one says, and they both laugh.

  One of the boys who works behind the counter at Burger King has only one arm. He smiles. The one empty sleeve of his uniform dangles like a ghost arm at his side.

  Both of the girls flirt with him, not just out of pity. He has a bright, eager face and a gentle laugh. He flirts back with the girls from a distance, his olive-green eyes never meeting theirs. At first they think this reserve is due to his being at work, but when they walk away with their French fries and diet Cokes, they see him turn to his coworkers and pretend to be shot, grabbing his stomach with his one hand and collapsing onto the linoleum while the others laugh.

  "He must have a girlfriend," one of the girls says.

  Both girls are used to being flirted with, especially when they've initiated the flirting. They aren't conceited girls. They are simply both very beautiful and very young, and they have no idea that not every girl in the world is treated by men and boys with such intensity and attention.

  They take their diet Cokes and small paper envelopes of French fries out to the Burger King parking lot, sit on the curb, stretch out their legs and let them shine in the sun.

  Both girls will turn seventeen within the next few months, old enough now to get pregnant, to get jobs, to drive cars (neither girl has one yet, and one of the girls has never been allowed to take driver's ed)—they could even get married with their parents' permission—but neither will even be expected to get an after-school job. Their mothers feel too guilty about their girls' childhoods to let them work now....

  All those years spent in day care or with baby-sitters while their divorced mothers worked and dated and took classes at the community college—their daughters are now being compensated for those years by being given all the money they need and vast stretches of unoccupied time.

  They don't have much to do except wait for something to happen in that vastness.

  They eat their French fries slowly. The salt and grease taste good, but they don't need to savor it. Neither girl needs to worry about her weight. The world is still full of French fries—fatty and golden and inexpensive. The future is rich with food ... as much as they want of whatever they want, forever. They've seen their mothers measuring out portions of cottage cheese and skinless chicken breasts, but it's never crossed their minds that such a time in their own lives might come.

  The lot of the Burger King begins to fill with cars. Those cars have to drive past their brilliant legs to park.

  From a silver sports car, two ugly men emerge and walk together toward the restaurant entrance. Neither of the men is talking. They're wearing suits with loosened ties, and one of them has a thin mustache. They both look unself-consciously at the girls' legs as though the legs were attached to nothing, and both girls begin to laugh so hard at the absurdity of it that a young mother—she has a toddler dangling from one arm and a Teletubby diaper bag dangling from the other—gives them a dirty look.

  All the young mothers glance angrily at the girls, whether they're laughing loudly or not. Also the middle-aged women with their prepubescent sons in football uniforms:

  Those women glare over the clattering shoulders of their boys in the direction of the laughter.

  The girls try to lower their voices, glancing nervously at those women, but within a few minutes they are screaming with laughter again.

  Neither understands that the sight of them—long legged, sixteen, utterly free to scream with laughter in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in the middle of the afternoon—might fill some women with ... what?

  Longing? Resentment? Regret?

  Neither girl has ever been an older woman, but every older woman has been a girl.

  SHE'D MADE LINGUINE FOR DINNER, WITH HER OWN tomato sauce.

  She'd bought a bushel of California Reds that morning from the fruit-and-vegetable stand operated every summer on the outskirts of Briar Hill by an elderly Mexican man and his elderly wife.

  They'd been there every summer selling fruits and vegetables at the same junction between M-50 and the Blue Star Highway for twenty years, or longer—ever since Diana had been a child, buying with her mother identical bushels of tomatoes.

  And the couple had always looked old, immortally old, to Diana.

  They never spoke, only handed over whatever was requested of them and took the money for it coldly.

  But Diana didn't mind. It was the fresh produce she went to that corner for ... the apples, the tomatoes, the peaches. She'd been on one diet or another since Emma was born, and it was hard work, every day, watching what passed between her lips, to stay the same weight she'd been before Emma was born—a vigilance, a self-discipline she'd never imagined she'd have—and it wasn't until June, when the fresh fruits and vegetables came back, that Diana felt again what she'd once taken for granted: Eating and guiltless pleasure were relatives.

  "Delicious!" Paul said.

  And it was—the tangy freshness of the tomatoes, the sun and swelling still in them—but Paul always said that.

  Diana was a good cook but not nearly as good as Paul made her out to be. When she'd meet his colleagues for the first time, they'd always say, "Oh, Diana, the incredible cook!"

  At department parties his students would tell her that he often talked in class about what a great cook his wife was.

  Diana watched her family eat the meal she'd made. Paul ate the linguine slowly, relishing, looking up now and then to smile, but Emma only twirled the linguine warily around and around the prongs of her fork. It was a phase, Diana and Paul had decided, this picking instead of eating, this playing with the food to avoid having to consume it, or at least to buy time until eating it. Paul and Diana thought, however, that it was best not to make much of it. Both of them had bad childhood memories of being forced to eat broccoli, or lima beans. Diana could still remember the deep soul-shudder she felt when she was forced to swallow a spoonful of casserole, globbed with cream of mushroom soup, her mother had held for what seemed like hours to her mouth—the cold sweat that broke out on her brow, and her mother, exasperated, saying, "Oh, come on, Diana."

  "Don't you like your linguine?" Paul asked Emma.

  She looked up at him and smiled weakly.

  "Try it," Diana urged her, trying not to sound overly interested in whether or not she did. "The sauce is homemade."

  Emma looked from one of her parents to the other, then at her fork massed wi
th pasta. Tentatively, she put the fork to her mouth, kissed at it like a fish.

  Then she looked up, seeming relieved, and let the linguine pass between her lips. She chewed, swallowed, then went for another bite of linguine, then another.

  Emma ate a plateful of linguine.

  "Well, I guess we've finally found something the picky eater likes!" Paul said, passing the plate back to Emma after putting another helping of linguine on it.

  "This is good," Emma said, digging in again. She ate so fast that there was tomato sauce on her face and on her hands.

  "Whoa, sweetie," Diana said, "slow down a bit." She reached across the table with a napkin and wiped some of the sauce off Emma's sweet, dimpled chin.

  Footsteps

  AFTER DINNER EMMA WENT TO HER ROOM TO FINISH A drawing she'd started the evening before. Maybe, Diana thought, all children spent most of their hours with paints and crayons and sidewalk chalk—by what other means could a child express herself?—but Diana also dared to think that for Emma, as it had been for herself, the artistic impulse might be something more, something out of which a whole life could be created.

  For Diana, drawing had been her grace. Her salvation. At the end of her sophomore year in high school, the year she'd neatly been kicked out of Briar Hill High, the art teacher, Ms. Jacobs, had pulled her aside in the hallway between classes one afternoon.

  Ms. Jacobs was a thin, intense woman, with cascades of dark wavy hair. She wore middle-aged-hippie clothes—scratchy sweaters, Birkenstocks and purple kneesocks, long Indian-print skirts. Diana had liked her from the wary distance at which she regarded all her teachers. Too many times she'd grown fond of a teacher only to get kicked out of the class later, for tardiness or poor attendance. The teachers always liked Diana at first because she was smart and polite and because she carried herself with an adult poise. But then, as Diana began to skip class, miss assignments, fall asleep, they'd dismiss her as another one of those.

  Ms. Jacobs had spoken to Diana in the hallway as if she were her friend. "Diana," she said, "I was a crappy high school student. Art saved me. You're so gifted, maybe it could save you, too, if you took it seriously."

  A few weeks later Ms. Jacobs held up one of Diana's drawings in front of the class—a dark charcoal drawing of a woman's face, angled so that her hair fell over her features. She could have been any woman. It was an image Diana had held in her mind for many years. An image that came to her some mornings when she woke up, an image she saw clearly in all of its shades and outlines before she opened her eyes.

  Ms. Jacobs had said, "This is one of the best student drawings I've ever seen."

  She pointed out the detail, but also the way crucial elements had been left out—mystery, implication. The students hadn't—as Diana feared they would, when she saw it was her drawing being held up in front of the class—snickered or sighed. Even the most cynical of the students—the ones who took art because there weren't any papers or exams—were silent, attentive to the thing Diana had made. A new part of her life began that day.

  When Emma had been upstairs with her drawing for a while, and Paul and Diana had finished their glasses of red wine, they stood up from the dining room table and started to clean up the dinner mess together.

  Diana went into the kitchen, and Paul cleared the table, bringing the dishes to Diana, which she scraped off into the sink, then rinsed. She flipped the garbage disposal switch, and it did its violent underworld chewing and swallowing. Then Diana switched it off and stacked the cleared plates in the dishwasher.

  The kitchen, like the dining room, was small. The cupboards were plain and pine, like the dining room table, and Diana had decorated the walls with small painted plates—flowers, thistles, herbs. It had always been her idea to do this when she had a kitchen of her own ... to start a little collection of something to clutter it with. She had hung a checkered curtain on the window above the kitchen sink.

  While she was bent over the dishwasher sorting the knives—which needed to be pointed down in the silverware basket for safety's sake—from the gentler forks and spoons, Paul came up behind her and slid his hand up the back of her sheer blouse. He leaned over and growled softly into her neck.

  Startled, Diana flinched and dropped a knife on the floor at his feet.

  "It's just me," Paul laughed. "Did you think someone else had slipped into the kitchen?"

  Diana laughed, shook her head. She picked up the knife, which was golden with margarine.

  That growling ... it was the sound Paul used to make when they were first together, back when they used to make love on the floor of his office or in the creaky single bed in her dorm room when her roommate was gone. Over the years that growling had become a signal, Paul's way of letting her know he'd want to make love the minute they were alone.

  Diana turned around, put her arms under her husband's, and offered her mouth to his. She inhaled the sweet grass-smell of his beard and mustache. They kissed long and hard until they heard their daughter's bedroom door creak open above them and the sound of her feet padding across the hardwood floors.

  Every night they talk to each other on the telephone for hours....

  When their mothers ask them what they could possibly have been talking about, they tell them the truth—that they don't know.

  Their voices travel across the town of Briar Hill into each other's bedrooms. The phones they hold to their ears are cordless, weightless. They catch the girls' voices out of air.

  But the voices are so clear, it's as if there is nothing in between them. Not lawns, not gardens, not the walls of their apartment complexes, not a grid of streets with names like Maiden Lane and University Street and Liberty Avenue—streets they walk along every day, streets down which their mothers drive them to school.

  Their hometown is only a small dot on a map, but it's their world. No other hometown has ever existed. They are only sixteen, and the universe is a smeary mess of stars above the small town where they buy their CDs and French fries, develop their crushes, form their friendships—like this one—which are all of history to them. The pyramids. The Hebrews wandering in the desert. The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. None of it has ever existed until this place, until them....If you asked them to find Algiers on a map, they'd giggle, though they are no more or no less superficial than any other American girls.

  Sixteen.

  They've never heard of the Magna Carta, but they know the intimate secrets of the stars....

  Not the stars in the sky...

  Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, Madonna, Britney Spears.

  "Nate's going to ask you out. He was looking at you today."

  "No way!"

  "Really ... he was staring straight at you."

  "He was probably just staring out the window."

  "Well, he was staring out the window, too..."

  "My mother just said I have to empty the dishwasher."

  "Call me back."

  "Okay. Give me fifteen."

  "Bye."

  "Bye."

  IT WAS A BLESSING AND A CURSE, THE SOUNDS THAT HOUSE made.

  Like all the houses in the neighborhood, their house was over a hundred and fifty years old. Generations of families had lived and died in it.

  Despite its echoes and groans, it was a solid house, painted a respectable farmhouse white. It was right in the middle of the nicest neighborhood in Briar Hill, the neighborhood in which the most successful of those associated with the university chose to live, and had since 1816.

  Diana had seen black-and-white photographs of those first academics living in the neighborhood when it was new. They were thin, formal people, it seemed. The clothes they wore looked stiff. They drove carriages instead of Volvos. Diana tried, but always failed, to imagine such people in her garden, in her dining room, in her kitchen at a table, studying their thick books by candlelight at night.

  They were so long gone by now that they couldn't even be imagined. Who they were, what they'd known, the things they'
d wanted while they were alive, the way they must have felt, as certainly as all people felt, that they would never die.

  But here were their houses, still held up by their original hand-hewn beams, inhabited—how briefly!—by strangers.

  It was a perfect house ... a dream house! And the fact that every footstep taken in any corner of it echoed through the rest of the house seemed a small price to pay for the perfection.

  Maybe even a part of the perfection.

  Paul and Diana, still in one another's arms, listened to their daughter's footsteps until they stopped at the upstairs bathroom.

  "Paul," Diana said then, looking at his face, "I'm so proud of you ... the lecture."

  "I have to admit I'm pretty damn pleased with myself," Paul said, grinning and narrowing his eyes, which were the twinkling blue of a boy's, though he was fifty-five years old.

  Diana listened again. She said, "Do you hear Emma?"

  Paul cocked his head in the direction of the stairs.

  "Maybe," he said. "She's in the bathroom. We can still fool around."

  He pulled her to him again, one arm locked hard around her hips. He looked behind him as if to double-check that no one was watching. Then he pulled her blouse out of her jeans and slid his hand up her back, under her black bra to her breast, and squeezed it gently.

  They heard the toilet flush upstairs—the sound of water rushing through their house, then away from it—and Paul pulled his hand out from under her bra.

  "Look what you did," he said, adjusting the erection inside his khaki pants.

  Diana laughed. Her heart was beating hard, like the heart of a teenage girl. They were both flushed.

  "Enough of this for now," Diana said, handing Paul a wet sponge. "Go wipe down the table, you devil. We'll finish up this business later."

  Paul winked as he left the kitchen, taking the sponge obediently with him.

  Diana put the kettle on the stove to boil water for tea. It was a warm-weather tradition. After dinner she and Paul would sip cups of hot orange-spice tea on the front porch, rocking in the wicker rockers while Emma rode her bike up and down the block in the fading light, the streamers on her handlebars whipping as she zipped past.