The Life Before Her Eyes Read online

  These mornings alone in her dream home, often Diana felt as if her hand could pass right through the furniture and walls.

  All of it humming. All of it made out of shadow and light.

  But this morning Diana had become distracted by her annoyance and annoyed by her distraction, as if she'd been wakened from a beautiful dream by the buzzing of a fly, and it had turned the beds and the curtains blowing in the breeze into mere artifacts, necessities. It had turned the morning into a chore.

  Those teenagers. The nakedness. The fearlessness. The audacity.

  Had she ever been bothered by the audacity of teenagers before?

  Never.

  She remembered well that she'd once been a teenager herself, that on more than one occasion the police had been called, warnings had been given. Once, she'd been parked with a boy—she could hardly have called him a boyfriend since she'd known him only a couple of days—in the empty parking lot of a strip mall on the outskirts of town.

  Though Diana had forgotten that boy's name and his face, she could still recall the eerie fizz of the neon sign sputtering over the closed Laundromat. A static green. The car heater had been on because it was November, and the radio, which was playing loudly—rap music, the bass so thick and loud it was as if the car were its own big heart and they were inside its pumping.

  Apparently someone had reported suspicious activity.

  The boy and Diana were naked when the officer shone his flashlight into the backseat and ordered the boy to get his license out of his wallet.

  While the boy was looking for the wallet in his pants' pocket, the cop made Diana step out of the car.

  It couldn't have been more than forty degrees that night.

  Diana could see the officer's hot breath escaping from him in smoky veils.

  She tried to grab her black down jacket to hold in front of her, but the cop told her not to touch anything. He made her stand there, shivering, with her feet burning on the cold asphalt, and he looked at her while the boy in the car searched for his driver's license. He kept the frozen zero of his flashlight trained on her naked body, and moved it around. A cold eye.

  She could remember the way she consciously removed her mind from the body he was looking at ... removed her self. She let the other thing she knew she was—the part that could disengage itself from the legs and the breasts and the shivering—escape through an open space at the base of her brain, and Diana could imagine the look it caused to cross her face, the expression that made the policeman angry, made him sneer at her and shake his head. She'd seen the look on plenty of teenage girls' faces since then—fuck you, go to hell, eat shit...

  The audacity. That's what it was.

  Diana went back into her own bedroom and was surprised to see that the bed she shared with Paul had already been made.

  When had she made it?

  Before or after she'd changed her clothes?

  And if she hadn't, when had he?

  Had she simply not noticed that the bed was already made?

  No ... vaguely, she remembered tossing the pillows back onto the straightened quilt, which was a beautiful hand-stitched teal blue antique she'd bought at a flea market back before she'd become pregnant with Emma, the quilt under which she and Paul had been making love when Emma was conceived.

  She remembered tossing the pillows into their places, but she could have sworn that was yesterday.

  Or even the day before.

  Diana stood looking at the bed, a little amused:

  This is what happens, she thought, with middle age. Each day, if you were lucky, smoothed so effortlessly into the next that you couldn't tell one from the other. Life went on... and on and on and on. But no one knew this until he or she turned forty. Until then life was struggle and change—she remembered growing beans in Dixie cups in elementary school, an experiment, and the slow pale green eruption of the dirt, the bent necks, the wetness—and then suddenly that was over. From one stage to the next, until middle age, it had seemed as if one life ended and another took its place. Puberty, maturation, mating, marriage, pregnancy, baby—but then the stages blended into a sameness. A maintenance. Middle age. It was a river. A river you stepped into over and over again, finding it always the same.

  It was a good time, Diana thought. It was the first time in her life she'd felt that the world was predictable, that her life was going to last, that what would happen the day after tomorrow could be predicted based on what had happened today.

  Only in the last year had she begun to think of herself as middle-aged.

  But maybe she wasn't middle-aged yet. It seemed to her that middle age was being pushed further and further back. Many of her friends and colleagues were older than she was and hadn't even had babies yet. One had just married the summer before and had worn a white wedding gown with a twelve-foot train. Her bridesmaids had worn light green chiffon and giggled like girls, though they were in their late thirties, at least.

  It was a wonderful era in which to be middle-aged, if that's what she was. So many others, and everyone so fit, so healthy. Just the day before, she'd seen a photograph of a famous model (Christie Brinkley? Cindy Crawford?) on the cover of a magazine by the checkout line:

  "Sexy at Sixty" the caption under her stunningly line-free face had read.

  Perhaps it was airbrushing, but still ... Diana was only forty, and here was this woman, who'd been beautiful and famous as long as Diana could remember, not seeming the least bit daunted by sixty.

  Immortal. Undaunted. Audacious.

  When Diana had been the age of those kids swimming naked in the Ellsworths' swimming pool, she would not have believed it. Forty would have been old. Forty might as well have been sixty, which might as well have been dead, no matter how well they could have fixed you up for a photograph. As a teenager Diana had known perfectly well what immortality was and that becoming middle-aged wasn't part of it.

  But what had she really known then?

  Then, she'd had no idea that she might someday look at herself in a mirror and be more than happy to overlook the lines around her eyes; the loose flesh at her belly button, where it had puckered like a kiss ever since she'd had the baby; the midriff (and that gold ring she used to wear through her navel!) she would no longer dream of exposing to the world, and be simply grateful that the gray in her hair was fairly easy, yet, to rinse away...

  What would she have thought then if she had known that someday she'd be this woman in the mirror, the woman she was looking at now in a too-tight white dress, looking no older than forty, but definitely forty?

  She looked more closely at herself in the mirror, and smiled.

  She didn't have to teach that afternoon. She'd go to her studio and sketch for a while before she cleaned up the kitchen and living room. Perhaps, she thought whimsically, she'd come back in from her studio to find that she'd already vacuumed and dusted, too.

  They put the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog back in its place on the nightstand, and they go to the kitchen.

  The air-conditioning is on, and it fills the apartment with a false chill. Outside it's ninety degrees and nothing is moving, because there is no breeze. The tar in the streets has turned sticky. At the window where the air conditioner rattles, a stiff wind blows the curtains around as if there's an angry blizzard trying to escape.

  "Want some ice cream?" one girl asks the other. She stands with the freezer open, and the cold ghosts drift in and around the Swanson dinners and the bags of mixed vegetables and the ice-cube bucket.

  "Sure," the other says.

  Bowls are taken out of the cupboard, spoons are tossed into the bowls, and a carton of Chocolate Silk ice cream is placed in the middle of the kitchen table.

  They eat the dark sweetness until it's gone, and then they open a bag of Cheetos that was sitting on top of the fridge.

  "Want some diet Coke?"

  They both laugh about that.

  "Yeah," the other says, "I'm on a diet. Can't you tell?"

 
After the Cheetos are almost gone, they make sandwiches from cold roast beef and American cheese, and eat them, and even after that they're still hungry.

  They heat up a can of New England clam chowder.

  They toss oyster crackers into the soup.

  They finish with Chips Ahoy, right out of the bag.

  Neither girl has ever been anything but slender and ravenous as long as she can remember—and will be slender and ravenous for as long as she can imagine.

  THE TEENAGERS WHO'D BEEN IN THE POOL WERE GONE by the time Diana got to her studio loft above the garage.

  If they'd still been there Diana would have had a bird's-eye view. And although that wasn't what she'd had in mind, she had to admit to herself she was a bit disappointed that they were now nowhere to be seen. Perhaps if they'd been lying in lawn chairs, poolside, Diana would have sketched their young and gleaming bodies. The girls' thick, wet hair. The boy's natural muscles. The unself-consciousness of those few humans who made perfectly beautiful nudes.

  She'd been one once, and remembered what it was like to be flawless as a beam of light...

  Once, as a perfectly beautiful fifteen-year-old nude, she'd posed for a photographer—a man who must have been in his late forties, a stranger she'd met at the mall. He paid her sixty dollars to recline for an hour on the couch in his apartment—a couch he'd draped with a black satin sheet—while Diana's boyfriend paced around waiting for her in the man's smelly kitchen.

  She and the boyfriend spent the money on a dinner at a steak house, and Diana could still remember the steak—a rib eye, medium rare—and the salad bar with its chilled ceramic bowls of bacon bits, crumbled hard-boiled egg, shredded cheddar cheese.

  Her boyfriend was older. Nineteen. And Diana had never seen anyone eat as hungrily as he did that night, laughing between forkfuls about the old guy and his camera.

  The photographer had claimed that he was going to sell the photos to a magazine, and Diana was flattered. She imagined her image reproduced glossily and sold at newsstands in big cities.

  But Tony, her boyfriend, just kept laughing, saying the photographs hadn't been taken for any magazine. The old guy planned to keep them. He was probably developing them in his closet right now, jerking off.

  It wasn't until then, in the restaurant with Tony laughing over his bloody steak and the bright iceberg lettuce littered with bacon bits, that Diana began to feel guilty. Stupid. Dirty.

  They ordered dessert. Diana remembered that it had been called Mud Pie—chocolate ice cream on a dark, compressed pastry, drizzled with even darker chocolate. It had tasted, perhaps, as sweet and dense as the mud out of which God had fashioned the first human form...

  Diana took out her box of charcoals and clipped a fresh sheet of paper to the easel and began to sketch the teenage bodies she'd seen—even though they were gone and she had always been best at drawing forms she could actually see. When she looked directly at the thing she was rendering, the process was easier, less inward. But when she drew from memory or imagination, there was often a sameness to the things she drew. The faces would be nearly identical every time—something about the eyes, even the eyes of old men, of children. They weren't exactly her own eyes she'd find herself giving those faces, but they were remembered eyes, someone's eyes, eyes that had imprinted themselves on her mind as the archetypal eyes, the eyes she saw watching her when she closed her own and imagined the idea of eyes.

  Still she wanted to draw those kids, and the kids were gone, so Diana recalled what she could of them as she looked out her studio window at the Ellsworths' backyard. She sketched first what she saw—the lawn chairs, the pool, the sliding glass patio doors—and then she drew what she imagined:

  The girl's figure, reclining in one of the chairs.

  And then the boy, all sleekness and skin.

  She drew the girl's arm, bent at the elbow, tossed casually over her head. It was a gesture Diana remembered making, a gesture that casually let the observer see the entirety of her nakedness.

  With a charcoal shadow across her shoulder, Diana suggested that the body of the girl was wet The boy's face was tilted toward the sky—chin lifted, arrogant His eyes were closed.

  The girl's legs were raised, crossed at the knee, as if she were swinging a foot.

  Diana considered adding a cigarette to the hand bent above the girl's head. It seemed like something this girl might be doing, naked after sex in a stranger's pool, midmorning three weeks into June.

  But she didn't do it This girl didn't smoke.

  She drew the girl's eyes last. Then she looked up from her drawing and out the window again to check the light Would it be pouring over their heads—baptismal, cleansing? Or would it be slanted? Would the slanting elongate their forms, divest them of innocence, or—?

  It was the light she was looking for—light's physical emptiness, as she described it to her students—as she parted the curtains again. Diana never worked in color. It was so much mote interesting to see what could be done without it, the incredible range of what was possible to render with only darkness and light.

  She'd been looking only for light, but there was movement down there. Something beyond the lime green leafiness of the trees.

  It was the girl.

  She'd come back.

  She'd put on a white tank top and faded jeans, and she was bent over, buckling a high-heeled sandal. Her hair had dried, and it was gossamer blond. She looked up just at the moment that Diana looked down. Perhaps she'd seen the curtain move above her....

  Diana yanked it closed again, instinctively, and felt somehow embarrassed to have been looking out the window of her own studio.

  Still she could see the girl through the sheerness of the curtain—although her form was muted, a shadow, nearly transparent. Perhaps stupidly Diana believed that the girl could no longer see her. But then the girl straightened herself, still looking toward the window.

  She was a thin, tall girl.

  She tucked a strand of pale blond hair behind her ear and rested all of her weight on one angular hip, then pulled the strap of her tank top up her shoulder. Still staring straight at the window, straight at Diana's face hiding behind the curtain there, the girl raised a middle finger from her fist and held it high.

  Diana inhaled and took a fast step backward.

  Her heart was racing.

  She made her way to a chair in the corner of her studio and sat down.

  Blood

  EMMA'S PIGTAILS HAD LOOSENED, AND IN THE SUNLIGHT several escaped strands of her golden hair shone like little filaments of light. She had her pink windbreaker tied around her waist, and Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth under one arm. Her Snow White backpack was slung over the other arm, and it dragged along the ground beside her. When she opened the door of the minivan, she threw it all—the windbreaker, the backpack, and the doll—onto the floor.

  Diana had never seen Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth treated like an inanimate object before. Beneath the other things, with only her pale arm visible, the doll, to Diana, looked more like a human child than she'd ever seemed. A television image surfaced in her mind—an earthquake, a bombing?—of just such a child's arm emerging from the rubble.

  Emma sat down next to Diana and pulled the minivan door closed hard, and Diana leaned over the console to kiss her cheek.

  It was hot, and Emma smelled like cafeteria—steam and soft carrots—though there was no cafeteria at Our Lady of Fatima. Emma took her own lunch with her to school every day, something sweet but nutritious that Diana had packed for her in a paper bag and put in her backpack.

  The smell of cafeteria was Diana's own association with elementary school.

  Hot lunch.

  Some of the children at Diana's school had brought their own lunches in just the kind of paper bags Emma took hers in, but there was also hot lunch. Behind humid glass, in silver tubs, spooned up by an old woman wearing a hair net—spaghetti and green beans, hamburger patties and cooked carrots.

  Diana's mother h
ad always signed her up for that, but it was the mystery of those bagged lunches that Diana longed for. The peanut butter on bread that someone's mother had spread there herself. The stiff carrot sticks in plastic Baggies.

  Emma was scowling, an expression that pulled her features downward and caused her to look like a woman, like Diana, instead of a child.

  "Is something wrong, Emma?" Diana asked.

  Emma said nothing. She turned her face away, but Diana could see the transparent reflection of it glaring at her in the window.

  She backed up, looking carefully behind her, then pulled out of the semicircular drive.

  As she pulled into the road, Diana was conscious of how smooth it was under her wheels, the sensation of floating inside two tons of machinery. Maybe they'd repaved this road. It was like driving on layers and layers of black silk, or the slick petals of black tulips, as if the road had been carpeted with them.

  She glanced over at Emma again, but Emma still had her face turned to the window. She looked down at her daughter's knees, which were exposed between her kneesocks and her plaid skirt. They were dirty—a dry, dusty dirt—as if Emma had recently knelt in ashes.

  Diana cleared her throat, preparing to invent for herself a firm but sensitive maternal tone.

  "Emma," she said, "look at me."

  Emma didn't look.

  Diana could see the very pale place at the base of Emma's skull where her pigtails parted, and it made her feel frightened and protective. She reached out to touch her daughter's golden hair, but as soon as Emma felt her touch she flinched away.

  Diana pulled her hand back.

  She cleared her throat again.

  "Emma," Diana said more sharply, "I told you to look at me."

  Still Emma didn't move. Her face was turned resolutely, as if permanently, away from her mother.