The Life Before Her Eyes (7 page)

Diana had no idea what communion was but felt something slide open like a window inside her. A bit of the mystery slipped in along with the smell of cloves before her mother told her to hurry up and the window slammed shut.

She didn't think about religion much again until high school, when she became best friends with a born-again Christian. By then (and by then she was only sixteen) Diana had slipped far into the world, done many things for which she was sure she could not be forgiven by even the most merciful of divinities. She had only the vaguest concept of what constituted a sin, but Diana knew she ought to keep her head low, that if there were a god watching, the god didn't smile when he looked down on her.

Maureen never tried to convert Diana, but she used to talk about Jesus, how he loved everyone, forgave everyone, died for everyone. She talked about it in such a private, inward way—with total supernatural understanding—that Diana felt fearful and jealous at the same time. Maureen's eyes were very dark and long-lashed, and when she talked about Jesus, whom she'd actually
seen,
Diana could see why Maureen's mother had forbidden her to go to the church where she'd been reborn.

Now, as a grown woman, the confusion Diana felt when she thought about God was
made
of that fear, along with the fog and red velvet she used to imagine. She carried it inside her like a small candlelit church right behind her ribs—a place full of muttering and blood, a place she didn't feel comfortable going even though it belonged to her.

And sometimes Diana suspected that Sister Beatrice, in her strange black robes—only her pasty white hands and face exposed to this world of the flesh—saw the flaw, as well as a catalog of sins. That didn't frighten Diana, necessarily, or make her feel ashamed. It made her feel, instead, as though some private moment or place of her own had been glimpsed by a stranger from a disinterested distance.

If there were a word for what it made her feel, Diana guessed the word would have been
hopeless.
It was similar to the emotion she felt when, on the nightly news, she saw a corpse being taken out of a car wreck or out of a bombed building on a stretcher.

There was no use trying to hide yourself then.

If the world wanted to see your secrets, stare at your corpse, it could.

But it was also because Sister Beatrice had this effect on Diana that she changed the provocative, anti-math-and-science
sentence in her daughter's story to read, "Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth does not like math tests or science as much as she likes ice cream!"

Then Diana folded the typed story into fourths and tucked it into Emma's backpack.

They go to a boutique downtown and have extra ho/es pierced in their ears....

Three small red-glass rubies in the left and three fake but dazzling little diamonds in the right.

They take turns looking at each other in the sunlight when they step out of the boutique into the brilliant sun bouncing off the chrome and glass of the clean cars parked up and down the street.

There are bright silver streaks of light on the sidewalk, sent out like arrows from those cars, and the girls step into that shower of arrows wearing sandals, shorts, and tank tops. They hold each other's hair away from the new jewels, which shock and spark like miniature and glittering thoughts around their heads.

"Great," one of their mothers will say wearily when she sees them. "Just what you girls needed. A few more holes in your heads."

It's the first day of summer vacation.

I
T WAS A DARK MORNING.
T
HE THUNDERSTORM OF THE
night had left the sky cloudy and the streets slippery with green leaves. Emma sat quietly, still half asleep, next to Diana in the minivan; Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth sat on her lap. The doll
had been a gift from Paul's mother—an expensive blond baby girl with bright blue eyes that shut when she was put down on her back for a nap or when she slipped from Emma's bed onto the floor while Emma slept. That doll wore a lacy white dress and had a fixed rosebud smile—or was it, Diana wondered, a bit of a smirk?

She pulled up in front of the school, into the semicircular drive. Little girls were being let out of cars, skipping up the concrete steps to wait at the orange double doors for the bell to ring, to be let into the school.

Diana felt homely in the gray sweat suit she'd pulled on that morning. She wore it often in the mornings but never without feeling like a fixed target in it. Fervently Diana believed that women didn't need to get dumpy when they got older, but here she was in a baggy sweat suit, without makeup. It was only to drive her daughter to school, she always thought, but by the time she was actually a few miles from her home, wearing this middle-aged mother's uniform, Diana felt conspicuous, ashamed.

But it didn't matter to Emma.

"I love you, Mommy," she said.

"I love you, too. Have a good day, Emma-o," Diana said, leaning over to hug and kiss her daughter good-bye.

Emma's breath smelled of chocolate milk. Her hair smelled of dreams and damp dirt. As she always did, nuzzling her daughter before bedtime or kissing her good-bye before parting, Diana felt a moment of physical longing like terror, like the moment she sometimes had just before sleep, not wanting to slip out of the sensual world no matter how sweet the dream that was waiting beyond it might be.

"What about Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth?" Emma asked.

"Good-bye, Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth," Diana said animatedly to the blank face of her daughter's doll.

"But she wants a kiss," Emma said, holding the doll up.

Diana leaned over and kissed the doll, whose cheek was cold.

Emma jumped out of the minivan and, with her Snow White backpack on, her pink jacket, her doll held like a real baby carefully over her shoulder, supported in the crook of her arm, Emma ascended the concrete stairs. Above her, at the orange double doors, the other little girls waited, pacing, looking pale in their plaid skirts and knee socks in the wavering dampness that had begun to warm and rise steamily up from the cement.

For a second Diana felt the urge to hurry after her, pull her back, keep her apart from that group, which looked somber to her from this distance—too serious, like sick girls. Too, they seemed to be watching Emma climb the stairs too closely, too anxiously, and Diana felt a terrible pang of possessiveness
(mini)
just before she heard the mechanical wildness of the school bell ringing and saw her daughter start to run. The orange double doors opened, and the little girls began to disappear into the shining darkness of the place where they spent their days.

Diana glanced one more time toward those doors before she pulled out of the semicircular drive, thinking she saw Sister Beatrice—in her black habit, smiling—take Emma by the hot-pink arm of her summer jacket and pull her through the open doors.

June.

It's still just June.

But time begins to slow down and the summer afternoons
become palpable, made of warm laundry and canned air freshener.

Their mothers go off to their jobs in the morning, and the girls never hear them leave. They sleep until noon, then rise and watch talk shows while eating bowls of cereal. The milk in their spoons is sweet even after the Froot Loops or Cheerios or cornflakes have been eaten.

One of them always calls the other by the middle of the raunchiest of the talk shows.

"Are you watching?"

"Can you believe it?"

They agree on a place to meet. Downtown in a coffee shop or a bookstore or the boutique where their ears were pierced.

They would rather go to the mall, but a bus would have to be taken to get there.

Downtown will have to do.

They can walk there from their mothers' apartments. In summer most of the students are gone, and what they've left is a humid breeze blowing the dry dirt and trash around by the curb, along with the street people playing their busted guitars, and the empty emerald beer bottles in the bushes.

Also in summer the restaurants and stores along East Main Street and University Avenue prop their doors open. The smell of incense mingles with the smell of
moo shu
pork. There are always a few young men—graduate students? Young professors?—sitting at outdoor tables eating egg rolls and reading library books.

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.

I
T 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.