The Life Before Her Eyes (8 page)

But it was a neighborhood with so little crime that it was impossible to stay vigilant and not feel neurotic. The safety of the neighborhood encouraged complacence, and probably made them more vulnerable because of it. Yet Diana couldn't understand how a person could prepare for something that couldn't be imagined, something that had never been experienced, and could not have been expected...

Like a stroke, or a bomb, or a flash flood, or death.

Maybe some people could think that far ahead—like the emperor who'd had a whole army of terracotta soldiers and horses made to accompany him to the grave.

Maybe Mrs. Mueler had. Maybe she'd cleaned out her closets when she was diagnosed with cancer, so her relatives wouldn't have to. Some people, Diana knew, wrote the services for their own funerals, picked out their own cemetery plots.
And
those
people would have shut and locked their doors even in the safest of neighborhoods, even in a neighborhood in which there hadn't been even an act of vandalism in half a century.

Those people could have imagined it and prepared for it But Diana couldn't.

Before she went in the house, she walked around to the front, to retrieve the manila envelope she'd seen Randall stuff into the box.

The sun had already made its way to the daisies, which looked crushed from the hard rain of the night before, but stirring, lifting themselves out of the damp dirt.

The front yard was littered with apple blossom petals, as if there'd been a wedding there in the rain, or a fight between two flower girls. On the lawn those petals looked like cool candle flames, or polished fingernails.

"Hi, Mrs. McFee!" a boy yelled as he rode his bike past their house, but by the time Diana turned to see who it was, the boy had blurred halfway down the block.

Who had it been, and why wasn't he in school?

She lifted the manila envelope out of the mailbox.

DIANA
was written in large block letters with black Magic Marker on the front of it, and her address, in smaller letters, underneath:

1740 Maiden Lane

The handwriting seemed vaguely familiar. It reminded her of her own. She walked back around the side of the house, tearing open the gummed flap as she walked.

She glanced at the daisies as she passed. Not even nine o'clock in the morning and they were already stretching, lifting their big eyes to the sky....

Inside the envelope, in the yellow shadows, there was nothing.

Diana held the empty envelope in her hand a long time.

The daisies, from the corner of her eye ... she could almost see them writhing, trying—

She looked more deeply into the envelope, but still there was nothing. She looked at the front of it again. Her name, but no return address. Then she shook her head, crumpled the envelope up and took it into the garage, removed the lid from the trash can, which was empty but smelled of decay, and threw the envelope in. The trash can made no sound as the envelope dropped into the bright aluminum, but it shuddered when Diana put the top back on. She stepped back into the light, and then she thought about it again.

Envelopes contained letters. Envelopes did not arrive in mailboxes empty.

She went back and retrieved the envelope, turning her face away from the sweet stink of years of garbage gone but still lingering in the brilliant container, and pressed out the wrinkles as best she could, then looked inside it again.

This time she noticed a small scrap of paper at the very bottom of the envelope. A tiny piece of notebook paper folded into fourths. She took it out, pressed it flat, and walked with it out of the garage, where she could see it more clearly in the light.

In black ink, in big block letters:
SLUT.

Something ran through her like a knife blade, but made of cool air, and she inhaled, turned the paper over, looked at it again.

That word. A word she hadn't heard or used in years but which used to mean something to her ... about her.

She put her hand to her forehead, and it felt hot.

High school.

It hadn't been since
high school
that she would have cared whether or not she'd been called a slut. In high school that word was the worst thing a girl could be called, and that word was everywhere. It was in the water that came out of the drinking fountain, in the whisper of the paper-towel dispenser in the girl's bathroom—and the word had to do with
her,
with her body and its curves, with her dreams and desires ... something having to do with the very essence of her, the sexual essence of who she was and was becoming—a physical creature, all five senses poised, bared, laid open, and condemned.

And then, simply, she went to college, where everyone had sex, everyone had sexuality—bisexuality, homosexuality. They gave you condoms with the key to your dorm room.

Slut.

Miraculously, suddenly, the word had evaporated from the world. The word meant
nothing.
And then she'd gotten married.

And now ... now it was almost a compliment, Diana realized, half smiling.

To be a forty-year-old woman in a gray sweat suit standing out behind her clapboard house having just dropped her daughter off at school, breakfast dishes waiting to be washed, the hood of her minivan still warm in the garage....

To be a soccer mom someone might have taken the time to think of as a
slut.

She didn't laugh out loud, but she smiled.

There was no sting in it, no life, and the realization came as a strange relief, a strange relief out of nowhere, like finding out you didn't have a disease you'd never suspected you'd had.

But who would have sent her such a note?

She looked at the handwriting again, but the more she looked, the less familiar it became. Finally she crumpled it all back up and again tossed it in the trash can in the garage, closing the lid tightly, walking away from it, still smiling.

It was certainly not worth worrying about.

Some crazy student of Paul's. Some student of her own from the community college, someone she'd failed for poor attendance, or someone who remembered her from high school—some old boyfriend she'd dumped.

She was forty years old. She'd lived in Briar Hill her whole life. The number of people she'd hurt or rejected, the number of times she'd said something cruel (though never intentionally—could she ever remember a time she'd
intentionally
hurt another person?) was unfathomable by now. It made her dizzy and sick to think of it, like looking into an abyss full of stink and flies. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Some inexplicable message intended to—what? Unnerve her? Disarm her?

She wouldn't let it.

Life was short.

Her life was perfect.

And it was
hers.

A
LWAYS WITH
E
MMA OFF AT SCHOOL, THE HOUSE SEEMED
empty to Diana—though not unpleasantly so.

All the life that had taken place in it only an hour before—the toast, the coffee, the scrambled eggs, the pajamas tossed on the bedroom floor—all that life had accumulated a silence that seemed made of whatever dusty particles thought and memory sent out of the mind in the process of passing.

Nothing had happened there in the brief time between Diana's leaving with Emma and returning without her, and nothing would change now until Diana chose to change it.

The house was a still life....

A still life you could walk into and observe with all of your senses, the stationary images of your things, the silence and the material that made up your life.

Paul's spoon lying where he had left it beside his bowl of Grape-Nuts.

Emma's Pooh cup half full of Sunny Delight.

Diana stopped at that image and took a sip from the cup. The strange breakfast beverage in it—what was it made of, the juice of some hallucinated fruit?—tasted oddly cold, and the frozen sweetness of it opened a bright eye of pain at Diana's temple, and the pain of it placed her securely back into her body. She poured what was left of the juice into the sink and put the cup upside down in the empty dishwasher, then opened the back door and looked out into the yard.

A damp violet fog poured in through the screen door, filtered into a million little microscopic squares. But there was heat in the breeze. The sun was rising higher in the sky, and it was burning away the cool storm of the night before.

Diana stood very still, trying to remember something ... Who?...What?

There was something (someone?) standing just outside of the reach of her thoughts, someone she needed to recall, who had been brought in on the warmed breeze but then been turned to molecules passing through the back door's screen. It was something that bothered her, some detail that was out of place in her dream-perfect life, something that, if she could reach it with her recollection, she might be able to return to its right place.

Miss Zena?

Miss Zena.

It must have been the peonies in their crisp tutus, just bloomed, that had reminded her—the ribbons and lace, the girly purity of it. Then, a little black cloud passing over the prettiness of her backyard. Diana never thought of ballet, of her pink satin toe shoes, without feeling shame.

For years she'd taken ballet lessons at Miss Zena's School of Dance, a studio owned by a French woman in a strip mall outside of town, and she'd loved it ... loved the French woman, who was all grace and bones, loved ballet ... but then she'd quit taking the lessons after ninth grade, after she'd gotten caught smoking marijuana with six or seven other ballerinas in the dressing room just before they were to go onstage for their end-of-the-year recital.

They were wearing black leotards, flesh-colored tights, hot-pink tutus that circled their hips and waists with stiffness. The auditorium was in one of the oldest buildings in Briar Hill. Heavy velvet curtains. Radiators knocking, leaking boiling water onto the dressing room's cracked ceramic tiles.

It was spring. The heat was unnecessary, especially with all those girls perspiring in their leotards, and it steamed up the dressing room mirrors.

They'd gathered in a circle and passed the joint around, the smell of cotton balls and the sickly sweetness of those burning leaves.

It hadn't been Diana's joint, and it hadn't been her idea, but there she was in the circle when Miss Zena, who must have been standing in the doorway for a while by the time she was noticed, said, crying a little, "It ees time for you to dance, you leetle beetches, you beetches who half broken my heart."

There was no time to talk then. Whoever had the joint tossed it away somewhere, and Miss Zena hurried them out to the back of the stage, which was dark and hung with ropes and discarded ballet shoes, sequins and tinsel scattered on folding chairs, and the heavy dust-smell of velvet.

The accompanist started to bang out their cue, then stopped, and the girls drifted into the stage lights. There were
chalk circles drawn on the floor, and each girl moved into her own circle, the
swish-swish
of tutus in the silence.

All Diana remembered was the sensation of floating, a starburst in her eyes, and then it seemed as though there were little bits of glitter attaching themselves to her eyelids and arms. She had never smiled before with such unselfconscious joy. When she looked out at the audience of parents and siblings, she saw electric beach grass blowing in a breeze.

Wild applause when they were done.

Her heart was beating hard.

"That was beautiful," her mother said when she came to the dressing room to get her. "You girls are so talented," she said, speaking to them all.

They didn't look at one another.

Miss Zena never told any parents what had happened, as far as Diana knew, but none of the girls who'd gotten caught in the dressing room signed up for ballet lessons the next year. When her mother asked her why she was giving up ballet, Diana had simply said, "It's for little girls."

And even all these years later it still filled her with remorse and a terrible stab of loss to think about it. All those years of ballet lessons—Miss Zena scolding her about her derriere, her pliés and relevés, maneuvering her thin feet into satin shoes with cardboard toes, the tautness of ribbons around her ankles.

All that sweetness and grace had turned into one false and brilliant performance in her mind, a few fleeting and hallucinatory minutes of fraudulent bliss.

She narrowed her eyes, looking through that screen, then rubbed her eyes and Miss Zena was gone.

The backyard was scattered with Emma's toys—a Frisbee, a red wagon, a plastic pony on wheels, which had been bought at a
garage sale when Emma was three and which she'd ridden wildly around the house for years, scuffing up the hardwood floors.

Then it was abandoned in the front hallway, near the coat closet, where it grazed absently for a long time ... a stiff, blank-eyed thing they had to step around on their way to other places, a toy in a kind of limbo between rummage sales.

When Diana and Paul had suggested that they give the pony to the Salvation Army with some old bicycles, Emma had squinted at her parents as if they were people she barely recognized, people she wasn't sure she wanted to know better.

The pony was kept, although it was eventually sent out to the backyard, where it spent its days staring expressionlessly into the side of the garage. If it ever thought of them, of the lives they led inside the house without it, it could not have been with fondness. It had a few wet leaves stuck to its saddle and in its mane that morning.

Already the lilacs that grew in wondrous profusion near the back of the garage had gone brown. They'd bloomed fiercely throughout May, sending out a perfume that made Diana think of a funeral parlor or a prom dance.

One afternoon in the first week of July, they run into Nate Witt outside Big Mama's CDs & Tapes.

There are small yellow leaflets at his feet. He's looking at the back of the CD he's apparently just bought.

"Hi, Nate," one of them says.