Life Before Man (11 page)

Auntie Muriel decided it was the minister’s fault and spearheaded the drive to get rid of him. They didn’t have to listen to that sort of thing. More like a Baptist. Years later he’d been in the newspapers for doing an exorcism on a girl who really had a brain tumor and died anyway. You see? said Auntie Muriel. Crazy as a coot.

As for Caroline, when seven years later that scream took final shape and she made it totally, calamitously clear what she’d been trying to say, that was something else; that was a judgment. Or a lack of willpower, depending on how Auntie Muriel was feeling that day.

In the hospital, and afterwards in the institution, Caroline would not talk or even move. She would not eat by herself and she had to be diapered like a baby. She lay on her side with her knees curled up to her chest, eyes closed, hands fisted. Elizabeth sat beside her, breathing the sickly smell of inert flesh. Damn you, Caroline, she whispered. I know you’re in there.

Three years after that, when Caroline was almost seventeen, an attendant was called away while she was in the bathtub. An emergency, they said. They were never supposed to leave patients like Caroline alone in a bathtub; those were the rules. They weren’t supposed to put patients like Caroline into bathtubs at all, but someone had decided it would help her to relax, uncurl her; that was what they said at the inquest. So it happened and Caroline slipped down. She
drowned rather than making the one small gesture, the turn of the head, that would have saved her life.

Sometimes Elizabeth has wondered whether Caroline did it on purpose, whether all along, inside that sealed body, she’d been conscious and waiting for the chance. She has wondered why. Sometimes, though, she’s merely wondered why she herself has never done the same thing. At these times Caroline is clear, logical, pure; marble in contrast to her own slowly percolating flesh, the gasps of her decaying lungs and spongy, many-fingered heart.

In the room someone is singing. Not singing but a hum; Elizabeth realizes she’s been hearing it for some time. She opens her eyes to locate the sound; the pipes, it must be, vibration of distant water. The wallpaper is too bright, morning-glories, and she knows she should be careful. No openings. She hadn’t found those people in the sixties who’d torn their cats apart and jumped out of high-rise windows because they thought they were birds in the least glamorous: she’d found them stupid. Anyone who had ever heard those voices before or seen what they could do would have known what they were saying.

“Shut up,” Elizabeth says. Even this much acknowledgment is bad. She’ll concentrate on the text.
Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius before the remains of an ancient slave-owner’s war chariots
, she reads. The charioteers were buried alive. She peers into the picture, trying to see them, but all she can make out are the skeletons of the horses. Indignant peasants clamor around the grave.

Her hand holds the book, her body stretches away from her through the water, surrounded by white porcelain. On the ledge, far away, so far she is sure she could never reach them, are the toys the children still insist on floating in their baths, though they should be too old: an orange duck, a red and white boat with a wind-up
paddle wheel, a blue penguin. Her breasts, flattened by gravity, her belly. Hourglass figure. Nancy’s
Little Riddle Book:

On the next page over was a riddle about a coffin. Hardly suitable for children, she said that Christmas. Nate bought it, in a little boxed set.

Her knees jut from the blue water like mountains; clouds of bubble bath floating around them.
Bodykins
, imported. She bought it for Chris, for both of them, in some sybaritic dream; early, before she found out he didn’t like having her look at his body except from half an inch away. He didn’t like having her stand back from him, he wanted her to feel him but not see him. I’ll get you where you live, he said, much later, much too late. Where does she live?

Sand runs through her glass body, from her head down to her feet. When it’s all gone she’ll be dead. Buried alive. Why wait?

L
esje is out for lunch with Marianne. They’ve just had a sandwich at Murray’s, which is near and cheap; now they’re walking over to Yorkville and Cumberland to look in the store windows. It’s no longer the place to shop, says Marianne, whom Lesje regards as an authority on such things; too overpriced. Queen Street West is the place now. But Queen Street West is too far away.

Marianne habitually has lunch with Trish, who’s off with the flu. They’ve asked her along on these expeditions before but usually she says no. She’s behind in her work, she says, she’ll grab a sandwich downstairs. Surely they don’t have much to offer her in addition to the gossip they provide at morning coffee. Marianne openly admits – or is it a joke? – that she went into Biology to meet medical students and marry a doctor. Lesje doesn’t approve of such frivolity.

Now, however, gossip is what she wants. She craves gossip, she wants to know anything Marianne can tell her about Elizabeth and especially about Elizabeth’s husband Nate, who has not phoned, written or appeared since he shook hands with her beside the
EXIT
sign at the dinosaur gallery. She isn’t interested in him, really, but
she’s baffled. She wants to know whether he often does such things, makes such odd approaches. However, she isn’t sure how to obtain this information from Marianne without telling her what has happened so far; which she doesn’t want to do. But why not? Nothing has happened.

They stop at the corner of Bay and Yorkville to look at a bunchy blue velvet suit with gold braid trim and a blouse underneath, cuff ruffles and a Peter Pan collar.

“Too goyish,” Marianne says, which is her word for tacky taste. Despite her blue eyes and blond hair and her madrigal name, Marianne is Jewish; what Lesje thinks of as pure Jewish, in contrast to her own hybrid state. Marianne’s attitude towards Lesje is complicated. Sometimes she seems to include her among the Jews; she’d hardly say
too goyish
in front of her if she thought of her as too goyish herself. Though, as one of Lesje’s aunts explained to her, sweetly and maliciously, when she was nine, Lesje isn’t really Jewish. She could be classified as truly Jewish only if it was her mother instead of her father. Apparently the gene is passed through the female, like hemophilia.

At other times, though, Marianne focuses on Lesje’s Ukrainian name. It doesn’t seem to bother her the way it would probably bother her parents; instead she finds it intriguing, though a little funny.

“Why should you worry? Ethnic is big these days. Change your last name and you’ll get a Multiculturalism grant.”

Lesje smiles at these jokes, but weakly. She’s multicultural all right, but not in the way the grant-givers want. And her father’s family has already changed its name at least once, though not to get a grant. They did it in the late thirties: who could tell, Hitler might invade, and even if he didn’t there were enough anti-Semites in the country already. In those days, the aunts said, you didn’t answer the door unless you knew who was knocking. Which is how Lesje has
ended up with the unlikely name of Lesje Green; though she has to admit that Lesje Etlin wouldn’t have been any more probable. For two years, when she was nine and ten, she told the teachers at school that her name was Alice. Lesje meant Alice, her mother said, and it was a perfectly good name, the name of a famous Ukrainian poet. Whose poems Lesje would never be able to read.

She changed it back, though, for the following reason. If she were to discover a country which had never been discovered before (and she fully intended to do this sometime), she would of course name it after herself. There already was a Greenland, which wasn’t at all the sort of place she had in mind. Greenland was barren, icy, devoid of life, whereas the place Lesje intended to discover would be tropical, rich and crawling with wondrous life forms, all of them either archaic and thought extinct, or totally unknown even in fossil records. She made careful drawings of this land in her scrapbooks and labeled the flora and fauna.

But she couldn’t call this place Aliceland; it wasn’t right. One of her reservations about
The Lost World
concerned the names of the topographical features. Lake Gladys, for instance:
too goyish
. And the whole primitive plateau was called Maple White Land, after the artist whose sketches of a Pterodactyl, found clutched in his delirious and dying hand, had first put Professor Challenger on the track. Lesje was sure – though it didn’t say so in the book – that Maple White must have been a Canadian, of the pinkest and most frigid kind. With a name like that what else could he be?

Lesjeland
, though. That sounded almost African. She could picture it on a map: seen that way, there was nothing ludicrous about it.

Once, after she was grown up, she’d gone to the Odessa Pavilion during the Caravan Festival. Usually she avoided Caravan. She distrusted the officially promoted goodwill, the costumes nobody wore any more. There were really no Poles like the ones in the Polish
Pavilion, no Indians like the Indians, no yodeling Germans. She’s not sure why she went, that time; perhaps she was hoping to find her roots. She’d eaten foods she remembered only vaguely from her grandmother’s house and had never known the names for –
pirogi, medvynk –
and watched tall boys and auburn-braided girls in red boots leap about on a stage decorated with paper sunflowers, singing songs she couldn’t sing, dancing dances she’d never been taught. According to the program, some of the dancers were named Doris and Joan and Bob, although others had names like hers: Natalia, Halyna, Vlad. At the end, with that element of self-mockery she recognized too in Marianne when she said
schwartze
, imitating her mother’s views on cleaning ladies, they sang a song from Ukrainian summer camp:

Lesje admired the bright costumes, the agility, the music; but she was an outsider looking in. She felt as excluded as if she’d been surrounded by a crowd of her own cousins. On both sides.
Kiss me, I’m multicultural
.

She hadn’t been sent to Ukrainian summer camp or to Jewish summer camp. She hadn’t been allowed to go either to the golden church with its fairy-tale onion dome or to synagogue. Her parents would have been happy to send her to both, if it would keep the peace, but the grandmothers wouldn’t allow it.

Sometimes she thinks she was produced, not by her parents in the usual way, but by some unheard-of copulation between these two old ladies who never met. They’d existed in an odd parody of marriage, hating each other more than either hated the Germans, yet obsessed
with each other; they’d even died within a year of each other, like an old devoted couple. They’d infested her parents’ house in relays, fought over her as if she’d been a dress at a bargain. If one baby-sat for her the other must be given a turn or there would be histrionics: weeping from her Grandmother Smylski, rage from her Grandmother Etlin (who’d kept her name, who’d refused to scurry for cover with the rest of them). Neither of them had ever learned English very well, though Grandmother Etlin had picked up some scatological curses from the neighborhood children who hung around her store, which she’d used in garbled versions when she wanted to get her own way. “Jesus asshole, dog poop, I hope you die!” she would scream, stamping her black boots on the front doorstep. She knew the front doorstep was the best place to do this: Lesje’s parents would do almost anything to get her inside, away from the observation of the street.
English people
. These bland clones of their imagination did not have tiny black-booted grandmothers who screamed, “I hope your bum falls off!” on the front doorstep; or anything remotely equivalent. Lesje knows better, now.

The strange thing about her grandmothers was how much alike they were. Both of their houses were small and dark and smelled of furniture polish and mothballs. They were both widows, they both had sad-eyed single male boarders stashed away in upstairs rooms, they both had fancy china and front rooms crowded with silver framed family photos, they both drank tea in a glass.

Before she was old enough to go to school she’d spent half the week with each of them, since her mother had to work. She would sit on the kitchen floor, cutting pictures out of magazines and folders from the small travel agency where her mother worked, arranging them in piles – men in one pile, women in another, dogs in another, houses in another – while the grandmothers drank their tea and talked to the aunts (her father’s sister, her mother’s brothers’ wives),
in languages she couldn’t understand and which her parents never spoke at home.

This should have made her trilingual. Instead she was considered bad at English, plodding, a poor speller, lacking in imagination. In Grade Five she’d been asked to write about “My Summer Holiday,” and she’d written about her rock collection, with technical details of each rock. She’d been given a
D
and a lecture by the teacher. “You were supposed to write about something personal, something from your own life,” the teacher said. “Not out of the encyclopedia. You must have done
something
else during your summer holidays.”

Lesje didn’t understand. She hadn’t done anything else during her summer holidays, not anything she could remember, and the rock collection was something personal from her own life. But she could not explain this. She couldn’t explain why her discovery that rocks were different from each other and had special names was so important. The names were a language; not many other people might know it, but if you found one who did, you would be able to talk together. Only about rocks, but that would be something. She would walk up and down the stairs murmuring these names, wondering if she was pronouncing them right. “Schist,” she would say, “magma, igneous, malachite, pyrite, lignite.” The names of the dinosaurs, when she found out about them, were even more satisfactory, more polysyllabic, soothing, mellifluous. Though she could not spell
receive
or
embarrass
or
career
, she spelled
Diplodocus
and
Archaeopteryx
from the beginning without a hitch.