Life Before Man (17 page)

Unlike her mother, who’d sat crying for two days in the flowered chair by the window after their father was suddenly not there any more. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked the air, as if there was somebody listening who had a standard of behavior all ready for her. Her sister Caroline crawling up to her mother’s lap, crying too, sliding off repeatedly, crawling back up her mother’s slippery-skirted legs like some demented beetle.

Elizabeth had not wept or crawled. When it became obvious that their mother was not going to get up out of the chair and fix them dinner, she’d counted the quarters she’d been saving, the ones Uncle Teddy had been slipping down the front of her dress on their infrequent visits to Auntie Muriel’s big house. She’d gone through her mother’s purse, throwing the lipstick tubes and crumpled hankies onto the floor, finding nothing but a wrinkled two-dollar bill and
some pennies. Then she’d let herself out of the apartment, using the keys from her mother’s purse to lock the door behind her. She’d gone to the little grocery store three blocks away and bought some bread and cheese and marched back carrying the brown paper bag, stamping her rubber boots hard on the stairs as she climbed up. This was no great feat, she’d done similar things often enough before. “Eat this,” she’d said to her mother, furious with her and with her sister. “Eat this and stop crying!”

It hadn’t worked. Her mother had sniveled on, and Elizabeth had sat in the kitchen, chewing on her bread and cheese, in a white rage. She wasn’t angry with her father. She’d always suspected he couldn’t be depended on. She was angry with her mother for not having known it.

It was Auntie Muriel who had taught her how to keep a bank account, how to balance a checkbook, what
interest
was. Although Auntie Muriel regarded most books as frivolous trash and even schoolwork as of marginal value, she’d spent a good deal of time on this part of Elizabeth’s education. For which Elizabeth is grateful. Money counts, Auntie Muriel used to say – still says, when anyone will listen – and Elizabeth knows it’s true. If only because Auntie Muriel enforced the lesson so strongly: she supported Elizabeth, paid for her well-made underwear and her blue tweed coats and her piano lessons, therefore she owned her.

Auntie Muriel’s attitude towards Elizabeth was equivocal. Elizabeth’s mother was no good, therefore Elizabeth herself was probably no good. But Elizabeth was Auntie Muriel’s niece, so there must be something to her. Auntie Muriel worked at developing those parts of Elizabeth that most resembled Auntie Muriel and suppressing or punishing the other parts. Auntie Muriel admired backbone, and Elizabeth feels that, underneath everything, she herself now has the backbone of a rhinoceros.

Auntie Muriel is unambiguous about most things. Her few moments of hesitation have to do with the members of her own family. She isn’t sure where they fit into the Great Chain of Being. She’s quite certain of her own place, however. First comes God. Then comes Auntie Muriel and the Queen, with Auntie Muriel having a slight edge. Then come about five members of the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, which Auntie Muriel attends. After this there is a large gap. Then white, non-Jewish Canadians, Englishmen, and white, non-Jewish Americans, in that order. Then there’s another large gap, followed by all other human beings on a descending scale, graded according to skin color and religion. Then cock-roaches, clothes moths, silverfish and germs, which are about the only forms of animal life with which Auntie Muriel has ever had any contact. Then all sexual organs, except those of flowers.

This is how Elizabeth puts it for the amusement of others when she’s telling Auntie Muriel stories; notably to Philip Burroughs of Greek and Roman, whose aunt is Janie Burroughs, who travels in the same wee circle as Auntie Muriel. Unlike Nate, Philip can be depended on to know what she’s talking about.

Auntie Muriel may be a droll story, but this doesn’t affect her malignance. She’s a purist as well as a puritan. There are no shades of grey for Auntie Muriel. Her only visible moral dilemma is that she thinks she ought to rank her family with the Timothy Eaton Church members, because of their relation to her; but she feels compelled to place them instead with the cockroaches and silverfish, because of their deplorable behavior.

Such as that of Elizabeth’s mother, which even now Auntie Muriel never fails to allude to. Elizabeth has never been sure why her mother vanished. Helplessness, perhaps; an inability to imagine what else to do. Auntie Muriel’s version is that Elizabeth’s mother deserted the family out of innate depravity – ran off with the son of her own father’s lawyer, which Auntie Muriel saw as a kind of incest
and which luckily didn’t last long. She, Auntie Muriel, had rescued the deserted children and had begun immediately stuffing them with all the advantages.

Elizabeth, even as a child, did not fully accept this story. Now she thinks it may have been the other way around, that Auntie Muriel stole her and her sister away from their apartment while their mother was out on one of her expeditions, “looking for work,” she told them. Then, once Auntie Muriel had the children safely barricaded into her own house, she’d probably told their mother she was unfit and it could be proved in court if necessary. This is more Auntie Muriel’s style: self-righteous banditry.

She can remember the actual event but it tells her nothing. Playing movie-star cutouts with Caroline; then Auntie Muriel suddenly there, saying, “Get your coats on, children.” Elizabeth had asked where they were going. “To the doctor,” said Auntie Muriel, which seemed plausible.

Caroline at the third-floor window.
That’s Mother. Where?
Down below on the sidewalk, her face upturned in the streetlight, a sky-blue coat, Mayflies fluttering around her. Opening the window, smell of new leaves. Calling,
Mummy, Mummy
, both of them. Auntie Muriel’s footsteps on the stairs, along the hall. What are you yelling about? That’s not your mother. Now close the window or the whole neighborhood will hear. The woman turning, walking away, head sadly down. Caroline screaming through the closed window, Auntie Muriel prying her fingers from the ledge, the catch.

For months Elizabeth put herself to sleep with a scene from
The Wizard of Oz
. The book itself had been left behind, it was part of the old life before Auntie Muriel’s, but she could remember it. It was the part where Dorothy throws a bucket of water over the Wicked Witch of the West and melts her. Auntie Muriel was
the Witch, of course. Elizabeth’s mother was Glinda the Good. One day she would reappear and kneel down to kiss Elizabeth on the forehead.

She leans back, closes her eyes. Dry eyes. Chris wanted her to quit her job, leave her home and her two children. For him. Throw herself on his mercy. His tender mercy. She’d have to be crazy, he’d have to be crazy to think she ever would. No visible support. He should have left things the way they were.

She sits up, reaches quickly for the bundle of letters, reads the one on the top.
FUCK OFF
. His last message. She’d been angry when she first read that.

She tucks the check stubs and paid bills and the duplicate rent receipts from the tenants upstairs into an envelope, marks it:
1976
. That finishes off the year. Now she can start another one. Time hasn’t stood still while she’s been away, as she now thinks of it. She’s barely managed to hold things together at the office, but she has a lot to catch up on. The quilt exhibit, for instance, must be scheduled and promoted. The girls need new underwear and Nancy needs new snowboots: she’s been coming home for days with a wet foot. And there’s something wrong with Nate. Something is happening in his life; he hasn’t told her about it. Perhaps he has a new ladyfriend, now that Martha has been used up. He’s always told her before, though. She riffles back through the days, looking for clues; at the base of her skull the old chill begins, the old fear, of events, cataclysms preparing themselves without her, gathering like tidal waves at the other side of the world. Behind her back. Out of control.

She stands up, turns the key in her desk. She has backbone. She has money in the bank, not enough but some. She does not have to depend, she is not a dependant. She is self-supporting.

O
rganisms adapt to their environments. Of necessity, most of the time. They also adapt to their own needs, often with a certain whimsy, you could almost say perversity. Take, for instance, the modified third claw on the hind foot of one of Lesje’s favorite dinosaurs, the medium-sized but swift and deadly Deinonychus. This third claw does not, like the other two, touch the ground; therefore it was not used for walking or running. Ostrom, the noted authority and discoverer of Deinonychus, speculated from its position and its shape (sickle-curved, razor-sharp) that it was used for the sole purpose of disemboweling. Deinonychus’s front legs, proportionately longer than those of Tyrannosaurus or Gorgosaurus, held the prey at a suitable distance; Deinonychus then stood on one foot while using the third claw of the other foot to slash open the stomach of the prey. A balancing act; also an eccentric way of coping with life, that is, the capturing and preparation of food. Nothing else even close to Deinonychus has yet been unearthed. It is this eccentricity, this uniqueness, this acrobatic gaiety, that appeals to Lesje. A kind of dance.

She has watched this innocent though bloody dance many times from the immunity of her treetop, which today happens to be a conifer. There is nothing in sight at the moment, though; not so much as a pterosaur. William has frightened everything away. He wanders below her among the bulbous-trunked cycad trees, ill at ease. Something is wrong; this isn’t what he’s used to. The sun is strange and there are odd smells. He hasn’t yet realized he’s in a different time.

Not realizing is his adaptation. Lesje is his environment, and his environment has changed.

William also sits at a card table, eating the Betty Crocker Noodles Romanoff Lesje has just dished out for him. She herself doesn’t feel like eating right now. He’s bombarding her with gloom: pollutants are pouring into the air, over three hundred of them, more than have yet been identified. Sulfuric acid and mercury are falling, metallic mist, acid rain, into the pure lakes of Muskoka and points north. Queasy fish rise, roll over, exposing bellies soon to bloat. If ten times more control is not implemented at once (at once!) the Great Lakes will die. A fifth of the fresh water in the world. And for what? Pantyhose, he says accusingly, fork dripping noodles. Rubber bands, cars, plastic buttons. Lesje nods; she knows, but she’s helpless. He’s doing it on purpose.

At this very moment, William continues relentlessly, birds are eating worms, and stable, unbreakable
PCBS
are concentrating in their fatty tissues. Lesje herself has probably been incapacitated for safe child-bearing due to the large quantity of
DDT
she has already stored in her own fatty tissues. Not to mention the radiation bombardment on her ovaries, which will almost certainly cause her to give birth to a two-headed child or to a lump of flesh the size of a grapefruit, containing hair and a fully developed set of teeth (William cites examples), or to a child with its eyes on one side of its face, like a flounder.

Lesje, who does not want to hear much more of this right now, truthful though it may be, counterattacks with the supernova theory re: the extinction of the dinosaurs. Eggshells grown so thin the young could not hatch, due to a dramatic increase of cosmic radiation. (This theory is not in good repute at the Museum, which favors a more gradual hypothesis; nevertheless, it gives William something to think about. It could happen here. Who can tell when a star may explode?) Lesje asks William if he’d like a cup of instant coffee.

William, glumly, says yes. It’s this glumness of his, the disappearance of his customary buoyancy, that constitutes the adaptation. Like a dog sniffing the air, he senses the difference in Lesje; he knows, but he doesn’t know what he knows. Hence his depression. When Lesje brings in the coffee he says, “You forgot I take cream.” His voice is plaintive. Plaintiveness isn’t something Lesje associates with William.

Lesje sits down in her easy chair. She wants to ruminate, but if she goes into the bedroom William will take it as an invitation, he’ll follow her and want to make love. Lesje doesn’t wish to do this right now. (Problem: copulation of Deinonychus. Role of the third claw, sickle-shaped, razor-sharp: how kept out of the way? Accidents?) Despite the fact that every cell in her body has grown heavier, is liquid, is massive, is glowing with watery energy, each nucleus throwing out its own light. Collectively she blinks like a firefly; she’s a lantern, a musky signal. No wonder William hovers, priapic, anxious because she’s twice locked the bathroom door while taking a shower and once told him she had a bad case of heartburn. Awkward William bumbles, June bug against the screen.

But how is it that Nate has failed to appear? He was supposed to phone on the seventeenth; he’s two days late. She makes excuses to waft past the phone in case it rings, she stays in when she would otherwise go out, goes out when she can no longer stand it. She should have given him the phone number at work; but he could get
her easily through the switchboard if he wanted to. Could it be that he’s already phoned, that William has answered and, divining everything, has said something so vicious or threatening that Nate will never phone again? She doesn’t dare ask. She doesn’t dare phone Nate, either. If Elizabeth answers, he’ll be displeased. If one of the children answers he’ll also be displeased. If he himself answers he’ll be displeased too because he’ll know it could just as well have been one of the others.

Lesje takes refuge in work. Which was once the perfect escape.

Part of her job involves the education of the public on matters pertaining to vertebrate paleontology. Right now the Museum is developing a dinosaur media kit for schools, which will include film strips and taped commentary, as well as booklets, posters and guides to the Museum’s exhibits. It’s hoped that this kit will be as popular as the sale of the models of Diplodocus and Stegosaurus (grey plastic, made in Hong Kong) and of the dinosaur coloring book indicate it will. But how much to tell? What for instance, of the family lives of the dinosaurs? What about their methods of egg laying and – delicate subject, but always of interest – fertilization? Should these be ignored? If not, will the various religious and moralistic parent-action groups now gaining strength object to this material and boycott the kits? Such questions would not normally have occurred to Lesje, but they have occurred to Dr. Van Vleet, who has asked her to look into them and to propose some solutions.