The Life Before Her Eyes (11 page)

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.

E
MMA'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 had 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.

Diana felt something moving just under her ribs.

What was it?

Anger? Panic?

Guilt?

It was a crawling sensation similar to the one she'd had when she was pregnant ... something swimming inside her ... something that wasn't violent, something that meant no harm but was kicking with all the strength it had.

Diana held more tightly to the steering wheel than she needed to and bit her lower lip. It was something she used to do when she was Emma's age—bite her lower lip until it bled. For
years she'd had a scab there, which she could never keep from biting or fingering long enough to let it heal. It had driven her mother crazy, that scab. She'd slap at Diana's hand every time it went near her lip. She'd grab her chin and say, "Stop it!" whenever she caught Diana biting it, which was about a hundred times a day. Still Diana hadn't stopped until she was in seventh grade and a boy she liked pointed at the scab and said, "Gross. What's that?"

Diana inhaled. She reached over and patted the dark dust on her daughter's knees, but Emma moved away from the touch and pulled the plaid skirt down over the dirt.

Diana inhaled sharply and put her hand back on the steering wheel. "Young lady," she said, "you'd better tell me right this minute what's going on."

The outburst was a damp explosion. "No!" Emma screamed, burying her face in her hands. "You can't make me! You can't make me do
anything.
"

Emma started thrashing so violently that Diana was afraid she might grab the door handle and throw herself out of the minivan. It wasn't until that moment that Diana noticed that Emma's seat belt wasn't buckled.

She reached across her daughter, who fought, thrashing, against her, for the silver buckle of the seat belt. It was cold as a little gun in her hand. She pulled it across Emma, but Emma reacted to this as if her mother were trying to put her in a straitjacket or slip a noose around her neck. She kicked at the glove compartment with the heel of her white canvas shoes until it finally snapped open and spilled its contents—a map, a tampon, an owner's manual—onto the pile of Emma's things that she'd thrown onto the floor.

Diana glanced down at the map, which had fallen open to
what looked like a limb—broken, veined, tangled with freeways and highways.

California.

The map had been in the glove compartment since their trip out West the summer before.

Diana let the seat belt's silver buckle slip from her hand, and she gripped the wheel tightly again, staring straight out the windshield, steering home....

Death Valley. She'd always remember that...

The long shadowless drive through its blond dust, and the eerie sense she'd had that she'd been there before. But who wouldn't feel that way? How many movies had been filmed there, and how many of them had Diana seen whether she remembered them or not?

It was a hundred and twenty degrees outside, but they'd had the air-conditioning on, and inside the minivan they were wearing sweaters. In the rearview mirror mounted at the passenger's side window (Paul was driving) Diana could see the Funeral Mountains sinking blackly into the desert behind them.

She'd loved Death Valley—the sweeping grandeur of it, the way even the most vivid imagination could not have invented it, not even come close. And as they traveled closer to the ocean, and California began to shift gradually into its moss green lushness, Diana had felt homesick for the endless, soulless expanse of what they'd left.

One of the girls has never had a boyfriend.

But years before, she had a vision of Jesus while she was sitting in a pew of the church to which her mother took her. Jesus was kneeling at the altar with his hands folded. His hair was
reddish brown, and it hung down his back. He was wearing a torn white robe. The reason she knew it was Jesus was that he appeared out of nowhere and then became more and more translucent as she watched him until he disappeared.

Not long after diat her mother quit taking her to that church. She didn't like that her daughter was spending so much time with the youth group. She walked into the basement of the church one Saturday afternoon to pick her up and found her with seven other teenagers weeping and clinging to one another on a gym mat on the floor. One of the older girls was speaking in tongues, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

But lately she's begun thinking about boys. Her body is a bit too warm all the time. Nate Witt, or the boy with one arm at the Burger King, or some college boy she might meet downtown at the French Café...

But the other girl has not been a virgin for a very long time. She sees her soul as a little pinprick somewhere just above her stomach. Lately she's begun to think about sin. She's had dreams in which an elderly man with leathery skin stands above her bed and weighs her sins on a balance.

The good deeds are weightless, made of white Styrofoam chips, the kind they use to pack breakable things that need to be shipped.

But the sins are made of red and swollen fruit. They're overripe, and though there are as many good deeds as sins, the sins are so heavy that the scales tip right over and spill their contents onto the floor of her bedroom, and the old man laughs.

That girl wishes something would come to cleanse her, baptize her, empty and clean her body like a glass bottle.

"Let's go to Baskin Robbins," one of the girls says to the other.

They've spent the afternoon watching soap operas they've never seen before, guessing at what the conflicts and dilemmas of the characters must be. Though the air-conditioning is on full blast, it only cuts a path through the heat in the apartment.

"Mint chocolate chip!" the other girl says, sitting up straighter on the couch.

"French vanilla," the other says.

She points the remote control at the television, and the screen turns black.

D
IANA WAS STILL TREMBLING AS SHE DROVE, BUT
E
MMA
had grown quiet beside her, just the leftover hiccuping of her sobs.

Pulling the minivan into the driveway, Diana was relieved to see Paul in his usual spot on the front porch. He waved, as he always did, largely and generously, but Emma was still staring out the passenger window and Diana could only bring herself to lift a hand in his direction. The word
FOOL
flashed through her like some kind of airy bullet, in and out, without disturbing so much as an atom but leaving a sense of itself behind.

"Go to your room," she said to Emma gently but seriously, and Emma leaped out and ran into the back door of the house, leaving her windbreaker, backpack, and Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth crumpled on the floor of the minivan along with the spilled contents of the glove compartment.

Diana heard the screen door close behind her daughter like a slap.

She had to hold her breath to squeeze out because she'd parked so close to the garage wall, and then she had to let her
white dress press against the side of the minivan to get out of the garage, though she knew it would probably leave a shadow of dust and dirt against her hip. The darkness of the garage smelled of pine and rot when she inhaled again, and when she knocked over a rake it made a rattling and tinny sound that Diana felt in her teeth. She propped the rake back up against one of the exposed beams of the garage.

Her eyes watered when she stepped back out into the sun—those sunglasses, she still hadn't bought a pair—and she rubbed them as she walked toward the front of the house, where she knew Paul was waiting. She passed, as she had to, the daisies, which were staring straight into the sun without blinking. Some kind of pollen was hovering around them, and Diana could feel it in her throat and lungs, and she coughed.