The Life Before Her Eyes (15 page)

Diana had watched for years with her own eyes as Timmy had aged and decayed. She'd been right there with the veterinarian when the injection was given. She'd been holding Timmy. This cat in her lap was not that cat.

"Are you keeping it?" Paul asked.

The question sounded strange to her. Are
you
keeping the cat. Surely he meant
we....

"If no one comes looking for him, if no one puts an ad in the paper, I don't see why—"

"That's fine," Paul said. "I was just asking."

"It'll be nice for Emma."

Paul said nothing.

"When will you be home?" Diana asked.

He told her he'd be home early. He was having trouble working. He'd see her that afternoon.

***

Driving back into Briar Hill, they stop at a roadside fruit stand.

An old man and his old wife are selling California peaches.

The old man has skin like leather, but the old woman is draped in a brown shawl, and she wears a man's fishing cap low on her face. What they can see of her skin looks perfectly smooth. The skin of someone who has avoided the sun all of her life.

The old man doesn't look at the girls. He simply takes the money they offer him for the peaches, and points at the bushel baskets and says, "Take your fruit."

The old woman watches them from under the brim of the khaki fishing cap.

One of the girls can feel the old woman's eyes on the rose tattoo on her hip.

A pickup pulls up at the corner, turning left onto the country road, and two boys inside it whistle and shout out the window.

"Baby! Hey!"

They could be shouting at either one of the girls, but the one with the rose tattoo on her hip cannot look up from the bushel basket of peaches. She feels something warm, like tears or blood, smooth itself out from her throat to her hips.

The boys, whistling.

The old man and woman scowling.

The bushels of fruit in the sun—ripe.

A small cloud of fruit flies hovering almost invisibly over the fruit.

The sun like a burning Earth overhead.

But why would she dress this way—the shorts, the tattoo, the spaghetti straps, the gold ring in her belly button—if she didn't want to be looked at?

The girls eat the peaches in the car.

The taste is blindingly sweet, but the juice runs all over so that everything the girls touch until they wash their hands will turn to sweetness and stick to the tips of their fingers.

A
FTER A WHILE
T
IMMY JUMPED OFF HER LAP.

He leaped up onto the couch then and curled to sleep in his favorite spot—a place where the floral pattern had been worn away from years of sleep and restless kneading.

Timmy was an outdoor cat, so he'd had his claws. Every piece of furniture in their house, and every rug, still bore Timmy's marks.

Diana stood up from the chair. She was feeling good again. Something had been returned to her ... changed, but hers. He was purring and snoring when she left the living room to go to her studio, and she closed the kitchen door behind her when she left the house.

Outside, the rain had stopped, but there was still the distant rumbling of thunder, sporadic flashes of lightning near the horizon. The air smelled like tin. It was steamy. There were worms lying bloated on the driveway.

Inside the garage it was dark, but once Diana had climbed the stairs and opened the door to her studio, she turned on the light, and she saw the sketch of the two teenagers, the one she'd drawn the day before, still on her drawing board.

It was one of her favorite moments, the one in which she approached a drawing she'd recently done but which she hadn't looked at closely yet, hadn't really
seen.
She'd been away from it for a day, so looking at it now was like looking at a stranger's piece, or like something one of her students had drawn. It was
the only time when she could be critical and admiring of her own work.

And this work was pretty good.

There was a sense of composition in it. Neither too centered nor too symmetrical, but not lacking those qualities, either.

The boy and the girl were near the right corner of the drawing, almost as if the artist were seeing them out of the corner of her eye. The informality of the girl's arm flung across her eyes was perfect. Unposed. Real. And her cigarette in the other hand was the right, unsentimental touch. The girl was beautiful, and so was the boy. His arms were thin. The girl's breasts lay flat against her chest as most girls' breasts lie, in this position, no matter how young and firm their bodies are.

And the light was right.

It glinted off the surface of the pool, rippling but jagged, like measured brain waves.

And the shadows cast by the edge of the Ellsworths' garage were creeping slowly from the teenagers' legs to their torsos, which made the brightness of the sun on their limbs and faces appear even brighter.

Diana was pleased.

Then there was a flash of lightning followed by a crack of thunder so loud and close that she gasped. The light in her studio surged and flickered once, and then it went out.

"Shit," Diana said, louder and more angrily than she'd meant to, and then the headache began again.

She'd forgotten about the headache...

Had it ever gone away, or had she simply, for a while, not registered the pain?

Another flash of lightning, and in the half second of it,
Diana saw nothing but her own drawing, which seemed altered in the brevity and brilliance.

The image.

The darkness.

Another flash. Again the image. The cigarette, Diana realized.

Darkness.

Another millisecond of brilliance.

The cigarette.

She hadn't drawn it.

This girl didn't smoke.

Diana rubbed her eyes and started to feel her way backward. She bumped the chair too hard with her foot, and it crashed, and again Diana said, "Shit." Her heart was racing. The darkness became total, and the rain on the roof was deafening. Between the darkness and the muffled drumming of the rain, Diana felt panicked to return to the world of her senses. She couldn't hear. She couldn't see. She felt silly for feeling frightened. It was just a thunderstorm. It was just an image she'd remembered differently than she'd actually drawn it. She was a grown woman. Safe neighborhood. Good life...

And then another flash of lightning broke into the blackness, and again it was her drawing she saw—the white window of it, and the teenage girl, who'd moved her arm away from her face and was looking back at Diana.

B
Y THE TIME SHE GOT BACK INTO THE HOUSE, THE LIGHTS
had come back on. The clock on the microwave was blinking, and the refrigerator was purring loudly, as it always did after a surge.

Diana went to it and put her head against it. There was something comforting about the machine noise of it, the soft hum of its motor. It struck her as mysterious, suddenly, the solid reliability of it, the way a machine, without food or encouragement, does one job well until it dies.

The pain seemed to pass from her head into the refrigerator, though she knew it would come back when she was no longer resting against the solid hum.

Tylenol. Motrin. She needed...

Diana wasn't surprised to feel the cat rubbing up against her bare legs, but still she inhaled.

His nose was cold on her ankles, a familiar sensation. He looked up at her and opened his mouth to reveal his white teeth and hot-pink tongue. He made a noise that was halfway between a cry and a purr ... a growl?

Timmy.

Diana moved away from the refrigerator, expecting the headache to return to her suddenly and completely, but it didn't. She exhaled. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of low-fat milk and poured some of it into the emptied bowl. There wasn't much in the house to feed a cat. She'd have to go to the store for cat food and litter and a litter box, since surely they'd thrown Timmy's things out long ago.

He lapped happily at the milk.

They have fathers.

One lives alone in an apartment across town. He works at Circuit City selling entertainment systems during the day, and at night he plays saxophone in a jazz quartet. He looks younger than he is. He has an earring. His name is Robert. It's hard to remember to call him Dad. Everyone else calls him Bop.

The other girl's father moved long ago to a nearby town. He has a son and a wife and a computer software company.

Their mothers speak of their fathers with too much intimacy. It's terrible to think that their mothers and fathers were once in love with each other. It means that love is nothing but bitterness, wistfulness, oblivion—although still, for some reason, the girls believe in it. They imagine their own happy marriages vividly, as if they'd been born with an image of it imprinted on their dreams, the way birds are born knowing how to make their species' nests without ever having to be taught.

They think about their fathers on the second Saturday of every month, on Christmas Eve, their birthdays, and on Father's Day.

Father's Day.

It rises out of June like smoke, smelling of barbecue sauce.

Bermuda shorts, beer cans, and the sound of a lawn mower starting up—that gasping roar, over and over, like a wild animal being trained.
Baseball games on the radio, a hushed and imaginary diamond far away. In the aluminum toolshed, the garden hose coiled up like a huge snake, waiting.
They are the Hallmark images that are attached to the idea of fatherhood but not to their own fathers.

Next Sunday is Father's Day.

The girls go together to a store downtown called Precious Moments, where they buy matching glass beer mugs and have
Happy Father's Day
engraved on them in a kind of stiff, feminine cursive written by a machine with a very sharp needle at its tip.

The clerk who sells them the mugs shrouds them in tissue paper and bubble wrap so they won't break.

D
IANA FELT TIRED.

She lay down upstairs on the bed and tried closing her eyes, but she felt too nervous to nap. What was it? She wondered without knowing what she was wondering about.

Something was happening.

Had it just begun in the last few days?

She was too young for menopause. But something, she felt, was changing. It had to do with her body as well as her mind.

Was this what happened with middle age?

An accumulation of experiences and things tumbling toward you?

Did the past start to bleed into the present, as if the past were red towels washed in warm water with white sheets?

Haunted.

Her body. Her mind. Her neighborhood. Her town.

She'd inhabited these things for a long time now.

She'd done things she regretted.

She saw the life she'd lived, the accumulation of its details, like a huge wheel rolling toward her, rolling down a hill.

She liked to think of herself as the kind of woman who saw the cup as
half full
She tried to look on the bright side. She had long practiced the art of avoiding morbid thoughts. She rarely read the newspaper. When an accident or murder was reported on the evening news, Diana turned the television off. Paul liked to kid her that her presence at any gathering "cleansed" the atmosphere, that in her presence no one told dirty jokes or relayed disturbing anecdotes.

She hoped he was right.

She knew the kind of woman she could have been—ironic, a little angry, a bit too loud. Diana saw those women coming, and when they opened their mouths with some half-decent bit of gossip or some shocking crime report they wanted to talk about as if it were funny, Diana simply looked at them, let them talk, but didn't approve of them, and they knew it.

Even her drawings were simple revelations of goodness. It was probably why she hadn't gone on to greater success. It was an age in which the shocking image was celebrated, but Diana wasn't interested in making that kind of art.

She didn't even experiment with line and form. To her those
elements were pure. There was nothing sinister about what she drew. The shadows were still shadows and the light was light.

However, for a while, she'd been someone else. Vaguely she knew it, but only in the way that one knows that nine months were spent in a womb once. There was the evidence to prove it, but the experience itself was as lost as if it had never been.

She couldn't have been the only one who felt this way.

The time period in which she'd been a teenager had led to indulgences and excesses no other generation had ever known, and now millions of those teenage girls were soccer moms. Diana had
seen
those soccer moms when they were teenagers—when they'd been promiscuous, tattooed, pierced in intimate places. She couldn't be the only one who'd grown up and become a mother and found herself to be a complete stranger to the girl she'd been—but haunted. Definitely haunted. That girl she'd been
was
her now, although the woman she'd become wouldn't have trusted that girl with her wedding china, with her car keys, let alone her home, her child, her
life.

Diana opened her eyes.

No sense lying there.

Every woman had a past.

She got out of bed.

She'd dust She'd straighten Paul's study. It would surprise him when he got home. Maybe she'd go to the store before she got Emma, and she'd pick out a nice little gift for Paul, something to celebrate his lecture.

She turned the light on in his study, and as it always did, the smell of it—musty books and Paul—and the sight of his shelves, the chaos of papers on his desk and on the floor, reminded her of her love for him. That love, the feeling of it,
began at her lips and smoothed warmly down her throat and filled her chest.

It had always been like that.

She'd start with the garbage can, she decided. It was overflowing with ripped and wadded-up sheets of yellow legal paper next to his desk, but before she took the can out of his study to empty it, she sat in his desk chair and looked around. She ran her hand over the pine drawer in which he kept his pens, his calculator, his rolls of tape and boxes of staples.