The Life Before Her Eyes (20 page)

And hadn't she seen a june bug clinging to the trunk of a tree in the front yard last summer? It had been brown and shiny, but when Diana looked more closely at it she could see that it was just a shell, a bug's shed skin. The june bug itself had crawled away and left a transparent amber self behind, still clinging.

But spiders; when was the last time she'd seen a spider? In her mother's apartment they used to make their ways somehow into the bathtub in the summer and climb the tile to the ceiling, sew webs in the corners of the shower walls.

And flies.

Flies had little razor-shaped wings and iridescent eyes.

And beetles, waddling along with their shells on their backs, cracking under her shoes whether she meant to step on them or not.

Hadn't Mr. McCleod told them once how many different kinds of insects there were in the world? Hadn't it been staggering, the number and variety—a number too large to comprehend and therefore impossible to file away in the mind?

Bees! She knew she'd seen bees. You couldn't remember roses and not remember bees.

You couldn't remember summer and not remember roses....

Paul rolled over and pulled the sheet and quilt with him, and Diana was left exposed to the darkness in her white summer nightgown, which looked so white in the moonlight that it seemed to be
made
of moonlight.

She got out of bed.

She'd go to her studio.

She might as well draw. There was no sense lying awake all night. Now she remembered insomnia.

They dry themselves and hurry back into their clothes, then run giggling down the strangers' driveway to the sidewalk, back into the wavering wall of heat that is an August afternoon.

Back to the apartment, where they eat Doritos and drink Seven-Up. The taste is sweetness and light, like water extracted with syringes from flowers.

The air-conditioning feels cooler now that they've been in the water and emerged from it. They turn the radio on. Jewel is singing a song that was popular a few years before...

"
Who will save your soul?
"

Her voice is like a length of silk thread taken up by a thin, bright needle.

One of the girls has goose bumps. They're both wearing spaghetti-strapped tops and cutoffs. The one who's cold pulls an afghan over her legs. It's something that her dead grandmother crocheted two decades before—olive green, forest green, and orange, with terrible geometric shapes all meeting in an ugly swirl at the center.

She's never liked the afghan, into which her mother sometimes sobs when she's missing her own dead mother.

The girl feels sad ... the song ... the cool water gone. Next year they'll be seniors, and then what? Where will they go? Who will they become?

As hard as she tries she can't imagine it:

Dormitories, pizzas, her mother's apartment empty of her. When she gets past graduation ... wearing a black gown, like a witch or a nun, on the football field ... she sees a yellow sign. It
says
YIELD
, or
NO OUTLET
, or
PED XING,
and her imagination grinds to a halt.

She clears her throat and asks her friend, "Have you been baptized?"

"Sure," her friend says. "When I was a baby, but again when I was going to the Pentecostal church. We went on a retreat Pastor Mallory baptized me in a little creek that ran through the woods where we were camping. It was just after I was born again."

Born again.

They've never talked about that. Though they've talked about sex, their periods, their fantasies, their fathers, all the secret painful things, they've really never talked about God. No one ever really talked about God. A whole lifetime could pass by, and God would never be mentioned, or death.

From behind the pulled shades there's a hot breath sneaking through the imperceptible spaces between the windows and their frames.

I
T WAS LARGE, THE NIGHT.

It seemed to be empty, but as soon as she turned on the back porch light, hundreds of moths swarmed out of the darkness and began to circle the bulb.

Where had they been before she turned on the light? What had they been doing until then?

They thrummed dully against one another with their dusty little wings made of—what?

A kind of skin like toilet tissue, the same thinness that covered every living thing, the thin film that existed between the earth and the sky, one moment and the next. What else?

Diana stepped into it, the night, closing the door quietly behind her so as not to wake up Paul or Emma.

As soon as the house was behind her, she felt calm again. The grass was dry but cool on her bare feet. She could smell roses. It was quiet...

The noises that had kept her awake were still there, but they were muffled by the enormity of the world. The sky, black but full of stars—she looked directly up at the Little Dipper, which was like a spoonful of diamond dust—was high, unfathomably high. Plenty of room for everything.

She looked from the sky to the backyard.

Emma's plastic pony was shining whitely in the night.

Diana felt it return her gaze with its blank eyes. It seemed ready to say something ... something Diana knew she wouldn't want to hear. All the years that the thing had spent outside staring into the side of the garage, the weather, the night, the nothing. It couldn't move, and it couldn't disintegrate. Made of plastic, it would last forever.

What would
forever
mean to something without brain waves, or respiration?

Forever.
An eternity of insomnia. Diana looked back at the pony, and—a trick of the eye—in its contrast to the darkness, it seemed to move.

She looked away, stepping out of its line of vision. She hurried over to the garage and rolled up the door, which groaned like a stone being rolled from a cave. A hot breath exhaled from it, smelling of gasoline, and Diana walked through it, the cement slab strangely cold against the soles of her bare feet, and she climbed the stairs to her studio.

From behind the door Timmy must have heard her coming, because he'd quit yowling. Now he was purring.

Diana could sense his impatience. He wanted out of there, whether it was safe and full of places to sleep and food to eat or not. The second she opened the door Timmy dashed past her, down the stairs, and out of the garage. A soft darkness hurrying out to join the larger, softer darkness.

By the end of August, the hot wet blanket of humidity that's been lying over Briar Hill for two weeks finally lifts.

One of the girls has been given a car by her father, who's moving to California with his wife and son. It has no air-conditioning, so they keep the windows rolled down, and their hair is ratted and wild by the time they get wherever they're going.

It's ending quickly.

Summer.

Soon they'll be back behind their desks—the smell of Pine-Sol on the shiny surfaces—stating into Michael Patrick's or Mary Olivet's back.

They take the car to the zoo.

Why not?

Who says teenage girls can't go to the zoo?

One of them hasn't been there since she was a child, holding her father's hand as he pushed the stroller of his newer child and talked to his newer wife. She remembered only the hand, the way it kept slipping out of hers when he had to readjust the direction of the stroller he was pushing ... that and a lion sprawled out on a rock, yawning, lifting its lazy head up to look at her, then dropping back into its nap.

The other girl had come to the zoo the summer before with an older man who kept exotic pets. He bored her with facts
about wolves and lynxes and bought her a snow cone. The animals seemed to recognize him, she thought. In the snake house he put his hand up her shirt when no one was looking. He kissed her hard enough to make her lower lip bleed, near the monkey pit. She was already pregnant, although she didn't know it then.

Near the lion's den she'd seen Mrs. Adams, who'd been her third-grade teacher. Mrs. Adams had been hugely pregnant then, and Mrs. Adams was hugely pregnant now. She was pushing an empty stroller, waddling, and though she didn't seem to recognize her, Mrs. Adams looked disapprovingly at the teenage girl holding the hand of an older man.

Today the zoo is crawling with children.

They shout and scramble as their mothers and fathers, looking weary and washed-out in the bright light, hurry after. The parents are carrying things, pushing things.

The girls are wearing short shorts and have put temporary tattoos on their ankles.

The fathers of the children look at the tattoos while their wives and children look at the polar bear, who is pacing back and forth along the moat between himself and the zoo visitors, with blood on the white fur around his mouth.

The girls know, moving through the zoo, that they are closer in kind to the children than to anything else there....

The animals are nothing like the girls. Dulled, pacing, or swimming in circles in their dreamless sleep.

And neither are the adults, with their diaper bags and other burdens.

The girls, like the children, have to hold their stomachs because they're laughing so hard. They want treats—snow cones, candy corn, licorice whips. They are still like children, except
that the world, in all of its complexity and implications, is coming into focus for them:

The hungry boredom of the polar bear, like the fathers; the effect of their own flesh on the mothers who follow their husbands' glances in the direction of the girls, then look away.

They aren't children. Or animals, or women. Briefly they're in a state between each of these. They are all of these things at once.

D
IANA WOKE UP AT HER DESK WITH HER FACE IN THE
crook of her arm, which was sprawled across a piece of blank drawing paper.

Timmy, who'd stayed outside for only a few minutes before climbing the stairs to her study and scratching to get back in, stood up from the braided rug where he'd slept He stretched, then sat on his haunches and stared at Diana simply. No affection. No judgment. He was just looking.

The sun was coming up. The smeared peach and gold of it lit up the curtains on the window of her studio. It could only have been about six o'clock in the morning, but Diana heard voices, and she stood up and stretched, and was surprised that she wasn't stiff from having fallen asleep sitting up. She felt well. Oddly rested. She went to the window and parted the curtains, which seemed to be
made
of dawn, lit up as they were with new sun. She looked out.

They were back.

The blond and her boyfriend had come back to the Ellsworths' swimming pool.

The girl was sitting at the edge of it, naked, dangling her bare feet in the water, which was plum colored in the shade of
the Ellsworths' house and the sun just coming up. With one hand she was rubbing the back of her own neck, and in the other she held a joint, which she brought to her lips, inhaled from it deeply. Diana could taste it in her own lungs ... the sweetness, just like
dawn ... pollen, flower petals, the smell of the baking supplies aisle, fruit cocktail, sun.

She held the smoke in her lungs for a minute and then exhaled, but Diana could see nothing escape, not even a plume of it, from the girl, who continued a conversation with her boyfriend. He was floating on his back. Diana couldn't quite make out what she was saying.

So I was ... anatomy, and he was, like, get your scalpel, there's the sweetheart; don't put your hand on that.

This time their nakedness didn't shock Diana. She'd seen their bodies before. The slick perfection of them. The shocking youth of them. The boy let out a loud laugh at what she'd said, then sank out of sight—only the waxy vagueness of him under the plum-colored water from where Diana watched—a moving smoothness, like a dolphin, or a cadaver. Then he resurfaced between the girl's legs.

He shook his head to get the water out of his eyes, then put his face there, between her legs.

She tossed what was left of the joint into the Ellsworths' pool, then spread her legs farther, inched to the edge of the pool, and leaned backward.

Before Diana had thought about it, she'd yanked open the window and was shouting through the screen, "What's going on over there? What are you kids doing?"

The boy splashed backward but came up again quickly, sputtering and shaking his head. The girl stood up and looked straight at Diana, and she called up, "Fuck you, you old bag."

The boy burst into laughter then and pulled himself up the side of the pool in one muscular movement, and then he ran to a towel hanging over one of the Ellsworths' lounge chairs. He tied the towel around his waist, grabbed his clothes, and ran, still laughing, behind the Ellsworths' toolshed.

At least he was ashamed, Diana thought.

But the girl just put her hand on her hip and stared straight up into the window of Diana's studio.

It scared her, the boldness, but there was nothing Diana could do now but face it. She had to say something. She said, "Do the Ellsworths know what you've been up to?"

The girl narrowed her eyes and smirked.

"We
are
the Ellsworths," she said.

D
IANA TREMBLED IN THE SHOWER.

Though the water was scalding hot and sending up scarves and veils of steam, fogging the shower doors and everything beyond them—though her skin stung from the burning and she could see that her hands and feet were red from it—she couldn't get warm. The cold was too deep inside her. She needed ... what? Hot cocoa? Tea? Whiskey? Something that could get to
that
coldness.

We
are
the Ellsworths....

Diana had pulled the curtains closed and hurried across her studio to the door. When Timmy tried to follow her, she pushed him back gently with one bare foot In the garage she'd stumbled on the handle of a rake, which was propped upside down, leaning against a beam, and it had fallen on her with its claws. It had drawn blood on her neck and left its paw swipe there.

She was holding her neck in the darkness of the garage when she saw a silhouette standing in the open doorway, someone blacked out by the sun still rising behind him.