The Life Before Her Eyes (10 page)

The clothes are unremarkable in every way, except that the perfection of the young bodies becomes even more apparent emerging from those clothes.

If it will ever seem alien to them—health, youth, beauty—neither of them can imagine it now, looking at the images in that two hundred-page advertisement for the physical world.

W
EARING HER WHITE DRESS, WHICH SEEMED A BIT
tighter than it had last summer, Diana went to Emma's room to make her daughter's bed.

She started with the bottom sheet, which she straightened and then attempted to tuck more snugly under the mattress. She hated fitted sheets. The corners were always snapping free. She lifted the mattress a little, and the elastic edge of the opposite end escaped from its place, just as she'd known it would.

Diana sighed, went to the other end of the mattress, and pulled the fitted sheet tight across it, then tried to tuck the elastic corner under, but then the
other
end of the sheet snapped loose.

It was a terrible game—the kind of game you might be forced to play in hell. In a hell for housewives, whores, or wayward girls ... a game called Frustration or Wrestling with the Angel. Diana took a deep breath and felt her ribs strain against the waist of her white dress. Why was the dress tighter? The scale hadn't registered a single pound of new weight. Was her body simply shifting her weight around from one place to another?

She went back to the other end of the bed to try again.

When the bottom sheet was finally secured, she pulled the
top sheet and the comforter, with its little pink butterflies hovering in a pink sky, over the bed and tucked everything in. It was the way Emma liked her bed. Everything tucked.

Diana fluffed the pillows and lay them one on top of the other at the head of the bed, then picked Brownie and Pooh and Teddy off the floor, where they'd fallen in the night, and tossed them back on the bed. Then she leaned over to straighten them because they'd fallen awkwardly against one another, lifeless limbs flopping sloppily. With her back turned to her daughter's doorway, leaning over the bed, Diana thought for just a moment that she'd heard someone behind her, in the hallway, and she turned around quickly. No one was there.

Still there was a constriction in her chest—surprise? The dress? She realized that her head still hurt. Could it still be the headache from the night before? The cold juice in her daughter's cup? The struggle with the fitted sheet?

It was those things, she knew, but it was also those teenagers....

Though she hated to admit it to herself, she was still upset about them, and the headache and the fitted sheet and the teenagers making love in her neighbors' pool—it was the same to her. She felt as if she'd been defied by the very morning, the very
life,
she'd been determined to enjoy. The summer, the dusky leftovers of storm in the air, the quiet virtuality of her home with no one in it but herself ... all of it made of matter, but the matter made of silence, of dreaming.

These mornings alone in her dream home, often Diana felt as if her hand could pass right through the furniture and walls.

All of it humming. All of it made out of shadow and light.

But this morning Diana had become distracted by her annoyance and annoyed by her distraction, as if she'd been wakened
from a beautiful dream by the buzzing of a fly, and it had turned the beds and the curtains blowing in the breeze into mere artifacts, necessities. It had turned the morning into a chore.

Those teenagers. The nakedness. The fearlessness. The
audacity.

Had she ever been bothered by the
audacity
of teenagers before?

Never.

She remembered well that she'd once been a teenager herself, that on more than one occasion the police had been called, warnings had been given. Once, she'd been parked with a boy—she could hardly have called him a boyfriend since she'd known him only a couple of days—in the empty parking lot of a strip mall on the outskirts of town.

Though Diana had forgotten that boy's name and his face, she could still recall the eerie fizz of the neon sign sputtering over the closed Laundromat. A static green. The car heater had been on because it was November, and the radio, which was playing loudly—rap music, the bass so thick and loud it was as if the car were its own big heart and they were inside its pumping.

Apparently someone had reported suspicious activity.

The boy and Diana were naked when the officer shone his flashlight into the backseat and ordered the boy to get his license out of his wallet.

While the boy was looking for the wallet in his pants' pocket, the cop made Diana step out of the car.

It couldn't have been more than forty degrees that night.

Diana could see the officer's hot breath escaping from him in smoky veils.

She tried to grab her black down jacket to hold in front of her, but the cop told her not to touch anything. He made her stand there, shivering, with her feet burning on the cold asphalt, and he looked at her while the boy in the car searched for his driver's license. He kept the frozen zero of his flashlight trained on her naked body, and moved it around. A cold eye.

She could remember the way she consciously removed her mind from the body he was looking at ... removed her
self.
She let the other thing she knew she was—the part that could disengage itself from the legs and the breasts and the shivering—escape through an open space at the base of her brain, and Diana could imagine the look it caused to cross her face, the expression that made the policeman angry, made him sneer at her and shake his head. She'd seen the look on plenty of teenage girls' faces since then—
fuck you, go to hell, eat shit...

The audacity. That's what it was.

Diana went back into her own bedroom and was surprised to see that the bed she shared with Paul had already been made.

When had she made it?

Before or after she'd changed her clothes?

And if she hadn't, when had
he?

Had she simply not noticed that the bed was already made?

No ... vaguely, she remembered tossing the pillows back onto the straightened quilt, which was a beautiful hand-stitched teal blue antique she'd bought at a flea market back before she'd become pregnant with Emma, the quilt under which she and Paul had been making love when Emma was conceived.

She remembered tossing the pillows into their places, but she could have sworn that was yesterday.

Or even the day before.

Diana stood looking at the bed, a little amused:

This is what happens,
she thought,
with middle age.
Each day, if you were lucky, smoothed so effortlessly into the next that you couldn't tell one from the other. Life
went on...
and on and on and on. But no one knew this until he or she turned forty. Until then life was struggle and change—she remembered growing beans in Dixie cups in elementary school, an experiment, and the slow pale green eruption of the dirt, the bent necks, the wetness—and then suddenly that was over. From one stage to the next, until middle age, it had seemed as if one life ended and another took its place. Puberty, maturation, mating, marriage, pregnancy, baby—but then the stages blended into a sameness. A maintenance. Middle age. It was a river. A river you stepped into over and over again, finding it always the same.

It was a good time, Diana thought. It was the first time in her life she'd felt that the world was predictable, that her life was going to last, that what would happen the day after tomorrow could be predicted based on what had happened today.

Only in the last year had she begun to think of herself as
middle-aged.

But maybe she wasn't middle-aged yet. It seemed to her that middle age was being pushed further and further back. Many of her friends and colleagues were older than she was and hadn't even had babies yet. One had just married the summer before and had worn a white wedding gown with a twelve-foot train. Her bridesmaids had worn light green chiffon and giggled like girls, though they were in their late thirties, at least.

It was a wonderful era in which to be middle-aged, if that's what she was. So many others, and everyone so fit, so healthy. Just the day before, she'd seen a photograph of a famous model (Christie Brinkley? Cindy Crawford?) on the cover of a magazine by the checkout line:

"Sexy at Sixty" the caption under her stunningly line-free face had read.

Perhaps it was airbrushing, but still ... Diana was only forty, and here was this woman, who'd been beautiful and famous as long as Diana could remember, not seeming the least bit daunted by sixty.

Immortal. Undaunted.
Audacious.

When Diana had been the age of those kids swimming naked in the Ellsworths' swimming pool, she would not have believed it. Forty would have been old. Forty might as well have been sixty, which might as well have been dead, no matter how well they could have fixed you up for a photograph. As a teenager Diana had known perfectly well what immortality was and that becoming middle-aged wasn't part of it.

But what had she
really
known then?

Then, she'd had no idea that she might someday look at herself in a mirror and be more than happy to overlook the lines around her eyes; the loose flesh at her belly button, where it had puckered like a kiss ever since she'd had the baby; the midriff (and that gold ring she used to wear through her navel!) she would no longer dream of exposing to the world, and be simply grateful that the gray in her hair was fairly easy, yet, to rinse away...

What would she have thought then if she had known that someday she'd be this woman in the mirror, the woman she was looking at now in a too-tight white dress, looking no older than forty, but definitely forty?

She looked more closely at herself in the mirror, and smiled.

She didn't have to teach that afternoon. She'd go to her studio and sketch for a while before she cleaned up the kitchen and living room. Perhaps, she thought whimsically, she'd come
back in from her studio to find that she'd already vacuumed and dusted, too.

They put the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog back in its place on the nightstand, and they go to the kitchen.

The air-conditioning is on, and it fills the apartment with a false chill. Outside it's ninety degrees and nothing is moving, because there is no breeze. The tar in the streets has turned sticky. At the window where the air conditioner rattles, a stiff wind blows the curtains around as if there's an angry blizzard trying to escape.

"Want some ice cream?" one girl asks the other. She stands with the freezer open, and the cold ghosts drift in and around the Swanson dinners and the bags of mixed vegetables and the ice-cube bucket.

"Sure," the other says.

Bowls are taken out of the cupboard, spoons are tossed into the bowls, and a carton of Chocolate Silk ice cream is placed in the middle of the kitchen table.

They eat the dark sweetness until it's gone, and then they open a bag of Cheetos that was sitting on top of the fridge.

"Want some diet Coke?"

They both laugh about that.

"Yeah," the other says, "I'm on a diet. Can't you tell?"

After the Cheetos are almost gone, they make sandwiches from cold roast beef and American cheese, and eat them, and even after that they're still hungry.

They heat up a can of New England clam chowder.

They toss oyster crackers into the soup.

They finish with Chips Ahoy, right out of the bag.

Neither girl has ever been anything but slender and ravenous as long as she can remember—and will be slender and ravenous for as long as she can imagine.

T
HE TEENAGERS WHO'D BEEN IN THE POOL WERE GONE
by the time Diana got to her studio loft above the garage.

If they'd still been there Diana would have had a bird's-eye view. And although that wasn't what she'd had in mind, she had to admit to herself she was a bit disappointed that they were now nowhere to be seen. Perhaps if they'd been lying in lawn chairs, poolside, Diana would have sketched their young and gleaming bodies. The girls' thick, wet hair. The boy's natural muscles. The unself-consciousness of those few humans who made perfectly beautiful nudes.

She'd been one once, and remembered what it was like to be flawless as a beam of light...

Once, as a perfectly beautiful fifteen-year-old nude, she'd posed for a photographer—a man who must have been in his late forties, a stranger she'd met at the mall. He paid her sixty dollars to recline for an hour on the couch in his apartment—a couch he'd draped with a black satin sheet—while Diana's boyfriend paced around waiting for her in the man's smelly kitchen.

She and the boyfriend spent the money on a dinner at a steak house, and Diana could still remember the steak—a rib eye, medium rare—and the salad bar with its chilled ceramic bowls of bacon bits, crumbled hard-boiled egg, shredded cheddar cheese.

Her boyfriend was older. Nineteen. And Diana had never seen anyone eat as hungrily as he did that night, laughing between forkfuls about the old guy and his camera.

The photographer had claimed that he was going to sell the photos to a magazine, and Diana was flattered. She imagined her image reproduced glossily and sold at newsstands in big cities.

But Tony, her boyfriend, just kept laughing, saying the photographs hadn't been taken for any magazine. The old guy planned to keep them. He was probably developing them in his closet right now, jerking off.

It wasn't until then, in the restaurant with Tony laughing over his bloody steak and the bright iceberg lettuce littered with bacon bits, that Diana began to feel guilty. Stupid. Dirty.

They ordered dessert. Diana remembered that it had been called Mud Pie—chocolate ice cream on a dark, compressed pastry, drizzled with even darker chocolate. It had tasted, perhaps, as sweet and dense as the mud out of which God had fashioned the first human form...

Diana took out her box of charcoals and clipped a fresh sheet of paper to the easel and began to sketch the teenage bodies she'd seen—even though they were gone and she had always been best at drawing forms she could actually see. When she looked directly at the thing she was rendering, the process was easier, less inward. But when she drew from memory or imagination, there was often a sameness to the things she drew. The faces would be nearly identical every time—something about the eyes, even the eyes of old men, of children. They weren't exactly her own eyes she'd find herself giving those faces, but they were remembered eyes,
someone's
eyes, eyes that had imprinted themselves on her mind as the archetypal eyes,
the eyes she saw watching her when she closed her own and imagined the
idea
of eyes.