The Life Before Her Eyes (13 page)

Briar Hill, with its quaint clapboard houses and brick facades.

It was like a stage set, not a hometown.

The rolling lawn of the university commons was deserted, and the thin layer of snow coating it glowed a fiery pink in the sun coming up. She felt loathing for it—the lawn, the snow, the university where her mother worked as a secretary ("administrative assistant" they called it) in the philosophy department.

She felt hatred for the smug, clean students—none of whom were out this early, but whose ghosts she could see moving from class to class in their down jackets ... the students to whom her father, for a living, sold stereo equipment.

She hated the professors, who were either men with beards or women in flat shoes and knee-length skirts.

She hated Briar Hill.

The prettiness, the peace, the
decentness
of the place. She thought of the little village scene set up in the window of the gift shop at Christmas. The miniature train running in circles around it. The fake snow. The little fires painted inside the ceramic houses. A hammer smashing it to chalky bits.

She'd ended up at the police station that night because she'd disturbed the peace of Briar Hill by arguing loudly with her boyfriend outside his parents' house, which was one of those clapboards—bric-a-brac, front porch with a scrolled railing.

His parents were off at some conference in Chicago, and she and the boy had been smoking dope and staring at the aquarium in his parents' living room. His father propagated corals as a hobby, and although at first the corals seemed merely to be decorations to Diana, no more interesting than the dried flower arrangements scattered throughout the house,
after a few minutes of watching them she realized that they
weren't
decorations.

They were
alive,
like animals, like brains. Inside them the whole world was being dreamed, and she was a part of the dream.

She could see the image of herself in the aquarium glass and realized entirely, and for the first time, that
she
was the one who was a decoration.
She
could be
seen through.
A hand could have passed straight through her, waved her image away, waved her out of the world altogether.

But the corals ... they were heavier than she was. More solid. Heavy with thought. Breathing in the underwater blue.

If she didn't disturb them, maybe they would let her stay.

She stayed for a while lost among them, stoned, stating ... a thought swimming between pulsing minds. The one with the blue fingers. The one with the little stars at the end of each strand of hair. The one like a small pink shrub, the branches of it made of flesh. But when she turned to look at Brian, whom she'd met at Big Mama's CDs & Tapes and only known for a few days (they hadn't even kissed yet, though she knew they would, that they'd end up fucking, that it was why he'd invited her to his parents' house while they were out of town)... when she turned to look at him to see if he understood, if he was with her, speechless, among the other life-forms, she saw that he'd unzipped his pants, that he was staring at the side of her face, not at his father's corals, and that he was stroking his erection.

When she looked down at it he grabbed her hand and tried to replace his own with hers, and yanked her out of the most beautiful vision she'd ever had, the closest she'd ever come to understanding ... what?

Now she'd never know, and she slapped him. "Fuck you!" she screamed.

At first he laughed, but when Diana tried to stand up, to get away, he pushed her back onto the couch.

She fought it—punching, kicking. It wasn't the sex she was fighting against—she'd expected the sex—but it was the return to the world, which seemed even uglier and more vulgar than it had since she'd been away.

He ripped her blouse. He called her a slut. She told him she had an older lover with a panther who'd come and kick his ass.

He slapped her, hard.

They knocked over a lamp.

She tasted blood on her tongue and spit at him. Then she ran out the front door, with no shoes on, and the frost felt like shards of glass under her feet. He knocked her to the ground, and she scratched his face. He knocked her head against the lawn, but even with the frost, the grass was soft. She kicked him in the balls. When the police pulled in the driveway, they stopped.

One of the girls gets her driver's license, and now she can have the car all day if she drops her mother off at work at nine o'clock in the morning and is there to pick her up at five.

"Let's just drive around," she says.

She turns the radio on. They're playing a song that was popular a decade ago. It sounds computerized and reminds the girls of sitting in the backseats of their mothers' cars, eating Pop-Tarts, being driven to elementary school.

They sing along.

They roll down their windows.

They stop at a red light beside a car idling in the left-turn lane.

In that car, there are also two teenage girls—one dark, one light. They're smoking and listening to the very same song on the same radio station.

They look over. They wave and laugh.

When the light changes, the two cars full of music and girls go their separate ways.

The roads, the world, the summer ... they're full of teenage girls driving and singing.

"Why don't
we
smoke?" one girl asks the other loudly over the music.

"Because it's disgusting," the other answers.

E
MMA ATE HER HAMBURGER IN NIBBLES, PUTTING IT DOWN
every few bites to take a sip of milk, swipe a fry through ketchup, then eat it.

She was almost done with her dinner when the phone rang.

Diana raised her eyebrows to Paul. The expression meant
Should we answer that or let the machine get it?

He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling, considering, then looked at her. It meant
Who could that be? Maybe we ought to get it.

Diana got to the phone just as the answering machine picked up, which meant that she had to shout, "Hello? Hold on a minute..." over her own voice, which was saying, as if to contradict her, "We aren't available to take your call right now..."

Diana fumbled with a few different buttons until she hit the right one and cut herself off in midsentence.

"Mrs. McFee?"

"Yes?" Diana asked.

"This is Sister Beatrice."

"Oh, Sister Beatrice," Diana said, trying to sound pleasantly surprised.

"I was hoping you could come in tomorrow morning before school. Something has arisen with Emma."

"Oh," Diana said. She felt a quick funnel of air whirl around her face. She said, "I'd be happy to come in, but what seems to be the problem?"

Sister Beatrice cleared her throat, then said, "Did Emma show you a copy of the story she brought to school today?"

"Yes, I—"

"She
did
?" Sister Beatrice's astonished tone sounded phony, or was it gleeful? "Then you must know what the problem is—"

"I'm sorry?" Diana asked. "There was some problem with the story?"

"Excuse me," Sister Beatrice said, "I think if you'd seen the story you'd understand the problem. I made a copy of it, but I returned the original to Emma. I think she put it in her backpack. I told her she'd better show it to her parents when she got home."

"I guess I haven't—" Diana cut herself off. She touched her forehead and was surprised to find it beaded with cold sweat.

"Well, as I said, I have a copy here if she didn't bring it home—"

"If you told her to bring it home, I'm sure she did," Diana said. "I'll find—"

"Good," Sister Beatrice said. "And I'll see you then tomorrow morning? Is seven forty-five too early?"

"No," Diana said. "I'll see you in the morning, Sister."

"Good-bye," Sister Beatrice said as if she weren't quite ready to hang up, but Diana put the receiver back into its place quickly.

"Emma," Diana said softly when she stepped back into the dining room.

Emma was swirling a French fry around and around in a tiny puddle of ketchup.

"Emma. Do you know who that was?"

"No," Emma snapped. She looked straight up at Diana defiantly. Paul looked from Emma to Diana.

"That was Sister Beatrice."

Diana felt strangely afraid....

Afraid of Emma, afraid of Sister Beatrice, afraid of what had happened and might happen next. It was a fear completely out of proportion to the events, but her life, for so long now, had been so simple, so free of...

She had no idea, now, what she'd do if trouble...

"So?" Emma asked.

Her daughter's voice startled her. It was, she realized, her own younger voice.

Her own younger voice come back to haunt her.

"So," Diana said, trying to sound calm. "So, go out to the car and get your backpack."

Emma said nothing. She slid from her chair and stomped out.

"What's this all about?" Paul asked.

Diana shrugged, but she felt defensive. She felt that Paul was looking at her too closely, as if he could see past her eyes into her mind, past her mind into
her.

She shrugged and looked away from him. She said, "Sister
Beatrice said she wanted to see me in the morning. Something about a story Emma wrote."

Paul nodded. He said, "That's what Emma said when I asked her what was the matter. She said she was upset because of a story, but she said that
you
wrote the story."

The screen door slammed weakly.

"Here," Emma said, shoving a piece of paper, which was folded into fourths, at her mother, then she ran up the stairs.

Diana took the paper and carefully unfolded it.

Paul looked over her shoulder.

Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth is very naughty. She wants to show boys her underpants. She is a bad dirty girl. Who should I kill? Who should I kill? Kill Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth, not me.

"I
HAVE
NO EXPLANATION FOR IT,"
D
IANA SAID.

Sister Beatrice looked at her blankly. The eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses were so pale they appeared nearly white ... the eyes of a snowy owl, Diana thought, or some color-blind creature, some bird or animal that spent most of its life staring into frozen waste, waiting for the shadow of something small and mammalian to move.

Sister Beatrice looked from Diana to the piece of paper between them, then reached out and folded it back along the original lines into which it had been folded, as if she could no longer bear to look at it.

Diana had thought that the days of nuns in habits were over, that the nuns of this generation simply wore skirts and blouses and sensible shoes. She wasn't entirely sure she'd have opted to
send her daughter to a Catholic girls' school if she'd seen Sister Beatrice before enrolling Emma.

The habit Sister Beatrice wore was starched stiff, though it still managed to fall in sharp folds around her. Only her small pale hands and her powder white face could be glimpsed underneath it all. If Sister Beatrice had hair or breasts or voluptuous hips, it wasn't possible to see them, or even to imagine them. The illusion was of sexlessness,
bodilessness.

Sister Beatrice was ageless as well. Sitting across the desk from her and looking closely, Diana could see that her face was unlined. The skin on her cheekbones looked thin, tissuey, but there were no wrinkles around her eyes. Her eyebrows were pencil thin and black.

"As I said," Diana tried to explain, but now she was trembling and there was a cold chill rising from the hard wooden chair she was sitting in and from the linoleum under that, which was flecked with gold. "As I said, this couldn't be Emma's doing, because she doesn't know how to use my husband's computer. She's never even turned it on by herself, and"—Diana put her palms up empty on the table between them—"I'm sure you know as well as I do that this is nothing like Emma. This is just not the kind of thing Emma would ever do."

Diana put her hand over the piece of paper, folded into fourths, as if to keep Sister Beatrice from picking it up again.
Guilt.
She knew she had the look and smell of it about her. She felt it under her skin like a hot and slippery lining. But she
had not; why would she?

And if not her, then who? And why? And how had they managed to snatch the original story from Emma's Snow White backpack and replace it with this ugly thing, this story twisted out of Emma's sweet and innocent original, perverted?

Briefly it crossed Diana's mind that the only person besides herself who could have done it, who could have switched the pieces of white paper, who would have known where to find the first one and where to stash the second, was Sister Beatrice herself.

At that moment, the nun looked up from Diana's hand to her face. It was as if she were trying to see through her.
You can't,
Diana wanted to say,
I'm made of flesh and blood
But Sister Beatrice stared through her anyway. Sister Beatrice knew something Sister Beatrice
saw
something and didn't like it....

It was the only explanation—though it was also no explanation at all.

Sister Beatrice stood up and said, "We can bring Emma in now."

Diana stood up, too, but her chair made a terrible scraping sound as she did, and it felt as if the sound had pierced her. She put her hand to her head.
Headache,
she thought, and had to steady herself with a few fingers at the edge of Sister Beatrice's steel desk. Sister Beatrice went to the classroom door and opened it and called into the silent hallway for Emma, who'd been waiting out there.

Diana could feel the blood pumping at her temple. She kept her fingers on that pulse to try to hold off the headache she felt coming. When she glanced up she looked directly into the eyes of the Virgin Mary, whose portrait was hanging above the perfectly blank chalkboard.

The Virgin Mary was holding her own heart in her hands. It was pierced with a dagger. The dagger was exactly like the sound Diana's chair had made when she stood up, scraping itself across the linoleum. She felt sick, dizzy, and had to sit back down, and when she did, the denim skirt she was wearing crept
up her thighs, and the Virgin Mary seemed to regard this as if it were something that disappointed but did not surprise her. Her expression didn't change. It was as if she had been waiting.