Life Before Man (14 page)

They didn’t think to look for bottles, Nate says. They were in too much of a hurry.

“Actually this is all a joke,” Martha says. “They’ve been drinking. It’s the Christmas spirit, they thought it would be fun to cart me down here and make me get my stomach pumped out.”

The nurse hesitates, looking severely from Nate to the new man. “You can smell the liquor,” Martha says. “They aren’t like this except when they drink. See, they’ve been fighting.”

The nurse squints at Nate’s swelling eye. “Is this true?” she says.

“They used force,” Martha says. “You can see the finger-marks on my arms. Do I seem to you like someone who’s just swallowed a bottle of pills?” She stretches out her bare arms. “Would you like to see me walk a straight line?”

L
esje joins the queue in front of the cashier at the liquor store. The time is past when they’d ask to see her birth certificate, but she still gets the same cold feeling. Whenever she has to present a document proving she is who she is, she’s convinced they’ll find something out of order or that it will have someone else’s name stamped on it. The worst that ever happens is that they mispronounce her name, giving her the look that says, we thought you were one of us but now we can tell you aren’t.

She’s buying a bottle of wine to celebrate the return of William, which will take place this evening. William is in London, Ontario, celebrating Christmas with his family. Impossible, of course (Of course! She agrees!) for her to have gone with him. Last year this separation between them seemed like a conspiracy, both of them giggling over the puritanism, xenophobia and general dingy-mindedness of their respective families. This year it seems like a betrayal.

Not that she could have gone with him, even if invited. She was expected to go to her parents’ house for Christmas dinner, and
dutifully she’d gone, as she did every year. How can she deprive them of their only daughter, their only child, they who have deprived themselves of whole platoons of sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins, all, it’s understood, for her sake?

Her parents’ house is neither far enough north to be impressive, like the aunts’ houses, nor far enough south to be quaint, like the grandmothers’. Her mother’s brothers did well in real estate, her father’s sister married into a china shop. Her parents began the trek north but got stuck halfway up, on a nondescript street south of St. Clair. It was as if all their desire for transformation and change had gone into one act, their marriage to each other. They had none left over for two-car garages.

Her father doesn’t possess that ferocious instinct for business, or is it survival, which is supposed to be Jewish; which had impelled her grandfather from door to door, buying castoffs; and which once gave her grandmother six stitches in the head, defending her front-parlor variety store against a young man with an iron bar.
Turn your back, they steal you blind. Not the Chinese kids though. Them you don’t have to watch
. Lesje’s father rolled to his present modest eminence of color television and a second-hand Chev on used fur coats, on bubble gum and jawbreakers, two for a penny and the pennies carefully saved. And was he grateful? No. Married a
shiksa
, and of the worst kind too. (Like Lesje.)

He owned a dress business, true, but reluctantly: his mother almost forced him into it after his father died.
Little Nell Dresses
, it’s now called; once it was called
Tinker Bell
. Her grandfather once had a partner who got these names out of books he’d read. The dresses are for small girls; Lesje grew up wearing them and resenting them. For her, luxury was not the piqué and lace collars of the Little Nell line, but the jeans and T-shirts the other girls wore.

Little Nell neither expands nor collapses. It doesn’t even make the dresses; they’re made in Montreal. It merely distributes them.
It’s just there, like her father; and like him the methods of its existence are unknown to her.

She sat at the table covered with her mother’s good linen cloth, watching her father with a certain sadness as he swallowed down the turkey and cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes, the mince pie dictated by a religious holiday he would never have observed in the natural course of events and which her mother would have observed fourteen days later. At Christmas they always ate Canadian food. A capitulation, that turkey; or perhaps one more piece of neutral ground for both of them. Every year they chewed their way through this dinner, proving something or other. Elsewhere, one set of cousins was recovering from Hanukkah, another set was getting ready to sing the songs and dance the dances they’d learned at Ukrainian summer camp. Lesje’s mother, in the kitchen putting hard sauce on the slabs of mince pie, sniffled with quiet stoicism. This too happened every year.

She could never ask William to this meal or even to this house. Don’t irritate your father, her mother said. I know young people are different now but he still thinks of you as his little girl. You think he doesn’t know you’re living with someone? He knows. He just doesn’t want to know.

“How’s the bone business?” her father asked, the usual joke, his way of reconciling himself to her choice of job.

“Really great,” she told him. He didn’t see the attraction for a pretty girl, crawling around in the dirt, scratching for buried bones, like a dog. After first-year university, he’d asked her what she was going to be. A teacher, maybe?

“A paleontologist,” she’d said.

A pause. “So what are you going to do for a living?”

Her Ukrainian grandmother had wanted her to be an airline stewardess. Her Jewish grandmother had wanted her to be a lawyer and also to marry, another lawyer if possible. Her father
wanted her to make the most of herself. Her mother wanted her to be happy.

Lesje is uncertain about her choice of wine, since William fancies himself a connoisseur. He tends to condescend. He once sent back a bottle in a restaurant, and Lesje thought, He’s been waiting a long time for the chance to do that. She dug out from the garbage the bottle they shared the night before he left and copied down the name on the label. He chose that one. If he sneers, she’ll tell him. But this thought fails to cheer her.

She sees Nate Schoenhof in front of her in the line. Her breath jumps; suddenly her curiosity is with her again. For a month and a half he’s been invisible, she hasn’t even seen him waiting for Elizabeth at the Museum. For a time she felt, not rejected exactly, but disappointed, as if she’d been watching a movie and the projector had broken down partway through. Now she feels as if she has things to ask him. She says his name, but he doesn’t hear her, and she can’t step out of the line to touch his sleeve. But the man behind him notices and pokes him for her. He turns, sees her.

He waits for her at the door. “I’ll walk you back,” he says.

They set off, carrying their bottles. It’s dark now and the snow is still falling, clumps of wet flakes drifting windlessly down, the air moist, the sidewalk mushy underfoot. It isn’t cold. Nate turns onto a side street and Lesje follows, even though she knows it’s out of her way, this is east and she should be going south. Perhaps he’s forgotten where she lives.

She asks him if he had a nice Christmas. Terrible, he says, how about hers?

“Pretty awful,” she says. They laugh a little. It’s hard for her to say how bad it was or why it was that bad. “I hate it,” she says. “I always have.”

“I didn’t used to,” he says. “When I was a kid I kept thinking something magic would happen; something I didn’t expect.”

“And did it?” she says.

“No,” he says. He thinks for a minute. “Once I really wanted a machine gun. My mother absolutely refused. She said it was an immoral toy, why did I want to play at killing people, there was enough cruelty in the world and so on. But there it was on Christmas morning, under the tree.”

“Wasn’t that magic?”

“No,” Nate says. “By then I didn’t want it.”

“Do your kids like it?” Lesje says.

Nate says he thinks so. They liked it better when they were too young to know what presents were, when they just crawled around in the paper.

Lesje notices that one of his eyes is puffy and dark, with what looks like a healing cut above it. She doesn’t want to ask what’s wrong with it – it seems too personal – but she does anyway.

He stops, looks at her mournfully. “Someone hit me,” he says.

“I thought you were going to say you bumped into a door,” Lesje says. “Were you in a fight?”

“Not as far as I was concerned,” he says. “A woman hit me.”

Lesje can’t think of a good thing to say, so says nothing. Why would anyone want to hit such a man?

“It wasn’t Elizabeth,” Nate says. “She’d never hit anyone physically. It was someone else. I guess she had to.”

He’s letting her in, letting her listen in. She isn’t sure she wants this. Nevertheless her hand moves up, drawn to his mysterious wound, touches his forehead. She sees her purple and white-striped mitten silhouetted against his skin.

He stops, looks down at her, blinking, as if he can’t believe what she’s just done. Is he about to cry? No. He’s making a gift of himself, handing himself over to her, mutely. Here I am. You may be able to
do something with me. She realizes that this is what she’s been expecting from him, ever since his first phone call.

“It isn’t fair,” he says.

Lesje doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She opens her arms. One of his arms goes around her; in the other he holds his paper bag. Her wine bottle falls to the sidewalk, the sound muffled by the snow. As they’re walking away she remembers it and turns, expecting to see it cracked, the snow around it red; it’s too late to go back for another. But it’s intact, and suddenly she feels very lucky.

I
t’s the third of January. Elizabeth is sitting on the slippery rose-colored chesterfield in her Auntie Muriel’s parlor, which is truly a parlor and not a living room. It’s a parlor because of the spider and the fly. It isn’t a living room, because Auntie Muriel cannot be said to live.

Auntie Muriel is both the spider and the fly, the sucker-out of life juice and the empty husk. Once she was just the spider and Uncle Teddy was the fly, but ever since Uncle Teddy’s death Auntie Muriel has taken over both roles. Elizabeth isn’t even all that sure Uncle Teddy is really dead. Auntie Muriel probably has him in a trunk somewhere in the attic, webbed in old écru lace tablecloths, paralyzed but still alive. She goes up there for a little nip now and then. Auntie Muriel, so palpably not an auntie. Nothing diminutive about Auntie Muriel.

Elizabeth knows her view of Auntie Muriel is exaggerated and uncharitable. Such ogres don’t exist. Nevertheless, there is Auntie Muriel, sitting opposite her, large as life, the solid bulk of her torso encased in two-way stretch elastic with plastic boning, the jersey of
her mild blue beautifully tailored dress stretching across her soccer-player’s thighs, her eyes, like two pieces of gravel, cold and unreflecting, directed at Elizabeth, taking in, Elizabeth knows, every disreputable detail of her own appearance. Her hair (too long, too loose), her sweater (should have been a dress), the absence of a lipstick-and-powder crust over her face, all, all are wrong. Auntie Muriel is gratified by this wrongness.

She’s just a friendless old lady, Elizabeth thinks, trying out this excuse. But why? Why is she friendless? Elizabeth is aware of the way she ought to be thinking. She’s read magazines and books, she knows the lines. Auntie Muriel was thwarted in youth. She had a domineering father who stunted her and wouldn’t let her go to college because college was for boys. She was forced to embroider (embroider! with those stumpy fingers!), a torture she later imposed on Elizabeth, who however turned out to be somewhat better at it and whose cutwork tea cloth with pink French knots still lies folded in a trunk in Elizabeth’s closet, testament to her skill. Auntie Muriel had a strong personality and a good mind and she was not pretty, and patriarchal society punished her. These things are all true.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth can forgive Auntie Muriel only in theory. Given her own sufferings, why has Auntie Muriel chosen to transfer them, whenever possible, to others? Elizabeth can still see herself, at the age of twelve, writhing on her bed with her first menstrual cramps, nauseated with pain, Auntie Muriel standing over her holding the bottle of aspirin out of reach.
This is God’s punishment
. She never said for what. In Elizabeth’s view, no mere career would ever have satisfied Auntie Muriel’s lust for slaughter. She should have been sent into the Army. Only in a tank, helmeted, gauntleted, her guns directed at something, anything at all, would she have been happy.

So why is Elizabeth here? More importantly: why has she brought the children? Exposed them to this malignancy. They sit
beside her, subdued, wearing the white knee socks and Mary Janes they won’t willingly put on for any other occasion, little mouths carefully shut, hair clipped back from their faces with tight barrettes, hands in their laps, goggling at Auntie Muriel as if she’s a wonder, a mammoth or a mastodon, say, like the ones at the Museum, recently dug out of an iceberg.

In fact the children like to visit Auntie Muriel. They like her big house, the silence, the polished woodwork, the Persian carpets. They like the little crustless sandwiches Auntie Muriel sets out, even though they carefully take only one each; and the grand piano, though they aren’t allowed to touch it. When Uncle Teddy was alive, he used to give them quarters. Not so Auntie Muriel. When Elizabeth’s own mother had finally succeeded in frying herself to a crisp in that last tiny room on Shuter Street, setting fire to her mattress with a dropped cigarette and too drunk to know she was burning, Auntie Muriel drew up a list after the funeral. It contained all the items she’d ever lent, given or donated.
One light bulb, 60 watt, over the sink. One blue plastic shower curtain. One paisley Viyella housecoat. One Wedgwood sugar bowl
. Miserly gifts and chipped discards. Auntie Muriel wanted them back.