Life Before Man (31 page)

He wants to tell her she’s taking everything too seriously; but how can he do this when among the things she takes so seriously is himself? Elizabeth ceased to do this some time ago, and he isn’t even sure he can still do it. But Lesje can, she can do nothing else. He can’t remember ever having been listened to so attentively; even his banalities, his random comments. Almost as if he’s speaking a foreign language, one with which she is only slightly familiar. She thinks he knows things it would benefit her to learn; she thinks of him as older. Which flatters but alarms him: he can’t risk total exposure, bare his confusion or his carefully guarded despair. He’s never told her how he jittered in phone booths night after night, dialing her number, hanging up when she answered. Cowardice, failure of nerve.

In the bedroom he’s beginning to think of as theirs, she glimmers like a thin white moon for him alone. By seeing how beautiful she is he’s made her beautiful. But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he’s patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust.

He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he’s lucky she’ll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.

(Though on the shore, at a discreet distance and despite his best efforts, there’s always another hut. He tries to shut it out but it too is indigenous. For the children and, of course, for Elizabeth. Who else would take care of them?)

E
lizabeth has taken off her shoes and is brushing her hair, standing in front of the bureau with its oak-framed mirror. The air is humid and unmoving, though the window is wide open. The soles of her feet feel tender and swollen. She hopes she will never get varicose veins.

In the glass oval, behind her own face, rigid and it seems to her puffy in the muted light, she can trace the shadow of her face as it will be in twenty years. Twenty years ago she was nineteen. In another twenty years she will be fifty-nine.

Today is her birthday. Cancer. In the Scorpio decanate, as some pretentious little fraud at the last Museum Christmas party told her. Someone from Textiles, floral prints and herbal teas. Since yesterday the earth has turned once on its axis, and now she is thirty-nine. Jack Benny’s age, the joke age. If someone asks her her age and she tells it, they’ll automatically assume she’s being funny as well as lying. Jack Benny, of course, is dead. Not only that, her children don’t even know who he was. Before this birthday her age has never bothered her.

She half-empties her glass. She’s drinking sherry, has been drinking it for some time. A stupid thing to be doing, a stupid thing to be drinking; but since Nate left, the liquor cabinet is never very well stocked. She doesn’t drink steadily the way Nate does and she forgets to replace things. She finished off a heel of Scotch earlier in the day. Another of his leavings.

The children insisted on throwing a birthday party for her, though she tried to head them off. When Nate lived here they’d celebrated her birthday in the morning, simply, with presents only. Parties were for children, she’d told them, and Nate had backed her up. But this year they went the whole hog. They seemed to think it would cheer her up. It was supposed to be a surprise, but she knew what was coming as soon as Nancy, elaborately and casually, suggested after lunch that she take an afternoon nap.

“But I’m not tired, darling,” she said.

“Yes, you are. You’ve got big bags under your eyes.”

“Please, Mother,” Janet said. Janet has lately begun to call her “Mother” instead of “Mum.” Elizabeth wonders if that tone of weary, superior exasperation has been copied from her.

She climbed the stairs to her room, where she lay on the bed drinking Scotch and reading
English Tapestry Through the Ages
. If they were preparing a surprise, she would have to be surprised.

At five Janet brought her a cup of undrinkably bitter tea and ordered her to come downstairs when she heard three whistles. She tiptoed to the bathroom to pour out the tea; returning, she could hear them arguing in the kitchen. She creamed her face and put on a black cotton blouse and the pearl pin she knew Janet considered elegant. When she heard Nancy’s feeble whistles, she tightened the corners of her mouth, widened her eyes, and negotiated the stairs, holding on to the banister. Nude descending the staircase, in cunning fragments. Stewed, descending the staircase. But she wasn’t really drunk. Tiddly, said Uncle Teddy.

They’d lit candles in the kitchen and looped pink and blue streamers with teddybears on them around the walls. “Happy Birthday, Mum,” Nancy shrieked. “This is a surprise!”

Janet stood beside the cake, hands decorously folded. The cake was on the table. It had three candles on one corner and nine on the opposite one, “Because if we put thirty-nine on we couldn’t get them all on,” said Nancy. The writing, in impeccable baker’s script surrounded with bridal wreaths of pink sugar roses, said “Happy Birthday Mother.”

Elizabeth, who hadn’t expected to be moved, sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and locked her smile into place.
Lockjaw
. This was the shadow of all the birthday parties she’d never been given. Her own mother had either forgotten or found her birth no cause for celebration, though there would be presents, remorsefully, days after the event. Auntie Muriel, on the other hand, had always remembered, but had made it the occasion for a solemn presentation of some large or costly item, something that radiated guilt in advance, that cried out to be scratched, lost, stolen. A bicycle, a watch. Not wrapped.

“Thank you, love,” she said, hugging each of the children in turn. “This is the most wonderful birthday I’ve ever had.” She blew out the candles and opened her presents, exclaiming over the lily-of-the-valley talcum powder from Janet and the puzzle from Nancy that required to have its three white balls and three black balls jiggled into their respective holes. Nancy is good at such puzzles.

“Where’s your present from Dad?” Nancy asked. “He said he was giving you one.”

“I guess he just forgot this year, darling,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure he’ll remember it later.”

“I don’t understand that,” Janet said reflectively. “He gave us the money for the cake.”

Nancy burst into tears. “We weren’t supposed to tell!” She ran from the room; Elizabeth heard her wailing up the stairs.

“She’s been under a strain lately,” Janet said in that adult voice Elizabeth finds so hard to bear. She followed sedately, leaving Elizabeth alone with an uneaten cake and a small pile of crumpled wrapping paper.

She cut the cake and filled two plates, then carried them upstairs, prepared to stroke and comfort. She entered the children’s room and sat, rubbing Nancy’s damp back as she lay face down on her bed. It was far too hot. She could feel sweat condensing on her upper lip, in the hollows at the backs of her knees.

“She’s just showing off,” Janet said. She was sitting on the other twin bed, nibbling a sugar rose. “There’s nothing wrong with her really.”

Elizabeth put her head down to Nancy’s when the choking noises had subsided.

“What is it, love?”

“You and Dad don’t love each other any more.”

Oh hell, Elizabeth thought. He set this up. I should let him cope with it. Just stick them in a taxi and send them over. “I know it makes you unhappy that your father doesn’t live here with us any more,” she said carefully, correctly. “We felt it would be better for all of us if we lived apart for a while. Your father loves you both very much. Your father and I will always love each other too, because both of us are your parents and we both love you. Now sit up and eat your lovely cake, like a good girl.”

Nancy sat up. “Mummy,” she said, “are you going to die?”

“Sometime, darling,” Elizabeth said. “But not right now.”

Janet came to sit on the other side of Elizabeth. She wanted to be hugged, so Elizabeth hugged her.

Mummy
. A dried corpse in a gilded case.
Mum
, silent.
Mama
,
short for mammary gland. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed. If you didn’t want trees sucking at your sweet flowing breast why did you have children? Already they’re preparing for flight, betrayal, they will leave her, she will become their background. They will discuss her as they lie in bed with their lovers, they will use her as an explanation for everything they find idiosyncratic or painful about themselves. If she makes them feel guilty enough they’ll come and visit her on weekends. Her shoulders will sag, she will have difficulty with shopping bags, she will become
My Mother
, pronounced with a sigh. She will make them cups of tea and without meaning to but unable to stop will pry, pry like a small knife into their lives.

She doesn’t mean to now; she does now. Those careful questions about the other house: What were they given for dinner? How late did they stay up? Did they have a good time? And the equally careful answers. They can sense it’s a trap. If they say they like the other house, household, she’ll be hurt; if not, she will be angry. “It was all right,” they say, avoiding her eyes, and she despises herself for placing them there, making them shift and evade. She wants them to be happy. At the same time she wants to hear of injuries, atrocities, so she can virtuously rage.

She brushes her hair, her face in the mirror a flat plaque. Leaden. She’s making it too easy for him, he has it too easy. He isn’t the one who has to wipe the noses and wake up in the middle of the night because his children are screaming in their sleep. If she even told him about that, he’d think she was using emotional blackmail. She tips back her glass; reddish brown slides down her throat.

It isn’t Lesje she resents. Let him screw whatever he likes, why should she care? It’s his freedom she can’t take. Free as a goddamned bird, while she’s locked in this house, locked into this house while the roof leaks and the foundation crumbles and the earth revolves and leaves fall from the calendars like snow. In the centers of her bones dark metal smolders.

She sits down on the edge of her bed, staring at her crossed wrists, the blue veins where they branch and river. Every second a pulsebeat, countdown. She could lie down with candles at her head and feet. Thirty-nine of them. She could stop time.
Wristwatch
.

With an effort she turns her hand over. It’s eleven-thirty.

She checks the children’s room. They’re both asleep, breathing evenly. She goes back along the hall, intending to go to bed; but instead she finds herself putting on her shoes. She doesn’t know what she is going to do.

Elizabeth stands in the hot night outside Nate’s new house, Nate’s old house, which she’s never seen before. Although of course she’s had the address and the telephone number. In case of emergencies. Perhaps this is an emergency. The house is dark except for a dim light in the upper window. The bedroom.

She’d wanted to see it, that’s all. Make it enter her head so she can believe in its existence. (A dump, a slum; probably cockroaches. This tattiness pleases her; the house is much worse than her own.) But she goes quietly up the front steps and tries the door. She isn’t sure what she’ll do if it’s open. Creep up the stairs, fling open the bedroom door as in some antique melodrama? But the front door is securely locked.

They’ve locked her out. They’re ignoring her, giggling in the bedroom while she stands down here in the night, discarded, invisible. She will make a mark: a brick through the window, her initials on the door? She has nothing to write with. Should she kick over the garbage can, litter trash on the porch, scream? Look at me, I’m here, you can’t get rid of me that easily.

But she can’t scream; her voice has been stolen. The only power she has left is negative.

Suddenly she thinks: What if they look out the window and see me standing down here? Her face is flushed, the skin under her
blouse is wet and prickling; her hair sticks to her neck. Disheveled, a disheveled cliché. They will laugh. She turns quickly away from the house and begins to walk north, sober now, annoyed with herself for having allowed herself to be led to this ignominious, this vacant street.

And worse: where are the children? Locked in the house, alone.
Ladybird, ladybird
. She’s never left them alone like this before. She thinks of fires, of murderous climbers, silhouetted against their open window. Gross negligence. But if the children die it will be in a way Nate’s fault. On her birthday; an obscure revenge.

Even to think this terrifies her. She thinks instead of the cake, the candles.
Little Nancy Etticoat, in a white petticoat and a red nose
. And Nancy, looking at the picture of the melting woman in the
Little Riddle Book
, said,
Is that me?
Pleased to be in a book. She was much younger then.

“If you blow out all the candles at once,” Nancy said, “you’ll get your wish.” Nancy doesn’t yet know about wishes, their danger.
The longer she lives, the shorter she grows
.

T
his is it. Nate has spent several months avoiding this. He would rather be doing anything else at all. He has a brief vision of himself on a balsa raft, floating down the Amazon with malarial steam rising around him. A crocodile, or would it be an alligator, raises its head from the murky green water, stinking like a dead snake, hissing, lunging for him. Deftly he inserts a stick between its open jaws, twists and it’s helpless, it falls astern and he floats serenely on, sunburned and emaciated but not done yet, not by a long shot. He wishes he hadn’t lost his pith helmet in that skirmish. He’s on his way to discover something, or perhaps he’s already discovered it. A lost civilization. In his back pocket is a creased and water-stained map, which will be the only clue if the poisoned arrows get him. Delirious, he’ll be. If he can only reach Lima. He tries vainly to remember which side of South America Lima is really on. A miracle of endurance, they will say.