Life Before Man (7 page)

The third bowl, the steel one, is full of pennies, for the
UNICEF
boxes the children carry around with them these days. Save the children. Adults, as usual, forcing the children to do the saving, knowing how incapable of it they are themselves.

Soon the doorbell will ring and she’ll open the door. It will be a fairy or a Batman or a devil or an animal, her neighbors’ children, her children’s friends, in the shapes of their own desires or their parents’ fears. She will smile at them and admire them and give them something from the bowls, and they will go away. She will close the door and sit down again and wait for the next ring. Meanwhile her own children are doing the same thing at the houses of her neighbors, up and down the front paths, across the lawns, grass for the newcomers like herself, withered tomato plants and faded cosmos flowers for the Italians and Portuguese whose district has so recently been perceived as quaint.

Her children are walking, running, lured by the orange lights in front windows. Later that night she will go through their loot while they sleep, looking for evidence of razor blades in apples, poisoned candy. Although their joy cannot touch her, fear for them still can. She does not trust the world’s intentions towards them. Nate used to laugh at her concerns, what he called her obsessions: sharp table corners when they were learning to walk, open wall plugs, lamp cords, ponds, streams and puddles (you can drown in two inches of water), moving vehicles, iron swings, porch railings, stairs; and more recently, strange men, cars that slow down, ravines. They had to learn, he’d say. As long as nothing serious happens she looks foolish. But if anything ever does, it will be no consolation to have been right.

It should be Nate sitting on this sofa, waiting for the doorbell to ring. It should be him this time, opening the door not knowing who it will be, handing out the candy. Elizabeth has always done it before but Nate should know she isn’t up to it this year. If he used his head he would know.

But he’s out; and he hasn’t, this time, told her where he is going.

Chris came to the door once, not telling her, rang the bell. Standing on the porch, the overhead light turning his face to moon craters.

What are you doing here? She’d been angry: he shouldn’t have done that, it was an invasion, the children’s room was right overhead. Pulled her outside onto the porch, brought his face down to hers wordlessly, in the spotlight. Go away. I’ll call you later but please go away. You know I can’t do this. A whisper, a kiss, blackmail payment, hoping they wouldn’t hear.

She wants to turn out the lights, extinguish the pumpkins, bolt the door. She can pretend she isn’t home. But how will she explain the full bowls of candy, or, even if she throws the packages away, the questions of their friends?
We went to your house but there was no one home
. Nothing can be done.

The doorbell rings, rings again. Elizabeth fills her hands, negotiates the door. Easier to have put the bowls at the bottom of the stairs; she’ll do that. It’s a Chinaman, a Frankenstein Monster and a child in a rat suit. She pretends not to recognize them. She hands each a bundle and drops coins into their slotted tins. They twitter happily among themselves, thank her, and patter across the porch, not knowing, really, what night this is or what, with their small decorated bodies, they truly represent. All Souls. Not just friendly souls but all souls. They are souls, come back, crying at the door, hungry, mourning their lost lives. You give them food, money, anything to substitute for your love and blood, hoping it will be enough, waiting for them to go away.

E
lizabeth walks west, along the north side of the street, in the cold grey air that is an extension of the unbroken fish-grey sky. She doesn’t glance into the store windows; she knows what she looks like and she doesn’t indulge in fantasies of looking any other way. She doesn’t need her own reflection or the reflections of other people’s ideas of her or of themselves. Peach-yellow, applesauce-pink, raspberry, plum, hides, hooves, plumes, lips, claws, they are of no use to her. She wears a black coat. She’s hard, a dense core, that dark point around which other colors swirl. She keeps her eyes straight, her shoulders level, her steps even. She marches.

On some of the lapels, breasts, approaching her there are still those reminders, red cloth petals of blood spattered out from the black felt hole in the chest, pinned at the center. Remembrance Day. A little pin in the heart. What is it they peddle for the mentally disabled? Seeds of Hope. In school they used to pause while someone read a verse from the Bible and they sang a hymn. Heads bowed, trying to look solemn, not knowing why they should. In the distance, or was it on the radio, guns.

A Canadian wrote that.
We are the Dead
. A morbid nation. In school they had to memorize it two years in a row, back when memorizing was still in fashion. She’d been chosen to recite it, once. She was good at memorizing; they called it being good at poetry. She was good at poetry, before she left school.

Elizabeth has bought a poppy but she hasn’t worn it. It’s in her pocket now, her thumb against the pin.

She can remember when this walk, any walk through this part of the city, would have excited her. Those windows with their promises that are, finally, sexual, replacing earlier windows and earlier promises that offered merely safety. Tweeds. When did that happen, the switch to danger? Sometime in the past ten years the solid wool suits and Liberty scarves moved out in favor of exotica: Indian imports with slit skirts, satin underwear, silver talismans to dangle between the breasts like minnows on a hook. Bite here. And then the furniture, the
milieu
, the accessories. Lamps with colored shades, incense, whole shops devoted to soap or thick bath towels, candles, lotions. Enticements. And she was enticed. It once made her skin burn merely to walk along these streets, the windows offering themselves, not demanding anything, certainly not money. Just a word, Yes.

The goods are much the same now, although the prices have gone up and there are more stores, but that caressing scent is gone. These days it’s all merchandise. You pay, you get, you get no more than you see. A lamp, a bottle. If she had a choice she would take the former, the other, but there’s a small deadening voice in her now that cancels choice, that says merely: False.

She stops in front of a newspaper box, bending to look in through the square glass window. She should buy a paper, to have something to read in the waiting room. She doesn’t want to be left with nothing she can concentrate on, and at the moment she can’t bear the kinds of magazines they keep in such places. Full-color magazines, brighter than life, about health and motherhood and washing your hair in mayonnaise. She needs something in black and white. Bodies falling from tenth-floor balconies, explosions. Real life. But she doesn’t want to read a paper either. They’re full of the Quebec election, which will happen in three days and in which she is not the least interested. She’s no more interested in elections than she is in football games. Contests between men, both of them, in which she’s expected to be at best a cheerleader. The candidates, collections of grey dots, opposing each other on the front pages, snorting silent though not wordless challenges. She doesn’t care who wins, though Nate does; though Chris would have. There was always that unvoiced accusation, directed at her, as if who she was, the way she spoke, was a twist on his own arm, an intrusion. The language question, everyone said.

There’s something wrong with my ears. I think I’m going deaf. From time to time, not all the time, I hear a high sound, like a hum, a ringing. And I know I’ve been having difficulty hearing what other people say to me. I’m always saying, Pardon?

No, I haven’t had a cold. No.

She rehearses the speech, then repeats it to the doctor and answers the doctor’s questions, hands in her lap, feet side by side in their black shoes, purse beside her feet. A matron. The doctor is a round, sensible-looking woman in a white smock, with a light attached to her forehead. She questions Elizabeth kindly, making notes in the
Egyptian hieroglyphs of doctors. Then, after they go through a door and Elizabeth sits down in a black leatherette chair, she looks into Elizabeth’s mouth and then her ears, one after the other, using a light on the end of a probe. She asks her to hold her nose and blow, to see if there are any popping sounds.

“No obstructions,” the doctor says cheerfully.

She fits a set of headphones onto Elizabeth’s head. Elizabeth stares at the wall, on which hangs a picture done in painted plaster: a tree, a fairy-faced child gazing up at the branches, and a poem in scrolled script:

Elizabeth reads this far, then stops. Even the idealized tree in the plaster oblong looks like a kind of squid, its roots intertwined like tentacles, sticking itself onto that rounded bulge of earth, sucking, voracious. Nancy started biting her in the sixth month, with the first tooth.

The doctor twiddles buttons on the machine attached by wires to Elizabeth’s headphone, producing first high science-fiction sounds, then low vibrations, rumors.

“I can hear it,” Elizabeth says each time the sound changes. She can tell what kinds of things this woman would have in her living room: chintz slipcovers, lamps with bases made of porcelain nymphs. Ceramic poodles on her mantelpiece, like Nate’s mother. An ashtray with ladybird beetles on the rim, in natural colors. This whole room is a time warp.

The doctor removes Elizabeth’s headphones and asks her to go back to the outer office. They both sit down. The doctor smiles benignly, indulgently, as if she’s about to tell Elizabeth she has cancer of the ears.

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your hearing,” she says. “Your ears are clear and your range is normal. Perhaps you may have a very slight residual infection that causes plugging from time to time. When that happens, just hold your nose and blow, as you’d do in an airplane. The pressure will clear your ears.”

(“I think I’m going deaf,” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe,” said Nate, “there are just some things you don’t want to hear.”)

Elizabeth thinks the receptionist looks at her strangely when she says she won’t be needing another appointment. “Nothing wrong with me,” she says, explaining. She goes down in the elevator and walks through the archaic brass and marble lobby, still marching. By the time she reaches the outer door the humming has begun again, high-pitched, constant, like a mosquito or a child’s tuneless song, or a power line in winter. Electricity somewhere. She remembers a story she read once, in
Reader’s Digest
, while sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, about an old woman who started hearing angel voices in her head and thought she was going mad. After a long time and several investigations they discovered she was picking up a local radio station through the metal in her bridgework.
Reader’s Digest
repeated this story as a joke.

It’s almost five, darkening; the sidewalk and road are slick with drizzle. Traffic packs the lanes. Elizabeth steps across the gutter and begins to walk diagonally across the street, in front of one stationary car, behind another. A green delivery truck jams to a stop in the moving lane, three feet from her. The driver leans on his horn, shouting.

“You idiot, you wanna get yourself killed?”

Elizabeth continues across the road, ignoring him, her pace steady, marching. Does she want to get herself killed. The hum in her right ear shuts off like a cut connection.

There’s nothing wrong with her ears. The sound is coming from somewhere else. Angel voices.

L
esje is having lunch with Elizabeth’s husband, the husband belonging to Elizabeth. Possessive, or, in Latin, genitive. This man doesn’t seem like Elizabeth’s husband, or anyone else’s for that matter. But especially not Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth, for instance, would never have chosen the Varsity Restaurant. Either he has no money, which is possible considering the frayings and ravelings everywhere on his surface, patchy, like rock lichen; or he doesn’t think she’ll base her opinion of him on his choice of restaurants. It’s a restaurant left over when others like it became classy, preserving its fifties furnishings, its grubby menus, its air of cheesy resignation.

Ordinarily Lesje would never eat here, partly because she associates the Varsity Restaurant with being a student and she’s no longer that young. She isn’t sure why she’s having lunch with Elizabeth’s husband at all, except that something in the way he asked her – the invitation had been a kind of outburst – made it impossible for her to say no.

The anger and desperation of others have always been her weak points. She’s an appeaser and she knows it. Even in the women’s
group she went to in graduate school, mostly because her roommate shamed her into it, she’d been cautious, afraid of saying the wrong thing; of being accused. She’d listened with mounting horror to the recitals of the others, their revelations about their grievances, their sex lives, the callousness of their lovers, even their marriages, for some of them were married. The horror wasn’t caused by the content but by Lesje’s realization that they were expecting her to do the same thing. She knew she couldn’t, she didn’t know the language. It would be no good to say that she was just a scientist, she wasn’t political. According to them, everything was political.

Already they were looking at her with calculation: her murmurs of assent had not been enough. Soon they would confront her. Panic-stricken, she searched her past for suitable offerings, but the only thing she could think of was so minor, so trivial, that she knew it would never be accepted. It was this: On the gold dome of the Museum’s lobby, up at the top, it said:
THAT ALL MEN MAY KNOW HIS WORK
. It was only a quotation from the Bible, she’d checked on that, but it might keep them busy; they were very big on the piggishness of God. On the other hand, they might reject it completely. Come on, Lesje. Something
personal
.