In the girls' bathroom, Diana and her best friend, Maureen, are stealing a moment from the routine drudgery of high school when a classmate enters holding a gun. Suddenly, Diana sees her life—past, present, and acutely imagined future—dance before her eyes.
Through prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, readers will experience sixteen-year-old Diana's uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity—and, in exhilarating detail, her life-not-lived as a doting mother and wife of forty. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal are the tasks of Diana's adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding on to her successful husband.
This "poetic" novel encompasses both the truth of a teenager's world and the transformations of midlife (Vanity Fair). Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring, in a story that "takes on deep matters of life and death; conscience and consciousness; family, love and friendship" (Los Angeles Times).
"Evokes terror and redemption, shadows and light. Kasischke treads a delicate line with the precision and confidence of a tightrope walker. She reminds us to look hard at life, to notice its beauty and cruelty, even as it flashes before us and disappears." —The New York Times
"Mesmerizing." —Chicago Tribune
In the girls' bathroom, Diana and her best friend, Maureen, are stealing a moment from the routine drudgery of high school when a classmate enters holding a gun. Suddenly, Diana sees her life—past, present, and acutely imagined future—dance before her eyes.
Through prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, readers will experience sixteen-year-old Diana's uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity—and, in exhilarating detail, her life-not-lived as a doting mother and wife of forty. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal are the tasks of Diana's adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding on to her successful husband.
This "poetic" novel encompasses both the truth of a teenager's world and the transformations of midlife (Vanity Fair). Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring, in a story that "takes on deep matters of life and death; conscience and consciousness; family, love and friendship" (Los Angeles Times).
"Evokes terror and redemption, shadows and light. Kasischke treads a delicate line with the precision and confidence of a tightrope walker. She reminds us to look hard at life, to notice its beauty and cruelty, even as it flashes before us and disappears." —The New York Times
"Mesmerizing." —Chicago Tribune
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Overview
In the girls' bathroom, Diana and her best friend, Maureen, are stealing a moment from the routine drudgery of high school when a classmate enters holding a gun. Suddenly, Diana sees her life—past, present, and acutely imagined future—dance before her eyes.
Through prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, readers will experience sixteen-year-old Diana's uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity—and, in exhilarating detail, her life-not-lived as a doting mother and wife of forty. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal are the tasks of Diana's adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding on to her successful husband.
This "poetic" novel encompasses both the truth of a teenager's world and the transformations of midlife (Vanity Fair). Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring, in a story that "takes on deep matters of life and death; conscience and consciousness; family, love and friendship" (Los Angeles Times).
"Evokes terror and redemption, shadows and light. Kasischke treads a delicate line with the precision and confidence of a tightrope walker. She reminds us to look hard at life, to notice its beauty and cruelty, even as it flashes before us and disappears." —The New York Times
"Mesmerizing." —Chicago Tribune
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547541457 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 477 KB |
About the Author
Laura Kasischke is the author of two novels and three collections of poetry. Her numerous awards include the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sunlight
It was another beautiful day in a perfect life:
June again, and all the brilliance that came with it. All the soft edges of spring were gone, and a kind of clarity had taken their place. There was a sharpness to the trees and leaves, which were the green of bottle glass, while the sky beyond them had hardened into a pure and cloudless blue.
Diana McFee opened her eyes, and she might as well have been seeing the sky for the first time. Such a mundane surprise to be alive! A forty-year-old woman in the middle of June, looking straight into a very blue sky, a sky that looked like the center of something entirely fresh that had been neatly sliced in half with a sharp knife. A mind full of ether. A breathtaking emptiness, like a clean kitchen, a clear conscience.
She realized that she'd drifted into sleep while idling in theminivan, waiting for her daughter outside the elementary school, and had been startled awake by the hysteria of bells within the school's walls, up there on the hill, where the school day had just ended.
Inside, Diana knew, the girls were grabbing their jackets, pulling up their kneesocks, lining up outside the orange double doors that would burst open like a can of confetti in a moment. The green hillside would become a chaos of windbreakers and pigtails and the terrible bird shrieks of little girls.
But she was still in the process of waking, of rematerializing after her brilliant dream ... a soccer mom stepping out of sleep as if it were a mirror, her body and mind coming together again atom by atom in the brightness where she waited.
She rubbed her eyes and inhaled.
Summer.
She loved summer. The way it dried and tidied everything up. All through March, April, May, Diana had been waiting for the struggle to be over — the smell of rotting and newness, the grass and the roots like damp hair. So much moisture involved in resurrection! The dirty puddles full of worms. The moist privacy of turtles scrambling out of the muck. All that birthing and blood, and the blatant sexuality of it. The teenage girls, too flushed, looking as if they'd just been dragged out of the mud by their hair.
In May, Diana could hardly stand to look at those teenage girls wearing their first short skirts and tank tops of the season after so much winter whiteness ... those teenage girls waiting for the bus, crossing the street. The skin on their limbs looked barer than bare skin, as if the top layer of it had been peeled away, exposing to the air something more tender than flesh. Winter lasted a long time in the Midwest. For five months those girls had been buried in snow.
But by mid-June they were wearing human skin again.
Diana loved June.
She realized again how much she loved it, as she unrolled the driver's side window of the minivan and breathed in the glassy air of it, knowing how much she loved it ... all of it: Summer, and her life ... loved it with a heart that might as well have been made of tissue paper, it fluttered so lightly in her chest. There was the taste of pure sugar in her mouth. What had she last eaten? A peppermint? A sugar cube? Whatever it had been, it had been white and sweet, and she craved another.
She loved the sun on the side of her face, the smell of warm vinyl filling the minivan. She loved being herself in her forty-year-old body ... being a wife, a mother ... the bake sales and the field trips; the Band-Aids and the small sweaters coming out of the washer soggy and smelling of rain; the flour blended into butter and brown sugar, and the chocolate chips folded into that.
Now as she thought of it she realized that she loved all the material details of her days. The rolling heft of her silver minivan, the way the air parted to let it pass like a bullet on its way to the grocery store, the library, her child's elementary school, her part-time job.
She loved the sparkling clapboard house in which she lived on one of the nicest, shadiest streets — Maiden Lane! — in one of the most picturesque little college towns in the country.
Her daughter was pretty and happy.
Her husband was sexy, attentive, successful.
The world was very round. Round like a fishbowl. Thought swam around in circles in it.
How could they have ever believed it was flat? So much slipping and bending and arcing into space. Even at that moment, still stepping from her dream, Diana McFee could feel the roundness and hear the wind whispering as the earth turned in its grasp.
We are afloat in the sky, she thought, cradled, buoyed ...
Mr. McCleod — a sad, short man with yellow teeth — looks up from the lesson he's trying to teach ...
He almost never looks up. He is a painfully shy man, who makes teaching look like torture. His classroom is full of props that he can hide behind. Magnifying glasses. A television monitor. Computers. Microscopes. A transparency projector. And a map of the world beside a map of the human body — all its muscle groups and major organs labeled. Even the face on that human map looks like meat. And a skeleton, a real skeleton, which hangs from the wall at the front of the room ... a skeleton with whom Mr. McCleod is rumored, jokingly, to be in love.
"She's a teenager," he told them on the first day of class in September.
He pointed out the narrowness of the pelvic bones and showed them how some of the bones that an older female skeleton would have were missing on this one. He explained there were bones in the female body that didn't ossify — ossify: "to convert into bone," he wrote on the board in his lurching scrawl — until the human female was out of her teens.
Femoral bones, spinal vertebrae.
Those bones stayed soft inside the body for a long time, and if the girl died young, they simply melted away with her flesh.
Teeth and bones, Mr. McCleod told the class, would identifythem — who they'd been, what they'd done — long after they were dead....
Her husband? Had she been thinking of him? Counting her many blessings?
Sexy, attentive, successful.
He was a respected professor of philosophy at the university. She'd been — the old story — his student.
And Diana herself was successful, though in a more modest sense than her husband. She was an artist — a sketch artist — and taught a few afternoons a week at the local community college. She spent her mornings in the studio her husband had finished for her above their garage, and drew. Pen and ink, graphite pencil, charcoal. Her work was sometimes used on the covers of poetry collections, literary magazines, church programs, calendars. She worked strictly in black and white ... shadow and light.
And she was attractive. Still blond, though now she used a rinse to resuscitate the blond of her younger years. She was fit and slender, long-legged and blue-eyed as ever. She'd been told rather often that she resembled Michelle Pfeiffer, the Michelle Pfeiffer of the late 1990s, the one Diana used to watch on the movie channel, wishing (in vain, she'd assumed then) that she would look that good when she was almost forty.
And now she did.
Not that appearances were all that important to her now. She had wasted so much time in her teens primping, piercing, dieting ... and that terrible tattoo, the rose they'd promised her wouldn't hurt but that nearly killed her as they sewed it into her skin, a permanent purple heart earned for naïveté in the face of a fad. She'd be buried, an old lady in a housedress, with that sexy teenage rose still blushing on her hip. Sometimes the thought of that made her sad; sometimes it made her laugh.
She didn't worry much about her appearance anymore ... just enough to stay fit and wash her hair with Forever Blond once a week.
She wore simple clothing. She liked silks and Asian prints, dangling earrings and bangles. Today she was wearing a pair of shiny black slacks and a turquoise blouse. The blouse was sheer, but she wore a black tank top under it. A thin silver chain around her neck. An armful of silver bangles that made music as she walked, steered, brushed her hair.
Flat black shoes.
She dressed her age and income level, but did it creatively ... a little exotic, like the artist underneath the soccer mom she was. She was, it always surprised her to be reminded, still sexy enough to be whistled at on occasion while crossing the street at a busy intersection. She hadn't expected that at forty. It was one of the many pleasant surprises of middle age.
She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror.
Her teeth were crooked, but her lips were pretty. She looked like the woman she'd wanted to be. Someday this will be your life, she used to think when she was a dreamy adolescent staring out the kitchen window of the apartment she shared with her divorced mother, fantasizing. Someday this will be your life, she thought to herself even now, as if it weren't, hearing her voice clearly in her own mind ... the voice of the woman she had become, the pretty mother licking lipstick off her front teeth, smiling politely at her own reflection.
Summer ...
And all the longing and damp hope of spring had finallyamounted to something. At home the peonies had ruffled up in the front yard like the sleeves of a fancy blouse — but sticky, sweet, crawling with little red ants.
The grass was green as eye shadow, green as satin.
The sky was a piece of hard candy.
And the bees hovered around the honeysuckle like tiny golden angels playing trumpets.
The lilies had just begun to open, and a breeze made out of perfume was passing from the pure centers of them into the world.
Mr. McCleod is reading aloud from the textbook. ...
He is fiddling with his glasses as he reads, and his hands tremble.
Nicotine.
Perhaps he's thinking of nicotine as he reads to the class about one-celled organisms becoming two.
He hears the laughter of girls and looks up.
From the opposite sides of the classroom, they've caught each other's eyes.
They weren't trying to look at each other — they know better than that, know it will lead to uncontrollable laughter if their eyes meet across the room. But laughter is a vibrating wire strung between them. All they can do is avoid looking at one another, to keep from laughing. But as Mr. McCleod is reading, their eyes wander intuitively in the direction of Nate Witt — Nate Witt.
The boy with the unfortunate name.
Nit wit.
The boy with the flat-green eyes.
There are miles and miles of Astro Turf reflected in those eyes.
He has a mean laugh and a habit of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as if he's been boxing, as if he's just taken a punch to the jaw. He wears T-shirts with the names of bands and of baseball teams, faded jeans, and a pair of hiking boots every day. He's lean, with light brown hair, and neither girl has ever seen him laugh out loud, though they've seen him smile and smirk.
Nate Witt sits slumped and oblivious in the center of the room ... stoned and openmouthed between them, and while they are trying to catch a glimpse of him from opposite ends of the biology classroom, they catch a glimpse of one another glimpsing at him and begin to laugh.
"Is there a problem, girls?" Mr. McCleod asks.
Both girls try to go expressionless, and shrug.
"No," one of them says, though her eyes are wide and wet and she has to bite her lips.
"No problem," the other says, raising her shoulders and letting them drop.
There's laughter sliding all around her like an electric dress.
Mr. McCleod puts his face back in his book and continues to read.
Back home ... the honeysuckle. She had a lovely little garden waiting for her behind the house. A set of silver wind chimes dangling from a drainpipe under the eaves of the garage. In the breeze the wind chimes sounded like music made out of little girls' dreams ... charm bracelets, porcelain dolls, the kind of teacups so delicate and thin that if you held them to the light you could see through them.
CHAPTER 2
Whispers
At exactly 2:30 Diana glanced at her watch.
In five minutes they'd open the doors of her daughter's elementary school and let the little girls scamper back into the world. Deep at the center of herself she could feel the engine that kept her minivan idling. It purred on every side of her and over and under her ... a great humming motor at the heart of her small universe. She was afraid she'd fall back to sleep, so she turned on the radio.
It was only static at first. The whispers of the dead, she thought in a flash, not knowing why she thought it. And then she adjusted the dial until she heard the voice of her favorite talk-show shrink.
"Of course she means it!" Dr. Laura said. "Drunks always mean they're going to quit."
"So ... you think I need to see what she actually does?" the caller asked.
"Exactly. And don't count on anything. Thank you for your call."
There was a second of silence, the click of the caller being disconnected, and then Dr. Laura addressed the radio audience.
"Don't call me," she said, "and ask me whether your spouse is going to quit drinking. How should I know? I'm not God. Ask your spouse, and then — and this is the most important thing — ask yourself."
Diana felt a wisp of something — a little white feather, the kind stuffed deep inside a decorative pillow — brush her face with smug relief. Her husband didn't drink — or philander or gamble or take drugs. Never in seventeen years of married life had she felt the urge to ask anyone, especially not someone on the radio, for even the smallest scrap of advice.
"Hello, you're on the air," Dr. Laura said.
Again, a second of dead silence.
"Hel-lo? Are you there?"
"Ma'am?"
The caller was either an older boy or a woman with a very deep voice — a voice that sounded as if it were coming from the end of a long tunnel, a tunnel made of porous stone or cement, something that soaked up sound.
"Y-hes?" Dr. Laura said in a singsong that indicated impatience. "How can I help you?"
"I ... I don't need help."
The voice was not hollow or breathy, but neither did it seem physical. The voice sounded like a recording of a recording played back at a too-slow speed.
"Well, then," Dr. Laura said, "why are you calling my show?"
There was a low grinding. Again the sound of a cassette tape played backward or too loosely, followed by machine grinding, and then the voice, faster and unnaturally bright, said, "I am in hell."
Diana exhaled as if she'd been punched, and she put her hand to her chest.
She looked up toward the hill, but the girls were still inside the school. Where were the other mothers? There was no one in the semicircular drive except herself ...
Winter turns to spring, and everything melts.
The water in the drinking fountain in the high school hallway is nauseatingly warm, like human fluids.
Ryan Haslip puts his sister's bikini on Mr. McCleod's skeleton, and Mr. McCleod seems amused.
They have never seen him amused.
Someone puts a rose between the skeleton's bared teeth, and, along with the bikini, Mr. McCleod lets it stay.
It could have meant anything, but Diana McFee felt a bright flash at the side of her face as if she'd been slapped fast by a cold hand, and she snapped the radio off.
She inhaled after what seemed like a long time and smelled something familiar but out of place in the air ... the smell of the baking-supplies aisle at the grocery store. Spices, flour, crushed dry leaves.
I am in hell.
It could have meant, I'm in love with a married man. My husband's cheating on me. I'm a shoplifter, a heroin addict, a pathological liar ... guilty conscience, physical pain, mental illness, spiritual crisis. I'm in hell.
What difference did it make? Whatever it was, she didn't want to hear it.
Maybe, she thought to herself, maybe she was tired of the radio altogether ... these bodiless complaints traveling on the breeze, over lakes and playgrounds and cemeteries, to ask for help from strangers. So many souls in pain. They were all in hell, Diana thought, except that ...
"Mommy?"
Diana hadn't seen her come out of the double doors or run down the green hill, but there her daughter was beside her in the front seat, looking prettily fresh, out of breath, utterly innocent.
"What's wrong, Mommy?" Emma asked.
Her eyes were pale blue and wide. Diana could see herself in them, looking twenty years younger than she was. No wrinkles in those little pools, no laugh lines. Just two tiny watery faces that had once belonged to her.
Diana looked away, shifted into reverse, glanced behind her in the rearview mirror.
"Nothing," Diana said. "You just scared me, that's all."
Emma said nothing. She looked at her own bare knees.
Diana pulled into the street, trying to drive slowly, but the two tons of steel and upholstery she was maneuvering out of the school's circular drive seemed only vaguely under her control. She'd never been a good driver, though she'd also never had an accident. Only terrible caution accounted for that. Back when she was a teenager, when she should have been learning to drive, she wasn't allowed to take driver's ed, because the semester it was offered she'd been caught with a Baggie of marijuana in her purse at school.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Life before Her Eyes"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Laura Kasischke.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Prologue,
PART ONE,
Sunlight,
Whispers,
Heartbeat,
Daisies,
Footsteps,
PART TWO,
Thunder,
Peonies and Lilac,
Humming,
Blood,
PART THREE,
Silence,
Skin,
Light and Shadow,
Glass,
Glare,
PART FOUR,
Birds,
Cold,
Dust,
Steam,
PART FIVE,
Music,
Breath,
Rumbling,
April,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Reading Group Guide,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
Reading Group Guide
1. How did you react to Kasischke's alternating scenes from Diana McFee's fortieth summer with scenes from her high-school years? How does this technique contribute to our understanding of Diana's life, personality, and behavior? Why are apparent past events recounted in the present tense, and apparent present events in the past tense? What effect might this discrepancy of tenses have on our appreciation of Diana's stories?
2. Why does the narrative turn so frequently to Mr. McCleod, Diana's high-school biology teacher? What is the significance of his appearance at the zoo on the day of Emma's school outing? What is the importance to each of us of what Mr. McCleod tries to impress on all his students-"the enormity, the complexity, of themselves"?
3. "It is a moment in which a small good could triumph over a small evil," Kasischke writes of Mr. McCleod's not yet noticing the world SLUT written on his blackboard. "The world is always poised, waiting before such moments." Why do you agree or disagree with the possibility of small goods triumphing over small evils? How might we know that the world waits before such moments? What kind of small good might have prevented Michael Patrick's attack on his fellow students? What evils, small or large, occur in the novel for which there is neither explanation or identifiable source?
4. What parts "of the dream of the life she'd someday have" contribute to the quality of the adult Diana's life, and what parts contribute a distinctly dreamlike quality to that life? Which elements and events seem part of a credible actual life, and which suggest that Diana's life is not what it appears to be? At what point in the story did yoususpect that the adult Diana's life is a "dream" projected instantaneously into the future from a fear-filled Briar Hill High girl's room?
5. Forty-year-old Diana's rush of feeling for her daughter, Emma, "had to do with the great, unexpected mercy of love." What do you think Kasischke means by the "mercy of love"? What other instances of the mercy of love occur in the novel, and how do they contribute to our understanding of the role of love in all our lives? What failures of love's mercy occur, and what is their significance?
6. What does the novel indicate about the fragility and the tenuousness of life, even young life? In what ways might we understand the sentence, "Her daughter...would only be a child for a short time..."? What images of and references to insubstantiality, transitoriness, and the ephemeral occur-for example, Diana's feeling that "her hand could pass right through the furniture and walls" of her dream home? How do these images and references affect our understanding of Diana's life and our own lives?
7. What is the importance of intentional evil and of intentional good, as Professor McFee presents the concepts? What instances of intentional evil and intentional good do you find in the novel, and how would you explain the circumstances of their occurrence? Do we always have a choice between the intentional and the unintentional in relation to evil and good? Why might "all the goodness all our lives" be "the miracle...the real miracle"? In what ways does The Life before Her Eyes celebrate the exuberance of life in the face of death and the glory of good in the face of evil?
8. Why should Diana McFee feel "as if she'd been punched" or feel "a bright flash at the side of her face" when she hears the "unnaturally bright" voice on the radio say, "I am in hell"? What does Diana, as high-school student or as forty-year-old mother, know of hell? What other instances are there of the adult Diana feeling blows to the side of her face, feeling out of breath, or developing sudden and intense headaches, and what might be the significance of those instances?
9. What significance do physical beauty, sensuality, and "the blatant sexuality" of life have for the teenaged Diana and for the adult Diana? What roles do beauty and sexuality play in the lives of the novel's characters and in all our lives? How successful is Kasischke in conveying the young woman's and older woman's sexual awareness and experience?
10. How might we explain the sequence of increasingly mysterious and scary events that transform the adult Diana's dream-perfect life-for example, the howl and laughter she hears on the radio after her meeting with Sister Beatrice, and Timmy's reappearance? What might be the sources and significance of these and similar experiences? To what extent did each event prompt you to modify your view of Diana?
11. What instances are there of the adult Diana's noticing the absence of something from her world and at that precise moment observing her world fill up again with that something? To what extent might these instances affirm the power of thought and imagination to shape the world in which we live? To what extent might their significance relate to some other power?
12. What is the significance, near the novel's end, of the wolf that the adult Diana, we are told, had seen before-"the blue eyes, the howling in the next room"? How might we interpret the clause that follows Diana's recognition of the wolf-"but that was something else, that was before he became this, before he began this life"? Why might the moment outside the wolf cage, as Diana faces the wolf, be "the moment she'd been born for," "the moment in which she gave up herself..."?
13. One reviewer has written of "the central questions of the novel: What is the difference, if any, between perception and reality? Is an imagined future as real as an actual one"? How does Kasischke explore these questions, and what conclusions does she arrive at? After completing The Life before Her Eyes, how would you answer these two questions?
14. How credible is it that the story of Diana's adult life occurs instantaneously, as Michael Patrick shoots her in the left temporal lobe of her brain, "the place where the future is imagined, the place where what would have been is"? What details in the preceding narrative link the "what would have been" with what has been and what is? What situations might give rise to an instantaneous view of the possible versions of one's life? What alternative versions of Diana's future life might we-and she-envision?
Copyright (c) 2002. Published by Harcourt, Inc.
Written by Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey