The Life Before Her Eyes Read Online Free
Author: Laura Kasischke
herself....
So, profanity was one of the first to go when she began to shed her bad habits. She'd not even sworn out loud to herself in ... what?...A decade? Two?
She swerved around the minivan in front of her own and into the road. The driver, who was the mother of one of Emma's friends, honked angrily. In the silence inside herself Diana heard her own younger voice say, "
Go to hell,
" before she'd taken even a single second to think about it.
Heartbeat
S HE'D CALMED BACK INTO HERSELF BEFORE THEY EVEN turned the corner to their neighborhood, which was a bright tunnel of green glass that afternoon. She was breathing evenly, and her heart had slowed to its normal
thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum.
She was herself again. Diana McFee. Wife. Mother. Content
woman-of-a-certain-age.
The phrase amused her. She couldn't remember where she'd heard it, or why it had stuck in her mind. But now it was
her...
mother to a lovely little girl, wife of a respected professor, the woman she'd dreamed of becoming, whether or not she'd known it was her dream.
Perhaps, for a while, she'd had a different dream. Maybe she'd dreamed of being a model. She'd had the legs for it. And the high cheekbones. The teeth ... she could have had them fixed. When she was young, she'd go into department stores
and the sales people would say, "You should be a model," and she'd think,
Maybe someday.
But time had passed with the sound of doors closing behind her—car doors, revolving doors, sliding glass doors, automatic doors—and she realized that the dream of being a model or a movie star was the kind of dream you might be able to take out of high school with you, driving a red convertible fast into your twenties. But after thirty, those dreams were dead.
That red convertible. You couldn't be a forty-year-old woman driving a red convertible.
This
dream—the silver minivan, the daughter, the sparkling clapboard house—was the dream worth having.
When Diana McFee drove past Briar Hill High School, as always, she didn't look in the direction of the memorial to the victims, the bronzed angel with its wings spread and bearing the names of the twenty-four students and two teachers who had been killed....
Both girls are half asleep in the droning of Mr. McCleod's voice as he reads from the textbook to them.
Next to Mr. McCleod, the skeleton hangs in her absurdity, wearing a green bikini, holding a rose in her grim smile.
Twenty-two teenagers in the room, and no one makes a sound. Outside, it's pouring rain strangely icy for May, and it makes the classroom smell like the humid, private alcoves of the human body—crotches, underarms, the place where the shoulder meets the neck.
Never again in their lives will twenty-two strangers know one another as intimately as they do in this classroom. Passengers on a ship lost at sea for four years.
One of the girls rouses herself from her half-sleep and writes a note to the other. The note is about Nate Witt:
What's his best body part?
The note has to pass from Ryan Haslip to Melanie Burt to Nate himself, who passes it over to Michael Patrick without seeming, for even a second, to imagine that the note concerns him, concerns the great charge he sends off in two directions from the center of that classroom where he slumps and stares at the ceiling and thinks his brooding, magnetic, mysterious thoughts.
Lips,
the other writes under her friend's question, and the note begins its journey back.
Mr. McCleod looks up from his textbook and sees Michael Patrick handing a folded piece of paper to Diana Allen.
He rises from his gunmetal desk and intercepts the note before Diana Allen can take it from Michael Patrick's hand.
Mr. McCleod's yellow fingers unfold it, trembling. He reads the note, tucks it into his shirt pocket, returns to his desk, to the open book on it, and begins to read from it again.
He says nothing about the note.
Mr. McCleod, however, has blushed.
I T WAS BREATHTAKING, THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN J UNE.
The
So, profanity was one of the first to go when she began to shed her bad habits. She'd not even sworn out loud to herself in ... what?...A decade? Two?
She swerved around the minivan in front of her own and into the road. The driver, who was the mother of one of Emma's friends, honked angrily. In the silence inside herself Diana heard her own younger voice say, "
Go to hell,
" before she'd taken even a single second to think about it.
Heartbeat
S HE'D CALMED BACK INTO HERSELF BEFORE THEY EVEN turned the corner to their neighborhood, which was a bright tunnel of green glass that afternoon. She was breathing evenly, and her heart had slowed to its normal
thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum.
She was herself again. Diana McFee. Wife. Mother. Content
woman-of-a-certain-age.
The phrase amused her. She couldn't remember where she'd heard it, or why it had stuck in her mind. But now it was
her...
mother to a lovely little girl, wife of a respected professor, the woman she'd dreamed of becoming, whether or not she'd known it was her dream.
Perhaps, for a while, she'd had a different dream. Maybe she'd dreamed of being a model. She'd had the legs for it. And the high cheekbones. The teeth ... she could have had them fixed. When she was young, she'd go into department stores
and the sales people would say, "You should be a model," and she'd think,
Maybe someday.
But time had passed with the sound of doors closing behind her—car doors, revolving doors, sliding glass doors, automatic doors—and she realized that the dream of being a model or a movie star was the kind of dream you might be able to take out of high school with you, driving a red convertible fast into your twenties. But after thirty, those dreams were dead.
That red convertible. You couldn't be a forty-year-old woman driving a red convertible.
This
dream—the silver minivan, the daughter, the sparkling clapboard house—was the dream worth having.
When Diana McFee drove past Briar Hill High School, as always, she didn't look in the direction of the memorial to the victims, the bronzed angel with its wings spread and bearing the names of the twenty-four students and two teachers who had been killed....
Both girls are half asleep in the droning of Mr. McCleod's voice as he reads from the textbook to them.
Next to Mr. McCleod, the skeleton hangs in her absurdity, wearing a green bikini, holding a rose in her grim smile.
Twenty-two teenagers in the room, and no one makes a sound. Outside, it's pouring rain strangely icy for May, and it makes the classroom smell like the humid, private alcoves of the human body—crotches, underarms, the place where the shoulder meets the neck.
Never again in their lives will twenty-two strangers know one another as intimately as they do in this classroom. Passengers on a ship lost at sea for four years.
One of the girls rouses herself from her half-sleep and writes a note to the other. The note is about Nate Witt:
What's his best body part?
The note has to pass from Ryan Haslip to Melanie Burt to Nate himself, who passes it over to Michael Patrick without seeming, for even a second, to imagine that the note concerns him, concerns the great charge he sends off in two directions from the center of that classroom where he slumps and stares at the ceiling and thinks his brooding, magnetic, mysterious thoughts.
Lips,
the other writes under her friend's question, and the note begins its journey back.
Mr. McCleod looks up from his textbook and sees Michael Patrick handing a folded piece of paper to Diana Allen.
He rises from his gunmetal desk and intercepts the note before Diana Allen can take it from Michael Patrick's hand.
Mr. McCleod's yellow fingers unfold it, trembling. He reads the note, tucks it into his shirt pocket, returns to his desk, to the open book on it, and begins to read from it again.
He says nothing about the note.
Mr. McCleod, however, has blushed.
I T WAS BREATHTAKING, THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN J UNE.
The
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