The Life Before Her Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Laura Kasischke
discussed it with him—that as long as they were polite, honest girls, it was none of their business who their daughter chose to befriend or how close those friendships became.
Too, it had been the spring that Timmy died, and both Paul
and Diana speculated diat one of the reasons Emma clung so tightly to her two friends just then was because of the loss of Timmy. He'd been only a cat, but Emma had loved him, as she loved Sarah Ann and Mary, with a true and exclusive passion.
Diana could already tell that Emma, at only eight years old, was the kind of girl capable of passionate love, the kind of passionate love that might have caused an older girl, like a character in a tragedy or an old Scottish ballad, to throw herself from the cliffs onto the rocks, to allow herself to be tied to stakes, to rise from the dead to haunt the place where she'd lost the one she loved.
But Emma was only eight.
After Timmy had died, she simply refused to eat anything other than Cheerios and toast for a week, woke up screaming in terror for several nights, wept through the rooms of their house, looking under the couch and the chairs for Timmy long after Paul and Diana were sure their daughter understood that he was dead, and what
dead
meant.
Diana had brought Timmy's body in a cardboard box back from the veterinarian, and Paul had buried him in the backyard. Although they decided it would be too traumatic for Emma to actually watch her beloved cat being placed in a dark hole in the ground, they showed her where his grave was, and she and Diana had planted pale blue violets there. The violets had little human faces and seemed to crane their necks toward the world fearlessly, full of good humor, blown around gendy on their thin green stems, fed by Timmy's moldering.
Still, whenever they mentioned the possibility of getting a kitten, Emma would say simply, "Timmy doesn't like other cats."
***
For two weeks, Mr. McCleod. laughs easily in class.
He closes his book and speaks to the class from his heart about his love of biology, about the difficulties of finding a teaching position, about how he almost gave up and got a job in the auto-parts plant before he found this job, about the deep satisfaction he finds in coming to work at Briar Hill High every day.
The girls try not to look at one another.
It would only lead to laughter.
Laughter might hurt Mr. McCleod's feelings.
But they can feel one another thinking and full of laughter, a sea breeze across the biology classroom.
One day, a few weeks before the end of the school year, they come into the classroom before Mr. McCleod gets there. Ryan Haslip is at the blackboard. He writes
SLUT
on it with a piece of chalk the color of Mr. McCleod's teeth. He draws an arrow from the word to the skeleton, and then he takes his seat.
No one makes a sound when Mr. McCleod comes in.
It is a moment in which a small good could triumph over a small evil. The world is always poised, waiting before such moments. In this one, someone could jump up from his or her seat, take the eraser, and erase the word before he sees it.
But the silence is full of static....
A light rain begins to tick against the windows, although it's perfectly sunny outside, like an admission of guilt.
The word on the blackboard is the first thing Mr. McCleod sees, and he picks up the eraser himself and wipes it away.
He wipes furiously.
There's a pale yellow cloud of chalk in the air around him when he's finished.
When he turns to look at the class, his face is terrible, but he says nothing.
The next day, the bikini and the rose are gone from the skeleton, and Mr. McCleod gives the class an impossible, damning pop quiz on the three different types of the six hundred and forty muscles of the human body. One of them—the body's strongest—is the heart, and though he'd told them this fact over and over, not a single student gets it right.
Too young, too young.
R EMEMBERING THAT —T IMMY TURNING TO VIOLETS IN the
Too, it had been the spring that Timmy died, and both Paul
and Diana speculated diat one of the reasons Emma clung so tightly to her two friends just then was because of the loss of Timmy. He'd been only a cat, but Emma had loved him, as she loved Sarah Ann and Mary, with a true and exclusive passion.
Diana could already tell that Emma, at only eight years old, was the kind of girl capable of passionate love, the kind of passionate love that might have caused an older girl, like a character in a tragedy or an old Scottish ballad, to throw herself from the cliffs onto the rocks, to allow herself to be tied to stakes, to rise from the dead to haunt the place where she'd lost the one she loved.
But Emma was only eight.
After Timmy had died, she simply refused to eat anything other than Cheerios and toast for a week, woke up screaming in terror for several nights, wept through the rooms of their house, looking under the couch and the chairs for Timmy long after Paul and Diana were sure their daughter understood that he was dead, and what
dead
meant.
Diana had brought Timmy's body in a cardboard box back from the veterinarian, and Paul had buried him in the backyard. Although they decided it would be too traumatic for Emma to actually watch her beloved cat being placed in a dark hole in the ground, they showed her where his grave was, and she and Diana had planted pale blue violets there. The violets had little human faces and seemed to crane their necks toward the world fearlessly, full of good humor, blown around gendy on their thin green stems, fed by Timmy's moldering.
Still, whenever they mentioned the possibility of getting a kitten, Emma would say simply, "Timmy doesn't like other cats."
***
For two weeks, Mr. McCleod. laughs easily in class.
He closes his book and speaks to the class from his heart about his love of biology, about the difficulties of finding a teaching position, about how he almost gave up and got a job in the auto-parts plant before he found this job, about the deep satisfaction he finds in coming to work at Briar Hill High every day.
The girls try not to look at one another.
It would only lead to laughter.
Laughter might hurt Mr. McCleod's feelings.
But they can feel one another thinking and full of laughter, a sea breeze across the biology classroom.
One day, a few weeks before the end of the school year, they come into the classroom before Mr. McCleod gets there. Ryan Haslip is at the blackboard. He writes
SLUT
on it with a piece of chalk the color of Mr. McCleod's teeth. He draws an arrow from the word to the skeleton, and then he takes his seat.
No one makes a sound when Mr. McCleod comes in.
It is a moment in which a small good could triumph over a small evil. The world is always poised, waiting before such moments. In this one, someone could jump up from his or her seat, take the eraser, and erase the word before he sees it.
But the silence is full of static....
A light rain begins to tick against the windows, although it's perfectly sunny outside, like an admission of guilt.
The word on the blackboard is the first thing Mr. McCleod sees, and he picks up the eraser himself and wipes it away.
He wipes furiously.
There's a pale yellow cloud of chalk in the air around him when he's finished.
When he turns to look at the class, his face is terrible, but he says nothing.
The next day, the bikini and the rose are gone from the skeleton, and Mr. McCleod gives the class an impossible, damning pop quiz on the three different types of the six hundred and forty muscles of the human body. One of them—the body's strongest—is the heart, and though he'd told them this fact over and over, not a single student gets it right.
Too young, too young.
R EMEMBERING THAT —T IMMY TURNING TO VIOLETS IN the