Free The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke Page B

back of the garage had gone brown. They'd bloomed fiercely throughout May, sending out a perfume that made Diana think of a funeral parlor or a prom dance.

    One afternoon in the first week of July, they run into Nate Witt outside Big Mama's CDs & Tapes.
    There are small yellow leaflets at his feet. He's looking at the back of the CD he's apparently just bought.
    "Hi, Nate," one of them says.
    Nate Witt looks up and says hi to the air, but he doesn't seem to see the girls.
    They start to laugh, hurry past him, pushing each other and covering their mouths with their hands.
    One of the girls is wearing an ankle bracelet, which makes the sound of jewel-box music as she runs.
    They don't stop laughing until they're back at the apartment where one of the girls lives with her mother. There they turn the radio up loud. WRIP is playing a song by Nirvana.
    They try looking up Nate Witt's telephone number in the Briar Hill phone book—paging through the thin, pulp-soft pages of tiny names—but there are eleven Witts listed there, and who knows what Nate Witt's father's first name might be, or even if Nate Witt has a father? The phone book makes a dusty sound when it's tossed back into its place on the coffee table next to the phone.
    The girls lie around in the bedroom, which is full of stuffed animals and dolls—expensive ones, the ones that last past childhood because they were never dragged to day care or to the park or left at Daddy's house by accident on an overnighter.
    At Daddy's house that doll might have been ruined by Daddy's other kid: a little boy who looks exactly like his mother and doesn't seem at all like a brother. He's shy, especially around strangers, but he'd have played hard with that doll's arms and legs, snapped her neck trying to bend her head backward so she could look up at the stars....
    The dolls—one of them a perfect baby girl with blue glass eyes—and stuffed animals regard the girls stiffly, but without judgment, accumulating dust on the shelves. They never consider the future, which for them can't last much longer. What mother would keep such things around a small apartment after her grown daughter has moved out?
    Outside there's the sound of traffic swooping by on the busy street.
    Only half the day is over.
    Not even half the summer.
    It's a hot and odorless afternoon.
    The blossoms of May and June have dried up or fallen out of the trees, but girlhood goes on and on.
    "Why the hell didn't we stop and say something, ask him what CD he bought or something?"
    "Because we're idiots?"
    "Well, why are we idiots?"
    One of the girls is lying on her back on the bed, balancing a lacy white pillow on her bare foot.
    The other sits cross-legged on the floor.
    "Because he's Nate Witt," she says.

    T HE SMELL OF FLOWERS. I T WAS THE VERY ESSENCE OF the month of June—the suffocating sweetness of flowers, the loose pastel scarves of scent slipping through the air, riding over the dampness and rot of spring.
    By June she'd grown used to the smell of flowering. Though the flowers continued to bloom, they ceased to surprise. But in May, the lilacs had come on like a light in a cave. The scent of them brought back the scent of every flower she'd ever smelled. A little shock. A pin stabbing her just above the heart, a spray of baby's breath and pink roses pinned to her white prom dress. And she could remember, too, standing at the edge of her grandmother's white coffin, looking in, the smell of violets rising from the powdered hands.
    Only a month ago the lilacs in the backyard had bloomed, then dwindled, and now they were brown corsages stuck into
the shrubs near the back of the garage. New flowers—the peonies, rustling through the backyard in their tutus and toe shoes, and a wild vine of roses trained to climb the white fence that separated their yard from the neighbors'—had taken their place, accompanied by small and golden clouds of honeybees circling them, humming.

Humming
    D IANA M C F EE WAS NO