Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction - Drama, Family & Relationships, Women's Studies
ISBN: 978-1551994925
Publisher: Emblem
Published: 2010-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, February 8, 1977

LESJE

Lesje drifts along the street with the drifting snow. Cars in their chains jingle past her, their tires locked in ruts; slush clogs their fenders. In the night there’s been a blizzard. She doesn’t care that her feet are cold: she has no feet. The trees she passes are heavy with ice. Each twig glitters in the weak sunlight, lit from within; the world glows. Lesje stretches her arms out, feels the blood flow along them to explode in purple at each hand. She knows the blaze of light she sees is only a mitten. But it is a mitten transfigured, its acrylic fibers shining with their own atomic light. Dazzled, she squints her eyes. She’s weightless, all pores, the universe accepts her finally, nothing bad can happen. Has she ever felt like this before?

It’s only two o’clock. She left the office early, telling Dr. Van Vleet she felt she was coming down with something. Really it’s Nate who is coming down with something: he phoned from his house, nasal, forlorn, he has to see her. Lesje walks to the rescue in her gum-soled snowboots, a nurse hurrying over frozen Siberia, driven on by love. She will put her hand on his forehead and miraculously he will revive. By the time she reaches his front steps and stamps her way up them her nose is running.

Nate opens the door, draws her inside quickly, shuts the door before enfolding her. Lesje is pressed against his brown wool dressing gown, which smells of old smoke and burnt toast. His mouth comes down on hers; sniffling, they kiss. He half-lifts her, then thinks better of it and sets her down.

“My boots will drip,” she says, and bends to unzip them. She tugs at her boot heels, her eyes at the level of Nate’s knees. He’s wearing work socks, grey with red stripes around the top and white toes and heels. These socks, for some reason, fill her with tenderness and lust: her body is with her again.

In their stocking feet they tiptoe along the hall and up the stairs. Nate leads her by the hand.

“In here,” he says. Although there is no one home, they whisper.

Nate folds back the Indian spread. Lesje can hardly see: the room is a blur around her, vision a shaft of light illuminating tigers, off-red tigers in a purplish jungle. Under the tigers there are flowered sheets. Wordlessly Nate undresses her, lifting her arms, bending her elbows as if he’s undressing a doll or a child; Lesje stands still. He eases her sweater over her head, presses his cheek against her stomach while he kneels to slide down her jeans. Lesje raises one foot and then the other, stepping out, obedient. There’s cold air, a draft somewhere in the room. Her skin contracts. Gently he pulls her onto the bed. She sinks into a hollow, petals flow over her.

He’s on top of her, both of them impelled now by fear, the sun moving across the

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