Points of Departure (17 page)

She seemed to react only to violence, to immediate threats. When he made love to her, she struggled to escape, and sometimes she cried, a wordless sound like the babble of the irrigation water flowing in a ditch. After a time, her crying came to excite him—any response was better than no response.

She would not sleep
with him. If he dragged her to bed, she would struggle free in the night, and when he woke she was always at the window, gazing out at the world.

He beat her one afternoon, when he returned from the fields and caught her sawing at the rope with a kitchen knife. He struck her on the back and shoulders with his belt. Her cries and the sight of the pale sap excited him and he made love to her afterward.
The rough blankets of his bed were sticky with her sap and his sperm.

He kept her as a man keeps a Vegetable Wife, as a man keeps a wild thing that he has taken into his home.

Sometimes, he sat in the dome and watched darkness creep over his homestead as he listened to the wind in the grasses. He watched his Vegetable Wife and brooded about all the women who had ever left him. It was a long
list, starting with his mother, who had given him up for adoption.

One day, a government agent came in a copter to inspect the cimmeg fields. Fynn did not like the man.

Though Fynn directed his attention to the cimmeg, the government agent kept glancing toward the dome. The Wife stood in the window, her naked skin glistening in the sun, smooth and clear and inviting. “You have good taste,” said
the agent, a young man dressed in khaki and leather.

“Your Wife is beautiful.”

Fynn kept his temper with an effort.

“They’re quite sensitive, I hear,” said the young man.

Fynn shrugged.

The apple tree that he had planted near the dome entrance bore fruit: a basketful of small hard green apples.

Fynn had crushed them into a mash and fermented a kind of applejack, a potent liquor smelling
of rotten apples. Late in the afternoon after the agent had left, he sat beneath the apple tree and drank until he could barely stand. Then he went to his Wife and dragged her away from the window.

Fynn whipped his Wife for flaunting her nakedness. He called her a tramp, a whore, a filthy prostitute. Though the sap flowed from the welts on her back, her eyes were dry. She did not fight back,
and her passivity inflamed him. “Goddamn you!” he cried, striking her repeatedly. “Goddamn you.”

He grew tired and his blows grew softer, but his fury was not abated. She turned on the bed to face him, and his hands found her throat. He pressed on her soft skin, thinking somehow, in the confusion of drunkenness, that strangling her would somehow stop the whispers that he heard, the secrets that
were everywhere.

She watched him, impassive. Because she absorbed air through the skin, the pressure at her throat did not disturb her. Nevertheless, she lifted her hands and put them to his throat, applying slow steady pressure. He struggled drunkenly, but she clung to him until his struggles stopped.

He was quiet at last, quiet like a plant, quiet like a tree, like the grasses outside. She
groped in his pocket and found a jackknife. With it, she cut away the rope that bound her. The skin of her ankle was scarred and hardened where the rope had rubbed her.

She stood in the window, waiting for the sun. When it warmed the earth, she would plant the man, as she had seen him plant seeds. She would stand with her ankles in the mud and the wind in her hair and she would see what grew.

T
HE CLOSET IS
filled with boxes and the boxes are filled with things that I have almost forgotten. Two chunks of clear acrylic, molded to imitate quartz pebbles—my sister and I had stolen them from the bases that supported the “Cars of the Future” display at the 1965 New York World’s Fair. Two troll dolls, still dressed in the tunics that my sister and I had sewn for them. Two
aluminum medallions from the county fair engraved with our names: the inscription on the heart says Janet; the inscription on the four-leafed clover, Cynthia. Two charm bracelets that Aunt Mary brought us from Hawaii: the letters that dangle from mine spell out
ALOHA
; Cynthia’s says
HAWAII
.

My mother comes up behind me and peers over my shoulder. “Oh,” she says. “Your charm bracelets. How pretty.
I’d almost forgotten them.”

It is very convenient that the pronoun “you” is both singular and plural. Five years after Cynthia went away, my mother stopped mentioning her name or acknowledging that I had once had a sister. One day I came home from school to find that my mother had bought a new coverlet and bolsters for the twin bed that had been Cynthia’s, converting it into a day bed that served
as a couch. She had taken Cynthia’s picture from the mantel and removed Cynthia’s books from the bedroom shelves. Each year, on the frame of the kitchen door, Cynthia and I had marked off our heights in pencil; my mother had erased Cynthia’s share of the marks. My mother had erased Cynthia.

I close my hand around the charm bracelets to hide them from my mother’s view, but she has forgotten them
already. My mother tried hard to forget.

“I’d like you to sweep the dead leaves from the garage roof,” she says. “If you sweep them off the roof, I can rake them up from the lawn.”

I tuck the bracelets back into the shoe box, hiding them away. Unlike my mother, I don’t want to forget.

When I was in first grade and Cynthia was in third grade, she told me stories about the lady from outer space.
“She comes from planet X,” Cynthia would say. “And she flies in a spaceship.”

Cynthia knew constellations and stars on a first-name basis. In the summer sky, she could find all the constellations: Cassiopeia, Scorpio, Draco, Sagittarius, and many more with names that seemed so exotic. She pointed out stars: Antares, the reddish heart of Scorpio; Polaris, the North Star. She knew where and when
to look for falling stars and satellites. And she knew all about alien spaceships.

She had learned about the constellations and planets from the leader of her Girl Scout troop. Her information about spaceships had come from less reputable sources—the tabloid newspapers that my mother brought home from the supermarket, science fiction books from the library, and late-night TV movies. But the sources
didn’t matter; Cynthia believed in the space lady and I believed in Cynthia.

Whenever our parents argued, Cynthia told me stories about spaceships. Our parents’ angry voices drifted up the stairs, like poisonous gas that filled the house and made breathing difficult. My mother’s voice was high, with an edge like broken glass; my father’s voice was a low intermittent roar, like a truck gunning
its engine.

I don’t remember what they were fighting about. Money, most likely. They always fought about money: money to fix the washing machine, money to pay for swimming lessons at the YMCA, money for new clothes, money for braces that Cynthia didn’t want. Always money.

Cynthia spoke quickly, breathlessly, drowning out the voices. “Up on the moon, where the space lady lives, they don’t have
any money. Instead of money, they have rocks. And whenever anyone needs more rocks, they just go outside and get some. So everyone always has plenty.”

“Where do they live?” I asked.

“In caves,” she said.

“I wouldn’t want to live in a cave.”

“These are moon caves,” she said. “Not like earth caves at all. They grow lots of plants to give off oxygen and there are flowers everywhere.”

Sometimes,
I dreamed of the space lady and her flower-filled caverns on the moon. In my dreams, her face was very much like my mother’s face. She wore a long green dress covered with glittering sequins. Cynthia said that the space lady was coming to take us away to another planet. I wished that she would hurry.

My mother is cleaning the house before putting it up for sale. Ever since she and my father got
divorced, I’ve been telling her that this house is just too big for one person.

Finally, she has agreed that it is time to sell. I drove out from the city to help her, and for the past three days, I’ve been weeding the garden and mowing the lawn, fixing the back fence and knocking cobwebs from the rafters in the garage. The house looks better than it has in years.

I climb the ladder to the garage
roof. The willow that grows beside the house has littered the wooden shingles with leaves and fallen branches. As I sweep the debris into the rain gutter, the wooden shingles creak and snap underfoot.

“Now don’t fall,” my mother calls from below. The window of my old bedroom lets out onto the garage roof. I peer in through the dirty glass and see my old bed, the open closet.

On warm summer nights,
Cynthia and I used to slide the window open and slip silently out onto the splintery shingles. We would lie on the roof and watch the stars.

I remember watching a meteor shower one night in August. We counted twenty-eight shooting stars, each one worth a wish. Each time a bright streak crossed the sky, I wished for a pony, but I didn’t think I would really get one.

Cynthia told me that the falling
stars weren’t really stars at all. Each falling star was a rock falling down to earth and burning up in the atmosphere as it fell. “Except for some of them,” she said. “Some of them are spaceships bringing people from other planets down to earth.”

“There.” I pointed out a meteor that left an especially brilliant trail. “I bet that one’s a spaceship.”

“Maybe,” she said. “You might be right.”
We watched as a few more meteors left trails across the sky. “They can’t land right here,” she told me. “Too many people. They don’t like landing where people can see them.”

Cynthia claimed that the only way to get the space lady to land was to signal to her with a flashlight from the top of a big hill. Our house was on the edge of a development. Just behind us was a big hill where range cattle
still grazed. Cynthia thought that this hill would be perfect for the space lady’s landing. “You can come with me when I go to signal her,” she told me graciously.

“As I sweep away the leaves and debris, I can look from the garage roof and see the big hill. It is still free of houses: in an area prone to mud slides, the land was considered too steep for construction. The hillside looks a little
mangy; new growth, watered by the early autumn rains, sprouts in irregular patches among last year’s golden brown grass. Near the hilltop, a cluster of coast live oak trees provides a spot of shade. On the steepest slopes, I can see dusty brown streaks where bicycle-riding kids have worn trails through the vegetation.

I clean the rain gutters, dragging out matted tangles of leaves and branches.
“That’s great,” my mother says as I finish the job. “Just great.” She looks weary and a little frazzled, an expression that has become habitual over the years. She has always been an active woman, but now her energy seems somehow unhealthy, almost feverish, as if she continues to work only because her body will not allow her to rest. She holds the ladder steady as I climb down from the roof, and
I notice her hand on the metal. Just below the skin, thick blue veins snake across the back of her hand. The skin is wrinkled and spotted. She has grown old, and her body betrays her.

“I need your help moving some things in the garage,” she says. “I want to get out one of the steamer trunks so I can pack the linens inside it.”

The trunk is nearly hidden beneath cardboard boxes, stacks of yellowing
newspapers, paper bags filled with rags and scraps of cloth. With great effort, I move the boxes and extract the trunk, a heavy black chest large enough to hold a body or two.

“I’ll clean it out later,” my mother says, but as I stand there, she lifts the lid and pokes idly through the contents: old papers, books, clothing that’s long since out of fashion.

“Here,” she says, pulling out a large
book bound in dark green fabric. “You should take that to your father. It’s his college yearbook.”

I accept the yearbook reluctantly. I saw my father rarely, and I’m not eager to drag this book around until the next time we get together for dinner. “Why don’t you mail it to him.”

“I’m not mailing it,” my mother says irritably. “I want nothing to do with him.”

“All right, all right.” They started
divorce proceedings the year after I graduated from college. They had stayed together for the sake of the children, but it had never been a good marriage. In all my memories, I can’t find a single moment of spontaneous affection between my mother and father: I can’t remember a casual hug, a kiss, a joke. I remember only arguments: about money, about my father’s drinking, about where to go on
vacation, and then, while on vacation, about where to stay and what road to take. My father always drove and he would never stop to ask directions. Yet somehow, it would always be my mother’s fault when we got lost. Little things—they argued incessantly about little things.

The arguments finally drove Cynthia out. That summer, we kept talking about going to the hill to signal for the space lady,
but we always put it off. First, Cynthia wanted to wait until after her Girl Scout troop went for their overnight camping trip. Then I insisted we wait until after the Fourth of July, so we could watch the fireworks. Then we waited until the neighbor’s cat had her kittens—I didn’t want to miss that.

As the summer wore on, I found one excuse after another. I was hoping that we might make it to
the beginning of school without having had a chance to climb the hill in the night. I didn’t want to admit to Cynthia that I was scared: afraid of the dark, afraid of the teenage boys who rode their old bicycles around the hill all day and smoked cigarettes in the shelter of the oaks, afraid of the cows that grazed in the dying grass, afraid of the space lady herself. I hoped that autumn would come
early and the weather would turn cold and wet. Even Cynthia would not insist on climbing the hill in the mud and the rain.

But one week before the first day of school, my parents had a fight that lasted for hours. We could not make out the words for the most part, but sometimes a phrase would penetrate the walls of our bedroom.