Points of Departure (3 page)

On the TV, three dead women in tight, sequined dresses sing about summer nights, moonlight, and
love.

“What happened to your ex-wife?” I ask.

“She found someone who didn’t snore and moved to Phoenix, Arizona.”

“Do you hate her?”

“Naw. I figure living in Phoenix is punishment enough.”

He shrugs. “She’s got what she wanted, but she still isn’t happy. Some people just don’t know how to be happy.” He yawns and lumbers to his feet. “Want some hot milk to make you sleep?” Without waiting
for my answer, he heads for the kitchen; I trail behind him. I watch him pour milk into a saucepan and rummage in the cupboards, a naked hairy man taking charge of my kitchen. “You got any brown sugar? It’s better with brown, but I guess white’ll do.” He heats the milk to near boiling, sweetens it with sugar, and sprinkles cinnamon on top. Then he fills two mugs and leads me back to the living room.
“My mom used to make this when I couldn’t sleep,” he says, giving me a mug.

The milk is sweet and soothing. I have never tasted anything so good. On the television, my father is dancing with the leading lady. Her head is resting on his shoulder and they look very good together.

“I hate my father,” I tell Pete.

“Yeah?” He stares at the couple on TV and shrugs.

“Why bother? He’s dead.”

I shrug,
watching my father’s face on the TV.

“Come on,” Pete says. “Lie down and sleep.” I lie beside him on the couch and he wraps his arms around me.

I dream myself into my father’s movie. My father’s arm encircles my waist and we waltz together beneath crystal chandeliers.

The ballroom’s French doors open onto a clear summer night, but the room is cold and damp. The air stinks of decay, a charnel-house
stench of rotting flesh and dying flowers.

My father and I spin together, and I catch a glimpse of the band. The bandleader is freshly dead; his body is bloated, the skin puffy and discolored. The dead musicians are in various stages of decay: a trumpet player presses the trumpet’s mouthpiece to bare teeth; his head is a skull, precariously balanced on the column of vertebrae that rises from
the collar of his tuxedo. The bass player plucks the strings with skeletal hands.

“Relax,” my father says to me. He has held up better than the band, but his corneas have turned milky white, and the hand that holds mine feels suspiciously soft, as if it has begun rotting from the inside. “Isn’t this where you’ve always wanted to be?”

At small tables around the dance floor, well-dressed men and
women talk and laugh, but the laughter sounds like chattering teeth and rattling bones. A blond woman has lost clumps of hair and her sequined evening dress hangs limply on her shoulders, no flesh to fill it out.

“You can stay here with me,” my father says. His eyes are sunken; his smile is the expressionless grimace of a skull. “I was never a good father. I can make it up to you now.”

I try
to pull away, but he clings to me, clutching at me with soft decaying hands, staring with cloudy sightless eyes. I tear myself free and run from him, toward the open doors.

On the TV screen, a woman in an evening gown is running away across the dance floor. My father, handsome and whole, stares after her. A lock of dark hair has fallen into his eyes. He looks handsome and charming. The dance
floor is filled with beautiful men and women.

I slip from Pete’s arms and unplug the TV before I can change my mind. The old television is too heavy to lift, so I drag it across the living room. The wooden legs make a horrible scraping sound on the Italian tiles in the entryway, and Pete wakes up.

“What are you doing?” he mumbles.

“Give me a hand,” I say.

Half-asleep, he helps me push the
set down the hall and out the back door into the yard. He stops in the doorway, watching sleepily as I drag the set down the concrete walk toward the pool. Near the pool, I tip it off the path. It lies on its back in the damp grass, the screen reflecting the patio lights and the moon.

The VCR is light by comparison. I heap the videotapes on top of the TV. Then I clear the upstairs closets of
my father’s clothing: white suits, tuxedos, a trench coat, a drawerful of blue jeans. A tweedy jacket carries his smell even now: a hint of tobacco, a whiff of aftershave, a touch of whiskey. I stand in the wet grass for a moment, holding the jacket and fingering the rough fabric. Then I drape it over my shoulders to keep off the wind. Pete watches, shaking his head.

In the garage, I find the
can of gasoline that the gardener keeps there for the power mower. I am generous, dousing the clothes repeatedly.

A single match, and the heap of clothing erupts with flames. It is like the Fourth of July, like orgasm, like the moment when the monster dies, like the happy ending when the credits roll. Pete is pulling me away from the fire, shouting something. I struggle away from him for long
enough to strip the jacket from my shoulders and hurl it into the flames.

I stand in the circle of Pete’s arms, leaning against his shoulder. The air smells of gasoline, flames, and wet grass.

I watch the flames and listen to the distant sound of sirens.

It’s good to be free.

“T
HIS IS OUR
new place,” your husband says. “We’ll be happy here.”

A white farmhouse with peeling paint, far from the nearest neighbor. Behind it, golden hills roll away into the distance. Trees crowd closely around it, sprawling oaks that grow outward as much as they grow upward. Their leaves are small and brittle; their thick branches are gnarled and twisted with age.

Your
husband takes your hand and you stand very still, like a deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car. He kisses your cheek and squeezes your hand gently. “We’ll be happy,” he says again, as if repeating the words will make them come true. You hope that he’s right this time.

That afternoon, after the movers have come and gone, you are unpacking clothes in the bedroom. You are putting your
husband’s shirts in the drawers of the dresser. You place each shirt with its collar toward the back of the drawer, the buttons facing up. His shirts must be right or you don’t know what will happen.

You look up from the drawer and for a moment you forget about your husband’s shirts. The leaves of the oak tree that grows outside the window filter the sunlight; the bare mattress of the bed is
dappled with bright spots that shift and move with the breezes. You look out the window into the leaves of the tree. In the shifting patterns of light and dark, you see faces. Women’s faces, looking back at you. When the leaves flutter in the breeze, the women laugh to see you in the bedroom, worrying about your husband’s shirts.

Your husband didn’t mention the women in the trees when he told
you about the house, but then it makes sense that he would miss them. You are accustomed to watching for tiny signals that others might not see: the tightening of a muscle in your husband’s jaw, a sudden straightening of his shoulders, an involuntary movement as his hand begins to clench to form a fist. When you can see the beginnings of a frown from across the room, spotting women who live in the
trees is simplicity itself.

You hear your husband’s footsteps and look away from the window. He stands in the doorway, with one hand hidden behind his back. “Daydreaming again?” he asks in a playful tone. “What were you watching out there?”

You lie automatically. “A blue jay in the tree,” you say. “It flew away.”

“I brought you something,” he says. From behind his back he produces an enormous
bouquet of scraggly wildflowers, an assortment of California poppies, yellow mustard flowers, and dandelions. As he holds them out, yellow petals fall to the carpet, each one as bright as the spots of sunlight on the bed.

When you take the bouquet, he puts his arms around you and kisses you on the neck. You are glad that this is a day for kisses. He sweeps you up in his arms: he is not such a
big man, but you are a small woman, a frail woman, barely twenty years old and light enough for him to carry.

He lays you on the bare mattress and kisses you again, so gently, so sweetly. You know just now that he loves you; you are sure of it.

Your body responds to him, responds to his hand on your thigh, to his lips on your breast. His hand strokes between your legs and you moan and press
yourself to him. Your body is fickle; it forgets the other times so quickly. He pulls you to him, and you cry out with each thrust, the pleasure coming in waves. Then he relaxes on top of you, and it feels good to have him near.

You look up at his face. His expression is distant, as if he is remembering something. He is looking down at your arm. On the pale skin of the upper arm there are bruise
marks, left by four fingers and a thumb. Gently he touches the injury, matching his thumb and fingers to the marks. A perfect fit.

You push the thought away and look into the trees to see the women laughing. If he were to ask what you were thinking, you would lie.

You have acquired the habit of lying, the habit of covering up. To do otherwise would be admitting to failure. You have failed as
a wife; you have failed as a woman. Your man is not happy and his discontent is your fault. On some level, deep down where your mother’s voice is stronger than your own, you know this.

Your husband beat you for the first time just a month after your wedding. He was angry because one of his shirts had lost a button in the laundry, and you had forgotten to sew another on in its place. He yanked
the shirt from the drawer, threw it at your face, and then came at you with his fists, punching you in the ribs, in the breasts, in the belly.

After it was all over, you lay on the bedroom floor, gasping for breath. You heard him weeping in the living room and you went to him. His face was wet with tears.

He begged for your forgiveness. He said that he would kill himself if you left him. It
would never happen again, he said. Never. You rocked him in your arms and the two of you wept together. He loved you and you loved him. How could it happen again?

A week after the beating, you still felt a stabbing pain with each breath. Solicitous and concerned, your husband drove you to the doctor’s office.

In the examination room, the doctor asked you what had happened. How had you hurt yourself
so badly? You looked at the doctor, an older man with a stern face. “I fell,” you said. “I was getting a bowl down from a high cupboard and the chair slipped. I fell.”

He studied your bruises. The purple marks had turned to a sickly yellow-green. Both arms were mottled where fingers had grabbed you, where fists had struck you.

“I see,” he said. In his report he wrote, “Accident.” And then he
told you that you had two broken ribs.

Yes, you thought, it was an accident. Surely your husband would never have broken your ribs intentionally. He loved you. He said that over and over. He brought you flowers and gifts. He promised you it would never happen again.

And then, after a while, he said, “If only you wouldn’t do these things that upset me.”

If only you wouldn’t flirt with other
men. So you stopped smiling when you walked down the street, because a smile could be flirting if your husband was watching.

If only you wouldn’t neglect his needs. So you told your sister not to call in the evening when your husband was home. If only you wouldn’t talk back. So you stopped stating your opinion, and he called you stupid because you had nothing to say.

He doesn’t hit you often.
And when he does, he strikes where the bruises will not show. Oh, sometimes he slaps you, but more often he uses fists. He doesn’t use his fists on your face, because that would leave marks that you could not easily hide. He punches you in the ribs, in the breasts, in the belly. If you try to block his punches, he strikes the arms. He knows that you will wear long sleeves rather than reveal your
failure, your shame, the bruises that are marks of dishonor.

At night, that first night in the new house, you hear the oak trees scratching against the roof. The branches of the one nearest the house rattle against the windowpane, tapping like fingernails on the glass, trying to get your attention. “Over here. We’re over here.” It’s a comforting sound.

In the morning, your husband says that
the damn branches scraping against the window kept him up all night. You know that isn’t true: he was snoring while you lay awake. But you say nothing. The women in the trees will understand. You can’t speak out.

After your husband leaves for work, you go outside and wander among the trees. Though the morning is hot, the shade is cool. Insects trill in the grasses, a soothing sound.

Squirrels
scold you from the branches, then fall silent, recognizing that you belong here. When you squint up at a squirrel, you see a woman’s face staring back at you. Her eyes are blue, like the gaps between the leaves where the sky shows through. The wind blows and the woman vanishes.

She is shy, easily frightened—you understand that. No doubt she has reasons for hiding. You catch a glimpse of another
woman, or perhaps the, same one. You move suddenly, and she disappears.

The women in the trees are like those puzzles in children’s magazines: “Find all the things that are hidden in this picture.” When you searched diligently, you discovered a cocker spaniel in the patterns of the wallpaper, a hammer and saw among the flowers in the flowerpot, a high-heeled shoe in the window curtains. You know
you must observe carefully; if you are quiet and attentive, you will see things that other people miss.

Though you walk quietly, you don’t see the women again. But on your way back to the house you find a bright blue feather, and you know that they have left it for you as a sign. They are watching. They will take care of you.

Just as you get back to the house, the landlord drives up in his pickup
truck. He has come to see that everything is okay. You are wearing a sleeveless shirt. He notices the bruises on your arms and asks about them. You shake your head, looking away so that he can’t see the lie in your eyes. “I’m so clumsy,” you say. “Always banging into cupboard doors and counters.” The cupboard doors are too high to bruise your arms and the counters are too low, but the landlord
says nothing more. People believe what they want to believe; people see what they want to see.