Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  No fear was left in her.

  The single wire of the old fence was strung with drops of dew, one drop on each rusty barb. The old fence should come down, she thought. It served no purpose anymore.

  The waves washed against the base of the cliff; the ocean moved in its endless rhythm. Drops of her blood ebbed and surged with those waters. And the strength of the sea surged in her.

  Far away, a sea lion barked. And the bright sunlight of early morning glinted on the two strands of eel grass that lay across the steps.

  His Vegetable Wife

  FYNN PLANTED HER with the tomatoes in the greenhouse on the first day of spring. The instructions on the package were similar to the instructions on any seed envelope.

  Vegetable Wife: prefers sandy soil, sunny conditions. Plant two inches deep after all danger of frost has passed. When seedling is two feet tall, transplant. Water frequently.

  A week later, a fragile seedling sprouted in the plastic basin beside the tomatoes: two strong shoots that grew straight with little branching. The seedling grew quickly and when the shoots were two feet tall, Fynn transplanted the seedling to a sunny spot near the entrance to his living dome, where he would pass it on his way to the fields each day.

  After transplanting the seedling, he stood beneath the green sky and surveyed his empire: a hastily assembled refabricated living dome that marked the center of his homestead; a greenhouse built of Plexiglas slabs, tilted to catch the sun; and the fields, four fertile acres that he had tilled and planted himself. Most of the farm’s tilled area was given over to cash crop: he was growing cimmeg, a plant that bore seeds valued for their flavor and medicinal properties. Row after row of dark green seedlings raised their pointed leaves to the pale sky.

  Beyond the fields grew the tall grasses native to the planet, a vast expanse of swaying stalks. When the wind blew, the stalks shifted and moved and the grasses hissed.

  The soft sound of the wind in the grasses irritated Fynn; he thought it sounded like people whispering secrets. He had enjoyed hacking down the grass that had surrounded the living dome, churning its roots beneath the mechanical tiller, planting the straight rows of cimmeg.

  Fynn was a square-jawed man with coarse brown hair and stubby, unimaginative fingers. He was a methodical man. He liked living alone, but he thought that a man should have a wife. He had chosen the seed carefully, selecting a hardy stock, bypassing the more delicate Vegetable Maiden and Vegetable Bride, selecting a variety noted for its ability to thrive under any conditions.

  The seedling grew quickly. The two shoots met and joined, forming a thicker trunk. By the time the cimmeg was knee high, the Wife had reached the height of his shoulders, a pale green plant with broad soft leaves and a trunk covered with downy hairs. The sun rose earlier each morning, the cimmeg grew to waist high, filling the air with an exotic spicy scent, and the Vegetable Wife’s stem thickened and darkened to olive green. The curves of her body began to emerge: swelling hips pinching in to form a thin waist; rounded breasts covered with fine pale down; a willowy neck supporting the rounded knob that would become her head. Each morning, Fynn checked the dampness of the soil around the seedling and peered through the leaves at the ripening trunk.

  In late spring, he first saw her pubic hair, a dark triangle just above where the twin trunks joined to form her body.

  Hesitantly, he parted the leaves and reached into the dimness to stroke the new growth. The smell of her excited him: rich and earthy and warm, like the smell of the greenhouse. The wood was warm beneath the hair and it yielded slightly to his touch. He moved closer, moving his hands up to cup the breasts, running his thumbs over the unevenness that promised to become nipples. The rustle of the wind in her leaves made him look up.

  She was watching him: dark eyes, a suggestion of a nose, a mouth that was little more than a slit, lips barely parted.

  He backed away hastily, noticing only then that he had broken the stalks of several leaves when he stepped in to fondle the trunk. He touched the broken leaves guiltily, and then reminded himself that she was only a plant, she felt no pain. Still he watered the Wife generously that day, and when he went to work in the cimmeg fields, he hummed to himself so that he would not hear the grasses whispering.

  The instructions had said that she would ripen at two months. Each morning, he checked on her progress, parting the leaves to admire the curves of her body, the willowy stalk of her neck, the fine bright gleam of her eyes. She had a full body and a softly rounded face.

  Though her eyes were open, her expression was that of a sleepwalker, an innocent young girl who wanders in the darkness unaware.

  The expression excited him as much as her body, and sometimes he could not resist pushing close to her, running his hands along the gentle curve of her buttocks and back, stroking the fine dark hair that topped her head, still short like a little boy’s hair, but growing, maturing like the rest of her.

  It was late spring when he first felt her move under his touch. His hand was on her breast, and he felt her body shift as if she were trying to pull away. “Ah,” he said with anticipation, “it won’t be long.” Her hand, which had formed recently from a thickened stalk, fluttered in the wind as if to push him away. He smiled as she swayed in a puff of wind and her leaves rustled.

  That afternoon, he brought a thick rope, looped it around her ankle, and knotted it carefully in place. Smiling at her angelic face, framed in dark hair, he spoke softly. “Can’t have you running off. Not now that you’re almost ripe.” He tied the other end of the rope firmly to the frame of the dome, and after that he checked on her three times each day, rather than just once.

  He cleaned the inside of the dome for the first time in months, washing the blankets of his bachelor bed, opening the windows to banish the mustiness. He could look out the open window and see her swaying in the breeze.

  Sometimes, she seemed to be struggling against the rope, and when she did that he checked the knots to make sure they were secure.

  The cimmeg grew tall, its sharp glossy leaves catching the sunlight and glittering like obsidian blades. Her leaves withered and fell away, leaving her naked olive green body exposed to the sun and to his gaze. He watched her carefully, returning from the fields several times each afternoon to check the knots.

  He woke one morning to find her crouched at the end of her tether, pulling at the knot with soft fingers that bled pale sap where the coarse rope had cut her. “Now, now,” he said, “leave that alone.” He squatted beside her in the dust and put his hand on her sun-warmed shoulder, thinking to reassure her. She turned her head toward him slowly, majestically, with the stately grace of a flower turning to face the sun. Her face was blank; her eyes, expressionless. When he tried to embrace her, she did not respond except to push at his shoulders weakly with her hands.

  Excitement washed over him, and he pushed her back on the hard ground, his mouth seeking her breast where the rough nipple tasted like vanilla, his hand parting her legs to open the mysteries of that dark downy triangle of hair.

  When he was done, she was crying softly, a high faint sound like the singing of the small birds that nested in the tall grass. The sound woke compassion in him. He rolled off her and buttoned his pants, wishing that he could have been less hasty.

  She lay in the dust, her dark hair falling to hide her face. She was silent, and he could hear the wind in her hair, like the wind in the tall grass.

  “Come now,” he said, torn between sympathy and annoyance. “You are my wife. It can’t be that bad.”

  She did not look at him.

  He cupped her chin in one hand and tilted her head so that he could see her expression. Her face was serene, expressionless, blank. He patted her shoulder, reassured by her expression. He knew she felt no pain; the instructions had said so.

  He untied the rope from the frame of the dome and brought her inside. By the window, he set a basin of water for her. He secured the rope to the leg of the bed, leaving the tether long enough so that
she could stand in the window or the doorway and watch him work in the fields.

  She was not quite what he expected in a wife. She did not understand language. She did not speak language. She paid little attention to him unless he forced her to look at him, to see him. He tried being pleasant to her—bringing her flowers from the fields and refilling her basin with cool clean water. She took no notice. Day and night, she stood in the window, her feet in the basin of water. According to the instructions, she took her nourishment from the sun and the air and the water that she absorbed through pores in her skin.

  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.

  Good-Bye, Cynthia

  THE 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 fa
ce 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.”