Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  For dessert, Mrs. Jenkins had chocolate ice cream. It had been a difficult week and she felt she deserved a reward. She left her daughter’s letter on the kitchen counter with the unopened advertisement, poured herself a nightcap, and sat down in the living room to watch the late-night movie.

  She went to bed late and dreamed that she heard a baby crying. In the dream, she wandered through her apartment, searching for the source of the sound, but could not find it. She was alone in her apartment with the constant cry of an unhappy child.

  She woke feeling confused, disoriented. She showered, wrapped herself in her robe, and wandered into the kitchen. The shaft of morning light spotlighted the ice cream carton. It lay on its side in a pool of melted ice cream, as dark and thick as blood in the morning sun.

  Mrs. Jenkins reached for the junk mail advertisement with a hand that trembled.

  The letter had been torn open, as if by eager fingers. Brightly colored brochures spilled from the envelope. Mrs. Jenkins pulled one out at random. For $9.95, the brochure said, she could have a picture book personalized for her child. The picture on the brochure showed a little girl wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed her name to be Sue. Sue was reading a picture book titled My Secret Friend and the little girl in the book was named Sue. In the space on the order form marked “Your child’s name here:” someone had scrawled BETH.”

  Outside the kitchen window the sky was blue and the sun was shining, but Mrs. Jenkins could not stop shivering. Her hair, still wet from the shower, dripped down the collar of her robe to send a cold trickle down her back. Moving quickly, she swept the advertisements off the counter and threw them away. She wiped up the melted ice cream and put the carton in the trash. Then she fled the kitchen, dressing quickly and hurrying to work.

  On the bus to work, she eyed a disheveled old woman who wore three sweaters over her flowered dress. The shopping bag at the woman’s feet was stuffed with clothing and the woman was talking loudly to the disinterested businessman who sat beside her, trapped in his seat by the crowd on the bus. The woman was telling him about the aliens who came to her apartment and stole her things. They came at night, she told him; they came out when everyone was asleep and nobody noticed but her.

  Mrs. Jenkins watched, wondering if this woman had started by forgetting things, misplacing things, until at last she no longer remembered where she was or what she was doing.

  The last time that Andrea had been out to visit, she had asked Mrs. Jenkins if she were still comfortable living alone. A simple question, an innocent question, but suddenly Mrs. Jenkins was worried about its implications: rest homes, senior citizens’ clubs, places for women who could not take care of themselves.

  Mrs. Jenkins was very glad when the bus reached her stop.

  At work, she could not concentrate. She felt a little sick to her stomach, a little dizzy and disoriented. At noon, she told Annie Clark that she had a touch of the flu, and she went home early.

  With the afternoon sunlight streaming in the windows, her apartment seemed cheerful and homey. Sunshine cast a glowing rectangle on her bedroom carpet. The bathroom and living room were just as she had left them.

  She stopped in the door to the kitchen. Her stomach tightened. On the counter lay the advertisement that she had thrown away. She knew for certain that she had thrown it away—on one corner of the brochure was a smear of chocolate from the ice cream carton in the trash.

  Beside the brochure, a stuffed toy watched her with bright blue glass eyes. She picked it up and smoothed back its soft fur with a hand that trembled. It was a sweet little toy, a plump white kitten with white plush fur. She remembered buying it for Andrea’s ninth birthday. She had known, even as she took the kitten from the shelf in the toy store, that the stuffed toy was too babyish for Andrea, too cute, too sweet. But Mrs. Jenkins was drawn to it, and she bought it at the same time that she bought the chemistry set that Andrea really wanted.

  Andrea had opened the chemistry set with cries of delight. The kitten she accepted politely and set on her bookshelf where it had grown dusty over the years. Mrs. Jenkins had never once seen Andrea take the kitten from the shelf and stroke its fur.

  Mrs. Jenkins stood in the kitchen and held the stuffed toy in her hand. The chill that had touched her spine did not go away. She placed the toy on the counter and she backed from the room.

  She had never noticed before how badly lit the hallway was. No windows here, and only a little light filtered in through the open kitchen door. She tiptoed down the hall until she stood outside the door to Andrea’s room. Through the door she could hear the faint sound of a transistor radio playing a scratchy rendition of a rock-and-roll tune.

  She put her hand on the cold metal doorknob, listening intently. Her stomach ached and she was angry. Finding the kitten made her feel sad and lonely and somehow the sadness and loneliness had become an anger that centered somewhere in her stomach.

  “Listen,” she said softly. Then more loudly, as if she were scolding a room filled with boisterous children, “Listen to me!” She could hear a hysterical edge in her voice, but could not control it. “You’d better get out of here, you hear me?” She listened for a moment. Over the staticy music she thought she heard something else: a small sigh as if someone on the other side of the door had let out a breath.

  “I don’t know who you are or how you got in here, but I’m telling you that I’m putting a lock on this door,” she said. “A good strong lock that opens only from the outside. So you’d better get out of here while you can.” She rattled the doorknob and the radio abruptly fell silent. “You’d better get out of here.”

  She fled the apartment. When she returned, an hour later, she carried a hammer, holding it in her hand like a club. Tucked under her arm was a brown paper bag from the hardware store.

  The hallway was quiet, a brooding stillness. Mrs. Jenkins went directly to Andrea’s door. There too the hallway was quiet: no radio, no muffled breathing.

  The lock was a simple sturdy mechanism. A steel rod about half an inch thick slid into two metal rings that attached to the door and two metal rings that attached to the doorframe. The young man at the hardware store had assured Mrs. Jenkins that the lock would make any door quite secure.

  Dust motes danced in the stream of afternoon light that shone through the kitchen door. Mrs. Jenkins waited, listening. Only silence.

  She held the steel rings up to the door. With a sharp pencil, she marked the places where the screws would go. Eight screws, each an inch long. She tapped starting holes with hammer and nail, then screwed the hoops into place.

  The wood of the frame was hard and the pressure of the screwdriver against her palm raised a blister. But she persisted even when the blister popped, ignoring the pain and forcing the screws into the wood. She was breathing heavily by the time she finished.

  She slid the steel rod neatly into the hoops. She rattled the knob and tugged on the door, but the lock held firm.

  She left it then and tried to go about her normal evening routine. She made herself some dinner, even though she wasn’t really hungry, settled down with the New York Times Book Review, and tried to read the reviews of children’s books.

  The apartment was not quiet. She could hear the rush of traffic on the nearby street; it ebbed and flowed like rushing water in a river. She turned on the radio and classical music filled one corner of the room. But beneath the rumble of passing cars and the dancing tune on the harpsichord, she could sense the silence, the great angry darkness. She poured a nightcap, but even the whiskey could not hold back the brooding silence.

  It began to rain. Raindrops tapped against the windows, as if seeking a way in. The tires of cars hissed on the wet streets. Mrs. Jenkins found that she had started a review for the third time and she still did not remember what it said.

  She took out her umbrella, her raincoat, and her plastic rain hat, and she went to the movies. A musical comedy was playing at a theater down the block. In the darkness of the theater she felt
safe: bright pictures moved on the giant screen, enormous faces sang about love, and everything worked out right in the end. But when the movie was over, she had to go home.

  The light bulb on the landing had burned out and she fumbled for her keys. As she stood in front of the door, she heard music and laughter, but assumed the noise came from her downstairs neighbors, three students who tended to be noisy.

  She opened the door to her apartment and blinked in the sudden glare of the hallway light. The radio in her bedroom was blaring a pop hit—something about love and betrayal. A muted television voice told a joke she could not hear and a laugh track roared with amusement.

  She ran toward the living room, dropping her umbrella in the hall and leaving the front door open, thinking only of turning off the television and stopping the laughter.

  A blizzard of paper scraps covered the living room floor, drifting around the couch and piling up beside the legs of the coffee table like snow beside fence posts. Last Sunday’s newspaper had been torn into tiny pieces and scattered like a New York snowstorm, white touched with gray.

  The oven timer was buzzing, a raucous nagging tone. The blender, an ancient Osterizer, was stuck on puree and it whined on a high thin note. All the heating elements of the stove were cherry red, and the kettle was whistling with agonized desperation, as if it had been howling for hours with no hope of relief. As Mrs. Jenkins stood in the doorway, unwilling to venture into the snowdrifts of paper, the toaster popped and the laugh track guffawed. A breeze from the open window caught a few paper scraps, swirling them in a miniature tornado, picking up other scraps and tossing them high in the air. Mrs. Jenkins heard the front door slam closed and her breath came quickly, almost in sobs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she was almost crying. “I’m sorry. Please stop it.” Then louder. “Stop it! I said I’m sorry!”

  Then shouting so that she could be heard over the laughter, the whistling, and the buzzing, “Goddamn it—I’m sorry!”

  The lights went out. The laughter fell silent, along with the whine of the blender and the buzz of the timer. The whistling of the kettle persisted for a minute, deepening from its panicked wail to a bass note, fading to a whimper, and then to nothing.

  Mrs. Jenkins stood in the darkness, listening to the sound of her own breathing. She heard a faint rustling and something soft—maybe a paper scrap blown by the breeze—brushed past her ankle. Nothing else happened.

  She reached for the light switch beside her and flipped it up and down. No response. The apartment’s circuits had overloaded and a fuse had blown, a minor emergency that Mrs. Jenkins could deal with.

  Tentatively she stepped into the living room, shuffling her feet through the newspaper scraps. Nothing harmed her. She could see the outline of the television set in the faint glow of a streetlight shining through the window. She fumbled for the set’s on/off switch and pushed it to off.

  Carefully she made her way into the kitchen where she turned off the blender, the oven timer, and all the heating elements on the stove.

  She turned quickly away from the stove, half-expecting to find someone watching her from the living room. The room was empty. She listened—but heard nothing except the rapid beating of her own heart. She groped in the kitchen drawer for spare fuses, a candle, and matches.

  On her way to the fuse box she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the living room window. In the wavering candlelight, her face was pale, her eyes were wide, and the irises were ringed with white.

  She changed the fuse. When she threw the circuit breaker, the lights in the hallway came on and the radio deejay announced the next tune. She went to the bedroom, turned off the radio, and sat for a moment on the bed. The bright lights hurt her eyes and her ears still rang with the remembered buzzing of the oven timer.

  She forced herself to stand and walk down the hall to Andrea’s room. The steel bar had been shoved to one side, unbolting the door. Slowly, she slipped the bar out of the hoops completely, leaving the door free to open. She put the bar in the kitchen drawer where she kept the fuses.

  Her purse lay in the doorway where she had dropped it. She picked it up, shook off the bits of paper, and took out the box of Milk Duds that she had bought at the theater. About half were left. She put the box on the kitchen counter and returned to her bedroom.

  Her head ached and the sickness in her stomach had grown worse. She felt feverish as she undressed and put on her nightgown. She lay on the bed and picked up a magazine, planning to read for a while before going to sleep.

  She woke with her stomach in a knot. The bedroom light was still on. Her stomach twisted and she ran to the bathroom where she vomited into the toilet again and again, continuing to retch helplessly even after her stomach was empty. For a time, she lay on the bathroom floor, welcoming the coolness of the linoleum. She roused only to vomit.

  She woke sometime later and pulled the blanket closer around her, shivering with a sudden chill. Vaguely she wondered where the blanket had come from; it hadn’t been there a minute ago. Her fingers worried at a hole in the flannel as she drifted in and out of sleep. Finally, she woke enough to realize that she might be more comfortable in bed. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders like a cape and staggered back down the hall to her bedroom, pausing now and then to lean against the wall. The hall seemed very long, but at last she reached her room and collapsed on the bed. She drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the night.

  Once she woke and wished she had a glass of water so that she could wash the taste of vomit from her mouth. The next time she woke, she discovered a glass of water on her bedside table. She sipped it gratefully and did not question its presence.

  In the morning, she woke briefly, then drifted back to sleep. She slept sporadically, and each time she woke she found a gift on the table beside her: a glass of orange juice from the pitcher in the refrigerator; a cup of hot mint tea sweetened with honey; two slices of toast, still warm from the toaster; the stuffed white kitten with its blue-glass eyes.

  Late in the afternoon, she fell sound asleep again and slept through until morning. She woke early, feeling ravenous, and wandered into the living room. The paper scraps had been swept into a paper bag and a jam jar on the kitchen table was crammed full of dandelions and yellow mustard flowers, gathered, she suspected, from the back patio. The box of Milk Duds was empty.

  The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing: pale blue with a border of white lace clouds. A rainbow curved over the radio tower on Twin Peaks.

  She thought about what it would be like to be young, lonely, and far from home. Then she smiled at the bouquet of ragged flowers. Children could be thoughtless, but they meant well.

  The apartment was quiet, but it seemed filled with a kind of warmth, a cozy feeling, like the sound of a cat purring or the touch of sunshine on bare skin. Mrs. Jenkins threw away the empty Milk Duds box, added more water to the jar of flowers, and fixed herself some scrambled eggs for breakfast. As she worked, she hummed to herself, a tuneless happy sound.

  She folded the blanket that had covered her when she lay on the bathroom floor, recognizing the worn sky blue flannel as Andrea’s security blanket. Mrs. Jenkins left it at the door to Andrea’s room. Inside the room, the transistor radio played softly.

  When she went out to get a Sunday paper, Mrs. Jenkins stopped by the corner market to buy another carton of chocolate ice cream and a box of graham crackers.

  With Four Lean Hounds

  WE START WITH a thief: slim, wiry girl with ash-gray hair and eyes the color of the winter sky. No one knew how old she was and no one cared. Old enough to beat; just barely old enough to bed.

  Tarsia was running from an angry baker. The loaf tucked under her arm was still warm. She dodged between the stalls of the market, heading for a spot where she knew she could climb the tumbledown wall that ringed the city.

  From there she could run surefooted across slate roofs, hide among the
chimneys. A creature of the wind and sky, she could escape all pursuit.

  She heard the whistle of the guard’s warning and the pounding of his running feet. Ill luck: he was between her and the wall. Behind her, the baker shouted curses. She changed course abruptly, ducking into the mouth of an alley and—too late—realized her mistake.

  The walls were slick stone. Though she climbed like a monkey, she could not scale them. The alley’s far end had been blocked by a new building. A dead end.

  She heard the guard’s whistle echoing down the cold stone walls and remembered the feel of the shackles on her wrist. Her bones ached in memory of the cold jail.

  A jumble of papers that the wind had blown against the alley’s end rustled. A rat peered out at Tarsia—a grizzled old grandfather rat who watched her with an arrogant air of unconcern, then turned tail and darted into a hole that had been hidden in the shadows. It was a dark, dank hole just the width of a small thief’s shoulders.

  Tarsia heard the footsteps at the mouth of the alley and, like a sensible thief with a healthy concern for her skin, she dropped the loaf and squeezed into the hole. Her shoulders scraped against the damp stone. A creature of rooftops and light, she wiggled down into the darkness.

  On her belly, she groped her way forward, reminding herself that rats were only bats without wings. As a child of the rooftops she knew bats. But she could hear her heart beating in the narrow stone passage and she could not lift her head without bumping it. She inched forward, telling herself that surely the drain led into a larger passage; it could not just get smaller and darker and damper.

  A cold blast of air fanned her face, carrying scents of still water, damp stone, and sewage. At last, she could raise her head. She felt a soft touch on her ankle—a tiny breeze rushing past—with only a hint of fur and a long tail.

  She heaved herself out of the drain into a larger space, quick and clumsy in her eagerness to move. She stepped forward in the darkness, stepped into nothing and stumbled, clutching at an edge she could not see, slipping and falling into a moment she did not remember.