You are on the porch when you hear footsteps. The door creaks open. Your husband sits beside you on the steps and for a moment you let yourself think that everything will be all right. You listen to him breathing beside you.
“I couldn’t sleep,” you say. “I came outside so I wouldn’t wake you up.”
“You woke me up by getting up,” he says. He isn’t looking at you; he is gazing out toward the oaks.
“I’m sorry,” you say automatically.
“If I’m late again, that bastard will have my ass,” he says, and somehow it is your fault. You are responsible for the long commute, for the unreasonable boss, for your husband’s state of mind. He will be late to work and you will be to blame.
“Let’s go back to bed,” you say. “You need your sleep.”
Moving carefully, you reach out and take his hand. You lead him back to bed.
He falls asleep quickly, but you lie awake beside him, listening to him breathe.
You do your best. You have dinner ready on time. You serve his favorite foods. You keep the house very clean.
But even so, there are small signs—you watch for them and you notice them. He stops complaining about the traffic and his commute to the city, although you know neither one has improved. He stops complaining about the boss who is picking on him, always on his back. You watch and wait, knowing that something is coming.
You try to make sure that everything is perfect. Everything must be perfect. If it isn’t perfect—but you don’t want to think about that. This time, you will follow all the rules. You will put all the shirts in the drawer just so. You will not say anything that makes it sound as if you think you’re smart. You will not smile at anyone. And you will watch him, noticing the slightest signal.
Even though you are very good, sometimes you slip away to your place in the trees when he is at work. Once, when he has had too much to drink and falls asleep, you risk sneaking out at night, finding your way in the darkness.
You are lucky. You don’t get caught.
He is silent much of the time. When he gets home at night, he watches cop shows on TV. He drinks steadily, watching you over the rim of the glass. Sometimes, you catch him watching you. Something is coming, but if you can keep everything perfect, it will not come.
Your husband is at work when the landlord and his wife stop by. The Lions Club is having a pancake breakfast at the local high school and they want to sell you tickets.
They want you and your husband to come; they say you will have a good time; they say you should get out more.
Your landlord’s wife says you need some meat on your bones.
You buy two tickets. You know, even as you buy them, that your husband will not go. But you smile and buy them to be polite. And you think about what it would be like if he decided to go and be charming. He could be charming. He could be sweet. You picture yourself in a sundress. You have no bruises on your arms and your husband is smiling at you the way he used to before you married.
You tell the landlord and his wife that you can’t talk long. You must get dinner started. Your husband will be home soon. But they keep talking until the shadows stretch across the valley. When they finally leave, you make a pot of stew, a big green salad. Your husband is late and you’re glad. Dinner will be ready when he gets home.
Everything will be perfect.
It’s dark. You see his headlights first, sweeping across the trees and spotlighting the house. You stand on the porch, ready to greet him. “Dinner is ready,” you call to him.
He has been drinking. You can smell whiskey and cigarette smoke on his clothes. He pushes past you into the kitchen and you follow him, still trying to smile. He glares around the kitchen. The stew bubbles on the stove and it smells good. Surely he will be happy now: good food, a nice clean home.
“What’s wrong?” you ask. You know as soon as you speak you have said the wrong thing. There was no right thing to say.
“That son of a bitch I work for fired me,” he says. “Are you happy now?”
You can think of nothing to say. Are you happy? No, you’re not happy.
He sees the tickets to the pancake breakfast. Carelessly, you left them on the table. He snatches them up and reads what they have to say.
“You spent money on this shit?” he says. He throws them down on the floor. Before you can speak, he grabs your hair and tries to slap you—once, twice, three times.
You block his hand once, twice, but the third blow knocks your arm aside. You try to pull away, but he strikes again with the back of his hand, rocking your head to one side.
“I’ll teach you a lesson,” he says, and you remember other lessons that your husband taught with his fists. You bring your arms up to protect your face and he swings his fist low and buries it in your stomach. Lesson one: whatever you do, it’s wrong. You double over, wrapping yourself around the pain, and he slams a fist into your head.
Lesson two: the same as lesson one.
You fall to the floor and try to crawl away. He grabs your ankle and you turn on him, slapping at his hand. He grabs your wrist. Desperately you bite him, tasting blood and sweat and cigarettes. You have never fought him so hard before. You have grown stronger during your time among the trees.
When you bite him, he lets you go, and in that instant you are running out the door, off the porch, into the protective darkness beneath the trees. You know your way.
You can hear him behind you, clumsy in his drunkenness, shouting that he will kill you, you bitch, you stupid bitch.
He is cursing you, screaming that you are useless and stupid, a burden to him, a drag on his life.
The wind is up and the oaks are alive. You run among them, ducking beneath the low branches. The women are calling to you in high thin voices like leaves in the wind.
Behind you, you hear your husband trying to follow. The branches slap at him, clawing at his eyes. The roots trip him. You can hear him grunt as he falls.
You are far ahead of him when you reach your secret place and you climb quickly, knowing your way by touch.
The oak women help you, their cool hands clutching your wrists, soothing your pain, urging you on. You find your place and you sit there, very still.
You hear your husband searching for you. He shouts your name, curses you, slams his fist into trees as he passes. He tells you that you must come out.
You sit very still, listening to your own heart pounding.
For a moment, you think, “I’d better go back. It will only be worse later.” But you remain still. After a time, you think, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
A flashlight beam darts across the tree trunks. You can see it flickering through the leaves, but he can’t see you.
You are as invisible as the oak women. You blend into the picture, becoming part of the branches, part of the leaves.
No one can find you here. As he crashes through the underbrush, you fight the urge to laugh. He is not strong, with all his bashing and crashing. You lean back into the fork of the tree, listening to the oak women soothing you.
“Hush,” they say. “Quiet.”
Finally, he goes back to the house. In the distance, you hear the sound of breaking glass. The kitchen window, you guess, but that doesn’t matter now. He can break every window and burn all your things. You don’t care.
Your body is stiff and you are starting to wonder what to do. “Leave it,” the oak women say. “Come with us.” The first light of dawn is rising. Birds are starting to sing.
“Come on,” the youngest one says impatiently. She reaches out her hand, and you take it. She smiles and tugs on your hand. It happens so easily. You stand up and look back at the small body, curled up in the fork of the tree.
So thin, so beautiful. You feel the wind in your hair.
Your husband will never find you here. You will watch him from the trees. Sometimes you will drop twigs on his head. Sometimes, remembering the good times, the times when he was sorry, the times when he danced with
you and treated you well, you will miss him.
But you will not be sorry, not sorry ever again. Eventually, you will forget how to lie. And then you can come back down.
Don’t Look Back
A SMALL WATERCOLOR painting hung over the fireplace.
When Liz had lived in the rambling old house, one of her sketches had hung in that spot. With her eyes squinted half-closed against the late afternoon sun, Liz could almost believe that the watercolor was one of hers.
She leaned her head against the arm of the couch, where the velvet had long since been worn smooth.
Amanda’s golden retriever, Bristol, bumped his head against her leg, trying to get her attention, and she scratched his ears idly.
She had visited the house a year before. At the time, she had been living with Mark in San Francisco. “You’re trying to live in the past,” Mark had claimed when she had left to visit the old house. “You’ll just make yourself unhappy. You can’t go back.” Lying on the couch with the afternoon sunlight shining on her face, Liz knew that Mark had been wrong. She was happy in her past. She was worried about her future.
Mark still lived in San Francisco, but Liz had moved on.
For the past year, she had lived in Los Angeles. Now she was taking a job in New York, moving far away and leaving her family and friends behind.
Bristol bumped his head against Liz’s leg again, and she resumed scratching his ears. “What a pair,” Amanda said as she stepped into the room. The older woman set a teapot and mugs on the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the floor beside the dog. Despite her gray hair, Amanda was as casual in manner as the art students who lived in her house, “You always were that dog’s favorite.”
Bristol lifted his head. With an apologetic air, he moved away from Liz, stretched, and paced to the front door. Liz frowned and sat up on the couch. “I wonder what’s up,” she said.
“That must be Elsa,” Amanda said as she poured the tea. “She lives in your old room now.”
When Liz opened the door for the dog, he pushed past her. Liz stood in the doorway, watching the golden retriever frolic around and around a girl of about eighteen. The girl was laughing and whirling as if trying to keep her face to the dog. A bright flower was stuck in the braid of her long brown hair. Under her arm, she carried a sketch pad and several slim art books.
Liz watched, remembering when Bristol had greeted her after a long day, when she had carried a sketch pad under her arm and walked home from the bus stop with a flower in her hair.
“Elsa painted the watercolor over the fireplace,” Amanda said from behind Liz. “She’s quite good. She’s working under Professor Whittier.”
“Nothing but the best for him,” Liz said, her eyes still on the girl and the dog. Whittier had been Liz’s professor.
Liz stepped back from the door when the girl turned toward the house. Footsteps pounded up the wooden stairs and the girl and dog burst into the room. “Hey, Amanda,” Elsa began. “I won’t be here for dinner.”
“Slow down, kid.” Amanda smiled at the girl as indulgently as she used to smile at Liz. “Say hello to Liz Berke.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Elsa’s voice was low, as if she were not quite certain she wanted to be heard. “Professor Whittier has one of your drawings hanging in his office. It’s very good.” When she hesitated, Liz was painfully aware that Elsa did not know what to say and she remembered how she had felt awkward when she had met Whittier’s old students, people he spoke of with respect and affection. Elsa shifted her sketchbook from one arm to the other and looked at Amanda as if for release. “I’m going out to a lecture with some friends so I won’t be around for dinner, Amanda.”
As Elsa hurried from the room with Bristol close behind her, Liz felt a twinge of something like regret. “Is this her first year?” she asked.
Amanda pushed a cup of tea toward Liz and nodded.
“That’s right. Why?”
“I don’t know. When I first saw her, she reminded me of someone.” Liz shrugged.
“Your lost youth, perhaps?” Amanda grinned.
“I don’t know,” Liz repeated, frowning. “I would have liked to talk to her, though.”
Amanda laughed. “I think you overwhelmed her. All of Professor Whittier’s students are dancing in your shadow, you know. You’re a tough act to follow.”
“Nobody says they have to follow.” Liz’s voice was resentful. She sat back down on the couch and sipped her tea, trying not to wish that the golden retriever’s head still rested in her lap so that she could scratch the dog’s ears.
Liz spent the evening with Amanda, reminiscing about the years that she had lived in the house. “It was good that you moved on, you know,” Amanda said. “I remember that you almost came back here a year after you left.”
“I was going to take a job as Whittier’s assistant,” Liz recalled. “I don’t know why I didn’t. Good pay, interesting work, a chance to come back…”
Amanda shook her head in quick denial. “I told you not to take it and for once you listened. You can’t come back. There’s no place for you here anymore.” Though Amanda’s voice was warm with affection, the words left Liz with a cold feeling: no place for her anymore.
The feeling lingered after Amanda bade her good-night and headed upstairs to the attic bedroom. In the many shadowed hallway, Liz paused at the door to the guest bedroom listening to Amanda’s footsteps ascend the stairs.
Though the hour was past one, Elsa had not yet come home. Liz turned from the guest room and pushed open the door to her old room.
A bouquet of daisies, backlit by moonlight, stood on the windowsill; Liz had always had flowers in her room. The desk was littered with sketches, books, designs. An easy chair—the same easy chair that she had used or else one just as misshapen—stood by the open window, an Indian muslin bedspread flung over it to hide the rips in its upholstery.
Through the open window and across the quiet yard, Liz heard someone whistling a fragment of song—just as she had whistled to keep back the darkness on her way home from coffeehouses, parties, late nights in the studio.
Liz heard a footstep on the driveway and she fled to the guest room, listening in the darkness to the sound of Elsa’s key in the lock and chiding herself for invading the student’s privacy.
Liz woke early the next morning. The sunlight filtered through the leaves of the tree outside the window and created shifting patterns on the ceiling. The sunlight had made shifting patterns on the ceiling of the adjacent room when she had been a student. Liz heard the creak of bedsprings in the room next door, the sound of the closet door opening. She heard footsteps on the stairs but she lay in bed, watching the light dance as the wind moved the leaves, until she heard the front door open and close. She waited until the sound of footsteps on the gravel drive had faded in the distance before she got up and joined Amanda in the kitchen for breakfast.
After breakfast, she caught the same bus she had taken each day as a student. On the bus and on the walk through the campus to Professor Whittier’s office, memories plagued her. Not good memories; not bad memories; just memories; I dropped my portfolio in front of this door when I was hurrying to class, I got caught in the rain and took shelter in this building, I used that fountain to fill an old jam jar with water for a bouquet of flowers, I stood right here the first time I went to see Professor Whittier, a sketch of mine hung on the wall just around this corner.
Just around the corner, a sketch hung on the wall. Liz stopped. She recognized the woman in the portrait as Amanda and she peered at the signature. Elsa Brant. Liz could not put words to the disquieting feeling that touched her—the same uneasiness that had kept her bed that morning.
When she raised her hand to knock on Professor Whittier’s door, she could not suppress the thought: I used to do this every day. And she could not avoid the thought that followed: Elsa probably does this every day.
Professor Whittier had not changed in her absence. The glacial old man nodded slo
wly when she told him about the work she would be doing in New York. They talked about the changes in the school, the growth in her work, and then she could not resist asking about his students.
He shrugged. Through the years, he had remained as slow and unstoppable as a mountain of ice. “All art students are alike: lazy, self-indulgent. That hasn’t changed,” he said. “Only one—the girl who works in your old studio—shows any promise. Her name is Elsa Brant.”
Liz had fixed her gaze on the drawing that hung behind Professor Whittier’s head, a sketch of Bristol that she had completed during her sophomore year. She remembered sitting in the living room on a warm afternoon while the dog slept in a patch of sunshine, trying to catch the smooth grace of the animal in pen and ink. She remembered the moment and clung to it. She was unique. No one else could have caught that moment in just that way.
“Yes,” Liz admitted quietly. “I’ve seen Elsa’s work. She does have promise.”
On her way out, Liz passed by her old studio and paused at the door. Elsa stood with her back to the corridor, facing the open window. The girl’s easel held a self-portrait that was almost complete. In the painting, Elsa wore the same twisted half-smile she had worn when the dog had greeted her in the yard. Liz stepped forward, about to speak to the girl, and as she did so, realized: I always painted with the window open. She turned and fled.
“I thought you were going to stay for a while,” Amanda complained as Liz stowed her suitcase in the trunk of her car. “You said you didn’t plan to start driving to New York for a week or so.”
“I know. I just…” She met Amanda’s gaze. “I don’t belong here anymore.” She hesitated. She had been about to say—“I’ve been replaced”—but she had thought better of it. “You’ve been telling me that for years. I just now realized you were right.”
Amanda looked worried. “Where are you going, then?”
“I’ve already called Mr. Jacobs, the man I worked for in San Jose. I’m going to be taking him to lunch.” She tried to force a light-hearted note into her voice. “Oh, don’t worry about it, Amanda. I’m just too restless to stay in one place just now.” She hugged the older woman good-bye and got into the car. With the engine running, she reached out the car window to squeeze Amanda’s hand. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I just have to …” She hesitated, uncertain of what it was she had to do. “I’ll write you from New York,” she said.