Perri O'Shaughnessy - Sinister Shorts

I give the maid a few extra dollars. She thanks me in Spanish. Spanish is a very courtly language, musical, like water over stones. Leo always complained that the Latinos were trying to take over his college. I wonder why he hated them so much.

In the quiet evenings, the air-conditioning whirring and the shades drawn, I lie on the bed and think about the college. I think how we trained people to become just like us. This kind of thinking is very hard work, but when I have a thought it sticks to the grain of sand that is my soul.

AUGUST 26

Leo and my husband are at the door. When I open it, they look stunned and step back.

They are looking at me. I see myself their way, disheveled and plain. No mask of makeup, no curls, no shoes. My legs are brown now and strong.

They are both sweating in their suits.

“We've come to take you home,” they say. My husband starts to cry. They follow me into my room and sit on the bed, their eyes raking around the furniture, looking like tarantulas. My husband is still crying angrily.

“Who do you think you are?” he asks.

Leo says, “The new school year is starting next week. Everything is a mess. I'm willing to overlook this irresponsible behavior.”

They do not wait for me to speak. They rush on, whining.

I shake my head, and I hear the tone change, becoming sinister. They are talking about nervous breakdowns. My husband says I can't abandon my children. Molly is back and she needs me.

I shake my head.

Leo takes my arm. He says I need a doctor, and tells my husband to help him. My husband looks at him, at me. Now he is the one who smells of brandy.

“Go away,” I say. They pick me up and carry me to the car. Leo drives and I am firmly strapped between the two of them in the front seat. We drive out the long flat highway. It's got to be a hundred ten degrees out here. I see my cactus receding in the distance. The wind is blowing up a real sandstorm.

Leo turns on the wipers and peers out the front window, going slower. My husband is telling me that they had to do it for my own good.

SEPTEMBER 10

I am back at home. I am seeing Dr. Bernstein three times a week. My eyes feel gritty, as if sand were blowing through my head. My soul may already have blown away. My father asks on the phone, “When are you gonna get me out of here?” His voice sounds weaker.

I don't think anymore. Dr. Bernstein says it would hamper my recovery.

SEPTEMBER 12

I am back at work. Leo has started an affair with his secretary. My husband says I better get with the program and start cooking again.

I wake up with a start, my throat dry, my eyes stinging. My husband is snoring. He has drunk a lot of brandy.

I'm rushing into the sandstorm. The wind shrieks and picks me up and tosses me into the howling chaos.

I tumble out of bed. I blow into the kitchen, past the sandy, dirty pots and pans and the sandy, filthy floor, and out the door to the garage.

Wind is roaring through my head. I tote the can of gasoline into the bedroom and pour gas all around the bed. Then I climb up quietly and take the batteries out of the smoke detector. I light the match and toss it toward the bed. There is a blast of heat and more wind.

I have made my own desert.

I force the bedroom door shut on the flames. I walk out into the night in my nightgown, but now the desert is gone, only the darkness remains, there's only confusion, confusion, confusion.

My body gets into the car, carefully setting the can of gasoline onto the passenger seat.

Where are we going? I ask, turning the keys in the ignition.

A siren sounds in the distance as I turn onto the boulevard.

It seems that we are going to Leo's.

“Look, Danny! Can you see? This is so fabulous.” Laura leaned back. Her neck cranked around like an alien's, all the way behind her and to the left. They were seated over the wing. Daniel assumed she could see better out the window behind her. He couldn't see out and he didn't care.

He wanted to say shut up, but his wife's excitement kept him kind. For so many years, Laura had stayed home taking care of the kids while he worked and traveled. This time, for the first time, when she asked to come along, he had said yes. He had agreed for reasons other than timing: a woman who took women's magazines too seriously, that night when he got home she had removed her robe to reveal a sleek black nightie that slid like oil down her ample curves. Wrapping creamy thighs around him, mouth cold and sweet as chocolate ice cream, she had made him beg, and she had made him promise.

He had no trouble begging, no trouble promising, because he had another motivation. Laura made good cover for this trip. He was a husband taking his pretty wife down to the islands for a vacation. Their wool coats were stuffed in overhead bins. He wore a rayon shirt with palm trees splattered across it, and she wore heeled sandals and a sleeveless cotton shift sprinkled with minuscule blue flowers, hidden at the moment under a sweater against the airplane's chill.

“All that snow, see it? Going, going… Gone! Good-bye miserable cold! Bye-bye, irksome children.” She let out a giddy laugh. “I can't believe your mom took them. Has she ever before?” Her head cocked to one side. “I don't think so,” she answered herself. “She was willing-almost. I'd suspect you put her up to it but you wouldn't do that just to take me on a trip, or else why would it be three years since we went anywhere alone together?” Possibly to soothe the sting of this implicit criticism, she wound her husband's arm through her own and gave his wrist a squeeze.

Laura spent most days wrangling the kids like an expert cowboy on horseback, cracking the whip without ever harming a hair of their valuable pelts. He never saw her read a newspaper, he never saw her relax, yet she seemed remarkably tuned-in. She knew current movie stars, and cannily guessed outcomes for the Friday night video rentals he usually slept through. Maybe she listened to public radio in the daytime. Maybe the kids connected her to deeper meanings, or some earthy mom-blood-dirt-detergent-kid link he couldn't comprehend. She continued to have the one thing going for her he had always admired, the ability to say things that surprised him, a good thing, since her chattering need to include him in the running drama of her thoughts often drove him crazy.

He called what he felt for her love, but differentiated it from what he felt for his children. That feeling, aroused a few times when they were little-when one ran ahead in the store or got away on a busy street just long enough for him to feel desperate, animal, and basic-growled in him, sharpened his teeth, revealed an ungovernable violence within. How could he use the same word for the sexual thrall that kept him with Laura?

She'd had trouble giving birth to Joey. When he entertained, for one second, the idea that she might not make it, he became efficient rather than terrified, resigned rather than angry. He didn't think he could have been so philosophical if Corinna were the victim. No, he didn't.

So call what he had with Laura a loving connection rather than the intense, crazy aura of fun he had once fantasized surrounding marriage. Their tie now only allowed him a certain amount of leeway before it dragged him back. He needed her, appreciated her abilities as a parent and as an easy, sometimes ingenious lover. Without her, there would be no flowered curtains on the windows, no soap-smelling, happy children running to greet him at the door when he did come home. There would be no tease, no mystery. She kept the mysterious machinery of their marriage oiled and operating. He played worker bee. Somebody had to.