Title:
When the Wind Blows By
Author: Havenhurst
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When you take flight, remember me to one who lives there.
--Guided by Voices, "I Am a Tree"
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Diane awakens early and alone, one unusual circumstance and one usual. She lies
in bed for almost two hours with her eyes closed listening to the distant buzz
of the groundskeeper's leaf blower, and after a while the throat-closing grief
and panic fade a little, become earthy and intermixed with desire and rage,
settle deep into her pelvic cradle. And eventually the combination pries her
burning eyes open, and she climbs out of bed to glare at the phone that she
wants to ring right now, and wants never to ring again, and after a while, who
knows how long, she realizes that she's still wearing last night's dress
twisted around her hips and waist, the last thing she remembers is climbing out
of the car bare-breasted and crying, with the chauffeur's eyes still locked on
hers, and Camilla's coldly turned away. Black overdress, red underdress, the
color of an open wound, and her just underneath that. She yanks the dress off
so hastily that the shoulder strap tears, and she leaves it on the living room
floor. She walks back to the bathroom in her black sandals, only remembers to
take them off when she steps into the shower and the heels clank against the
porcelain. She kicks them off in the tub and leaves them there.
The shower lasts much longer than she intends. The green light filters in
through the tiny bathroom window rendering her skin leafy and abstract, an
arboreal watercolor, and as she rinses, the shower nozzle dissolves into rain
cloud, the patter of water into the tub softens in the flat slop of rain on
dirt, and against her skin it becomes rustly, faceted. She feels her toes lengthening,
hardening, trying to burrow and root, and her fingers multiplying and reaching
for the sky, she breathes out through her mouth and in through her skin, feels
the CO2 running along her nerve endings, and by the time she becomes aware of
the dangers of standing still, she can hardly pull herself out of the bath, can
barely manage to bend her long, knotty fingers around the hot water faucet.
It's a good thing. It's a good thing she has she has the strength and stamina
she does, because otherwise she might have been stuck in that bath forever, in
the rain forever, growing and eroding and becoming something else. Again.
She dries off, curiously watches her rooty toes retracting and becoming human
appendages again, then pads to the kitchen naked. There's no food in the house
right now, hasn't been any for days, but Diane checks every morning just to be
sure, because she's not entirely sure the Other Her (the one she sees
occasionally with Camilla, the one who wears demure twinsets and always says
the right thing) hasn't taken care of the shopping for her. Because that's
exactly the sort of thing that the other Diane does. She shops for groceries
and pays the bills on time, if she even has them, and pulls the curtains closed
when she masturbates on the couch and keeps a bottle of wine in the fridge for
guests, is a worthy and committed lover and friend and a responsible niece.
Diane hates that woman almost as much as she hates Camilla. She thinks as she
drinks tap water from her cupped hands (careful this time not to let her sin
drink so much in, doesn't want to her skin to forget how to be hers) that she'd
like to cut that blonde hair away with a scalpel. She'd like to peel that wide
smile off with an X-Acto knife. Tape over the exposed sinew and bone with colored
gaffer's tape, which she does have somewhere in the house. And after that she
pulls the dress back on, and puts a t-shirt on over that, and leaves the house,
then realizes she's forgotten to put on shoes and doubles back for them.
Camilla did not call her last night after Diane got out of the car. Camilla
does not call this morning. Back in the apartment, Diane pulls on a pair of
sneakers and picks up the phone to call Camilla, to hear her voice chilled
down, to be mocked and dismissed one last time. But then when she gets around
to dialing a number, she dials it from the pay phone at the Chinese restaurant
on the corner and she doesn't dial Camilla and Adam's number at all. She makes
the appointment, Winkie's at three, calls for a cab, and when she climbs into
the back seat a few minutes later, her smile looks like the other Diane's, open
and engaging and uncomplicated.
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