In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  It happened slowly, the sense I came to have of myself as separate from my family and church. For a short period during the process, I believed I could exist as a Christian both inside and outside the world. But I was wrong, I realize now, not because it is impossible to live a moral life without setting oneself apart, but because I would not be allowed to do so. The lines were drawn for me. I must be either the daughter subjugated to her father’s will and the dictates of the church, or the harlot turned against God and family. There was a time when I believed the choice easy.

  I lied more. Over the next several weeks, I spent long hours with Maria, standing in the rooms’ shadows while she and her mother screamed, “You bitch! You whore!” It seemed like a television show—watching them pull each other’s hair and throw shoes against the wall while the babies wailed in their filthy nightclothes. Horrified and fascinated, I could not tear myself away. I came home electrified, vibrating with a tension I could not speak of and would never betray. And I was a good actor. I knew if my parents became aware of Maria’s true life, I would be forbidden to see her. I washed my hands and sprayed my hair with Final Net to rid myself of the smell of smoke, chewed extra sticks of Dentyne, sucked on Sen-Sens, their licorice bite almost painful on my tongue.

  One fall afternoon, with my father’s permission, Maria and I retraced our steps back to the school and found a place on the warped bleachers just as the sun settled cold and firm behind the Blue Mountains. I had never been to a football game before, and the cheers that rose as our team ran onto the field touched off a sense of unreality I could not shake for the remainder of the night. The band blared its wretched rendition of the fight song, competing with the announcer’s voice crackling from the loudspeaker. But mostly it was the lights that made me feel as though I were floating in a brilliant bubble, suspended in the outlying darkness. The players in their red-and-white uniforms, the cheerleaders bouncing about in front of us, all legs and pompoms—I thought I would fall over from the sheer sensory shock of it.

  We left early, not because I could no longer endure the stimulation, but because I had a curfew: seven o’clock and not a minute later. Maria graciously walked me the few blocks home, leaving me at the door because even though unspoken, she knew I feared her performance in front of my parents.

  The walk home had done little to alleviate my disoriented state. I sat on the couch, trying to explain to my concerned mother the effect of the lights and noise, how everything had swirled together and made me feel light-headed, giddy and nauseated. My mother felt my forehead, then pulled my lids up and studied my pupils.

  “You go to bed. We’ll talk more about this in the morning when your father gets home.”

  I felt my way down the stairwell, then fell into bed. I found the dial in the dark and tuned in KRLC. The game was still on, and I closed my eyes and imagined myself there, part of a world I might step into like Alice through her glass. I wasn’t sure I was ready. I wasn’t sure I could hold my own in such a place.

  Finally, the decision would not be mine. My behavior after the game had set alarm bells ringing in the minds of my parents: disoriented, pale, breathless, describing what could easily be hallucinatory events. It must be drugs.

  They sat across from me, asking their strange questions that held some hidden meaning, I thought. Their combined and studied attention made me sweat.

  “Did you take anything?” my mother asked.

  I knew by the way she emphasized anything—drew it out, loaded it with a small nod of her head—that she meant LSD or speed or marijuana or some other horrible substance our minister was always warning us about. The idea seemed ridiculous to me: where would I get it? Why would I take it? What made them think I would do such a thing?

  I might have laughed had it not been for the seriousness of their focus on my face. They were looking for truth in my eyes. I tried to appear humble, a compatriot, not a rebel.

  My father crossed his legs and stubbed out his cigarette. He was still in his oil-spattered pants and plaid western shirt with pearl snaps, having made this time between work and sleep to address my last night’s state. My mother had spread a towel on the couch for him to sit on. I waited for whatever thought or question that was forming in his head to manifest itself into speech.

  “When we were teenagers, your mother and I, sometimes we dropped aspirin into our Pepsi.” He paused here, gauging my response. I was intrigued by his confession, but I had no idea of its significance. Aspirin and soda pop? Did it explode? Was it like Alka-Seltzer, then? Was it dangerous?

  “Why?” I asked.

  My father glanced at my mother, who sat with her head bowed. I sensed she was ashamed of this story, just as she was about much of the life that had been hers before my father.

  “It made us high.”

  I considered this tidbit of information from such an unlikely source. Pepsi and aspirin. I tucked the formula away. Maria would be amazed.

  “Did you and Maria do that?”

  I shook my head. “We drank pop, but we didn’t put aspirin in it.”

  My father uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “Did anyone offer you anything? Offer to buy you candy?”

  I’d been cautioned to death about this. No, no one.

  “Where did you get the pop?”

  “At the snack stand.”

  “Did the cups have lids?”

  “No.” What were they after now? I wondered.

  “When did you start feeling funny?”

  I thought back to the game, the lights and noise. “As soon as we got there.”

  “Is that when you got the Pepsi?” He leaned back, flicked his lighter.

  They were trying to trick me. “Yes, but we didn’t put anything in it, honest, Dad, we didn’t … we didn’t even know …”

  My father held up his hand, his cigarette nestled deep between his fingers. “I’m not saying you did.” He looked at my mother and forced a jet of smoke from between his teeth. “I think someone dropped something in her pop.”

  I didn’t really think I’d been drugged by some pervert hoping to render me helpless or a pusher baiting his next junkie—I still believed my altered state came from being in such an altered environment—but it got me off the hook. We could all rest easier knowing the blame lay outside our circle.

  There was a penalty nonetheless. From that time on, football games were off limits, as were any other events that might draw a secular crowd. Who knew what evil lurked in the bathrooms and beneath the bleachers? They would keep me safe; they would protect me from the world.

  And so Maria and I felt we had reason to escape both our families: she, the chaos and filth of a home defined by poverty and abuse; I, the suffocating restrictions brought on by the actions of a world I could not control. We spent more and more time outside no matter the weather, mostly in the alleys that cut through our neighborhood.

  Sam and Maria introduced me to others—people my age, thirteen, fourteen—whose parents cared little for their presence or absence. My parents cared, but the attention and acceptance I found with orphans seemed familiar and comforting: they appeared not to notice my foolish clothing; they thought the drill team girls were stupid. I concocted tales of afterschool prayer meetings to be with them, able to evade my father sleeping his daytime sleep and my mother, who against my fathers wishes had taken a job as a checker at a local market to help with the bills.

  School became escape, a place to be with my new friends. But more important than the knowledge I learned from books was the knowledge that came to me in the girls’ bathroom between classes: how to apply eye shadow and mascara; how to exhale smoke through my nose; which boys carried rubbers in their wallets. By the time the bell rang for second period, I’d rolled my skirt to mid-thigh and thrust my bra to the bottom of my book bag.

  Even behind my heavy glasses, the makeup provided by my friends made my eyes seem bigger, bluer. I no longer slunk from class to class but met each face in the hall with studied indifference. Tuck
ed in the waistband of my skirt, the pack of Marlboros crinkled and scratched: I loved its feel there—a secret possession, a red-and-white undercover badge, my ticket into the alley, where the bad kids gathered each noon hour to slouch and curse with abandon.

  Soon, even school became unbearable. Once inside, I dodged the teachers and ran for the alley, where my friends already waited. Some days we spent in collapsing garages or hunched in the corner of a darkened bowling alley, doing nothing more than smoking and laughing at the fools left behind. Other days we made our way downtown and across the railroad tracks to the Clearwater River. There, among the lush growth of snake grass, cottonwood and locust, we found sanctuary with bums. Their cardboard lean-tos held treasure: Sterno, cigarettes, sodden magazines whose pages unfolded into bare breasts and spread legs. Most of the hobos tolerated our visits, even welcomed our company. Others chased us with sticks and rocks, and it was their camps we returned to later, kicking the makeshift shacks to the ground, burning everything.

  We called the shallow ponds and marshy backwater the slough, and even the name seemed wrought with adventure, a place that Huck and Tom might have frequented. Beyond the small islands ran the river’s swiftest current. In winter, when ice made for us a bridge from one bank to the other, we crossed and felt the rush of water vibrating beneath our feet. In warmer weather, we hauled from the back of Mac’s Cycle Shop huge Styrofoam packing crates and made rafts of them, which we floated from one back eddy to another. Larry was there then, and Brad and Sam, Shannon and LaDean, and Laredo. Once, when I slipped from the crate and came out soaked, Laredo built a roaring fire of driftwood while Larry peeled his white T-shirt from his skinny chest. “Here,” he said, and grinned as I turned my back to remove my own wet blouse.

  I still have that boy’s shirt folded in some box marked MEMORABILIA. I had never been offered such a gift, and wearing it home that afternoon, feeling its cotton weave stretch across my breasts, knowing his own skin had rubbed just where mine did, gave me a sense of intimacy I had not felt since Luke. I still had it on when Maria called that evening to tell me Larry was dead.

  He had taken the crate out alone, too far. Laredo watched from the bank as the current caught, then tipped the Styrofoam raft. Laredo always wore heavy, square-toed boots, and had he thought to kick them off before going in, he might have made it to Larry. He was a strong swimmer and fought the swift water until he was exhausted. The others pulled him from the river and watched the white rectangle disappear in the distance, believing they still might see a dark shape pull itself up and on.

  I locked myself in my room and cried as I never cried for Uncle Ed or Grandpa or Matthew. I wrapped my arms around my chest and hugged the shirt I wore and rocked, believing in my young girl’s way that all that was left of Larry remained with me, in the air between a layer of thin cotton and my own still-warm body. When my mother offered comfort, “Let’s pray he is with the Lord,” I jerked in disgust. Somehow this had to do with them, my parents and all the other adults who believed they owned their children’s lives. Better to live with our own dramas and deaths than allow the intrusion of elders, who spewed their nursery-rhyme dictates for good girls and boys. I added grief to my resentment, shaping each emotion to the bitterness I tended like a growing ball of wax—each candle drip first hot, then cooling into a hard, unmalleable core.

  I began sneaking from beneath the nose of my Sunday school teachers to join others like me—church kids who bucked and chafed at the bit of obedience. We met at the corner Chevron station and bunched together in the women’s room, sharing our Marlboros and cursing the air blue. I no longer cared that my parents might smell the evidence on my breath or in my hair. Let them. I had found my company.

  Weekday afternoons, my friends and I met at the house of one whose parents were working and whose older brother, Scott, scored ominous amounts of bennies and beauties, cross-tops and windowpane. I was often the one who volunteered to “baby-sit,” to remain straight and responsible.

  I went there one day to be with Danny, a lovely boy with dark blue eyes and black hair. I wore the scar of his initials on the back of my hand, made by rubbing away the skin with the tip of an eraser, down to oozing flesh. I don’t know what he ingested that afternoon, what combination of chemicals reworked the circuits of his brain or what had gone into the making of the street drugs he took, but I watched in horror as he contorted on Scott’s bed.

  I thought I loved him then, holding him down while he screamed and writhed. He was burning, he said. Every movement of his body through air, no matter how slow or small, created friction, speed-of-light combustion, and even his breathing brought on the flames that consumed him. I cradled him in my arms, rocking slightly, but this too was agony.

  “Danny, listen. You’re okay, you’re in Scott’s basement, in Lewiston. It’s 1972. You’re okay.”

  He moaned and opened his eyes wide. I could see the fear there, the vision he could not escape. “Slap him,” someone said. “Slap him hard.” I raised my hand but could not do it and thought for a moment to pray. “God, he’s dying!” I cried. “Help him, help him!” Someone pulled me into the next room, gave me a cigarette already lit.

  “We’ve got to call the ambulance,” I pleaded. “He’ll die!”

  “We call the hospital, we’ll all get nailed. He’ll be okay. Scott knows what to do. Stay cool.”

  I looked around me in the dim light of the basement, at the friends who stood hunched and pale, holding on to whatever remnant remained of their own reality. Just then Danny let out a long and piercing howl. We stood for a moment, looked into one another’s stricken faces, then I bolted for the stairs. I ran from that house into the street, not caring who followed me, running for home.

  In dreams that night I heard his scream again and again, felt it vibrate in my chest, echo off the walls of my room. I thought of possession and exorcism, remembered how violently his body had twisted, the fear in his eyes. The next day at school they told me Scott had tied Danny to the bed, put ice behind his neck and a gag in his mouth. Could a priest have done more?

  In the outside world I had a compatriot: my cousin Les, the one who had shared the open sky and dark outhouses of camp life, who fought daily the same battle I did—against a father who seemed bent on breaking her will to his.

  Large green eyes, brown hair falling straight and thick past her waist, highlighted with shades of platinum—the color it had been the first time I met her, when we were two and three. Small-boned like her mother, with the same honeyed skin and high cheekbones, she possessed the kind of exotic appearance that made the town girls look bleached and caused the farm boys to imagine spice on their tongues.

  I envied the ease with which she applied her makeup, perched on the bathroom sink, coating each of her long lashes with triple layers of Max Factor. I envied her perfect white teeth, her collection of miniskirts that hung to just below where her long hair brushed her bottom. Mostly, I envied her way with boys. The phone rang from the time she got home from school until the suitors either lost their nerve or were forced to give up the receiver. My uncle Barry, now a construction contractor who worked long, out-of-town hours, intercepted what calls he could. The threat in his self-made voice would have deterred most grown men, but that was what was so amazing about Les: boys would risk anything, it seemed, to gain her attention. I realized early on that part of Les’s appeal lay in her careless regard for the boys’ admiration. By shamelessly baiting then discarding her wooers like trash fish, she ensured their undying adulation.

  Even the crosstown boys found their way to Les’s basement window. I spent many summer nights with my cousin in her house, surrounded by pasture at the edge of town, and we were often awakened by the scattershot ping of gravel, or, if the window were open, her name hissed out in a loud whisper—“Les, Les!” She’d sometimes grant the boy the favor of her attention, but just as often she told him to get-the-hell-gone. He’d slink off, grumbling and aching but not long discouraged. He’d be back in
a week or two, bringing along a friend for me: maybe if he could get the cousin occupied, Les would be more inclined to his affection.

  There were times when Les, in a fit of ennui, would call the boy herself. Would he like to stop by her window, oh, say, around midnight? I marveled at the ease and polish of her banter, listening on the sidelines as she worked her thirteen-year-old magic, the crackle and spit of hormones nearly tangible over the telephone wire.

  One such night, her chosen beau, Geoff, scratched at our window, shadowed by Mike, a tall, precociously hairy boy meant for me. We smoked in the garish glow of Les’s blue-bulbed lamp, then split into pairs. Geoff pulled Les into the next room by her belt loops and she smiled at him, a smile that held all the promise in the world.

  As Mike’s fingers began their forays into the folds and beneath the buttons of my clothes, I listened half-jealously to the moans and pleading coming from the next room. I had witnessed the ritual of Les’s courtship enough to understand its rhythms: stroke him, give him a little, intimate more, then pull away, make him pout, pout yourself, let him woo you back, act petulant, kiss him hard, suck his tongue into your mouth deep enough to empty the marrow from his bones—then stop. Sit up. Light a cigarette. You are, your actions must say, bored beyond belief.

  Geoff was frantic, begging so unabashedly that my own face reddened just hearing it. If not for fear that it might wake my aunt, I’d have turned up the stereo, let Black Sabbath drown it all out—the mewling boy, Mike’s raspy breathing, the sense I had of being the ugly sister who could not work this miracle of seduction.

  My initial hesitation had goaded Mike into a stronger state of insistence, the intensity of which frightened me. When I pulled away, he was angry, and then my weakness showed through: I could not stand to think he might be mad at me, might be driven by my pathetic inexperience and prudishness to reject me completely. I fumbled apologies, offered shallow kisses.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Mike rose from the couch, tucking in his Mr. Natural T-shirt. He smoothed his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He was handsome enough, cool in our crowd and generous with his dope. Why didn’t I feel for him, this boy who would eagerly waste himself in my arms, what I had felt for Luke, whose elbow brushing mine had been enough to fuel a week’s dreams?