Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  The house’s narrow kitchen provided the greatest sense of intimacy. Outside its single window, I could see nothing but the stark flatness of the neighbors’ house, only a few feet away, but above the sink my mother had pinned the trailing philodendron she tended from house to house, its variegated leaves shined each week with a wash of canned milk and water, its occasional cuttings rooted in jars on the sill.

  Through the kitchen was the breakfast nook, the most privileged and exotic of the rooms, just large enough for a small and elegant table, had we one, but empty except for the telephone, which nested in its own miniature grotto. Around the room’s far wall ran a window seat, on which I could lie and study the grapevines growing rampant across the greenhouse roof.

  We spent only one year in that house, but I remember it as a time of sweetness and light, the kitchen steamy with boiling water and great pots of stewing grapes. I remember my mother, her fine hair caught up with a scarf, stray curls at her neck and temples. I helped her scald the little Ball jars, rings, and lids, dissolve the pectin, melt the paraffin. Pounds of sugar, a plastic lemon full of concentrate from which I sucked the last jaw-locking drops, a cone-shaped sieve and a wooden pestle worn smooth by generations of hands. I loved the efficiency and assemblage, and I loved the closeness of my mother, who was just turning thirty. There was not yet so much distance between us that we could not share such space and movement. In the years to come I would look back and remember the jars filled with syrupy fruit, the wax floated on top, the lids pinging as they sealed, the deep purple juice that stained our mouths black; I would remember the feeling of safety and sureness and provision and wonder when that closeness had been lost.

  OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I watched as my father rose in the evening, took his meal, collected his calfskin gloves and lunch pail and walked into the darkness. Mornings, just as Greg and I woke for school, my father would come back through the door, bringing with him the remembered smells of diesel and cedar but none of the joy he once brought home from the wilderness.

  It was all different. The water we drank was chlorinated, our meat wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic. Our church, the Assembly of God, was progressive, allowing women to wear makeup and pants. My mother took a job checking groceries at McPherson’s; my brother began playing ball. Sometimes, when I came home from school, I was alone, except for my father dreaming in his shaded room. On still afternoons I would lie on the couch and sleep, startled when I woke to find my father in his chair, eating Saltines and cheese, reading his Bible, watching me.

  We were in the world, and the world would destroy us. It was out there, waiting, biding its time. There were hippies and drug dealers, sex maniacs and pimps, Communists and big-city gangs. Even in Idaho, kids were being lured away by marijuana and LSD, flower power and peace marches. My father became more vigilant. What I could do was participate in church activities, go to school, and be with my family. What I couldn’t do was join drill team or play girls’ basketball, which required the wearing of indecent clothes. After I came back from a football game one evening, disoriented by the sensory overload of floodlights and the pep band’s deafening blare, my parents were frightened. Better that I remain at home, under supervision. The risks were simply too great.

  Each schoolday, I walked the few blocks to Jenifer Junior High, where the girls wore fishnet stockings and blue eyeshadow, where the high school boys hung out in their GTO’s and Barracudas, smoking Marlboros and listening to Casey Kasem play the Top 40. For the first time in my life, I saw myself as others must: a plain-faced girl in home-sewn clothes, doing what was expected of her. I went to church, I went to school. I brought home A’s and teachers’ commendations. I risked nothing, while all around me the world was on fire: Woodstock, Vietnam, Kent State, Haight-Ashbury. Race riots and Agent Orange. The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who. Men were burning their draft cards, women were burning their bras. Sin, sin everywhere, just as the Bible had warned, and yet, like Lot’s wife, I could not quit looking, hungry for one last glimpse before the judgment of the Lord descended.

  A freak, I thought. There were so few others like me. Even the girls with whom I attended church were allowed to wear nylons while I trudged along in my knee socks, the hem of my dress brushing my calves. No one in my class understood why I could not go to the after-school dances held in the cafeteria, or why the Liberty Theater was taboo. Where once I had proudly borne witness to my faith, knocking on doors, spreading the Gospel, I was now too embarrassed to explain why I couldn’t join drill team, why I turned down invitations for birthday parties at the skating rink. Soon, even the nicest and most compassionate girls quit asking me to join them.

  But there was another group, teenagers who themselves had been marginalized, rejected. Many of them were kids from the Northwest Idaho Children’s Home, an orphanage and detention center for those with nowhere else to go. They were the ones who spent their lunch period in the empty lot across the street from school, cupping their Marlboros, slouching in their ragged jackets and faded jeans. They were the ones who took me in, placed the cigarette in my fingers, ridiculed those who had taunted me.

  My father sensed my growing frustration, caught the rise of rebellion in my voice. The only response he knew was to take in rein, bear down harder, lock all the doors and bar escape. I began skipping school to meet my friends at the river, where we cajoled the railroad hoboes into sharing their wine, where we pushed ourselves into the swift water on packing-crate rafts and wished for the current to take us.

  I no longer believed in who I was, or why. Nothing made sense except my need to reach out and taste the forbidden. I knew what punishment my acts would bring, but I no longer cared. Better to risk body and soul than to be imprisoned by the tyrannical laws my father and the church imposed. I was hungry for a world I had never known, a world held at bay by the mountains and the trees, by my parents, who meant only to save me. I spent my fourteenth year in basements and back alleys, in the blue glow of black lights, listening to Led Zeppelin, learning how to French-kiss, smoking dope, dropping mescaline, waiting for a vision that might change it all.

  IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1972, instead of walking home after school, I met a girlfriend with whom I had made my plans to escape. We would run away, that magical phrase that promised to sever all ties to my old life, connect me to the new. We’d catch a ride with an older guy I’d never met who specialized in such underground relocations, ferrying discontent teenagers across the state line for little more, we’d heard, than the price of a doobie.

  I never made it to the new land, to California—that oasis of freedom to which my friends and I were headed. My parents found me before I’d even left Lewiston, hiding in the closet of my friend’s mother—a humiliation I could hardly bear. But they could do no more. My heart was hardened, my conscience seared. Their only hope, they believed, was to send me away to live with the Langs, our former preacher and his family, who, like us, had traveled from the woods and now lived in Spokane.

  I left Lewiston that summer knowing that all through the hot days of July and the late heat of August, my friends would smoke pot and listen to Black Sabbath and swallow the tiny tabs of Windowpane and Orange Sunshine; they would sprawl across the goal line of the empty football field to watch the moon rise, see it burst like a yellow balloon. They would close their eyes and taste butter on their tongues. They would eat my share of the sky—while I was stripped of my beads and makeup and given a bed in the Langs’ upstairs hallway. While I was under supervision day and night, allowed to go nowhere alone lest I flee. While I hoarded the last of my cigarettes and swore my hatred of God and man. I watched Luke, the preacher’s son, now sixteen, walk by me as though I were invisible, a chair in the corner, a ghost in his house. I remembered his hands between my knees, the dark stairwell we hid in, my adolescent shame and pleasure, there in the parsonage, there in the woods.

  I tried to stay awake at night, to tend the hard knob of bitterness in my chest, because I hated to wake in the
morning and feel, in that moment just before awareness, that girl I once had been take up residence in my body. She was the one who awakened with her eyes and mouth open, as though whatever might greet her came pleasant and sweet. I’d close my eyes, open them again, and she’d be gone, back to the closet I had made for her, back to where her softness could not be touched.

  ———

  THE LANGS reminded me of what I had once loved, of how simple things were when there was only one way. Over the course of that summer, I felt the fabric of who I was begin to tear. There came a time when I could no longer remember why it was I resisted, what I hoped to save myself from. I was isolated from my friends and family, but there was something else that wore at my resistance. It promised peace. It offered forgiveness. It whispered that I would never be free if I didn’t let go, give in.

  I remember how I lay on the floor of my narrow room and cried, then prayed. I felt the weight that was all my sins and worries and cares press me down, then fall away. It happens just this way: one moment, the horrid drunkenness of a life not right, of a soul bloated by neglect and transgression; the next, a feeling of lightness and sharp cleansing. Simply by letting go of my will, my stubborn refusal to submit, I’d been unbound, reborn into the Kingdom of God.

  When I came to the breakfast table that morning, those people who had only tolerated my presence welcomed me with open arms. We joined hands above the scrambled eggs and bacon and gave thanks for my salvation. Beneath the linen cloth, I felt the shuffle of feet against mine, the brush of an ankle, and opened my eyes to the eyes of Luke. He smiled, and I was infused with pleasure. Along with everlasting life, I had earned this reward: the approval of the man I now loved.

  That pleasure instilled in me a desire to do only good. I was redeemed, and for the price of my soul’s purchase I offered up daily prayers, busy hands, a chaste body and clean mind. I imagined how grateful my parents would be when they saw their daughter come back from the grave. I would prove to them how loving, how honest I could be. I would mend the wounds I had caused.

  I lengthened my skirts, scrubbed my face pink. I remembered to lower my eyes in modesty, to fold my hands neatly in the pleat of my lap. Was this what Luke had been waiting for? He might not have touched me otherwise, had I remained something unclean, unholy, unworthy of his desire. When he came to me deep in the night, I resisted because I knew it was what might prove my chastity, make him want to keep me. I felt his jaw tighten, the tendons of his arms hard against my breasts. When he went no further but pushed me away, then began to laugh, I breathed out a prayer of thanks. Now, I must continue to withstand, repel his advances because that is what he really wanted of me—it was the test, the fire. It was the unmarried woman’s duty, she who was charged with countering, tempering, molding the man’s instinctual passion. In my bed, even as I grieved for the loss of his touch, I swore I would remain pure, a gift for the husband I believed he would be.

  I believed that if I lived by the Book, the world would fall into place, and I could regain that peace I had lost. I was wrong. What happened at the end of that summer would define the story I told myself of faith, love, and betrayal for years to come; it would rend my sense of who I was into pieces I still struggle to fit together.

  Something began to shift in that house, something I sensed but could not speak, even to myself. I saw it in the way the Langs addressed me, or didn’t, in the way they let their eyes slide away from my face. Perhaps the threat of who I was remained; even though I had shed the skin of my former self, I still carried with me the stink of the purgatory I had once inhabited.

  I became more diligent in my chores, more dedicated in my prayers and fasting, until one day Sister Lang confronted me. I was evil, she said, a harlot whom the demons had followed: she and Brother Lang had heard them, shuffling in the closets, wallowing beneath the beds. She said she knew what I had done: seduced not her son but her son-in-law in the very church that had saved me, in the sacristy, the most holy of chambers.

  I could not convince her that none of this was true. There was no way for me to make sense of her lies, nor of the way they then shunned me. In their faces turned away, I saw what I was, what I must always be.

  I was kept in those rooms until the end of the summer when my parents came for me. Instead of a slouching teenager who spat her anger, what they found was that good girl I had once been, dressed in modest clothing, nodding politely, quick to attend to her father’s wishes. How could it not be the miracle for which they had so diligently prayed? They knew nothing of my life there except that I had been transformed back into the daughter they remembered, before things went bad, before the Devil whispered my name.

  When, on the drive from Spokane to Lewiston, I attempted in some way to articulate what had taken place, my mother responded with silence, my father with a single, oblique comment: “I was afraid that something like this might happen.”

  Although I might have interpreted my father’s statement as a kind of acknowledgment of the Langs’ culpability, what I believed was that the Langs’ rejection was my punishment, that I had earned it with my willfulness and rebellion. Back in our church at Lewiston, I sat straight in my pew beside my family and sang, “I want Thee forever to ransom my soul.” I sang, “I shall be whiter than snow.” When the sermon ended, I knelt at the altar for hours until my body weakened and I lay on the floor with others, whispering my plea, praying for more.

  MY PARENTS AND I never talked about what happened that summer. The distance between us was loud with what we could not say—words of anger, words of love. My relationship with my father seemed to exist only through proxy. If I needed permission to date or stay late after church, it was my mother I queried, who then asked my father and relayed his yes or no.

  Time not spent at school or church I filled with books, their pages softening the silence. I read about the cowboy Shane and Loki, the Norse god of mischief. I read The Martian Chronicles and 1984. I suffered through the cruelties visited upon Oliver Twist by the industrial machine. One literature teacher rewarded my interest by giving me the task of screening books for the class library, and so, before my parents could find out, I’d read my way through A Clockwork Orange, Go Ask Alice, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.

  I borrowed from the county library in methodical fashion: I started at the beginning of the fiction shelves and checked out three books at a time, working my way through science fiction (the spines with their yellow rocket ships and nuclear atoms), through fantasy and mystery, classics and contemporary. I discovered the stories of the Holocaust; I read about Sybil and her umpteen personalities.

  I paid no attention to the names of authors—the stories were what mattered. I read Judith Krantz and Richard Bach with the same rapt attention I gave Roth and Bellow. I liked Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and so the librarian gave me Castaneda. Mysticism fascinated me: Nostradamus and Black Elk, Philippine faith healers, African fire walkers, Uri Geller, who could twist a fork with nothing more than the power of his mind. But this was witchcraft, and so I hid the books in the folds of my sweaters, secreted them away between Little Women and The Cross and the Switchblade.

  What I wanted was someone to share this with, someone who could talk with me about things both common and extraordinary. I’d made few friends since my conversion: others in our youth group still eyed me with suspicion, and I was not sure where I fit into their circle. Although I had confessed my sins and been forgiven, my transgressions stayed with me like an ember bedded in ash: who knew what might fan that fire, cause it to spread and inflame those who stood too close? My intimacy with the world set me apart from those whose pages in the Book of Life remained unsullied.

  As much as I longed to regain that place of purity, I had little tolerance for the simple platitudes and condemnations the church handed down. Throughout the calls for Catholics to forsake their idolatry and know the true God, for women to turn deaf ears to promoters of the ERA who wanted only to enslav
e them, for the fornicators and adulterers and the nearly unmentionable Sodomites to forego their evil ways before the Day of Judgment fell upon them, I felt my resistance rise, and perhaps it was this that I believed set me apart—my innate unwillingness to simply believe, agree, accept. I kept silent, for to question might imply that my allegiance lay with the Enemy.

  Instead of lashing out, I drove my rebellion underground, so deep that even I forgot it was there. Its eruptions were minor compared with the wholesale rejection I’d practiced before, and I believed I might survive this way, presenting my shining surface for inspection while beneath ran the currents of my desire for knowledge, for freedom to explore and experience and entertain the endless possibilities contained in my body and mind.

  Each night I prayed for the humility to accept my station, to lay down my armor and weapons and quit fighting, let go that inherent and overwhelming drive I felt to set my own course, fly into the face of my predetermined fate. I knew that to continue in my obstinacy would once again lead me down the path to destruction. I must be docile, pliant, willing to bend. I must be a dutiful daughter, make of myself a worthy wife. Above all, I must, for the length of my woman’s life, give myself over to the direction of another.