Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  We were alone in his basement when he unwrapped the Bible, laid it aside, then pushed me down amid the colorful paper and ribbons. I laughed at first but then saw that he was not teasing. He pinned my arms above my head, held me with his weight. I remember how, at some point, I quit struggling, how I could not bear my own rising sense of helplessness or his growing brutality, how I turned my head so that I would not have to see who he had become, how it was easier to simply stop knowing and feeling and let that frantic part of me drift away.

  Perhaps it was pity he felt for me then, or fear for his own soul, the slackness of my body beneath his that made him stop. I rolled to my knees, smoothed my clothes, focused my eyes on the wall behind him. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Even as I spoke, I let what had just happened float like bits of ash into the air around us. We would not have to remember, would we? No one would have to know, no one would have to see the bracelet of bruises circling each wrist.

  I drove my car down the backstreets, holding to the edge of the city. The reds and oranges of fall were crisp against the pale blue sky, the stones in the cemetery angled and sharp as blades. Everything was so defined, distinct in its place, yet I felt as though I had no borders, as though my skin had begun to dissolve, as though I were the watercolor painting drawn by a child, bleeding across the lines.

  I was grateful for the emptiness of my house, the bathwater so hot I gritted my teeth to bear it. I did not think about what would happen next but gave myself to the weightlessness of water, to the nebulous cloud of steam and sleep, waking only to add more heat, to open the drain and let the cold flow away.

  When Thane called several days later, he was crying. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please.”

  Charity, forgiveness, compassion—I thought of all these things, Christ’s words of direction. I thought of the leather-bound book he held in his hands, even then, as we talked and made our plans to meet again, and I thought that this must have been what I had wanted all along, and that I could not blame him for anything.

  SOMETHING BROKE in me then—I cannot say what or why exactly, except that the restrictions I had placed on myself seemed suddenly pointless and impossible. When I met Thane at his house, I didn’t feel anger or disgust or betrayal; I felt nothing I can remember except a kind of disconnectedness, as though my world were being orchestrated in a way I could not control. I could lock myself in my house, sit pale and unsullied behind my father’s protective door, or I could go into the world, but I had begun to see the truth in my father’s teachings: to step through that passageway was to walk into the den of the lion.

  I knew that I could never sacrifice myself to the life of a nun. There was too much I wanted to know, do, see. This, then, was the path I chose, knowing what dues would be demanded of me. There seemed no other way.

  When Thane hid his face in shame, I stroked the bareness below his earlobe. I kissed the crown of his head, the thin ridge of his shoulder. How could I be angry, turn him away—he with his passion and humility, his grief-stricken face? Here, I said, and wrapped my arms around him, comforting, accepting that it was I who had brought him to this, after all, and that now I must be steadfast and strong so that he might rise and go on. My own penance was to do what he asked of me. Instead of him becoming the romantic teenage boyfriend I longed for, I became the secret lover he had fantasized. Instead of flying kites and going to matinees, we met for the moments he might take his pleasure before he left to share the evening with his truer love, and I returned to the house of my father, who slept the daylight hours and drove until dawn. Sometimes, during the course of our entrances and exits, my father and I met in the doorway, nodding our hellos or good-byes, something gone wrong between us, and no words to help understand why.

  I ATTENDED CHURCH five times a week, kept up my grades, and worked after school at a local pharmacy. I had friends and all the activities a Christian-bookstore calendar could hold. My daily life must have appeared ordinary enough to my family, although, except for those drives to and from the Assembly of God and the occasional Sunday dinner, there seemed little connection between us.

  My father had all but disappeared, sinking deeper into his thoughts, his head weaving over the pages of his Bible, his blue eyes hazy with hours of reading. I may have thought him at peace, although I know better now, having come to understand how much our trek out of the wilderness had cost him. All those hours of study and prayer toward one end: keeping his own will at bay, teaching himself the second-by-second discipline of self-abnegation, emptying his mind and his body of any earthly desire or need, his only joy the pure pleasure of total immersion, spiritual prostration at the feet of God. His only movement through our house was that of necessity—toward work or bathroom or bed—as though he believed that even the friction of his body through air might distract him from his quest for perfect consumption.

  The silence of the rooms, the impassive eating of meals, the inert solitude, the moth-colored light—I left the house each morning, gulping air, stunned by the school-bus yellow, the lurid sky, the pale pink rise of sun. Even as my father’s vision turned more and more inward, I was casting my eyes to the valley’s perimeters, gauging the pull of the river, the direction a wind-loosed leaf might sail.

  MAY 29, 1976: I sat in my lavender cap and gown, searching the stands for my family, some familiar face in the crowd of parents and relatives gathered to celebrate the commencement of Lewiston’s senior class.

  Perhaps they were there and I simply didn’t see them. Or have I forgotten, having just separated myself from them so fully, having walked from my father’s presence only hours before, vowing never to return?

  I had wanted only to attend the supervised senior party given by the family of a classmate at their cabin 150 miles north on Coeur d’Alene Lake. My father would not give his permission, and I couldn’t make sense of his denial.

  “I’m eighteen,” I’d said, shivering with the courage it took to question. “What if I go anyway?”

  He looked at me from the brown recliner, looked at me with his cool-blue eyes, looked at me until I began to understand and not care. “Then you would have to take your things,” he said, “and never come back.”

  I heard my mother crying in the next room. She could not defend me against her husband’s wishes, could not question his authority. I did not yet know how much she feared him, how much she feared for me. When I stepped out of that house and into the blue-green ocean of May with my bag of clothes and trinkets, I breathed in the air, sweet with locust and lilac. The day walloped me with its warmth and promise of a long summer ahead. I would forget about college for a while, find an apartment, a new job. I would buy a bikini and spend Saturdays at the beach with my girlfriends, burnished brown by the sun.

  I left my family’s house with little regret, left my mother to her ineffectual sadness, my brother to his good boy’s life. I left the church, its ridiculous rules, its warnings of evil spirits and perpetual damnation. I left my father to his silence. I no longer wanted his guidance, his iron sense of direction. It was a breach he could not bear—one, he said, he had expected all along.

  The next day I traveled with my friends to Coeur d’Alene, giddy with new freedom. I wouldn’t know until later, when my mother whispered it over the phone, that my father had come after me, driven the long road in the dark. The lake stretches for miles, and still my father believed he could find me, somewhere in the hundreds of cabins and homes hidden among the pines. I wonder now if he came with words to mend the rift between us, or if it was anger that drove him, made him think to push me into his car like a runaway, take me home and keep me as he had done once before.

  Had I known he was coming, I might have been afraid, sitting around the campfire, laughing with friends. But I didn’t know, and he did not find me, although he searched for hours. It was the first time I sensed some failure in my father’s ability to intuit my every move and motive. He was, after all, only human. In his weakness, I found my strength.

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nbsp; For a time, I would believe that there was nothing I missed about that home I had left. What memories I harbored were of the earlier years spent living in the woods, when harmony had existed between us, not of the years after—years when the rift between my father and me had widened into an un-crossable chasm.

  Sometimes I would drive by my family’s house and see Greg putting up shots against the garage in the last light. He was a freshman, center on the basketball team, already six feet and still growing. He had reddish-blond hair, my mother’s fair, Germanic complexion and light blue eyes. Like her, he chose to remain silent—he brought no dishonor to the household—yet I could not bring myself to envy him. I would slow my car a little, tap the horn, and wave as though I were just passing through, a passenger aboard a train, bound for distant places.

  MY FIRST APARTMENT SAT ON LEWISton’s Normal Hill, where the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen had first built their mansions before discovering the grander views and higher isolation of the Snake River bluffs to the west. The three-story house I lived in sprawled across two lots and must have been a grand home once, before the owners chopped its great rooms into studios for rent. Painted a dunny avocado, it sagged with the weight of old awnings and listing stairs.

  Below the brow of the hill was downtown: the Lewis-Clark Hotel; the Bon Marche, where my mother had hurried me into Foundations and a training bra (the powdery saleswoman measuring and pinching until I thought I might faint from embarrassment); the Liberty Theater with its stage, orchestra pit, and balcony; the Roxy, where I’d snuck to see Love Story and felt the adolescent pangs of my own impending doom. Main Street, anchored to the west by the bridge connecting Lewiston to Clarkston, Washington, ended in East Lewiston, where the poorest and least permanent lived, where the logging train rumbled through at midnight, where the mill’s whistle meant shift change: days to swing, swing to graveyard, graveyard back to days. Across the Clearwater was North Lewiston, where I seldom went, where the motels charged by the hour, where the drunks stumbled out after midnight and slept in the alleys until the doors opened again.

  I painted the water-stained walls of my rooms K mart white, hung a fern in the corner. Across from my bed I nailed the walnut rifle rack my great-uncle had made for me as a graduation gift, and in it I placed the Winchester 30.06 that had once belonged to my father. I had rescued it from my grandmother’s closet, rubbed it free of rust, oiled its mechanism into fluid movement.

  In the apartment above me I could hear the footsteps of Lonnie, a grayish man in his fifties who suffered from narcolepsy; he fell asleep over breakfast, during a shower, while rewiring the television sets he took in for repair. All night he walked, fell to the floor, woke up, and walked again. His face was bruised, his hands cut from catching on metal edges.

  Across the hall from Lonnie lived Steve, a young man with Frankie Avalon hair who cut the lawn for partial rent, a job Lonnie had held until our landlady, Mrs. Stout, found him collapsed behind the mower, its blade still whirring only inches from his peacefully slumbering face.

  Sometimes I found Steve outside my window or sitting on the step of my porch. When I asked what he needed, he shuffled and stammered, blushed and walked down the concrete stairs to the basement, where he folded his laundry and sometimes smoked pot. Later I would come with my Tide and bamboo basket and smell the sweet ghost of his presence.

  Everyone in the building seemed to function outside normal time considerations, each passing through the halls and yard with little allegiance to sun or moon: Lonnie’s nocturnal ramblings; Mrs. Stout’s midnight forays to the garage, where she stashed her Jim Beam between paint cans; Steve’s 2:00 A.M. serenade—“If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.” I would lie awake and imagine the loneliness of their lives, and I would feel myself alone, the pleasure of solitude slipping away.

  In the practice field across the street, I could watch the Lewiston High School baseball team gather for a sabbath of spring training, cursing themselves over missed throws and fast pitches. They seemed curious to me, as did the building that rose behind them, colored pink by the early light. The past seemed impossibly distant—those times during which the halls and rooms of the school had been familiar: the sharp smell of the janitor’s mop pail; the close and humid odor of lockers; the known way I traveled from one class to the next; the trophy case with its roll call of heroes. I wondered what remnant of myself I had left to what our class valedictorian had called posterity. National Honor Society, Thespians, Choir, German Club, editor of the literary magazine. It had seemed enough to keep me anchored in good works and moving forward into a future of successful college applications. But now that future I had imagined for myself—to become a teacher of English—was gone, replaced by my minimum-wage job as a teller at Idaho Fidelity, a ninety-five-dollar-a-month studio, a 1965 Chevrolet, Virginia Slims menthol, Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.

  So much had changed since that day only a year before, when I had left home flush with new freedom, the hours bobbing before me like fruit for the picking. At first I’d thought I might be transformed back into that girl I’d been at thirteen, who smoked and drank and let the boys who brought her drugs touch her breasts. Who hated with a loathing so pure she would have gladly given up her home, her mother and father and brother, her doting grandmother and cousins and aunts and uncles, given her soul for a chance to escape into the outside world, where dancing was not a sin, where she could listen to Magical Mystery Tour and wear mascara and not be cast out and down to Hell. Who had escaped for that short time, she and her dreams of California (poppies, sunshine, peace and love), only to be found and dragged back and sent away to be reborn.

  I had less to prove now, less to battle against: no father to ask and answer to, no mother to frown at my clothing and hiss at the Cosmopolitans I hid beneath my bed. No Sunday-morning service, no communion, no choir practice or youth group or Wednesday-evening prayer meeting. No elders telling me that the music I listened to was meant to serve Satan, no preacher predicting my damnation should I fail to heed God’s word. I knew they were praying for me to see the light, to find my way back down the straight and narrow path, but I was free now, more free than I had ever been.

  Yet I felt penned in, my boundaries defined by my ignorance, my uneasy acquaintance with the world. My travels had taken me to Boise, Spokane, Walla Walla. As a child, I had twice made the trip with my family to Oklahoma: once by car, missing the Yellowstone earthquake by a few hours; the second time with my mother and brother by train, relegated to our seats four endless days each way, eating from the grocery bag of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches my mother had wisely and frugally packed. My only other ramble out of Idaho had been in 1973, when my father had driven us through one post-Christmas blizzard after another to reach his brother’s house and the monstrous wonders of Disneyland. We’d been snowbound in Long Beach for a week—a “freak” weather system, the forecasters proclaimed, that brought the city to a standstill—and I’d seen little of the metropolis that existed outside my cousin’s bedroom window.

  I don’t remember that I longed to experience the urban adventures that lay beyond the Lewiston city limits, yet, along with my friends, I complained bitterly about there being nothing to do in the mill town we called home. A few movie houses; a skating rink where the junior-high kids went to smoke dope and gaze lovingly at the mirrored crystal ball; any number of bars that wouldn’t card, believing that anyone who could mouth the words “Harvey Wallbanger” was at least the legal drinking age of nineteen. You worked at the mill, the bullet factory, the stockyards, the Hilltop Cafe. You were a parts runner for Napa Auto, a tire grunt for Les Schwab. Summers you worked the peas—a backbreaking, money-making job, twelve hours a day, seven days a week—for as long as the annual harvest and processing of legumes would last.

  My position as a teller at Idaho Fidelity was glamorous by comparison—$2.75 an hour, plus full benefits and two weeks paid vacation. My friends were envious and imagined that I would embrace job s
ecurity and work my way up the teller line, but the work dulled me: often I found myself, dollars in hand, staring blindly past the walls of my cubicle, forgetting my count, remembering some afternoon spent fishing Reeds Creek, wondering what insects were singing, whether the lupine had yet begun to bloom.

  Like my father, whose tales of danger in the woods excited me, I believed some risks heroic and, with a good mind and strong will, most often manageable. But now, in the city, what lay out there beyond the doors of my apartment bore a definable threat. At night the old building snapped and moaned in the wind, and I jerked awake, my heart racing until I could convince myself it was not someone who had followed me home, one of the men who had seen me at the bar, where I went with girlfriends to drink sloe gin. I wore makeup and high heels; I drank and danced with men I didn’t know. In the teachings of the church, this would be enough to prove my immorality: how could I expect men to remain untempted? “The kind of bait you put out,” a preacher once warned, “is the kind of fish you’re going to catch.”

  I no longer believed in any of it, not the sin or the punishment. My break from such religious doctrine had been simultaneous with my break from my father, and I’d begun to wonder what morality I possessed that had not been implanted, grafted to my soul. Having been taught that there was only one defined way to embrace spirituality, I believed that my choice was either to follow or to fall away. I could not reject part of it without rejecting the whole. “Are you in or are you out?” the preachers demanded. “Will it be Heaven, or will it be Hell?” If what it took to gain salvation was obedience to the rigid restriction of my father and the church, then I was doomed anyway. I’d dress as I wanted, do as I pleased. And then I would come home, take the Winchester from its rack, and snug it close beneath the covers, feeling its promise of safety, its hard, metallic coolness against my side.