Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  Mr. Sloane straightened. “It’ll just be the two of us here,” he said. “I’m in the back office. If you need anything, let me know.”

  I returned his smile and nodded. His dark hair was thick, left long over the ears in the style of a younger man. He had a pudgy look about him, a softness, as though water had been pumped beneath his skin and left to find its own level.

  The minute I heard his door shut, I jumped to attend to the percolator, whose wheezing indicated the coffee was ready. I stood in the hall for a moment, peering into the other rooms, empty except for a few tables and rolled sheets of paper. I picked up the phone, listened to the dial tone, then placed it back in its cradle. I pulled out the desk’s top drawer, which held a single pencil and three paper clips. The other drawers held nothing. I switched on the Selectric: the little metal ball made a satisfying whir and chatter. I turned to face the plateglass window looking out over Hillcrest Road and realized that I had absolutely nothing to do.

  No files to put away. No typing or correspondence. Not a word on the Dictaphone machine. I opened the top drawer and separated the paper clips into compartments. I found a box of Kleenex and dusted the leaves of the philodendron whose vines drooped anemically down the sides of the file cabinet. I checked the few folders the cabinet held, making sure they were alphabetized correctly. I sharpened my pencil to a fine point.

  At noon Mr. Sloane opened the door to his office. I’d fallen into a traffic-induced stupor, staring out the front window, and I hastened to make of my props what I could: the pencil across the desk pad, the phone’s cord neatly spiraled, the phone itself at the perfect angle for retrieval.

  He sauntered across the room to the window, hands in his pockets. “Plans for lunch?”

  “No, I …home, I guess.”

  “You don’t have a car.”

  “It’s not far. I’ll walk.”

  He turned and looked at me. “In your high heels?” He moved to sit casually on a corner of my desk, crossed his hands on his thigh, and leaned forward just enough for me to catch the smell of whiskey. “Aren’t you hungry?” He leaned in closer. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t be surprised if your boss wants to lay you.”

  He winked, slid from the desk, and left.

  I was stunned, less by the statement than by the suddenness of its revelation. He’d seen something in my face, in the way I had lowered my eyes.

  I don’t remember what I did for lunch, where I went, if anywhere. I waited. When he returned, he offered only a nod my way before closing himself in his office. From one o’clock until five, I did not move from my chair. The phone didn’t ring. The only noises other than the traffic were the squeaks and shuffles Mr. Sloane made as he shuttled between the back rooms. At five exactly I rose and rinsed the coffeepot. I stood several feet away from his door and announced I would be going.

  “See you in the morning,” he called back, and in his voice I heard nothing that indicated threat or lechery.

  I walked the six blocks home, wincing at the rawness of my heels, unwilling to take the shoes off and ruin my one pair of panty hose. I told my roommates that I’d get paid in two weeks, soon enough to meet the month’s ledger of bills. I don’t remember that I shared with them what had really happened, thinking that to do so would only enhance the view I believed they had of me as flighty, irresponsible, a woman who did not know how to comport herself around men in a nonsexual way.

  It was like a scent on me—the smell of something clandestine, intimate, provocative. No matter how many hot baths and steaming showers, no matter the careful application of sprays and powders, no matter how long the hemline or loose the skirt, something remained to betray me. The next day’s dress would be even more modest, the fabric heavier, brown instead of mint green. I rubbed ointment into my blistered heels, set the alarm, convinced by such small, domestic tasks that I could be dependable, become an older version of that sturdy working girl I had been only a year before.

  I had begun to suspect that morality might lie in the exact and complete fulfillment of minutes and minutiae, a rigidly timed and compartmentalized existence. I would give myself no more than an hour for bath, hair, and makeup. I would eat one piece of toast, drink one cup of tea with only a teaspoon of sugar. I would borrow my roommate’s sneakers and allow extra time for the walk to work, arriving at five minutes before nine. I would remake myself into that young woman others would be happy to see: content, temperate, and clean.

  “HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO HAWAII?”

  Mr. Sloane stood in front of the plateglass window, hands in the pockets of his finely pressed trousers. He seemed enormously pleased with himself.

  “Hawaii?”

  “There’s a conference. I thought you might enjoy it. You can take notes.”

  It was my second day on the job. All I had hoped for was steady income, a way to support myself; suddenly, I was being offered free travel to an exotic island, a stay at the nicest of Waikiki hotels. I could see by the set of his mouth, the slight smile, that he believed I could not resist his lavish proposal. A sudden, intense disgust replaced my apprehension, not because he had insulted my virtue, but because he believed me so naïve. I was no longer that girl David had discovered, no longer so easily wooed. Nor was I David’s creation, although I could not yet say what shape my life was taking. All I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with this man or any others like him. I would starve on the street, I thought, before allowing such hands to touch me again.

  I leveled my gaze. “What would your wife think?” I asked.

  He pulled his hands from his pockets. His smile dropped to a straight line. “Mrs. Sloane,” he said, stepping slowly to my desk, “is none of your business.”

  He left, went into his office, slammed his door. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the world was framed in a four-by-five picture window, busy with the traffic of neighborhood people.

  I rose and made my way to the empty coffeepot. A spasm of nausea knotted my stomach when I opened the Folgers: during the long rides I had taken as a child up and down the river road from the logging camps to Lewiston, I had often settled my chin onto the lip of an empty coffee can, the sickness of sixty-mile-an-hour corners unchecked by saltines.

  As the water began to boil through, I heard Mr. Sloane’s door open. In the second it took me to turn, he had closed the distance between us. I took a small, sideways step, and he moved with me. I don’t remember the look on his face or what he smelled like or the feel of his hands. I remember the coffeemaker’s asthmatic breathing and the cramped muscle my body became as he pressed me to the wall.

  I didn’t panic or run—I knew too much about the excitement of the chase to do that—and I also knew that though I feared his strength, I would not go down without a fight.

  “You don’t want to do this,” I said. Perhaps it was the cold resolve in my voice that caused him to pull back. I said, “Don’t you touch me again.” The look on his face changed from rapaciousness to rage. I watched him smooth his hair, and then he turned away, stepped back into his office, and closed the door.

  The shaking came on then. I had felt it before, and I hated it. I worked my way along the wall, back to my desk, where I took off my high heels and began slowly lacing the sneakers. I’d have been surprised had he let me go that easily, and when his door swung open, hard enough to hit the wall, I straightened and waited.

  He came toward me, furious, nearly wild. I stood my ground, set my eyes against his, saw how he stopped, pulled himself back into the shape of a middle-aged man, a wife at home, two children, a business to run. He blinked hard.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

  I nodded and returned to the task of tying my shoes.

  “Your work is inefficient. You are not self-motivated and cannot be trusted to see what needs to be done.”

  I picked up my purse and high heels. He pulled a wallet from his suit coat and wrote out a check for one hundred dollars. “Good luc
k finding another job.”

  The check floated at the tips of his fingers. I took it and walked out into the bright light that knocked the color from everything. For a moment I forgot which way I should go. I couldn’t remember where I was at all. Then the colors settled back into the trees, the bleached asphalt soaked up its black ash, and I thought the day was good because of it.

  I took the check Sloane had given me and stuck it in the frame of my bedroom mirror—it would cover rent and my part of the utilities, with a little left over. Maybe we’d go to the disco. I’d buy.

  It would be several hours before Michelle and Connie got home from class. I lay on my bed, surrounded by my guns, my marksmanship medals, my karate certificates, library books piled high on the nightstand, at the bottom a copy of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I did not yet know how this book would give me my first true taste of political awareness, how it would make me see my own struggle in larger terms, give me membership in a common sisterhood. I did not know that within months, I would be doing what the health-clinic nurse had urged, cleaning toilets and mopping floors before and after class, scraping together enough money to pay my way through college, into that larger world I had always longed for and nearly forgotten.

  I picked up the novel I had begun the night before, found my place, turned the pages, felt my anger and frustration slip away. The night opened before me, the ways I could fill it without end.

  WHEN DAVID CAME FOR ME the last time, he arrived midday and did not try to hide himself but appeared as a suitor might, an old friend. I don’t remember that I thought to turn him away, not even for a moment. If I resisted this time, I knew that there would be another.

  I sat on the mattress’s edge and undressed as he watched, following the familiar routine. But something had changed. He could no longer reach that part of me that had once tensed beneath his hand. He had taken of me what he could; there was nothing he could do to resurrect some remnant of that girl I had once been, the woman he had worked so carefully to gain, to teach. What he had wanted was my willing trust, but trust was a word that now meant nothing to me. I observed myself from a distance, pleased by how little I was feeling, how great was my control: no emotion, no physical response. In this, there was power. I might never have to be afraid again.

  It was a simple act between us, then, common and homely: I, as though the lumpish wife-servant, giving herself to duty; he, the coarse husband, taking his pleasure, taking his due. When it was over, I watched him dress, listened to the sound of his pickup grow more distant, and I knew he would not return, and that if he did, I would not know him.

  I gathered my clothes, felt the seep of him between my legs, and this was the first time, for always before he had remained unfinished. In the beginning, I had thought this a sign of his control, his selflessness, his willingness to give and give without taking. Over time, I had come to see how it was he could not let go, could not allow that second’s death to make him vulnerable, unwary. It was like an illness with him, a disease, and if at first I had wondered what it might take to bring him to that moment of completion, I had come to fear what it might necessitate, where it might lead.

  Curious that it would happen now, as though the seed he spilled were emptied into nothing so different as his fist.

  I cleaned myself with delicate rags. I found my book and cigarettes and took them out onto the porch, where I would wait for my roommates to come home. I lifted my face to the air, smelled the rain moving in from the south. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smoke, holding it as long as I could, until my skin tingled. I’d never felt so free.

  I REMEMBER THE SPRING OF 1980, AN afternoon of May sunshine. The doors were open, birdsong and the smell of locust blossom dispelling the last rumors of winter. Michelle dozed on the couch, while I nodded over the texts I meant to study: Child Psychology, Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Physical Geology.

  There is a sweetness to this memory because it is the beginning of what will become my new life. After months without direction, I had filled out the one-page application to the local four-year school, Lewis-Clark State College. There, through the grace of Pell Grants and government loans, I had begun my work toward a degree.

  I’d opted for geology over algebra: as a child, I’d collected jasper and pyrite from the local rock shop, intrigued by the homely thunder-eggs with their secret vaults of crystal. Our professor, a compact man with white hair and mustache who smoked a pipe while lecturing, promised us experiments and field trips. He said we’d come to learn the difference between aggregates and achondrites, feldspar and shale. I loved the names, the sounds they made: smoky quartz, yellow wulfenite, Pele’s hair. And the maps—the measured contours, the calculated distance. I understood the logic of creation and negation—the buckle and shift, continental drift, the core of iron and nickel, the cool outer core of molten metal, warm rocky mantle, thin cool crust. The faults and layers, the ruptures, the ancient heave of lava—once thought to be the spill of immortal anger, our professor said, now predictable, nearly done.

  Michelle and I must have noticed the sky darkening at the same moment, for we both bolted for the clothesline to save our towels and sheets from the impending storm. The bank of clouds was moving in from the west, black with the promise of lightning and bone-jarring thunder. I’d never seen such a solid, dark mass, cutting the sky in half.

  I was thrilled. I loved the change a storm brought with it—the sense of being safely sheltered while trees snapped and the booming concussion rolled off the mountains. I noticed the absence of wind, although it often happened like this: one moment the air gone breathlessly still, the next moment, a howl of dust. I waited for the rumble of first thunder, but what I heard instead was the barking of dogs, beginning somewhere distant, taken up a block at a time, moving up from the valley bottoms until it touched the ears of our neighbor’s large mutt, who sent up a wail of recognition.

  We threw the laundry on the couch, then stood at the open door. We, too, felt it: something not quite right, a shift in the known and expected. A few houses down, the crazy lady’s chickens made for the henhouse; the robins left their worm beds to gather in the poplars and preen dust from their wings. I knew that animals could sense tragedy, impending disaster; I’d heard such stories from my grandmother—the chained hounds baying for days after the death of my grandfather, the fowl and beasts of burden given the power of speech at the moment of Christ’s birth. Watch the cows: if they lie down in the field, rain is coming. Watch the horses: if they skitter and jump for no reason, there’s a fire racing the field miles away, hail coming to beat the roof down. I thought of these things as the chorus of dogs rose and fell, then rose again, a warning or lament, I couldn’t tell which.

  Street lamps flickered on. The dogs stopped their howling. And then the ash began to fall. We thought it snow at first, stepped out and caught it in our palms, rubbed it between our fingers like moth wings.

  I can’t remember how long the darkness lingered, how long it took for the main body of ash to pass over our town, but it seemed only an hour, maybe less. The light came back slowly. The birds chattered. The roosters, fooled by the false morning, crowed hoarsely, buoys in the dry fog.

  Back in the house, our soap opera had been interrupted by the Emergency Broadcast System. Mount St. Helens was exploding four hundred miles away. Michelle and I watched the news flash in wonder. Of all the things we’d been warned of in our lives, no one had ever mentioned volcanoes.

  If you know what to look for, you can still see windrows of it along the highways and backroads, scraped to the sides, though it is no longer white, having taken on the color of dirt. There’s a potter in Lewiston who pays one hundred dollars a truckload for the ash. He mixes it to a fine glaze that fires iridescent and makes coffee mugs, salad bowls, garlic keepers. I have several pieces, MT. ST. HELENS 1980 stamped on the bottom, reminders less of the volcano than of the general feel of that spring as a time of secon
d chances, of new horizons forming.

  I lay in my bed that night, the ash still falling, and my dreams were full of the words I was learning, the stories that filled the books, the poems whose puzzle I might yet unravel. Prompted by my English professor, I was already planning to take more literature courses, perhaps even a creative writing class. I didn’t know how her encouragement would define my future, how I would rediscover that lost part of myself—that child who had spent hours at a time reading and rereading the legends of King Arthur and the trials of Robin Hood, swept away from her house in the woods by words so lovely and exotic, she repeated them for days: Excalibur, Nottingham, crab-tree staff, a flagon of rich Canary wine. Somewhere in me, there was still that young girl, sifting the water for jewels, unearthing the pearly sarcophagi, testing the flint with her teeth, tasting the world’s salty promise.

  WHERE I LIVE NOW, with my husband and children in the canyon above the Clearwater, is only a few miles from those feeding streams of my childhood. During spring thaw the trees, ungrounded by the wash of high current, float past us fully rooted. Old logjams from previous floods break loose; new ones pile against the bridge footings and small islands. Each becomes a nest of lost things: fishing lures, loops of rope, men’s undershirts, women’s shoes, a single dowel from the rail of a crib.

  I wonder, sometimes, if my own life’s mementos are contained in those tangles, perhaps a barrette I lost while fishing Deer Creek, or one of my mother’s pie tins that my brother and I used to pan for gold. Or the tree itself, fallen from the creek bank I sat on as a child while searching for the mussel shells we called angel wings, though they were mahogany brown and often broken.