In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [18]
Aunt Bev was only slightly less displaced in the winter snow and spring mud than Aunt Dorothy. Born in Texas, she mixed her own Southern drawl with that of her new Oklahoma relatives, who teased her, as border-sharers often do, about her home state allegiances. She was barely five feet tall and even when pregnant never moved the scale above a hundred pounds. (Her husband, Roland, stood over six feet, as do all the Barnes brothers.) She reminded me of my Barbie dolls—a tiny waist and blond hair looped and pinned in a fashionable twist. She was the only woman I knew who wore false eyelashes, and she taught her sisters-in-law how to mend a torn nail with cigarette papers and clear polish. My strongest memory of her is shooing me and my cousins out the door and locking it behind us, ensuring that her newly mopped floors would remain spotless until her husband got home. I see her standing on the threshold in a summer top and tight knit pants, broom clutched in one hand, the other hand cocked on her hip, enchanting in her blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick.
Other than my father, Uncle Barry, the youngest brother, remained the longest. He brought to the woods a woman from Colorado named Mary, and with her came Lezlie, a little girl with startling white hair and green eyes. I was a year older than she was, and the relationship we established in our shared yard became less that of cousins than sisters, with all its inherent jealous rages and intimacies.
Mary had the high cheekbones of her Indian mother. She came without pretense, equally at home in the trees as on the sage and cinnamon plains of Colorado. Her beauty was enhanced only a little by makeup and polish: large brown eyes and dark lashes gave her an exotic appearance even when she fluttered at the door in her soot-streaked bathrobe, and no matter how long the winter, her face and arms seemed bronzed.
She, too, left a life less than fortunate. The women in her family had run their men off, sometimes with the help of a gun, and her first marriage had lasted less than a year. She entered into our family with the bravado of a woman used to making her own way, and her spontaneity and the childlike pleasure she took in games and holidays often lent a carnivallike atmosphere to our get-togethers.
Each morning, the wives rose first to make their husbands’ breakfast, then stood at the door to see the men drive off into the pre-dawn light. They waved, hollering their day’s plans to each other across the yard before turning back to wake the older children for school. After the dishes had been done, the laundry hung to dry or sprinkled and rolled to be ironed later, my mother would take the cap off the tea kettle and whistle from the door, then wait for the long, high-pitched reply to echo across the meadow.
What time they did not spend baking or sewing they filled with wishing: mail-order catalogs cluttered the table. I often came home from school to find one of the women perched primly in a child’s high chair while another cut her hair, Sears models for inspiration, or one of the aunts straight-backed as a Buddha, clothespins numbing her earlobes, waiting for another to sterilize the darning needle over a kitchen match. I couldn’t bear to watch the needle punched through to its backing of raw potato or cork, and hid in my room, covering my head with a blanket.
During the high-altitude heat of summer, we loaded the car with iced tea and root beer, sandwiches and fried pies, and drove to the creek. While my cousins and I waded the shallow current, hunting periwinkles and crawdads, our mothers lounged on old sheets, their bathing suit straps undone, draping their shoulders.
They seemed glamorous and distant then, leaned back on their elbows, one knee slightly raised, not at all like the same women we saw scooping up their husbands’ piled work clothes, mixing batter for breakfast, still wearing long