In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [32]
I could no more find the true meaning in my mothers question than I could see the birds and wire. The distance from the window to the table where I sat, nose rubbing the pages of my reading book, was no more than ten feet, but even that distance would have been enough to fade her features to an airbrushed silhouette.
Some weeks afterward, I sat in the optometrist’s office, surrounded by cases of heavy frames, trying on pair after pair. I could not see myself in the mirror the assistant held out for me: the dark plastic lines faded into the peachy canvas of my face, which I obediently studied for a weighty minute before reaching for the next pair. Days later, when the doctor slid them over my ears, the glasses settled onto my nose with surprising heaviness. Even more startling was my mothers face peering into my own, so close I could see gray flecks in her pale blue eyes. Behind her, the doctor and assistant leaned toward me as though I had just been given the power of speech and were about to utter my first word.
What had I seen before? The birds on the wire I had imagined as leaves on a branch; now, when I saw them from the window, I could count their feathers, watch the small beaks preen for dust, see them tense for flight before rising into the air and disappearing. I described for my mother the colors of grass, the movement of shadows, the ever-changing shade of my aunt’s hair.
The language of vision had always been with me—pale, clear, bright, deep—but my sense of the words had been tactile, palpable, something I felt rather than saw. I remember the smell of smoke, the auroral glow of my father’s cigarette as we drove the dark road to town or back to camp. The trees and river flew by, miles I knew by heart but could not describe any differently in daylight than at night, although I never doubted their existence any more than I doubted the presence of angels, whose wings I imagined the cloudiest white, softly downed without quills or striation, large enough to carry me aloft in huge breathy beats.
In the parsonage stairway I came to believe the absence of light a blessing. I prayed for the counterfeit night and the sound of Luke’s voice husky with desire. I prayed we not be found out, knowing God’s grace covered a multitude of transgressions, knowing my wickedness lay in the very prayer I offered—the prayer of a sinner jealous of her sin.
It was Luke I thought of one Sunday night as I waited for my parents to finish their good-byes. Brother Lang’s sermon had been a long one, and everyone seemed ready to file from the pews and head home. No one had a special need or pressing confession to present to the congregation—not even Sister Paxson, a large, dark woman given to fits of lumbago, who normally went forward to have her swollen knees anointed with the thick green olive oil kept pushed to the back of the lectern. People had already begun pulling on their coats and shaking hands with their neighbors when Brother Lang stepped from the stage and clapped his hands together.
“Our work here tonight is not done,” he announced loudly. Everyone stopped still, eyes widening with sudden interest. “There is one among us who has a weakness, a need.” He released one of his hands and held it out, fingers together, pointed at me like a hatchet. “Sister Kim, will you come forward?”
My parents looked from Brother Lang to me, then shuffled back to let me pass, their hands lifted in prayer, palms up, as if to catch rain. Those who had left their seats, thinking the evening’s worship closed, settled back into their rows.
What was it I needed? My throat wasn’t sore. The pain in my shins had stopped, healed by the woman revivalist in Orofino who told me I lacked calcium, pressed her thumbs into my temples until my head pounded, then released me with her encouragement to drink more milk. As I walked down the aisle, mentally checking my stomach for pain, the balance of