In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [37]
I became determined to deny myself any pleasure. I fasted for days to rid my soul of whatever evil I carried inside me, even those evils of which I was unaware. I stayed with the adults in the kitchen after service, avoiding Luke’s eyes, praying into my hot cocoa when I saw him disappear toward the stairs. Women, I knew, were responsible for every temptation. If Luke sinned, if he touched my knee or brushed his arm against my breast, judgment would fall on me.
• • •
I loved the time I spent with Sister Lang and Sarah, perhaps believing that my kinship with women would be what would save me. I imitated their modest gestures, combed my hair and curled it just as they did, sat next to them at the table and filed my nails into blunt rectangles instead of the smooth ovals my mother preferred. Often, they took me to town with them—into Pierce with its sidewalks and American flag flapping above the new post office. They’d let me stop at the library, window-shop at Kimball’s Drug, buy me a cone at the Confectionery. The Confectionery seemed a rarity: soda fountain, booths and tables, a jukebox against the back wall, around which the high school kids congregated afternoons and weekends. Sometimes we lingered long enough over phosphates for me to catch a chorus of “Cherry Hill Park” or Elvis’s deep voice lamenting, If there’s one thing that she don’t need it’s another little child and a mouth to feed in the ghetto. I had never heard of a ghetto and could not imagine any mother mourning the birth of her baby, but I understood it was all very tragic. The songs left me feeling touched by something outside, real: there were places where people led lives of ongoing drama and magnificent despair while I raced the boys at recess for the one unbroken swing.
During one outing, while Sarah shopped for material at Durant’s, Sister Lang called me to a display against the wall.
“You don’t have any nylons, do you?”
I shook my head, feeling both childish for having to say no and excited by her interest. She held up a pair of tights the color of sand, nearly opaque.
“I bet your mother won’t care.”
I looked doubtful. She might not care but my father would, and she would not risk his disapproval.
Sister Lang placed them on the counter with her other purchases. I had never received such a gift, a gift made even more special by its provocative and conspiratorial nature; girls wore kneesocks because their legs had little value beyond simple locomotion, unlike the legs of women, whose shape and composure elicited considerable attention—why else were they so careful to wear their skirts covering their knees? It was permissible for a woman to show a certain portion of her body—the shins—as long as she did so with modesty. Too much revealed led men to imagine more.
Sister Langs instigation meant she saw me as more than a child, and I clutched the small package to my chest as we drove home. I could not wait for Sunday, for Luke to see me in this new way. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice, although he seldom missed scrutinizing my dress and demeanor. Still, there was my mother, whom Sister Lang had made to seem different somehow, on my side. I felt how the circle could split like the cells we studied in school—a line through the middle like a stricture between the women and the men—and I felt newly joined to the lives of my mother, Sister Lang and Sarah. There was some power