In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [38]
It confused me, seeing them without their husbands and still able to find their way in the world, making decisions as though the men did not exist. I thought of the night when Brother Lang had pulled his wife onto his lap and she whispered something in his ear that made him blush and squirm. Then, when she rose laughing, he watched her walk into the kitchen as though no one else in that room existed. What had she said to him? Whatever it was, it took him a moment to come back to his Bible, which had slipped between his knee and the chair cushion.
• • •
When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom, stripped off my kneesocks and pulled the silky tights over my pointed toes and up over my thighs. I bunched my dress at my waist and turned in front of the mirror, trying to make familiar the body in the glass. From the hips down, I looked like a woman, but above the gathered material I seemed still a child. My hair hung limp and stringy. My glasses slipped down my nose so that to look through them I cocked my head back, letting my mouth slack open. I dropped my dress and began brushing my hair furiously. One hundred strokes, day and night, Sarah said. Mayonnaise wash and vinegar rinse to make it shine. Someone knocked.
“Kim, what are you doing in there? Come on out, now. Greg needs someone to play with.”
I scowled at my mother through the door. I waited until I heard her step back into the kitchen, then gently pulled off the nylons, one leg at a time. The hair on my shins lifted with static. I had asked to be allowed to shave my legs, but my father said no. “Maybe when you’re thirteen,” my mother had said. She knew the boys at school teased me about the dark down. At least the nylons were heavy enough to hide the hair until my father gave his permission for it to be removed.
I stepped into the kitchen, where my brother waited. “Wanna go outside, Sis?”
I looked from him to my mother. No, I didn’t want to go outside. I wanted to stay in and wash my hair in eggs and honey, rub lemons on my knees to erase the rough skin, just like it said in Ladies’ Home Journal. My mother dipped her head toward the door. “Go out for a little while, just until dinner. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
Outside, the late afternoon air made me wish I’d pulled on pants beneath my dress. Ice on the eaves glistened, catching the last sparks of sun. I refused to talk to Greg and began trudging in circles, kicking aside moss and pine needles, scuffing lines into the damp ground. I took my time, working my feet close, until the letters looked perfect, joined by a cursive flourish—“LL+KB.” Greg watched from a distance. There was something different about me he wasn’t sure of, something secret. Instead of a playmate I’d become an adversary. When he edged toward me, I shuffled and kicked through the lines before he could see what I’d written.
He looked at me curiously. Had he done something wrong? Was I angry? All those years in the camps and moving from one house to another, he and I had shared everything—baths, beds, toys, the child’s heartache that followed being scolded and spanked. Now, I wanted to share nothing with him. Even his eagerness for my company disgusted me.
“Why don’t you leave me alone? Why are you always bugging me?” I gave the letters a final sideways kick and started for the house. Greg hesitated, then followed, wiping his eyes. I felt a twinge of guilt but could not bring myself to offer him anything other than indifference.
More and more, I wanted to be with the women, doing the things that gained them praise and proud glances from their husbands. My mother was an experienced seamstress, and I watched in fascination as she cut and pinned the onionskin paper to the fabric she had chosen for a new dress. The illustrations on the front of the Simplicity patterns showed several young models, hips cocked and hair flowing. I knew my mother always bought extra material to lengthen the hem, but as I studied the girls I longed to be like them, in whatever place it was they existed. They shaved