In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [60]
I sat on the floor, feeling the breeze against my face as we smoked and talked. She told me that she didn’t remember her father, that they had moved from California with some jerk her mom was living with who left months ago, and she was glad he was gone because he beat them all and snuck in her room at night; her mother got welfare enough to keep them in food. She seemed old, resigned to her life, with none of the longing for a better house and family that I expected. I watched her pull the smoke deep into her lungs and hold it there, her eyes seeing something beyond the crowded houses and topped-off trees of our neighborhood. She came and went as she pleased, had a boyfriend who dogged her every step, drank beer and bought her own cigarettes, never hiding them from anyone. She painted hearts on her walls. She seemed less damned than I did.
I told her everything I knew and could—about the church, about Luke, about our reasons for coming to Lewiston. I told her I wanted to do things like the other kids, that I hated my long skirts and plain face. She nodded as I talked. Nothing seemed to surprise her. The room darkened and our breath took form before us, flying out into the cooling air and rising. I didn’t think I could sleep there in the dirt and stink, but I did, waking only once to hear her mother banging the cupboards below, searching for the jar of peanut butter Maria had hidden on the ledge outside our room.
It happened slowly, the sense I came to have of myself as separate from my family and church. For a short period during the process, I believed I could exist as a Christian both inside and outside the world. But I was wrong, I realize now, not because it is impossible to live a moral life without setting oneself apart, but because I would not be allowed to do so. The lines were drawn for me. I must be either the daughter subjugated to her father’s will and the dictates of the church, or the harlot turned against God and family. There was a time when I believed the choice easy.
I lied more. Over the next several weeks, I spent long hours with Maria, standing in the rooms’ shadows while she and her mother screamed, “You bitch! You whore!” It seemed like a television show—watching them pull each other’s hair and throw shoes against the wall while the babies wailed in their filthy nightclothes. Horrified and fascinated, I could not tear myself away. I came home electrified, vibrating with a tension I could not speak of and would never betray. And I was a good actor. I knew if my parents became aware of Maria’s true life, I would be forbidden to see her. I washed my hands and sprayed my hair with Final Net to rid myself of the smell of smoke, chewed extra sticks of Dentyne, sucked on Sen-Sens, their licorice bite almost painful on my tongue.
One fall afternoon, with my father’s permission, Maria and I retraced our steps back to the school and found a place on the warped bleachers just as the sun settled cold and firm behind the Blue Mountains. I had never been to a football game before, and the cheers that rose as our team ran onto the field touched off a sense of unreality I could not shake for the remainder of the night. The band blared its wretched rendition of the fight song, competing with the announcer’s voice crackling from the loudspeaker. But mostly it was the lights that made me feel as though I were floating in a brilliant bubble, suspended in the outlying darkness. The players in their red-and-white uniforms, the cheerleaders bouncing about in front of us, all legs and pompoms—I thought I would fall over from the sheer sensory shock of it.
We left early, not because I could no longer endure the stimulation, but because I had a curfew: seven