In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [71]
What I cannot do is imagine the girl I was at twelve becoming the girl I was at fourteen. I remember the emotions vividly—at twelve, adolescent confusion tempered by the security of family, a sense of trust, openness, innocence, I guess. By the time I was fourteen, I felt only anger, loathing, a need to escape from the restrictions imposed by my parents and the church. Even now it scares me to understand how easily a soul may pass from one dimension of itself into another, as though the boundaries separating what we are and what we might become, given an infinite set of motivations and conditions, are little more than the line between waking and sleep, between story, memory, dream.
The most frightening thing of all is that each of those girls is still with me, both vulnerable and bitter, believing and hardened against belief. I could become one or the other of them again, I think, and so steel myself to become neither. And if I had to, which would I choose—the near-child about to lose herself to spite and anger? or the near-woman already there, calloused to the pain in her mothers eyes, the grim discipline of her father, the prayers of the church, her own sense of guilt and sure damnation?
That morning, when I awoke in the apartment of my friend, her mother and the man were gone. I maneuvered my way through piles of dirty clothes, past the bed with its crumpled gray sheets and into the tiny bathroom. Ash floated in the toilet water. Hair and wadded Kleenex covered the floor. I gagged against the intimate odors of other bodies.
In the mirror, I saw my own smudged cheeks, my eyes darkened by yesterdays mascara and blue shadow. The face disgusted me. I splashed cold water in the sink, hardening myself, spitting out the metallic taste of last night’s wine. I’m nothing but a whore, I thought. Just like her. But even as I searched for a clean corner of the towel to dry my hands on, I never considered another course. There was comfort in the fatalism of my vision. Like my father, I yearned for my life to be expressed in absolutes. I had made my decision. I could never go back.
Patti and I never made it to California. That morning, as I walked from the apartment’s bathroom, I heard a hard knock. Patti jerked her head and I stepped backward into her mother’s room.
Two women were speaking. I recognized my mother’s voice and whirled to search the room for a place to hide. The single window, swollen from the shower’s mist, wouldn’t budge. If it had, I would have jumped without hesitation to the ground two stories below. Instead, I crawled into the narrow closet, pulling the door shut behind me. I squatted beneath smoke-scented dresses and scratchy coats, piling shoes and boxes around my legs.
The voices moved toward me. Stop them, Patti, I thought. Jesus, please stop them.
The door swung open. Hands parted the clothes. I peered into the face of my mother and her friend Sally, eight months pregnant. Patti stood chewing her thumbnail like a child. I could run. I could fly past them and out and run and they’d never catch me. I looked at Sally’s bulging belly. This isn’t fair.
“Look at you.” My mother bent slightly toward me. I clutched my knees to my chest, nearly growling. My father appeared behind them, the shadow of his body blocking the light. “Come on, Kim. Let’s go,” he said, and though I had thought