In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [88]
When our eyes met, she pulled away. “You smell like an ashtray,” she said, regaining her composure, drifting back into her controlled and authoritarian self. I shrugged. She knew I smoked. She smeared a bit of Vaseline on my cut, then resumed her place at the sink. There was a heaviness in her movement, a hint that something was working inside her, and I waited to see what would come of it. She ran her rag around the edge of a plate. “It’s my fault, you know.”
“What’s your fault? The fight?”
“No, your smoking. God’s punishing me through you.”
What was she talking about? I knew she had smoked before, during those years in the camps. But why would God punish her now?
“But you quit smoking.”
“No, I just told everybody I did. I lied.”
She told me how she sneaked drags off Dad’s cigarettes, plugging the crack at the bottom of the bathroom door with a towel. It was her secret sin—she was sure not even my father knew. And because it was secret—because she had allowed herself to believe that she could hide such a transgression from her husband and God—she was doomed to reap what she had sown: the proof sat before her, her own daughter bedraggled and bloodied like some barroom whore.
Would God lead me to sin, I wondered, in order to punish her, a woman who gave so much of herself there seemed nothing left but a shell? Even then, to think of her trying to hide, fearing the judgment of her family, made me want to reach out to her, rock in her arms and let her feel the kindred circle of mine, make her feel what connected us—something more than weakness and sin, something more than cigarettes: it was the overwhelming sense of guilt and despair brought on by our inability to see ourselves as worthy of love.
I did not realize then what bonds there were between us. Nor did I consider these things when I was living in her house as the good daughter, fighting the bitterness and disdain I felt for her desire to please us. The struggle was constant: I knew I must subjugate myself, just as she did, to my father’s will, and then to the will of my husband; I also knew that I could no more imagine myself leading my mother’s life than I could imagine going against my father’s authority. Perhaps, just as my father had sacrificed his desire for the woods in order to take up his duty to God, I must give up my desire to control my own life. I must remember the cause of the Fall of Man; I must remember the perverse desire of Eve. I must learn to submit to my duty as a woman, don the veil of my sex, follow the teachings of Paul: “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of woman is the man. The woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” If I wanted to honor my family and my God by attracting a righteous man to wed, I must remember.
I must remember how deep and insidious was the nature of my weakness.
The fall after I returned from the Langs I began dating Tom, a young man from church. His initial courtship filled my need to be loved and desired, and I found myself calculating my every action in order to gain his admiration. Our need to spend every waking hour together wore at my mother’s patience and my father’s stony authority. What I know now they undoubtedly saw then: Tom was proprietary, jealous beyond reason. He guarded my every move, chose my wardrobe, flew into rages if he found me talking to another boy, whether friend or suitor. When I was invited to a pool party at the house of a church member (the Assembly of God allowed swimsuits covered by long T-shirts for girls taking part in mixed swimming), he ranted over the phone at me: he had to work and I couldn’t go without him. It was improper. The other boys would see my body, his girlfriend’s body, and I’d be responsible for their lust. Was that what I wanted? Did I want them to look at me, to want to have sex with me? That was it, wasn’t it? I was a prick-tease,