In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [90]
My mother said I was too young to get so serious. The retort was easy. “You were only sixteen,” I said. “Why isn’t that good enough for me?”
Sixteen seemed to me an age when something should happen, something that might change the way people looked at me, the way I saw myself. I thought of my mother’s marriage, Sarah’s life with Terry, how all I ever wanted was to be given to Luke and left to spend the rest of my life in bliss. But that was not to be, and so I went to the department store and had my ears pierced.
I drove home, my earlobes swollen with heat, fear of my father’s reaction adding to the feverish feeling. My hair was long enough to cover the small gold dots. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
But my mother did, and when she pulled back my hair and took in the twin punctures, she looked first as though she believed we were both doomed, and then she smiled a small smile and shook her head. “Kim, Kim, Kim. You better hope your daddy doesn’t find out.”
There was something of the conspirator in her after all.
A few months later, I sat in Tom’s pickup after school, feeling the calm afternoon bend and mutate. My house faded and narrowed as I stared at it through the windshield. Nothing seemed familiar. “I want to date other girls,” he repeated. “I just think we’re too young to get so serious.”
I sat frozen, refusing to believe what he was saying. “Kim, you can keep the ring. I think you should have it.”
A huge bawling noise rose from my throat. I ran across the yard and threw open the door to my house so hard the windows rattled. I heard him gun his pickup out of the driveway, spitting rock and filling the air with the smell of burned rubber.
My mother soothed me. It was for the better, she said. She washed my face with a cold rag and left me in my bed. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I whispered to myself again and again. I was ruined. No man would ever want to keep me.
CHAPTER TEN
As the shiny newness of my conversion faded, leaving me with little more than the present by which to define myself, I found I longed for those times with Les when she and I believed we owned the few hours around midnight, when we walked the empty streets of Lewiston. I saw little of her, having left her behind with the cast-off remnants of my past life. One of the few nights we spent together she had stroked my hair. “Don’t worry, Kim,” she said. “We’ll get you back.” I’d shuddered beneath her hand, feeling that dark sister in me rise, and at least for a moment I felt suspended between two worlds—half novitiate, half sibyl.
I drove to her house one spring afternoon, full of what Nan called piss ’n vinegar. It was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time—a kind of itch that started from the inside and worked its way out so that I jerked with the urgency of it.
Lewiston was turning green, green and daffodil-yellow, the sky so blue and clear it made your teeth hurt to see it. I recognized the restlessness I felt, and it scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t content, and nothing was more dangerous to a Christian.
Les was home, and she must have read in my eyes what I could not say. Her parents were gone, so she grabbed her Marlboros and we headed down the road. On the way, we picked up a few others, friends I hadn’t seen since the old days.
They got me to smoke a cigarette, and the rest came easy. I rolled down the window of my parents’ new Toyota, cranked the rock and roll and ripped through the back alleys of Lewiston at forty miles per hour.
Les was beside herself, happy and laughing in that way I remembered—a kind of seize-the-day, open-mouthed guffaw that made me brave. The skunky odor of pot filled the car, but I decided not to worry about consequences. One day was all I wanted; one day to feel free again, in charge of my own life.
Coming around a corner too fast, Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring, smoke wafting from the windows, I lost control in the gravel. The rest seemed a movie in slow motion: the car fishtailing, my frantic counter-steering, the trailer house that filled my vision as we skidded through someone