In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [92]
The door opened and I fell onto the soft carpet of my grandmother’s living room.
“Well, Kim honey. What in the world?”
I jumped to my feet and stood staring at her in disbelief. Behind her the television projected its silent story, the actors’ mouths moving in a pantomime of speech. Instead of dark-suited men reeling off news of the Second Coming, Eddy Arnold and Eva Gabor pointed in astonishment at a pig.
“What’s wrong with the TV?”
“Why, nothing. Are you okay?” She peered into my face, her forehead arched in concern. I couldn’t take my eyes off the black-and-white screen, off the grimacing faces of those people mired in mud to their kneecaps.
“Kim, what’s wrong?” She was pulling at my arm, pinching a piece of skin between her thumb and finger. I detached my gaze from the television and moved it to her. Her eyes were gray, the same color as Eva and Eddy and their worrisome pig. No one else I knew had eyes that color. I moved my face closer to hers, looking for the slate-blue corona around each iris. “Nan? Nan?”
“Sit down, Sister.” She pushed me toward the couch. “I’ll make us some tea.”
“Nan, why is the sound off?”
“The sound?”
“The TV.”
She studied the screen for a moment, as though she had forgotten its existence.
“I turned it down because I was taking a nap. You woke me up.”
I listened to her move through the kitchen, the familiar tick of cups and the discordant shuffle of her crippled leg. Was I crazy? My guilty conscience had done this to me. I was being punished.
The warmth of the sugared tea relaxed me. Looking at my grandmother—the round body and twisted foot, the hair bound up in toilet paper to keep its style while she slept—I managed a smile. We switched the channel to Dialing for Dollars and turned up the volume, hoping that our phone number would miraculously be chosen and I could answer when the call came, ready with the Word of the Day, ready with my grandmother’s address and Social Security Number so that they could mail her a check for $300 and she could make one last trip to Oklahoma, she said, before she was too old.
When I saw my father that evening, on his way to work, lunch pail in one hand, heavy gloves, thermos and notebook of logged miles in the other, I saw too that his hair was shorter. I should have known—every four weeks, same day, same time, my father visited the barber. How could I have forgotten this ritual?
I felt comforted seeing him there, absolutely predictable, stepping into the dusk with the confidence of a man blessed with night vision. I often imagined him in the heart of the night, driving his truck full of wood chips down the river road, the moon riding the water beside him. What did he see during those hours when the rest of us slept and only the animals had eyes to mark his passage? What did he think while his family dreamed? He could just as easily have been asleep in his bed; his presence would have been no less felt.
I wished for his vision that night as I lay staring into the dark, trying to discern the pair of hands reaching out to me—Jesus’ hands, delicate, mutilated, decoupaged and lacquered, beckoning to all those lost. I knew they were there, on the wall where I had hung them, but all I could see without my glasses was a small star of light reflected off the sleeve of Christ’s white robe.
What was I feeling? What had come to take the place of that afternoon’s consuming need to reject, at least for a moment, the life I had chosen? Not guilt, not even contrition. I was angry, resentful, like a child beaten for spilling her milk.
For the first time since the beginning of my summer at the Langs’ I wondered, What if it’s not true? Maybe there would be no Second Coming. Maybe, like Mrs. Steiner had said in mythology class, all people believe the same—that their god is the only god. Could the Greeks really have thought Zeus existed,