In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [95]
“No,” he said, and with his eyes warned me I had already gone too far, a look on his face that usually scared me into sullen obedience.
“But Dad, please, I want to go so bad …”
“No.”
All the disappointments of the past years, all the resentments, the swallowed protests rose in my throat. I had one thing to barter, and even as I spoke it I knew how little it was worth.
“I’m eighteen. What if I go anyway?”
He looked up from his plate, every muscle in his body tensed, solid. “Then you take your things and you never come back.”
I let the words sink in. Maybe it was what I’d wanted all along—a reason to leave. Years before, I had run away out of hatred and defiance, but all I felt now was the sense of a sudden and clear path opening before me, free of boundaries and punishment, fear and tongueless subserviency. I was not surprised by the ultimatum. The position of the father must be recognized and honored; by challenging him, I challenged not only the authority of the family head but the authority of the church as well. Such usurpation would not be tolerated.
I felt a sudden and overwhelming desire to be rid of it all: the sin and guilt, the constant answering to mother, father, god. I let my eyes meet his and did not look down, letting the seconds pass, letting the look on his face—stony and impenetrable—settle into my memory. When I turned away, I passed the kitchen, where my mother stood stunned and silent. The pain on her face stopped me for a moment, but I knew that any hesitation would be seen by my father as weakness. I did not want him to think that I was any less resolved than he was, that I felt anything like regret.
From the phone in my bedroom I called my best friend, Bonnie, asked if I could stay with her and her family for a few days, then began to take inventory of my possessions. Only then did I realize how insubstantial my physical presence in that house had been: a poster that read MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, hung on the back of my door because someone might find it offensive; a purple alarm clock; a few bottles of perfume; a basket of stuffed animals; a box marked KEEPSAKES, full of letters and trinkets from boyfriends; Barbie dolls still clothed in the straight suits and pillbox hats Glenda and I had dressed them in that year we lived in Whispering Pines; a 7 Up bottle with its neck melted and stretched; the peace-sign patches, torn from the pockets of my old 501’s and hidden away, the POW bracelet I had worn that year I turned fourteen, when I thought myself as much a prisoner as the man whose name I bore on my wrist; a picture album, which I opened then quickly closed, stung to tears by the photographs of family, my Bible, my name on its cover glinting like a reminder of my remonstrance; the print of Christ’s bloodied hands, which I left hanging on its single nail.
I made a small pile, added to it my curling iron, toothbrush and a bottle of Prell (little pearl floating in its thick green sea), and in a few trips carried it all to my 1967 Chevy Impala, the one thing I truly owned, bought and paid for with the money I had earned at afterschool jobs.
As I backed out of the driveway, I searched the windows for my mother’s shadow. What had I left her to? A husband brooding and immovable; a younger son who would spend years of his life trying to make up for the pain I inflicted, trying desperately to be the good child; a house suddenly and without warning emptied of a body, a daughter, a soul.
And silence—this surest of all, for my father was a man taught well the stoic art of burying that which is most deeply felt, and my mother could recite the words of Paul the Apostle: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Any utterance against my father’s authority, public or private, he would see as treason.
Perhaps because of the chaos of their own young lives this was the only way my