In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [96]
May 29, 1976, one week past my eighteenth birthday, I wrapped myself in lavender satin, hung the gold cord indicating my induction into the National Honor Society around my neck and marched down the aisle to the bombastic blaring of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I knew that by then every invited family member and friend had heard what I had done. I didn’t care that they were out there, that my mother and brother were somewhere in the crowd, pale and withdrawn, that my father may or may not be watching me from the bleachers.
I accepted my diploma, listened to the pep band play its ragged rendition of “The Way We Were,” watched the ice sculpted into an enormous red-white-and-blue “76” melt into its metal pan. The night was beautiful—full of damp-earth smells and the high call of nighthawks. I looked around me. It was the same field where I had seen my first football game, the same lights that had dazzled me into a state of astonishment.
In five years, the only thing that had changed about the setting was me. The world went on its way whether we thought it wicked or not, impervious to our sense of its contagion. And all these people around me—teachers, friends, parents, toddlers screaming for their siblings, babies oblivious to the delirium of the day, sucking their syrup-sweetened pacifiers—did they know they were doomed? How many had sat in their places before them? Generations of Lewiston seniors had found their way to the stage without ever once fearing that the paper might disintegrate in their hands, the earth might shudder beneath them, the sky crack open, the cemetery only blocks away give up its ghosts. I wanted to believe my life might continue. I wanted to be part of a community, a family, that believed the next day or year, the next son or daughter, held the promise of something other than inherent imperfection and destruction.
My father left Lewiston that evening and drove the 120 miles to Coeur d’Alene Lake, but this was northern Idaho, on a body of water larger than some counties, and even after hours of searching, the only speeding ticket of his life flung on the seat, he never discovered the one cabin where I slept.
I knew of this only later, and I was stunned, not by fear of what might have happened but by the action itself, that I was able to elicit such a reaction from him. What would he have said to me? I could not imagine anything other than bitter confrontation, could not imagine that he would ever suggest compromise. If he had found me, would it have been as it was years before, when his eyes were enough to command me to follow?
But he did not find me, there on the shore where I sat next to John around a campfire, gagging down half a beer from the six-pack one of the boys had brought. I hated the bitter, grassy taste, but it seemed the thing to do my first night of freedom. I waited for some panic to set in, some sense of loss and sadness. But all I felt was air and space, room to move and breathe. I wasn’t even sure I missed them.
I felt a pang remembering my mothers face, and if I let myself, a twinge of guilt every time I thought of Greg coming home to find our father settled deeper into his chair, our mother brittle as rime. I wondered when I would ever see my little brother again.
My boss at the pharmacy where I worked after school needed someone forty hours a week, and I would begin looking for an apartment the minute we got back from Coeur d’Alene. I had lost all sense of the future I’d planned: to attend college and become an English teacher. I looked around at the other seniors, still bound to their parents, chained by someone else’s rules. For once in my life, their lives seemed more pathetic than my own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I leaned against the counter, bored and restless, the feather duster loose in my hand.