In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  Even now, I wonder at my grandmother’s fortitude. Once, a few months after her open-heart surgery and a year before she died at seventy-three of heart failure, I asked her how she had stood it. She told me, “You just go on, Sister. There’s not much choice.” I looked at the still-red scar splitting her chest, her face drawn with the effort to breathe. Yet in her eyes I could see the spark, that will to survive.

  Those nights as a child when I lay in my grandmother’s bed, comforted by her soft presence, I felt little nostalgia for the woods, or even Luke. Instead, I thought of the faces of young men I had seen on Nan’s TV: Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, others with pearly grins and hair brushing their shoulders. Nan gave me money to buy the teen magazines that held their pictures, then gave me half the wall space in her room to hang the glossy centerfolds.

  I don’t know what my parents thought of this. I’m sure they were not pleased, but what could they say? Nan still held sway as the family matriarch and harrumphed mightily at the stodgy teachings of our church. She trimmed my hair, painted my nails, asked me to stay up late to watch Dean Martin and the Gold Diggers. I leaned into her shoulder, eyes down, imagining her staring my father cold in the eye, daring him to challenge her. I was thrilled to feel some nick in my father’s omnipotence, but I know now that she was only slightly less intimidated by his sternness than I was, and that he often demurred to her as much out of amusement as authority.

  During the course of those long summer days in Lewiston, I became more and more aware of the changes in my body. The hair on my legs and under my arms had set in with earnest. Now could I shave? Absolutely not. My mother passed on the answer from my father, then looked at me sympathetically. She knew that dark hair sprouted above my kneesocks, but she would never consider compromising my father’s authority.

  Ronnie, my father’s eldest brother, lived with Nan then. He and Dorothy had divorced, and he played guitar with his own country-western band, traveling around the Northwest, wildly popular with the locals. He was a tall, handsome man, blue eyes and black hair, and his voice held just enough edge to make the women wonder what he had suffered in love. He’d come home late, and I often woke to hear him humming in the bathroom. The next morning, I could still smell the sharpness of his aftershave mixed with the bar smells of stale cigarettes and whiskey. I breathed it in, wondering at the way it moved me, as though what I inhaled were attached to some memory.

  I found my uncle’s razor in the medicine cabinet. I picked it up, considered its edge bristly with whiskers, then carefully replaced it next to the can of shaving cream. The next morning, Sunday, I told my parents I didn’t feel well, then watched them pull from the driveway, headed for church. Nan was in the potato patch, a mason jar of gasoline in her hand. Normally I would have run to help her. I liked pulling the striped beetles from the leaves and dropping them into the amber liquid, not because of the killing but because of the good it did: less bugs, more spuds. I was drawn to these kinds of easy efficiencies.

  This day I had something else in mind. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, then opened the cabinet. The razor lay as I had left it. I memorized its angle on the shelf, the direction it pointed. I didn’t think Uncle Ronnie, who wouldn’t be out of bed for hours, would notice if I were careful.

  I filled the tub with hot water, undressed and stepped into the steaming water. I had read in one of my magazines to soak for a few minutes to allow the hairs to plump and rise. While I waited, I studied the razor: black handle, a broad triangular head, the blade a long ribbon of steel that could be rolled forward with the twist of a dial to expose a fresh edge. I turned the little plastic knob until the old blade and whiskers disappeared, then lifted my left arm.

  The hair had curled and tightened in the water. I pressed the blade above the dark mass and drew it downward. It didn’t come off as easily as I’d thought it would: a clump fell into the water, but scattered patches of hair remained, and even where I had shaved looked dark and prickly. I tried again, this time pressing harder and adjusting the angle of the blade. After several strokes, I paused to admire the scraped and bleeding skin, thrilled to have the ugly hair gone.

  I shaved underneath my right arm, an even more awkward task, then emptied the tub and ran fresh water. Dark, telltale hairs stuck to the sides and I wiped them up with toilet paper. I listened for Nan, less afraid of what she would think of my shaving than the fact I was using my uncle’s razor without asking. How many times had I heard my father and uncles and other men complain about their wives using their razors, returning them dulled, somehow tainted?

  Beginning at one ankle, I made several passes upward to my knee. The blade seemed slow and sticky, catching every few inches, nicking me until little rivulets of blood ran down my leg. I checked the razor and saw it was clogged with hair. This was taking longer than I had thought it would. My armpits burned.

  I twisted the dial, but nothing happened. I twisted harder. The plastic snapped and fell into the water. The narrow blade, curled inside like the keyed band of a coffee can, sprang out into a yard of glinting metal.

  Fear set in. My punishment for disobedience had begun before I could even finish my sin. Hands shaking, I gathered the pieces from the water. Everything was there. Nothing looked truly broken. Maybe I could get it back together and no one would know. Laying the plastic parts along the edge of the tub, I saw that the first thing I had to do was re-coil the blade. After that, it would be easy.

  I picked up the long strip and began straightening it. Suddenly, blood was pouring from my hands. I dropped the blade and held up my palms. Along one thumb ran a gaping, inch-long cut.

  I grabbed a towel, then put it back: blood would stain the cloth. Pulling the plug, I held my hand over the drain, watching the darker liquid join the clear, then swirl and disappear.

  How could I hide this? My parents would be enraged, not only at my rebellion but at my disrespect for my uncle’s possessions and my grandmother’s house. The bleeding from the cut slowed, and I ran more water, splashing it over my shoulders and along the sides of the tub. Holding my thumb over the toilet I dried myself with one hand, then rummaged through the linens until I found a frayed rag. I wrapped it around my thumb, swept the destroyed razor into the garbage and covered it with tissue.

  Nan was in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, fanning herself with her apron. I entered the room slowly, head down.

  She turned to where I stood, seeing first my stricken face and then the blood-soaked rag.

  “Oh, Sister, what have you done?”

  She pushed herself from her chair and pulled me to the sink. When the rag was undone, she let out a sigh of relief: the appendage was still attached. She clicked her tongue at the thumb as though it and not I were responsible for the fear she had felt.

  I began to confess, to tell her how I planned it all. I had lied to her and my parents, then stolen my uncle’s razor, and now it was broken. She held my hand beneath cold water, then dried it gently with her good tea towel. I flinched when she poured half a bottle of iodine into the wound. She studied it thoughtfully, then cut several strips of white tape, which she crossed back and forth across the cut.

  “Will I have to have stitches?” This possibility worried me. I had cut my leg several years before, and I had never forgotten the sting of the numbing needle.

  Nan shook her head; I couldn’t tell if that meant she didn’t know or simply no. She was muttering to herself, louder and louder, building up to something.

  “… should’ve let you do it months ago.” I could tell now that she wasn’t mad at me, but she was still angry. “All this foolishness. Never seen the like.” She began pulling pots from the stove drawer, canned corn and shortening from the cupboard, banging them onto the counter.

  “Mom and Dad will be mad. And Uncle Ronnie.”

  “Don’t you worry about them. This is between you and me. Next time you want to shave your legs, you tell me and I’ll let you use my Lady Norelco.”

  “But I�
�m not supposed to …”

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking.” She set the cast-iron skillet down hard on the burner and lobbed in a big spoonful of Crisco. “Big girl like you, already having her monthly. They should know you need to do these things.”

  Whenever my grandmother talked to me like this, I felt both pleased and sickened. I didn’t like attention being brought to my body and its changes, yet she seemed to understand something my parents did not. As she cut up the chicken and dusted it in flour, I felt my fear subside. I didn’t know what I’d tell my parents or my uncle, but Nan would protect me.

  More and more, I was beginning to sense how different my family was. I watched the commercials on Nan’s television, intrigued by the laughing, nearly naked teenagers running across the beach with their ice-cold Pepsis, and I slowly came to understand that I could be like them if … If what? My parents would never allow me to buy a bikini, much less mingle with boys on a beach while wearing one. But those young men and women seemed so happy, and there was nothing detectably dark in their pleasure. I saw the girls’ long, smooth legs and perfect hair. Was it a sin that I wanted to be like them?

  Compared with the other girls my age, I felt childish and dowdy. Compared with what I saw on TV, my family lived in the Dark Ages. Without the Langs, especially Luke, to validate my adherence to the laws of dress and behavior, I felt isolated. Even my grandmother (my grandmother!) thought us ignorant and old-fashioned.

  I studied my body in the big bathroom mirror, sucked in my stomach and threw my shoulders back to enhance the jut of my breasts. I let my hair fall across one eye and pouted seductively at my own image. Not bad. Digging through Nan’s toiletries I found a cake of Maybelline and a tiny red brush. I moistened the bristles and worked up a suitable goo, which I combed onto my lashes. Up close, the mascara looked “gommed on,” as my mother would say—balled up and flaking—but if I stood back against the wall, my eyes took on a shadowed glamour. I dipped into a compact of oily rouge and rubbed it high on my cheeks, then made a kiss of my lips and circled them in Parisian Red.

  What I saw in the mirror thrilled me: color, contrast, a face that might draw the attention of young men like the ones whose faces adorned my wall. I looked like a ruined woman. Even the sound of it was delicious.

  I studied myself long and hard, memorizing that other I could become with a few strokes of paint, before scrubbing my face raw with hot water and soap. I would keep my twin safe, keep her existence a secret. I dried my skin and caught a reflection of my plain self. The washing had pinkened my cheeks; my lips still held a taint of red.

  • • •

  By the end of the summer we’d moved into our new home. It was not far from downtown and belonged to a retired doctor, who had graciously lowered the rent when my mother offered to do extra upkeep. It was enormous, a white stucco bungalow with a hacienda-style porch and a red tile roof. For the first time in my life, I both heard the word “breakfast nook” and saw one, and it was ours. Off the utility room was a greenhouse with heated growing beds; grapevines covered its roof like ivy.

  The backyard grew thick with exotic ferns and roses. In one corner, beneath the overhanging limbs of a weeping birch, a pond held goldfish the size of large trout. A miniature cement bridge crossed over, and on the other side was my favorite spot: a small patio and bench, surrounded by lush green plants. It was a hiding place, cool and sheltered, and I’d lie on my stomach, watching the carp flash in the dappled light, silver and orange, white and black—a combination of colors I had never imagined in a fish that size.

  We moved our few pieces of furniture into the house, and still our voices echoed off the walls. Above the fireplace, a huge gilt-edged mirror reflected the emptiness. The dining room was sad, I thought, because we didn’t own a real dinette, although there was a certain holiday flair to throwing a colorful sheet across the borrowed redwood picnic table and setting places for the family beneath the sparkling crystal chandelier.

  There was no place for a television. My father thought it better to read, and our faith held that Satan’s influence had manifested itself via the auspices of ABC, NBC and CBS. On any given night one could witness the decay of Christian civilization on Channel 3: uncensored hells and damns, women wantonly exposing their midriffs and cleavage, couples engaged in passionate kissing. And the music! Young people gyrating on the stage of American Bandstand, flailing about as though possessed.

  This is how it would happen, just as it had at Sodom and Gomorrah, just as it had at the fall of Rome: all the sins of the flesh, the drinking and gluttony and adultery, the unnatural couplings, the orgies, the idolatry, everything was coming to pass just as the Bible predicted. Soon, very soon, we believed, Christ would return. Weren’t we already seeing the final preparations, the crime and disregard for God’s law, the wars and famines, earthquakes and persecution of the chosen people?

  We awaited the Rapture, longed for it, prayed for it, several times a day looked to the sky to be the first to see the clouds separate, the golden light shine through, Christ descend with his army of angels. “Please, God,” we prayed, “come now and deliver us from this world of despair, this den of evil, fly us to Heaven to live forever in the light of your love.”

  We were prepared, ready to enter our new bodies, to hear our names called, to receive our rewards. We would leave the nonbelievers behind to face the Tribulation—that time when the Antichrist would make himself known (even now, we believed, he may be alive, biding his time, eating and drinking with mortal ease), when every man, woman and child must be branded or tattooed on the wrist or forehead with 666—the Mark of the Beast. The Seven Seals would be opened, false prophets perform wondrous signs and miracles, and for seven years those yet willing to denounce Satan would be tormented and tortured beyond seeming human endurance. Even the Jews would turn to Christ, and for doing so would incur the greatest outpouring of Satan’s wrath.

  Until that time, true Christians must gird their loins with abstinence from worldly things, lest they too become mesmerized by the profane offerings of Satan bent on increasing his army, determined to take as many as he could with him in his final fall into the fires of hell. Each day presented new trials and temptations—lies to tell, money to covet, bodies to lust after. To be free of all desire was to be free of potential sin.

  Having left Luke’s presence, I thought I might exist in a state blessed by moral continence. I was twelve, and I had no idea what the world might yet lay on the table before me; I never imagined that what might tempt me was not desire for wine or food, money or sex, but desire for something even more insidious: some sense of myself as a girl becoming a woman, coming to age in a landscape empty of anything that might define her worth except as a good daughter and future wife.

  These were my horizons: to remain virtuous, to marry a modest man, to provide him with a clean house and an attractive body, to bear his children and raise them accordingly. To want anything else was an act of selfishness and betrayal of my predetermined role—mutiny, pure and simple. Such women, I was made to understand, those who neglected their husbands and families, who pursued their own interests outside the circle of kin and church, were doomed by their weak nature to be sucked down. You could find them in any bar, hiking their skirts, leaving thick smears of lipstick on their whiskey glasses. If as I came into womanhood I should choose to make such a bed, I would most certainly lie in it eternally damned.

  I settled into my basement room, larger than many of the shacks we had lived in. I lay in bed that first night, gauging the darkness against the city’s sounds skipping closer, then more distant, like the radio shows my father used to tune in, ear to the Zenith’s speaker, catching the music and strange voices that drifted to us in the hollow from up and down the Pacific Coast. But the new sounds seemed even more foreign—sirens, tires screeching, the continual hum of cars on their way to or from destinations I could not imagine.

  I found I couldn’t sleep with the noise and turned on the small tran
sistor radio my cousins had given me for my birthday. The hard-driving beat the church believed incited lust filled the room, and I lowered the volume and listened until the song ended. Then George Harrison was singing “My Sweet Lord.” Beneath the covers I held the music to my ear, hearing the words repeated again and again: I really want to see you, I really want to be with you but it takes so long my Lord …

  I was stunned. Was this worship or sacrilege? George was one of The Beatles and off limits to Christians, but this song seemed different. I remembered playing “Hey Jude” with Luke in the empty church, and I sensed in this song the same kind of spiritual melancholy. But hadn’t one of The Beatles said they were more popular than Jesus? Maybe that had been John. Maybe George didn’t believe it. There was nothing in the song that seemed evil, and George wasn’t screeching like some drug-crazed fiend. But maybe this was part of the world’s seduction: overt evil was easily discernible to the righteous; it was the backdoor variety you had to watch out for, that kind that made you rationalize, made you think you were safe.

  I listened until the announcer broke in with his revving parlance, wishing I could hear the song again. Even though I liked my room and our new house, I felt lonely, a little lost. My parents slept in their room upstairs, and Greg had the room next to mine, but something about the largeness of the house and all the walls and carpet we could not fill or cover left me hollow. The music filled the space around me, and I found it comforting. As I listened, knowing that hours were passing only by what the voice told me, even the more raucous lyrics lost much of their ominousness. I liked the sound of the deejay’s voice and the way he introduced the songs like old friends, as though there was nothing more natural in the world than to be alone in a glass booth, talking to a microphone in the middle of the night.

  In a way, we were alike, he and I, alone in our rooms, conversing with the air. Kevin was his name, and sometimes he asked me questions as though I could answer. “How ya doin tonight? Ready to rock and roll?”