In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was embarrassed having led him on. I deserved his ridicule.

  “You know what you are? You’re a prick-tease, that’s all.” He hit the wall with his fist, a loud crack that drew silence from the rec room.

  I wanted Les to be there with me, to tell me what to do, how to do it. Mike scuffed at the rug with his boot, huffing and cursing Geoff for having dragged him along, and for what? His noise brought the others into the room, Geoff sweaty and ruffled, Les as casual and composed as a diva.

  “What’s up?” she asked, already knowing her country cousin had screwed up a perfectly good time.

  “She’s a fucking prude.” Mike grabbed his jacket and stepped out of the window, leaned back in long enough to say, “I’m leaving,” then took off down the road, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots echoing like gunfire.

  Geoff glared. Les sidled to the couch, slid down next to me. “Mike’s a dick,” she said, yawning.

  I looked at Geoff, standing in the middle of the room, senseless as a toad, stunned with disbelief that he had been pulled back from the brink of having it all by some hick girl who didn’t know her shit from shinola. Les stared at him for a moment, blinked slowly. He’d been dismissed.

  It would take me years to realize what Les already knew: the trick is not in making them think you don’t care; the trick is in truly not caring. Exquisite disinterest drew a boy like a peacock to its mirrored reflection. Geoff would be there the next time she needed diversion, ignobly and perpetually hopeful, and I would work on perfecting my own emotional veneer; but the truth is, it’s no trick, and this, too, I would learn: the shell you build, one layer at a time, is real. No one gets in, and you may never get out.

  Family visitations allowed me long periods of time to spend with my cousin. When we couldn’t scrape together or steal the change we needed to buy cigarettes, we snitched whole packs from our fathers’ cartons, the daring it took to encroach on such territory thrilling us to the bones, outweighing the severe punishment such an act might bring. We slept in each other’s beds, whispering late into the night our secret desires: to make love to a certain boy, to run away, to be on our own until we died, and to die young because we could not imagine growing old and dull.

  We parted our hair down the middle and tucked it behind our ears in imitation of the girls we saw on TV. Perhaps because my family felt they must make some, hopefully harmless, concession to my desires, they allowed me to don jeans, and I wore my Levi 501’s pulled low on my hips. Les snuck me makeup and taught me how to blow smoke through my nose. I was happy, lying in her bed long past midnight, listening to Norman Greenbaum sing “Spirit in the Sky”: Never been a sinner, never sinned, I’ve got a friend in Jesus—I sang along, calloused to whatever blasphemous implications might have once made their impressions on me. I no longer believed myself saved. Whatever heaven existed was right here, lying awake next to my cousin, watching smoke rise in concentric hoops toward the ceiling. If I were doomed, then so be it. I could not live the life asked of me because it was hell. What difference did it make?

  When Les spent nights with me, in my house near the town’s center, we feigned unbelievable exhaustion in order to huddle together on my bed with the radio turned down low, closing our eyes to the luminescent glow of my black light and the images sprouting from velvet: a brilliant orange and yellow peace sign; a woman with butterfly eyes and blue seaweed hair. We mouthed the words to “American Pie,” deep into gut-felt appreciation of the obscure lyrics—Helter skelter in the summer swelter—bringing ourselves to tears of pity with the drawn-out refrain—singin’ this’ll be the day that I die. The song became our incantation, seizing us with its bittersweet nostalgia for a past we were too young to remember.

  Above my bed hung a poster of some inane early seventies icon—I forget exactly what or who now—but when my father had left for his nighttime work and my mothers incessant footsteps finally fell silent, we’d pull the tacks from the poster’s corners and flip it over: there, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper rode their one remaining Harley, gloriously doomed, flipping off the world in perpetuity.

  We’d bide our time, share a cigarette in the closet, then, when we believed that everyone else in the city slept but us, we’d pull ourselves from my bedroom window and run through the alleys as far as we could until we collapsed, breathless and laughing. Sometimes we made our way to Imperial Bowl, where the few customers left were more interested in their beer than their score and no one bothered to question our presence. Other nights we sat with our backs against a Dumpster, content to shiver in the cool air and smoke, free until the birds began their singing and the horizon colored.

  We had other friends who found no need to skulk and hide, and their lives were a constant source of amazement and envy to us. One night we sneaked out and made our way across town to the house of Rick, a boy our age with golden hair that hung in a thick shock across his forehead, a boy who walked with his thumbs in his pockets, never deigning to remove the cigarette from his mouth, clinching it between his teeth with a sideways grin, a boy we both hoped to kiss, though I knew Les would have the better chance.

  We tossed a handful of pebbles at his window, then scurried behind the rosebushes. He stepped onto the porch of the towering split-level (his parents had money) and waited. “Rick,” we hissed. “Over here.”

  “What are you guys doing?” He stood silhouetted by the light escaping from inside. I pulled him down to us.

  “Wanna go run around?” He was our age, maybe fourteen, but the smile that spread across his face showed nothing of the lure of truancy.

  “Why don’t you guys come in?”

  I looked toward the door. “Aren’t your parents home?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So? What do you mean, so?”

  “They like to meet my friends.”

  Les and I looked at each other. This was beyond our imagination. What if they called our parents? What if they called the cops?

  Instead they welcomed us with hot chocolate and little tuna sandwiches on brown bread cut into rectangles, stuck through with blue toothpicks. Rick’s red-haired mother lounged with her drink on the rec room sofa, her sculptured feet drawn up bare beneath a brightly flowered caftan like the ones I’d seen on the Gabor sisters (my grandmother’s Hungarian ideals—such lovely skin! such finely boned faces!).

  The father settled into his chair, crossed his legs and smiled. “So—is it Kim? Kim, how’s school going this year?”

  I shot a look at Rick, who sat on the sofa next to his mother, leaned toward her as though the few inches separating them were too great a distance to be endured. “Fine,” I answered, then bit into my sandwich. There was something besides mayo and pickles in the tuna—green olives, I decided, worrying the wad of bread across my tongue—pimento, and worst of all, onions. My mother never put onions in tuna. My father hated onions and pepper, odd ingredients of any kind. He tolerated one spice—salt and lots of it. My brother and I had grown up knowing only white: Wonder Bread, mayonnaise instead of mustard, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, white toast dunked in white-sugared oatmeal. I swallowed twice, trying to work the mouthful down my throat without chewing.

  Les reached for another sandwich, holding it between her first finger and thumb. She looked like a lady having tea with her matron friends. I watched in admiration as she bit and chewed, bit and chewed, never minding the grit of onion. Her mother made things like goulash and enchiladas. She was used to this stuff.

  “And Les, are you a classmate of Rick’s?”

  “No, sir. I go to Tammany.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin and added, “It’s an okay school, small enough to give the kids lots of time with the teachers.”

  What in the hell was she talking about? She hated Tammany, called it a pissy little place. The father nodded, pleased with her mature evaluation. He offered her another sandwich, which she demurely declined.

  The chat continued between Les and the parents
as though they were country club pals. I couldn’t believe it. Not a word was said about the inappropriateness of the hour or why we found it necessary to throw rocks at their son’s window. They beamed their pride upon him and seemed to miraculously approve of us, and what I realize now is that they were both stone drunk.

  I felt like I had that night beneath the blinding lights of the football field—as though I had stumbled into another dimension. When it became clear to us that we were not going to entice Rick into the streets, we wiped our fingers on the little napkins, said our thanks and were ushered to the door by Rick’s father, who waved to us as we darted down the alley. “You girls come back and visit us again anytime,” he called, his words echoing off the darkened houses.

  We found our way back home and had just crawled through my bedroom window when we heard the sound of my mother’s footsteps at the stairs. By the time she eased open the door, we were buried to our necks in blankets, working with all our might to breathe in sleeplike fashion. I felt her gaze cover us, and then she was gone.

  I wasn’t sure what I would do about the mud clinging to our shoes, smearing the sheets, but the near miss sent us into spasms of laughter. We hadn’t gotten what we wanted from Rick—something more daring than canapés with his parents—but there was nothing we couldn’t get away with. There would be other nights, and when we parted the next day we grinned with our secret and the promise of adventures ahead.

  I think we craved destruction. Even with the awareness I have now of repression and its common, reactionary results, I’m not altogether sure what drove us to challenge our place in family, church and community. Rebellion is natural enough, as is the desire to establish independence, a sense of individuality. But that does not explain for me why my cousin and I embarked on such a dangerous journey. We drank ourselves into stupors—barely thirteen and wise to the ways of Annie Green Springs and Mad Dog 20/20. We craved nicotine with the earnestness of our fathers. One night my mother caught me in bed, puffing the last inch of an old Marlboro. Before she could switch on the light, I foolishly cupped the cigarette and stuck my hand beneath the covers. When she threw back the blankets and pried open my fingers, the fire had burned a black pit in my palm. “Well, Kim,” she said, looking at me with disgust. “Is it that bad?”

  Yes, I thought, it’s that bad, and wallowed in the truth of it. I floated through my school days on bad marijuana highs, taking my paddlings with the nonchalance of a full-grown boy whenever the principal found me smoking in the bathroom. And even though I was whipped and grounded for my actions, I did not stop.

  Les and I believed that as long as we had each other, we could endure—certainly we told each other so. Then one night when Les was spending the weekend we took too great a risk. We had a friend call, say she was baby-sitting and sick, and ask if we could take her place.

  My mother smelled a rat. “Why doesn’t she just call the parents?” She eyed us skeptically, sounding our depths for truth.

  “She tried. She can’t reach them. She’s throwing up and everything. The baby keeps waking up and crying and she’s too sick to rock him.”

  I’d pushed the right button. My mother could endure a number of things, but the thought of a baby squalling pathetically in its lonely crib was enough to sway her judgment.

  She dropped us off at the house, where our friend peered from behind the drapes, hoping she wouldn’t have to look ill should my mother appear at the door. By some luck, we were left to wave good-bye at the doorstep. We stayed long enough to drink a Coke, called all the kids we could think of who might know where we could find a party and took off into the night, leaving our envious friend to her fifty cents an hour.

  The party was in a boxy apartment only blocks from my house, and the proximity made me nervous. Once in, my fears were obliterated by Jimi Hendrix riding the rails of his high-pitched guitar and the cloying smell of hashish. An American flag hung from the ceiling by its four corners, covering a single bare bulb.

  I recognized some of the high school boys who often gave us rides home in their Cougars and Mustangs and Javelins with baby moon hubcaps. One presented us with a couple of Coors, then directed us to a bed where bodies were piled and writhing in various states of undress.

  I sucked at the beer to quell the tremor of nervousness that threatened to rise and make me stupid. Wasn’t this exactly what I wanted? I felt the hands of the boy next to me—Jerry?—pull at the band of my jeans, then slide my shirt upward. I looked for Les and saw her pinned against the wall, holding the lit end of a cigarette between herself and whomever it was grinding his hips against hers.

  Jerry had worked his fingers beneath my bra but I felt nothing. Maybe it was the beer, or the densely rolled joints that kept making their way around. I pushed away from the bed, ignoring Jerry’s slurred protests. I needed to get outside, to see the stars and get my bearings.

  Les broke loose and followed me. We leaned against a hot-orange GTO and drank the rest of our beer, then the extras she had grabbed on her way out. There was little to say: we had made it to where we wanted to be, and maybe that was enough. We had only a few hours until my mother would expect us home from our baby-sitting. How could we make the best of it?

  Our answer came from inside the car. A young man I recognized as a high school senior raised up from the seat and smoothed his mop of red hair. Evidently, he too had needed some air.

  “Hey,” he said. “Wanna go for a ride?” We scooted into the front seat, but before we could get away half the party had decided to go along. I found myself wedged onto the lap of yet another older boy, and then we were speeding down the street, fishtailing around corners, headed for the Gut.

  The Gut is what we cruised, a mile or two of Main Street that made a circular track through town. I held my breath as we hit the lights red, doing sixty past the admiring eyes of others who sat on the hoods of their own cars in the empty lots. I’d be chicken if I screamed, and truth is I never felt the urge. Nothing seemed to scare me anymore—not speeding down the road through intersections nor the nearness of death such recklessness whispered; not the church and its damnation; not the grounding or the belt raised over me for my worst sins. At least I am free, I thought as the wind whipped in through the open windows and carried the smoke away. At least I am free.

  But I was not free. When Les and I staggered home that night, sodden with spilled beer and stinking, my mother was waiting. She took one look and without a word pointed her finger toward my room. We fell onto my bed, holding to each other not out of fear but because the room was spinning. I was too drunk to wonder what my mothers thoughts were as she shuffled in her robe from one room to the other, waiting for my father to come home.

  I have no doubt that Les feared her father even more than I did mine, so that when my parents the next day told her she must confess or they would call and tell the tale for her, she broke into sobs. I watched her from my window after her mother had come for her, and I felt I wanted to make some rescue, make a break for it and pull her away as I flew by. But what wings did I have? I was too young to drive. I didn’t even have a bicycle. Only my legs could carry me, and looking across the expanse of familiar yards and alleys, I knew my chances in broad daylight were slim.

  My father called me into the kitchen. I glared my disgust at him. I set my lips against my teeth and stared out the window behind his head, waiting to be ordered to my room and await my whipping. But they had another plan, one they believed might hurt me even more: Les and I would no longer be allowed to see each other.

  I was stunned. How could they deny me my cousin? Did they really think they could keep us apart? I fretted over Les’s situation: her family lived on the outskirts of town, on a small ranch. How would I know what her punishment had been? We could stand anything as long as we could make a story of it, as long as we could shape it for the ears of the other and control its end. I imagined her going about her chores, bringing in the firewood, doing the dishes, graining the big stallion named Smokey her f
ather had bought for her when she asked for a horse. God, I thought, let her be okay.

  Several weeks later, I was handed an envelope. It was a letter from Les. She had the oversized handwriting of a child, and the few words she sent filled the entire page of ruled notebook paper: She was fine. Her horse had cut his fetlock on barbed wire. That was all. I tried to read between the lines, to gain some sense of her daily life. Was she under the same restrictions I was, barred from using the phone, unable to leave the house except under supervision?

  Perhaps my parents knew that given the opportunity I would bolt like a branded calf from the chute. What punishment was left to them? They had whipped me, placed me under virtual house arrest. I no longer feared their anger or their limited power to inflict pain.

  Together, Les and I had formed an inner circle of companionship based on kin and something else—our desire to escape our fathers. We longed to be orphans, free to make our own decisions, free to die if we chose, or survive by whatever means available. And isn’t that what we were doing—making the only choice remaining to us? We could obey and survive. We could utter the simple word no and be whipped, locked in, denied our meals. Or we could run. I bided my time, comforted by the music I believed might save me, the loud and constant beat drowning out the self-loathing I felt no matter which part of my soul I listened to.

  By the time I was fourteen, my mother and father hardly recognized me. My grades dropped from A’s to F’s and I was labeled a truant. The child with whom they had shared their bed and its warmth, the girl they had dedicated to God, who had spoken in tongues and healed the sick, who had emerged from the waters reborn, now slouched past them, hissing out answers to their questions. When my father caught me in a lie, he whipped me, but I was stronger now and did not cry. I met his eyes, in my own the glint I hoped he knew meant you cannot hurt me, you cannot touch any part of me.