by Kim Barnes
At school I met Patti, a gum-snapping girl with long brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, who even at the age of fourteen seemed absolutely sure of her place in the world. She was everything I wanted to be: smart and tough, afraid of no one. She made her own rules, somehow free of parental constraint. She dreamed of going to San Francisco, and because I knew nothing of her life, I believed she longed not for escape but adventure. When, because of my parents’ growing restraints I could no longer make my own small escapes, we made our plans to meet at the high school track, stay in her apartment, then hitchhike the next morning for California.
I lay in my bed for what I believed would be the last time, remembering all I had heard of Haight-Ashbury and flower children and free love. We could steal to eat if we had to. I’d been told that some girls let men have sex with them for money, and even though I had never made love to a boy in my life, I resigned myself to doing whatever I had to do in order to stay alive. I believed that no matter how foreign the town and its people, I would feel no less lost than I did at that moment, in my house with its waxed floors and scrubbed toilets, my parents in the next room, the walls solid between us.
• • •
It is here, in memory, that I shiver with shame: meeting Patti at the track after school, where we shared a cigarette, leaned against the blue mats piled for the high-jumpers’ safe landing; the two of us alone where the ground dropped and flattened, forming a deep earthen bowl, alone because the wind blew cold and the sky threatened rain. Not this, but the sudden call of my name across the oval field.
I looked up to see my mother against the cloud-darkened horizon, her silhouette even darker, the tails of her coat flapping out like useless wings.
“Kim, please. Come home.” Her voice echoed off the bleachers, ringing back metallic and hollow.
“Oh, shit.” Patti stared at my mother’s form jutting up from the depression’s lip. I could hardly believe she had found us. I slid from the mats and ran for the far fence, Patti a step behind. The distance separating her from us was too great—she would never catch me, I knew, but I felt her breath at my neck, her voice still echoing: “Kim, don’t do this. I love you.”
We scrambled down the hill, bent low behind hedges, weaving our way through the glass-strewn alleys and familiar shortcuts, following the same route we took to reach the slough. The last time I saw my mother that day, she was leaning from the steering wheel across the seat, driving slowly by. She might have seen me, crouched behind two cans rank with moldering garbage, so closely did she pass: through the narrow slot between the cans I could see her eyes, puffed and red. I held my breath against the smell, against the belief that even the air in my lungs might give me away.
“Sweet,” said Patti as the car continued on and disappeared up the road. She lit a Marlboro before passing it to me. I inhaled until my heart seemed to beat outside its bony cage, then pushed the smoke out in a noisy rush.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sweet,” and took the lead, my mother’s words a cadence I marched to—Kim come back I love you Kim—lengthening my strides toward Patti’s apartment.
That night, I lay on a dilapidated brown sofa, feeling with my fingertips the cratered melts of cigarette burns. In the next room, a metal bed thumped rhythmically against the wall. I couldn’t make out Patti’s face in the streetlight’s curtained glow. She lay on her own sunken couch across the room; I knew by her carefully controlled breathing that she was only pretending to sleep.
I tried not to listen to her mother’s guttural moans, the man’s slurred cussing. Each time the thumping stopped, I hoped they had fallen asleep or passed out, but then the springs would let out their rusty, pinched sounds, the man’s coarse voice demand some other thing.
Her mother had come home after Patti and I had packed our single paper bag with the pepperoni sticks and cigarettes we had stolen from the IGA. She brought with her a man who fell heavily against the counter, change in his pockets jangling. I’d listened to them mutter in the dark, then watched their staggering shadows as they dragged the TV into the bedroom, where it sputtered and snapped its bad reception, not loud enough to drown out the clacking of the woman’s rings against the headboard.
I closed my eyes against the noise, breathing through my mouth so as not to smell the beer-damped cigarettes and soured dishrags. Where am I? I thought. What am I doing here? In the dark I could not look to Patti, could not see her wise half-smile and find the courage I needed to feel nothing. Shreds of my old self rose up like half-burnt pages from a fire—images of my own home, my mother running the bleach-whitened dishcloth across the counter, stove, table, humming in her broken way a hymn of sacrifice. I gritted my teeth and focused on morning, when we would catch our ride to California and be gone for good, away from the family and town I believed I despised with every bone in my fourteen-year-old body.
The distance between that filthy apartment in Lewiston and the house in the hollow could be counted in miles, in years, but not in any way that might measure the void separating my life before and my life after our move from the woods. Who was that twelve-year-old girl in long dresses, peering from behind her heavy-framed glasses, her smile true and uncompromised? And the girl on the sofa, still wearing her Levi’s, her sheer blouse, her makeup stolen from the local drugstore—who was she, is she? I cannot connect the two except through the telling of it, and even the story seems foreign, false somehow, memory that is both mine and not mine, as though the girls are simply characters I have invented. I can manipulate them, work their arms and legs like the wooden limbs of marionettes, make them laugh, hate, pray, believe in anything, believe in nothing.
What I cannot do is imagine the girl I was at twelve becoming the girl I was at fourteen. I remember the emotions vividly—at twelve, adolescent confusion tempered by the security of family, a sense of trust, openness, innocence, I guess. By the time I was fourteen, I felt only anger, loathing, a need to escape from the restrictions imposed by my parents and the church. Even now it scares me to understand how easily a soul may pass from one dimension of itself into another, as though the boundaries separating what we are and what we might become, given an infinite set of motivations and conditions, are little more than the line between waking and sleep, between story, memory, dream.
The most frightening thing of all is that each of those girls is still with me, both vulnerable and bitter, believing and hardened against belief. I could become one or the other of them again, I think, and so steel myself to become neither. And if I had to, which would I choose—the near-child about to lose herself to spite and anger? or the near-woman already there, calloused to the pain in her mothers eyes, the grim discipline of her father, the prayers of the church, her own sense of guilt and sure damnation?
That morning, when I awoke in the apartment of my friend, her mother and the man were gone. I maneuvered my way through piles of dirty clothes, past the bed with its crumpled gray sheets and into the tiny bathroom. Ash floated in the toilet water. Hair and wadded Kleenex covered the floor. I gagged against the intimate odors of other bodies.
In the mirror, I saw my own smudged cheeks, my eyes darkened by yesterdays mascara and blue shadow. The face disgusted me. I splashed cold water in the sink, hardening myself, spitting out the metallic taste of last night’s wine. I’m nothing but a whore, I thought. Just like her. But even as I searched for a clean corner of the towel to dry my hands on, I never considered another course. There was comfort in the fatalism of my vision. Like my father, I yearned for my life to be expressed in absolutes. I had made my decision. I could never go back.
Patti and I never made it to California. That morning, as I walked from the apartment’s bathroom, I heard a hard knock. Patti jerked her head and I stepped backward into her mother’s room.
Two women were speaking. I recognized my mother’s voice and whirled to search the room for a place to hide. The single window, swollen from the shower’s mist, wouldn’t budge. If it had, I would have jumped without hesitation to the g
round two stories below. Instead, I crawled into the narrow closet, pulling the door shut behind me. I squatted beneath smoke-scented dresses and scratchy coats, piling shoes and boxes around my legs.
The voices moved toward me. Stop them, Patti, I thought. Jesus, please stop them.
The door swung open. Hands parted the clothes. I peered into the face of my mother and her friend Sally, eight months pregnant. Patti stood chewing her thumbnail like a child. I could run. I could fly past them and out and run and they’d never catch me. I looked at Sally’s bulging belly. This isn’t fair.
“Look at you.” My mother bent slightly toward me. I clutched my knees to my chest, nearly growling. My father appeared behind them, the shadow of his body blocking the light. “Come on, Kim. Let’s go,” he said, and though I had thought I’d make him drag me out, I rose and followed him past Patti and the sagging couches, through the greasy kitchen, down the stairs to the car. He did not look at me nor I at him as I slid into the backseat and rode the few miles home in silence.
There was little I felt then—not fear, or loathing, not a need to escape. I was still in that closet, my knees drawn tight, my chin tucked. It was dark and quiet. If I just sat still and breathed carefully in and out, no one would see me, know I was there. I might even forget myself.
Again, shame. I’m to undress. My mother searches the bends of my knees and elbows for needle tracks. She leaves me, goes to her room, closes the door. My father comes, raises the back of his hand, says through his teeth, “Don’t you ever do this to your mother again.” I stare out the window. I am solid, I feel nothing. I wait for my door to close, then pull back the clean blankets and place my body between the whitest sheets. After a while, pots clatter in the kitchen. The washing machine hums. I sleep for a long time.
The next day, it is explained that I have become impossible. I understand that I have a choice: juvenile detention at St. Anthony, or summer spent living with the Langs outside of Spokane. Tve heard what happens to new girls at the juvenile detention center—rape, broken broomsticks, razors. I choose the Langs. I have not seen them for over a year. I think I can keep my new self safe from them. I think they cannot hurt me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The hills of the Palouse Prairie rose and fell outside my window like the deep swells of an emerald ocean. The land, only twenty miles north of Lewiston, seemed yet another kind of foreign—no trees, no water, only wheat and peas stretching off into the horizon. I leaned my head back against the seat and thought of all I had left behind: Patti, the slough, my hidden stash of makeup. One pack of cigarettes was tucked in my sock. I’d have to ration them carefully, not knowing how or when I’d get money to buy more.
What I’d been allowed to take was little: a suitcase full of clothing, and the blue leather Bible the Langs had given me two years before on my twelfth birthday. Whatever else I might need, the Langs and the Lord would provide.
I closed my eyes and imagined what Luke must look like. Sixteen and taller, maybe different hair but the same eyes and smile. Still, he would be like them, shunning me for my sins. And I didn’t care. They could all rot in hell if they thought a few months were going to change anything.
The hills gave way to forest and I breathed in the familiar pine smell. Post Falls, where the Langs lived, spread out from the banks of the Spokane River, supported by a saw mill. We pulled to a stop in front of a modern split-level, so new the lawn had yet to sprout. I sat sullen until my father opened my door and motioned me out with a sideways nod.
Brother and Sister Lang greeted us with hoots, hugs for the women, hard back-claps between the men. Luke was at work—he had dropped out of school the year before and was doing home correspondence—but the others paid me the same attention they always had, as though nothing had changed. Their honest smiles and teasing coupled with the fact that no one mentioned our reason for being there gave the entire afternoon a feeling of unreality: I could find no opportunity to respond with disdain nor protest some remark critical of me or my friends. They ignored my hunched shoulders and tight-lipped scowl. Sister Lang offered me lemonade and cookies, which I refused. “Good,” she laughed. “More for me, then.”
My parents left that evening, just as the sun slipped its last light through the close branches of tamarack. I shivered a little, hands tucked against my sides. I watched their car find its way up the unpaved road and then onto the highway, where my mother leaned out her window and gave a final wave. I desperately wanted a cigarette and wiggled my foot up and down to feel the sweaty cellophane slide reassuringly between sock and skin. My Levi’s, split and frayed along the leg seams to fit over my hiking boots, hung as low on my hips as I could pull them. The back pockets were patched, an American flag on one hip, a peace symbol on the other. POW bracelet, knotted leather necklace beaded with bones: I must have looked like the enemy. My one concession to modest attire was the bra I wore beneath my knitted midriff shirt; I chafed at the hooks biting my back.
Sister Lang took my arm and I stiffened. “Luke will be home any time. Let’s go make him some supper.” She grinned at me and started us both toward the house. I couldn’t say no.
Sister Lang gave me a knife and set me to peeling potatoes. Sarah hummed while she chopped onions, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her smock. They asked about my school, my friends, the boys I liked. I marveled at the lightness of their questions. Didn’t they know? Hadn’t my parents told them? I shrugged answers—“fine,” “okay”—and focused on the gritty strips of skin dropping into the sink.
When Sister Lang reached her hand to my face I flinched. She ran one finger behind my ear, smoothing back the strand of hair that hung over my eyes.
“After dinner, Sarah can curl your hair.”
I stood frozen, the knife and half-peeled potato in mid-air. Even silent and unsaid, it was a hiss, a vicious whisper: Leave me alone.
While Sarah chatted about Terry’s new job, I drew the blade slowly toward my thumb, wondering if I could hide the knife, secret it away in my sock or pocket. And then what? I couldn’t imagine stabbing or slashing, only the knife between me and whoever tried to get in my way. I’d only run if it got too bad, but I’d need the knife; it seemed important, more a key than a weapon. I could save myself with it, cut my way out or in, open cans like the bums did—one hard stab and twist. I could use it to fashion a pole, then find a string, bend a safety pin into a hook and fish the rivers to stay alive.
Luke’s voice from the door jolted me around. He nodded, dipping his head without moving his eyes from my own.
“Howdy.”
Cold water ran down my wrists and into the sleeves of my shirt. I turned back to the sink, steadying myself against the counter. His voice was deeper, his hands bigger. In his dirty work clothes, holding his thermos and black pail, he looked like a man—like my father and uncles coming home from the woods. Then the image of how I must look to him hit me: a girl standing with the women in the kitchen, scrubbing spuds. I pressed the sharp blade harder against my thumb, not so hard that the skin popped, just enough pressure to feel what was almost pain.
Luke pulled a chair away from the table and began unlacing his boots. I double-rinsed the potatoes, afraid to move from my place. I did not even know what the rest of the house looked like. Where had they put my bag? No matter which way I moved out of the kitchen, I’d have to pass by Luke, now working thick socks from his feet. From the corner of my eye, I could see his fingers move the cotton down his calves and over his ankles. How was it that a man’s feet could be so lovely?
“Done?” Sister Lang took the knife from my hand and pointed it toward the refrigerator. “There’s lettuce to be washed.”
A salad. Carrots to cut, tomatoes and celery. I took her orders, steadied by the chores I’d always despised.
“What’s for dinner?” Luke asked. I kept my head down.
“Steaks, potatoes and gravy,” Sarah answered. “Chocolate cake for dessert.”
He grunted, a small pleased noise. I li
stened as he moved down the hall. A door closed. His belted jeans clicked against the floor, water worked its way through the pipes. I imagined him beneath the hot spray, soaping his back and arms, suds running down his belly.
“Kim. Here.” A bowl hovered in front of me. I’d forgotten the lettuce. Sarah stood grinning and before I thought to glare I felt the heat rise from my hips to my throat and face.
Finally, we settled in at the dinner table, where Luke prayed beside me. “For this and all Thy blessings, we thank Thee. We ask that You also bless Sister Kim, who has joined us here today.”
I opened my eyes. For a moment I was twelve again, just come to the Sunday table. Some forgotten part of me responded to the memory, the easy laughter and affection, and I felt myself slipping back into that naive girl with her hair in tight braids.
No. I hated her. I never again wanted to be that vulnerable, foolish enough to believe in anything or anyone.
The knife was gone. The only weapon I had left was my bitterness, and I took deep breaths, feeling the fist in my chest tighten. It would be a fist, my heart, not an open hand. An open hand took what it was given. An open hand could be burned, branded. A fist took nothing—it kept its secrets.
I was wrong. I can’t survive here, I thought. These people will try to kill my soul and call it salvation.
In God one finds love, absolute and unconditional, but not infinite. We believed that the gates of Heaven could be closed against a hardened heart—a “seared conscience”—and never be opened again, no matter how sincere the penance. Having no context for my sin, I could believe only that I had fired my soul in the worldly kiln to an impenetrable and lacquered armor. Even if I had wanted to regain my Father’s house, I would find no ingress, no welcome.
