In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  Shame filled me, a hot and sickening infusion. What had I done to these people, the ones who really loved me? Nothing in memory seemed enough to have warranted my hostile behavior. I looked back on that other girl and shivered with disgust. That girl was no longer me.

  As we cleared the dishes my mother turned to me. “You know we cannot trust you yet. Only time will take care of that.”

  I nodded in agreement and understanding. Of course. Why should they trust me? I had hurt them deeply, had nearly destroyed my family. I too would need time, enough to make clear to them how deeply that other daughter lay dead.

  I was grounded, although it was not called such. Just as at the Langs’, I could not leave the house without a chaperone, kept inside as though even the air might contaminate my fragile resolve. I read the Bible and prayed. I made up songs of grace and salvation on the piano. I attended church with my family four times a week and felt the eyes of the elders upon me.

  Confession through testimony let me speak of my worldly experiences with the freedom of a voyager. Even as my mother and father listened to their teenage daughter describe the shame and degradation of her past, their eyes held the pride I remembered from before, when I was young, in that other life.

  When asked to testify, I did so, but what the people wanted most to hear, I soon realized, was not just the part where I was reborn, but rather the part that they knew must have come before. They wanted to hear the horrors of drugs and sex: the story of loneliness and loss that was mine was not enough.

  I had never shot heroin, had never found myself in the middle of an orgy. Never had I prayed to Satan or cast the bones of cats in the light of a black candle. I sensed their disappointment, and even I felt cheated. Marijuana seemed trivial in comparison, the Annie Green Springs I’d drunk after school little more than lemonade. Why hadn’t more happened so that I could offer up even greater proof of my miraculous conversion?

  The story I told became something outside of myself, something that had happened to that other girl. If my parents remembered what I had told them on the way home from the Langs’, they never said, and without the reaffirmation of words to keep it alive, the summer became first an emptiness, a dark pause, and then the before and after of the story expanded until finally there was nothing left of that time in between to tell.

  As I attempt to glean the telling moments of decision and awareness from the next four years of my life, from the time I entered ninth grade until I graduated with honors in 1976, I understand how difficult becomes the task of facing my own vulnerabilities and fears, resentments and regrets. And in seeing this I see also my inability to view even in retrospect that teenage girl as anyone innocent or without guile. Does some part of me still abide by that doctrine which insists that the child becomes responsible for the fate of her soul at the age of twelve?

  Church filled every nook of my life. Instead of going to dances and movies, our youth group held dinners, put on skits, passed out tracts each Saturday and participated in church conferences all over the state. When revival came, I attended service each night. At camp meetings I searched out those my age who sat at the back, rigid with rebellion. I told them I knew what they were feeling, told them of my own dark times.

  Among those followers of God who believed they saw the path my life must take was a quiet man who came to lead revival when I was sixteen. He was a stern but gentle speaker, not given to raucous condemnations or physical outbursts of praise. His dark suit and studied demeanor made him look more like a doctor than a preacher.

  There was one night I had felt burdened, beset by some melancholy I could not name. I had made my way to the altar and begun my prayers when he stopped in front of me and raised my chin.

  “Daughter,” he said. “God is with you.” I nodded, and he continued. “You have a special calling. It is very strong. You will teach many.”

  He moved his hand from my chin to my head. The gentleness of his touch made me want to cry. “Pray with me, sister,” he said, and I did, tilting my head back so he could cup it fully, feeling the balance of our weight between us. He spoke quietly, and the prayer he offered felt intimate, something only the two of us and our god need know.

  “Dear Jesus, our sister stands before You to ask Your guidance in her life. We thank Thee, Lord, for the gift You have given, for the special ministry she will undertake. We pray she be given the faith and strength to accept Your will. In God’s name we pray. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I whispered, once again feeling my life held out to me as though it were a rare and precious thing. Healer, leader—a child who carried with her the promise of miracles. I felt drained, unable to walk from that room into a life not of my own making. My path was clear, my choices clearer: I could hear and obey, I could turn away and lose not only my own soul, but the soul of all those I might have saved.

  But this was at a time when I considered myself incapable of choice. The exhaustion I felt I believed stemmed from a spirit made meek in the face of its Creator. I knelt at the carpeted altar, crying, praying until I lay prone in front of the preacher, who would not leave me until my spirit’s thirst had been quenched.

  It is often like this for those possessed of the Spirit: hours of speaking in tongues, singing and dancing, until finally your head lolls, your legs buckle. Later, you find yourself on the floor, arms still raised, covered by coats and prayer cloths. You feel the sweetness of surrender. You feel taken, ravaged by the very air—every breath, every pore, every part of your being a gift, perfectly composed and consumed.

  When school started in the fall of my ninth-grade year, my mother drove me across town each morning so that I wouldn’t have to attend my old junior high, where Patti and my other one-time friends still gathered at the corner to smoke. I was relieved not to have to deal with their scorn and pity. My new school had a reputation for being “clean,” populated with students more interested in football and cheerleading than mescaline and Janis Joplin. My new classmates had already heard of me, of my past and my sudden transformation. I was surprised to discover they thought I was a narc, a teenage undercover agent who had bartered her way out of juvenile detention by selling her soul to them—the priggish parents who saw pushers on every corner, the principal, the pigs.

  The distinction seemed of dubious credit, but I was secretly pleased to hear that my past reputation had preceded me. I had no desire, however, to be mistaken for a narc. Whether left over from my old self or ingrained in me by the code of family, one of the worst breeches of integrity anyone could make was to squeal, to rat, to be a toady. I went out of my way to assure the “rinks”—the dope smokers and neophyte hippies—that I was cool and would hold their confidence. My newfound jock friends were uneasy with my crossing over the clique lines, but they were aware that I had a mission: to recruit souls for Christ.

  I invited my schoolmates to attend our youth meetings, led by a young minister and his wife who had about them an intriguing California aura. Reverend Dave, our youth pastor, wore his hair a little too long, the elders felt, and he had a way of moving his shoulders and head while playing his guitar that made them nervous. His wife had a heavy hand with the mascara wand, the women whispered—a bit too much glitter. Still, all this might be forgiven in the face of the fact that more and more teenagers were being drawn to the church.

  “Jesus freaks!” the heathens shouted at us as they drove by, music blaring. We ignored them, joining hands in the park and praying beneath the limbs of gnarled elms, secure in our sacred circle, calmed by our combined voices. I wasn’t alone anymore. Many of the popular kids from my school had heeded the call from the altar and joined me in the ranks of the born again. Bonnie was saved now, and Candy, Brent and Joe.

  Together with Pastor Dave we started a call-in radio show, broadcast live from the studio of KRLC, the same station I had listened to all those long nights when my world was unraveling. We held the night spot from ten to eleven, catching the young crowd still tuned in by surprise. Between cuts of Chr
istian rock (a new designation not all our congregation was comfortable with), we testified to the joy and love Christ had brought into our lives. When it was my turn at the mike, I spoke of my past.

  “I know that there are those of you out there who are thinking, ‘I’m so alone, I’m so scared.’ You don’t need to be scared. You don’t need to be alone. You won’t find comfort in drugs or alcohol. I’ve been there. I know. Christ is the only answer. Ask Him into your heart tonight. I’ll pray with you.”

  Everyone in the booth would bow their heads; even the disc jockey, looking bored and a little incredulous, would lower his eyes.

  “Dear Lord, You see into the hearts of everyone. You can see, even if I can’t, the lost souls listening tonight. They need You, Jesus. Touch them, Lord. Let them feel You come into their hearts. Let them know the joy of surrender, the joy of knowing You as their Savior. Let them be born again.”

  As I prayed, Pastor Dave and the others joining in with their own urgings toward salvation, I marveled at how far I had come. To every thing there is a season, I thought. Only God could know the reason.

  Pastor Dave believed that if you were going to take away the activities of the world, you had to fill the void with more righteous choices. Instead of going to the school proms, we had banquets catered by the church matrons. We attended dressed to the nines—long gowns and stylish tuxedos, hideously large corsages and miniature boutonnieres. We did everything we could to mimic the ways of our unsaved peers without compromising the state of our souls.

  In the keepsake photographs taken by our own Christian cameraman, we look scrubbed and virginal, happy in our abstinence. But every time I hear a zealous politician or clergyman declaring the church a protector of chastity, I remember the common aftermath of any teenage social function I attended, whether blessed or unholy: a mad scramble in the backseats of the fathers’ Buicks or behind the church or in the closet where the choir robes hung down like a hundred satin wings. Even on the chaperoned bus trips to one Christian youth conference or another, straws were drawn to see who got first shot at the back, where lovers might pass their allotted ten minutes in seclusion behind the carefully draped garment bags and coats. The one difference between the manifestations of the hormonal ragings of those damned and those saved may be this: how deeply the afterglow is tinged with guilt.

  What part of our trysting the attendant adults were privy to was met with punishment. For sneaking out of the girls’ dorm and knocking on the boys’ windows, we were made to spend the night not in our bunkbeds but on the cold seats of the bus, shivering without blankets or pillows. And then there was the “hot seat,” a wired metal stool the offender had to sit on to receive her “jolt” of discipline.

  I sometimes regret those years in the church, filled with guilt and perhaps even abuse, yet given the choices in my own life, even considering the summer with the Langs, I feel lucky to have escaped the chasm that so many of my junior high school friends eventually fell into. The last time I saw Maria, the girl whose filthy upstairs bedroom seemed such a haven from the prison I believed my life had become, she was working as a carhop. I did not recognize her, but she did me. Her front teeth were gone, and one side of her face was grotesquely swollen. “The old man,” she said, shaking her head, dragging from her cigarette a final, sideways puff.

  I never saw nor heard of Patti again but cannot imagine her life took any uphill turn. Of the others I was closest to, the ones with whom I chased the bums and smoked dope after school, the majority are dead, imprisoned or living with abuse. Larry died in the river, Dennis in a car wreck. The night Les and I were caught coming home from the party and made to lead our separate lives, those who had dropped us off robbed the corner store at gunpoint and were caught the next day. Most were sent to do time in juvenile detention, and I might easily have been one of them. I wonder if I could have faced the old storekeeper and his silver-haired wife, who had been so kind to me in the days when all I wanted from them was a few pieces of penny candy.

  • • •

  My father continued his night work, and my memories of him during those years are few. Only on Sundays did he seem part of the family. Other times, when my mother insisted that we ask for his approval of our activities, my brother and I waited for that window of opportunity to present itself: in the evening, when he rose from his bed and made his way to his chair, where, before leaving for the truck yard, he sat with his Bible and the plate of food my mother offered.

  I seldom asked for privileges that might not be granted and knew well the boundaries of what events were considered acceptable. If I did question his decision, the reaction was immediate: there need be no reason but his word, and that word was no. I risked punishment if I opened my mouth again. I held my tongue but felt the resistance in me rise. In my room I would reach for my Bible and find the marked passage, Colossians 3:20: “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.” I closed my eyes and let the words settle into an intonation that separated me from the room, the house, the man in his chair whom I feared far too greatly to remind of the verse which followed: “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.” I could hardly allow myself to contemplate its directive, for to challenge my fathers knowledge of the Scripture, or to question his adherence to its dictates, would surely bring on his wrath.

  My mother continued to rise before the rest of us, preparing our breakfast, packing our lunches, cleaning and ironing until she left for her shift at the grocery store. The cycle continued when she arrived home, when she fixed our meals and tended to the needs of her family.

  Just as I had watched Sister Lang and Sarah, I now watched my mother, her seemingly perfect submissiveness, her quiet determination to keep peace and harmony between us. But I also wondered what secrets my mother hid, what stories she carried as deeply as I carried my own. She never complained about her life, never spoke of her own desires or emotions—she seemed to have no passion or need, no past or present of her own. I came to believe what she projected. I believed she needed nothing but her home, her family and her god, and something in me loathed her for it.

  Eating the biscuits and gravy, roast and potatoes, fried chicken, eating from the cleanest dishes, sitting in the room filled with the food smells of my mother’s cooking, I turned my back to her and ate what she gave. What I realize now is that what I wanted from her was not food or even harmony but a story, a narrative to give meaning to her life and mine. I needed my mother to tell me how to find happiness in submission, how to content myself with giving and serving and silence. If I could only find the secret—and surely she possessed such a secret—perhaps I too could be satisfied and happy.

  I think back to my eighth-grade year, to that time just after I had run away from home. I had returned to school a hero, except to one girl, Lisa, who looked so much like me that the police had picked her up, thinking her the truant. In fact, she was skipping school but might have gone undetected had it not been for the bulletin put out on my account. It was my fault the cops had taken her in, my fault her father had whipped her.

  She’d waited for me after school, and by the time I reached the corner where she and her friends gathered, I knew her intent. “She wants to beat you up,” they whispered excitedly. “She wants to whip your ass.”

  I had no intention of having it out with Lisa, providing the leering crowd with a “cat fight.” I crossed the street and kept on walking, only to have her follow me, throwing rocks at my back. Finally, I stopped and turned.

  “I don’t want to fight, Lisa.”

  “Chicken! Bitch!” The sides had been drawn, and I found myself being pushed toward her by the group at my back. Her supporters formed a wedge, and then we were a foot apart, circled by a loud and eager audience.

  I was already in enough trouble. I didn’t need to be hauled into the principal’s office for this. I opened my mouth to say so, and she hit me. I staggered back. Arms caught me and stood me straight. I touche
d my lip and found blood.

  There was something about seeing my hand glistening red that acted like a firing pin, sending me at the girl. I knocked her to the ground, pummeling her gut, twisting her hair in one hand to get at her face. By the time they pulled me off her, she was bleeding and retching onto the sidewalk. I wanted to kill her, and for years afterward the one confession I could always count on was my continuing desire to do so. I felt wild, unleashed, unable to control what had risen in me and exploded into fury. I jerked away from my friends, leaving them stunned and shuffling—half-ashamed at what they had seen—and walked home alone.

  I hadn’t tried to hide my swollen lip and bloodstained face from my mother, who stood at the sink, scraping carrots.

  “What in the world! What happened to you?”

  I shook my head and sat down at the table. While she dabbed at my mouth, I explained, for once feeling no need to lie. What had I done to provoke this? Hadn’t I tried to avoid the fight? In her eyes I saw sympathy and anger. It was the most intimacy I had felt with my mother since I was a child.

  When our eyes met, she pulled away. “You smell like an ashtray,” she said, regaining her composure, drifting back into her controlled and authoritarian self. I shrugged. She knew I smoked. She smeared a bit of Vaseline on my cut, then resumed her place at the sink. There was a heaviness in her movement, a hint that something was working inside her, and I waited to see what would come of it. She ran her rag around the edge of a plate. “It’s my fault, you know.”

  “What’s your fault? The fight?”

  “No, your smoking. God’s punishing me through you.”

  What was she talking about? I knew she had smoked before, during those years in the camps. But why would God punish her now?

  “But you quit smoking.”

  “No, I just told everybody I did. I lied.”