Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  THE FALL OF MY FRESHMAN YEAR in high school, I came to believe that what held my greatest allegiance was not my family or my church but Tom, a thin, fair-haired boy who had begun his courtship while holding my hand during prayer, so that, even now, when I remember my voice rising in praise that early September, I feel the tingle of something new about to happen, something sparking, traveling my knuckles, settling light and electric beneath my breastbone.

  He was the son of a deacon, a good boy a year older than I was who didn’t smoke or drink or cuss, who, like me, wore glasses and spent too much time reading. We began sitting together during Sunday school, walking hand in hand from the foyer. Hand-holding in and of itself was not a sin, but, we’d been warned, it could lead to disastrous things. (I still have several of the “hand-holding sticks” various young suitors carved for me at church camp, abiding by the rules set by our elders: the boy could hold one end, the girl the other, and in this way their flesh would not be tempted toward further engagement.)

  Our parents were friends, and so there were afternoons when we were able to gaze at each other with great longing across the dinner table, and I began to believe that I might not survive more than a few hours away from Tom. My father, I knew, was watching me carefully: my overt preoccupation with a boy was new territory for both of us.

  Could I go with Tom for a Coke after choir practice? Yes, my father said, as long as I returned home by the designated hour. Sundays after church, Tom took me to the gravel pit just south of Lewiston, where we fired round after round from his .22 revolver. The further I stood from the target, the more shots I placed in the tightest space, the more he praised me. He taught me to load and unload, sight in, compensate for distance and trajectory. He bought a .357, and I learned to allow for greater recoil, the concussion through my wrists and shoulders.

  Those long afternoons alone with Tom, hidden from the road by a cirque of basalt, gave me my first taste of true freedom. The reflected warmth of the rock, the heavy gun in my hands, Tom’s soft words of direction and praise, the red-tailed hawks winging lazy loops overhead—I felt both independent and protected, stronger, and strangely new.

  Tom lived in a large house with his parents and numerous siblings. As long as there were adults on the premises, my father said, I could go there, and I soon became a fixture at Tom’s dinner table, happy to be part of his raucous family, in rooms that seemed vibrant with television and music—less silent, less rigid than my own somber home. Tom and I spent hours listening to the rock-and-roll albums I was not allowed to possess, mesmerized by the flashing colored lights he had wired to his speakers. We talked of things that, aboveground, were taboo—the rumors and stories that fascinated us: the symbolism of Paul’s barefooted march across the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover; the eery accurateness of my cousin’s Ouija board; the article I had read about epileptic seizures bringing on visions. Though neither of us suffered from the disorder, we wondered if Tom’s chronic migraines might not serve to bring on an otherworldly aura, transport him to another plane.

  It might have been there, in his bedroom, or perhaps in the cold interior of his car, or even in the alley behind the church, that we began to feel our virginal resolve weaken. It was a sin to move beyond the feverish kissing that kept us occupied for long minutes in the parking lot’s dark corner while our parents chatted after evening service. Tom’s hand would find my breast, I would murmur that he mustn’t, and then he would profess to great misery and guilt, and we would both pray for strength and forgiveness. I don’t remember at what point the prayers quit working. I know that we were very young and very determined to save ourselves for marriage and that there came a moment when none of this was enough to smother the fire we had kindled in each other’s body. We agonized at first, and then we didn’t but simply began to allow ourselves the pleasure of consummation.

  We rationalized and reasoned: we were in love; we would be married the moment I turned eighteen, if not before. We imagined illicit escapes and elopements. Tom gave me a thin gold ring in which a single diamond chip was embedded, a promise that we would soon be engaged. When I showed it to my mother, she shook her head, said it was too much, too soon.

  “But you were married when you were sixteen,” I argued. “Why should it be any different for me?”

  “It just is, Kim. I didn’t know any better.”

  This meant nothing to me. All I saw was hypocrisy, unjust criticism, and restriction. My father said only one thing: I must give the ring back. I could not imagine such infidelity, and so I hid the ring in my pockets and purse, slipped it on my finger the moment I left my parents’ field of vision. I believed that nothing they could do would be punishment enough to separate me from Tom. He was the one with whom I could share every part of myself, the intimate who knew me better than any mother, father, or friend. We spent hours whispering our secrets, feeding ourselves to each other in bits and pieces, until we seemed less two people than a single, unified self. I was besotted by the intensity of Tom’s attention, the way he kissed me, took my breath into his lungs, touched each hidden part of me. How could we not call this love?

  It must have been apparent to everyone that what we were about was no longer simple infatuation but something bordering on obsession. My father’s growing disapproval of the time we spent together only strengthened my resolve to remain loyal to my lover. Soon there was little I would not do to gain a few more minutes with Tom. We wove elaborate plans to meet, skipping school, dodging teachers, urging our friends to cover for us should our parents discover that we’d sneaked from the back pew during the minister’s long-winded sermon. At one point Tom and another young man from the church consolidated their savings—enough to pay for one month’s rent of an airless apartment beneath the eaves of a crumbling Victorian mansion—a place of privacy, where we could lie together and love without interruption.

  The other boy and his girlfriend reserved the even days, Tom and I the odd. Tom presented the key to me as a gift, pleased with himself for daring such adult maneuvers. I was amazed and frightened by such risk. What if my father were to find out? How could I ever explain?

  Tom interpreted my hesitation as an insult. He’d worked hard for the money, taken chances so that we could be together. I talked myself into believing that we deserved this hideaway, that the oppression of parents and church had driven us to take such a step, forced us to take our love into hiding.

  But if the idea of such a retreat was romantic, the reality was not. I remember the lack of light and the cold darkness. The rooms smelled of spoiled food and mildewed linens. There was a small wooden table and two chairs, a rough-edged counter, a rust-ridden sink. The bed was a thin mattress with blue-striped ticking, discolored with sweat and urine. When I told Tom that I could not lie on it, he scowled, then spread his shirt and coat to cover the most offensive stains. He was, I could tell, not happy with me. As I lay beneath him, I felt nothing of the liberation such space had promised. What I felt instead was disgust. How many others had lain in this same room, for an hour, a night? What kind of woman would come here? I felt cheap and dirty, as though the soiled bedding had bled onto my skin.

  “You’re ruining this,” Tom said. He sat up, his shoulder blades sharp in the shadows of afternoon light.

  “I’m sorry.” I did not know what else to say. His anger made me feel as though I could not breathe. Men were dangerous if made angry. It was my job to soothe, to make things right. I placed the palm of my hand against his spine, let two fingers trace the vertebrae’s path.

  “I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.” I pulled gently at his arms. “I’m cold.”

  “Maybe I should just take you home.”

  “No,” I said, “I want to stay here.” I moved my hand across his back. “Next time I’ll bring a blanket. We’ll have a picnic lunch. We’ll say we’re going to the river.” I imagined a checkered tablecloth, a Mason jar of dried flowers. Maybe I could sneak a sheet or two. Maybe I could find a curtain for the kitchen
window, a rug for in front of the sink, bring softness and color to this place my lover had chosen. I thought of all the houses my mother had remade with little more than a swatch of gingham and a bucket of Pine-Sol.

  “Maybe,” I said, “I just need to learn how to be here, how to act.”

  “We can be whoever we want here. We can act however we want.” He pulled me against him roughly. “There are no rules.”

  There was a new insistence in him. Before, our times together had held a certain balance—both of us eager, both of us taking, both of us giving. But this was different. Now our roles were more defined: he the taker, I the giver. I felt disconnected, separated from my body, unable to feel the rush and rise of blood, unable to focus on anything other than the fly-specked ceiling, the room’s webbed corners, the bare bulb hung from its wire.

  When he was done, we lay together, listening to the sounds of traffic, the distant whistle of the mill train, and I had a sudden sense of impending loss. What if Tom were to become impatient, tire of me? What if I no longer pleased him? I was fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, and already I was wondering how I could keep this man—how I might reshape my own desire to more convincingly reflect his, become the lake he might fall into, enchanted by his own image in the mirroring surface.

  EVEN THOUGH HE MAY NOT HAVE KNOWN the intricacies of my relationship with Tom, there is no mystery to my father’s reasons for doing what he could to keep me home. It was not simply the obvious intimacy between Tom and me that alarmed my father but something perhaps even more dangerous. My father saw what I could not: Tom’s intensifying possessiveness, his demands that made my father’s rules seem nearly enlightened.

  Tom insisted that, as the man, it was he who should determine my boundaries, and one of those boundaries was that I could go nowhere without his attendance. If I could not be with him, Tom said, then he didn’t want me with anybody, and I could only see this as a manifestation of his affection: wasn’t this the way I had come to know all great love, through what it asked of me, through my adherence to the giver’s conditions? My father’s love, just like that of the Heavenly Father, necessitated that he guide and confine my behavior; I returned that love by concession and obedience. It was, I understood, for my own good.

  Yet who would I obey? If I went against my father, I was grounded, left without recourse; if I attended a high school football game or a church prayer rally without Tom, he became enraged, ranted that I was a whore, threatened to abandon me.

  Increasingly, my fear of Tom’s disapproval outweighed the threat of my father’s censure. I could, I believed, live without paternal love, but I could never survive losing Tom. What could I say or do that would prove to him my faithfulness, my allegiance? I pledged and promised, soothed him with words, touched him with my lips and fingers. I no longer thought of sin or damnation or even pleasure but instead wondered if this would be enough to win his tolerance and favor for a while longer, make him see that I was wholly his. Sex became something other, something more than a shared journey toward physical delight; it became a coin that I could use to buy back his approval.

  I believed I had given every part of myself to Tom, yet his jealousy increased, as did his policing of my attire and activities. He hectored and harassed, his anger turning more and more menacing until one night he wrapped his fingers around my throat and I thought he would kill me.

  Even then, it was he who ended the relationship, left me crying and hysterical, believing that I had not given enough, or taken enough, that somehow it was my fault that he’d turned mean. If I hadn’t worn that dress, talked to those other boys, if I’d stayed home like he’d asked—weren’t these the things I’d been taught would save a woman?

  My parents were relieved, but I felt an enormous loss, not only of Tom but of some part of myself. I had thought I would marry this boy, but now I was alone and no longer a virgin—a state that forecasted despair for any woman who hoped to win an honest man. I was “ruined”—I had heard my mother and grandmother pronounce it of other women—and I envisioned a life of sorrowful decay and abandonment.

  After Tom, there were other boys I believed I might love, and so I kept myself from them, thinking that to do so would shield my secret transgression and ensure their fidelity, win from them the respect and admiration such chastity attracted. Instead of approval, what my abstinence brought me was, at first, steady imploring, then anger and scorn. Why had I agreed to go out to a movie, for dinner, if I wasn’t ready to give something in return? I was a prude, a prick tease, not worth their money and time. Some part of me—that part that Tom had tended so well—believed them. It seemed that no matter which path I chose, I was doomed to rejection.

  ———

  THERE WAS ONE BOY whose romance undid me, remade me, broke me into even smaller pieces. Thane was a raven-haired athlete with a good arm and fast moves on the field. He had a steady girlfriend, but it didn’t seem to matter. He offered a special kind of companionship: afternoons of television and popcorn; Saturdays spent sledding and drinking hot cocoa; evenings when he called for no other reason than to pick me up, take me to the park, and launch a new kite above the city.

  After the tyranny of my relationship with Tom, Thane’s childlike pleasure in the world and the fact that he demanded nothing of me was a gift. We were intimates but not lovers, and I cherished this, believing that it freed me somehow.

  My father gave easier approval of my spending time with Thane. By all accounts, he was a respectable young man, liked by his teachers, admired by his peers, the shining star of numerous sporting events. He was polite and respectful, never surly or secretive. More often than not, there were others who accompanied us on our outings, groups of friends intent on a long evening of pizza and pinball. Such activities—ball games and pool parties, even the occasional movie rated G—were all new to me, and my father continued to surprise me with his acquiescence. Perhaps he had come to believe that this secular socializing might prevent the kind of fixation that had possessed me in my relationship with Tom.

  I shared Thane’s family dinners, came to the parties he held for his classmates—the boys and girls coupling up and finding the darkened back rooms of the basement, while, upstairs, his parents—the adult supervision on whom my father’s approval depended—watched The Odd Couple and mixed another gin fizz. I wasn’t interested in the beer secreted in beneath coats and book bags, nor did I care to let the other boys whisper me into the laundry room for an extended bout of French kissing, their zippered jeans grinding my hipbones raw. I was not a cheerleader, already claimed by the team’s top scorer, nor was I the plump girl in glasses who braced herself against the wall and lifted her sweater without hesitation, urging the boy to hurry. My choices were to stay and remain a part of the dim light and the music, or leave and go home, back to my solitary bed and the lackluster night. I sat on the couch, paralyzed by my separateness, an unopened can of Coors warming in my hand, listening to America sing, “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.”

  When a boy I hardly knew pinched my arm and asked me to dance, I hesitated, trying to remember the steps my father had taught me, trying to remember the ease of his lead.

  “Like this,” the boy said, and pressed my head against his shoulder, his arms raising my wrists to drape around his neck. We swayed in a small circle, and I breathed in the clean smell of his shirt, the complex odor of his skin, which made me feel animal and hungry and close to tears. He rocked me into the hallway, pushed open a door, then gathered me like a bride in his arms before laying me across the guest bed, musty with disuse.

  “It’s okay.” He shushed my protests with his mouth. For a moment, the movement of his hands was a comfort, but then his patience with me thinned, his need became more urgent.

  “Wait,” I said, but he wouldn’t, pummeling more than petting, burying his face in the softness below my ribs. When I pushed against him with the heels of my hands, said, “Stop,” he covered my mouth, his breath heavy in my face.


  “Be quiet. Someone might hear you.”

  I wrestled myself from beneath his weight, felt him roll away from me. “I don’t want to do this,” I said.

  “Yes you do.” He ran a finger down my arm, kissed my shoulder. I shivered, sat up. I could hear the music, the sound of other voices. He will hate me now, I thought, even as he smoothed his hair and left the bed, stepped out of the dark room and disappeared. Every time such closeness came, it ended in my feeling even more isolated and alone. If they all turned away, who would be left to love me?

  It was not this boy whose affection I most craved, but that of the boy who rolled and moaned in the next room. I knew that Thane was with his girlfriend, but I could not forget how, only hours before, he had kissed me for the first time. Had he felt me hesitate, nearly give in, the second or third or thirteenth time he tried to touch my breast? I longed to hold him against me, even as I told myself that such contact would destroy whatever existed between us. Some nights I allowed myself to fantasize that Thane might actually fall in love with me and leave his girlfriend, that we would be married and have dark-haired babies, that as his wife I might regain a sense of my own decency and entitlement.

  I listened to his voice rise and fall, the soft laughter of his girlfriend. I tucked my knees against my chest, rested my forehead against my arms. Thane didn’t know the other side of me, how I could touch him and move him in ways his lover could not. And what if he did? What if I showed him? What if he needed me in this way, came to me because I knew how to please him more than any other woman?

  I shook my head in the dark. I did not want to be that girl anymore, the one who stole the book and its secrets, who abandoned herself to lust on a filthy bed. Please let me be good, I prayed. Please let me be good.

  THE NEXT WEEK was Thane’s birthday, and I had a gift for him—a Bible with his name embossed in gold. After much prodding on my part, he had begun attending church, sitting beside me in the pew, bowing his head in prayer. This was the way it should be. My testimony had brought him closer to his own salvation, and if he were saved, then so was I.