Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  I thought of the young boy David had once been, napping in this same bed perhaps, or playing outside in the barn, where one summer he helped his aunt raise an orphaned fawn. He still remembered the way it suckled, pulling at his fingers, the smooth leather of its mouth around the bottle’s nipple. I had never seen the affection I heard in David’s words, but it was there, somewhere, and I would, through my patience, my sacrifice, coax it from him.

  Lying in the damp room, smelling wood smoke and the yeasty odor of bread dough rising near the stove, I realized that what I was feeling for David was something like love. I realized, too, how much I missed the calm and constant safety of family, how much I longed to re-create the circle that had once protected me.

  At that moment I made a traitorous decision: no matter what David said, no matter how many other women he chose to bed, no matter what he believed he wanted and must have, I would no longer lie with other men. I whispered the promise to myself, felt a new determination. I gathered the blankets tighter, tucked my chin to keep in heat. Outside an owl made its silent sweep across the meadow; the voles scattered seeds in their burrows of grass. The deer came with their luminescent eyes and drank from the river, dipping their heads, offering themselves to the moon, then turned back to the narrow paths so that the sun might not find them on the open aits, vulnerable and exposed.

  THE NEXT DAY, we learned from a neighbor that the howls we heard had come from a yearling bear, gut-shot and dragging its intestines across the forest floor. I can still hear its bawling, its distraction and pain filling the canyon like fire. I hear, too, the recorded cries of a dying rabbit, projected from the camouflaged tape player David used to call the coyotes in. I remember how we would rise from our blind and shoot the coyotes where they stood, looking our way, ears pricked forward, curious, nearly hopeful, then, at the last moment, sure.

  DECEMBER 24, I LAY ON MY COUCH, trying to concentrate on whatever sitcom David was watching to keep my mind off of the pain wracking my stomach. A virus had left me weak-kneed and pathetic, sipping 7-Up instead of champagne.

  The week before, my mother had called to invite me to the holiday dinner. Roast turkey, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, sugared yams, chocolate pie.

  “What about David?” I’d asked.

  My mother sighed. “You know how we feel about him,” she said. “Your dad wouldn’t have it, even if I would.”

  How long had it been since I had seen her, my father, my grandmother or brother? My thoughts of them came to me like distant memories, images from a photograph: mouths frozen in silent smiles, eyes peering into the dark lens of my face.

  Les and Marc stopped by with gifts that Christmas Eve. Les sometimes seemed the only tie left, the lone thread tethering me to my family. David devoted a great deal of attention to Les, invited her to the parties, plied her with dope. She met his interest with casual disregard, took what she wanted and left. I wondered if she knew the truth of my life, the stories that I could not tell her. I watched as she and Marc drank wine with David while I sat at the end of the couch, shivering with fever. I felt disoriented, as though I were separated from the others in the room, as though I were in a box of glass, cut off from their conversation and laughter.

  When I rose to use the bathroom, I saw David avert his eyes, not wanting to see me still in my robe, my hair unwashed, my colorless face. I closed the door and rested my head against the tub’s cool porcelain. My resolution of fidelity had not brought the reward I had hoped for. Instead of drawing us closer, my refusal to play the role of communal concubine had only served to alienate David. If what I longed for was deference and compassion, what I’d gained was neglect and isolation. “This is not my way,” David had said, arguing that I was ruining what was good between us. If I thought I could change him, he said, I was wrong.

  When I came back into the living room, Les and Marc were preparing to leave. As I slumped onto the couch, I saw in their eyes not just sympathy but something else: pity. I felt disgust for myself then. They had seen how David ignored me, had heard him say he’d be going out for the night. They may have wanted to gather me up and take me with them, feed me broth and sweet tea, but David stood between us, ushering them outside.

  I closed my eyes and heard the door latch, then the sound of David dropping change into his pocket, the slide of his wallet against his hip. I pretended sleep when he walked past the couch, heard him hesitate for a moment at the door, then felt the cold rush of air from outside. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. Christmas lights flared against the frosted windows. I became aware of the songs coming over the FM station, songs of joy and celebration, God and angels, peace on earth and a star in the East. On the mantel beneath the owl, I’d pegged two of David’s wool socks. I studied them for a while, wondering what I’d thought might appear in each, what bauble I might rise to Christmas morning.

  I wanted the sickness to be over, and the holiday too. I wanted nothing more to remind me of how alone I was and how I’d chosen this path and had no one to blame but myself. “You made your bed, you lie in it,” I whispered to myself. I looked at the owl, its outstretched wings so large they might cover me where I lay. I imagined the shadow of its body descending, the softness of its breast. I’d always loved the owls, suddenly there, looming white in the headlights, their solemn, monastic calling.

  And then I realized I was angry, that the anger had been with me from the beginning, when I had first seen the owl and realized that David had shot it—not for food or even for money but because it came into his vision and he desired to possess it.

  I thought of my father, whom I had never known to kill except for meat or protection, who came to the forest as though to worship. I remembered the story he had once told me of the rare white raven he’d seen while working in the woods. “I saw it there among the others,” he said, his voice still reverent, “like a ghost. Only that once, and never again.”

  My father did not covet the raven, as some would have, because he understood, because he had taught me, that some things are sacred, that some things are gifts.

  I studied the owl, as though there were secrets it might tell me. I thought of the nights it had flown through, the distant stars that guided its flight. I thought of my father that night the demon came, how it was nothing he could make sense of, how it frightened him. He quit believing in light, in the solid shapes of walls, and began walking through the dark as though it were day, knowing what he may or may not see a mere reflection of what he carried within himself—like memory, or sin.

  Could he have known what journey lay before him? Did his vision warn him of our family’s fragmentation, his daughter’s rebellion, her desire to run and be lost and never be found? I wondered if he cared anymore, or if he simply believed my destiny already sealed, with nothing he could do but wait.

  And what if my father had come for me there, where I lay on my couch, sick and exhausted? Would I have feared him, as I always had—feared him for all that he did not do but was capable of, as though in the repression of his rage lay the greatest threat of all? What if he had gathered me up in his arms and taken me home? I might have resisted him just as I had John, my pride and bitterness disallowing such rescue. Or maybe to have him come would have seemed such an act of uncompromised love that I would have welcomed his strength, his protection. I wanted to imagine the walls broken down between us, our mutual forgiveness, the coming days full of a new and tender awareness. I wanted to be only his daughter and not the daughter of Eve. But I knew that any freedom I might gain should I go back was only imaginary; the rules would still be the same, an exchange of one prison for another. Better that I suffer because of the choices I’d made than to have no choices at all.

  ———

  THAT JANUARY the cold came down hard, busting pipes, icing the streets. The snow settled into the draws, the twilight turning the mountains deep blue. As David had predicted, the coyote pelts were good, seventy dollars for each hide brought in.

  There is so little I remem
ber from that winter, so few images I can recall. David came off the road high on bennies, unable to sleep. When I stood beside him in front of the bathroom mirror, I was startled by his wild hair and beard, his dilated pupils, his wrinkled clothes. I got out the iron and did what I could, what I’d been taught to do for a man: crease the sleeves, smooth the placket, give the collar some starch. It was my mother’s map I followed now, what I did to impose order, to make sense of the course my life had taken—hot-water laundry, bleach-cleaned toilets, sheets snapped straight and folded tight around their mattress.

  I remember the strange weakness that took hold of me: at work, my knees gave way as I stood over the deep-fat fryers; my hips locked, and I fell, momentarily paralyzed from the waist down. The doctors injected dye, took X rays, performed their small surgeries. They showed me fine bits of cartilage and bills I could not pay.

  I remember the slick passage toward Seattle, the ice on Snoqualmie’s summit, the big rigs jackknifing around us, and David not slowing but easing us through and up and over.

  “You’ve got to keep power on the wheels,” he said. “You just can’t stop.”

  I wondered if I would ever be able to do the same, forestall the fear, be sure of my direction. I knew the route we traveled by heart now, the way the city looked at dawn just coming into its light, the bay with its mist rising like steam, gray for that time, and molten. In the motel I would lie awake next to David, unable to sleep in daylight or dark, listening to the freeway traffic. I would think of the sex shops and prostitutes, lap dancers and pimps. For so long, I had seen them as characters in a book, harmless, absurd, but now I was beginning to see the bruised thighs and lips, the needle tracks and empty vials. I saw the businessmen leave, tucking their shirts, straightening their ties, while inside the women squatted over their toilets and smoked, waiting for the next to arrive. They seemed never to sleep, seldom cried, but they spoke of their children and drank and dabbed another layer of makeup beneath their eyes. How could I have been so blind?

  MY LIFE, it seemed, was falling away from me in great clumps: I had alienated my friends and family; when, after minor surgery on my knee, I didn’t check in with my supervisor at the drive-in, he replaced me with someone less likely to miss her scheduled workdays. Suddenly, I had no money to buy food or gas, no money to make the payments on my car. I felt peeled, raw, and wounded, relieved when David offered to cover my share of the rent and groceries until I could find another job.

  “You can owe me,” he said. “Fifty percent.” I agreed, though I knew my salary would never match his and wondered how he thought I might pay.

  Those pieces of my life that had remained outside David’s influence were now more tightly bundled. It was no longer my apartment but his, not my black-and-white atop the chest but his color TV. My bed had been knocked apart and put into storage; his, he said, was more comfortable. His dishes in the cupboards, his guns in the rack. I look back now and see how I was disappearing, one room at a time, but what I felt then was less fear than hope: I was seeing not dissolution but domesticity. Even as I watched all my icons of independence vanish, I believed that what came to replace them was better somehow, more mature, what I should expect if I wanted a man in my life. And I believed that I did. I believed that what I wanted was David, not as I had known him, but as I believed he might yet be with me as his inspiration.

  Who of us, then, was the most desperate? For just as surely as David had built his prison around me, he immured himself to my keep. There was this fetter between us, this chain of servitude and responsibility. I cooked for him, cleaned, and laundered. I counted the days of his hauls across Washington. I curled my hair, put on lipstick, dressed in the outfits he favored, sat on the couch and awaited his return. None of it seemed to matter. Even our once lively conversations had become stilted, as though we had emptied ourselves into each other and now must face the limits of our ken. No more riddles, queries about origin, lessons on reading the trail. Only silence and its undercurrent of rage. Our hours together were spent watching TV, reading. At some point during the evening, he would shower, put on the clothes I had folded. And then he would leave.

  Whenever I questioned David about his life away from me, he reacted with anger. He must have felt my pulling away, not from him, but from the life he had planned for me. The terms had always been clear. If I wanted him to stay, I would keep my mouth shut, do as he said.

  If David’s frustration drove him to sullenness, I responded with exaggerated regard, stroking, pacifying, just as I had seen my mother mollify, take heed. But even the offering of my body was no longer enough to move David. He tensed away from me in bed and would not speak, so that I lay in the dark, cut off from the sound of him, the feel of him, and because my existence had become dependent on his acknowledgment and approval, it was as though I were no longer visible. I was the air around him, the sheets’ caress, the light falling in through the window. I felt my resolve weaken, the fear of rejection rise.

  I remember the panic of it still—David’s turn away from me, the shunning—although I now understand his intention: to bring me to yet another level of subjugation, to destroy whatever scrap of self-will I still possessed. In the face of such rejection, that vow I had made to myself while at his aunt’s house, snugged beneath covers, verging on dreams, now seemed foolish and impossible. In desperation, I begged David to tell me what I could do to make him see me again. It was true: there had been things he wanted from me I would not give, had thought I could not give, but now I said yes, that there was nothing I would not do or give or let be done to me. I would obey. I was that kneeling girl, offering my life, my soul, every part of me to win salvation, to regain my patriarch’s good grace. I had learned my lesson. Please. Do not cast me out.

  David brought his eyes back to me then. His demands were not of the coarse nature that I thought they would be. He asked only this: that I trust him completely. I must be patient and prove that I trusted him by my continued silent presence—even though he would not say my name or even look at me.

  I cried and swore I would do these things. I huddled against him in the darkness of our bed, felt the thinness of his back and legs, the rigid curve of his spine. I closed my eyes so that I could not see his face turned away from me. I folded my hands between my knees so they would not be wanton, would not implore.

  The next morning, he said that this is how it would be, that I must not question, never ask where he was going or when he would return, but must remain constant and wait.

  I lowered my eyes, bowed my head. When the door had closed after him, I lay back down on the bed, believing myself unable to rise, to walk or even eat. In the empty room, in the tattered gray light of predawn, I thought of my mother in her worn robe beginning to make the coffee, fry the eggs; my father, whom she would awaken and feed, whose clothes she would have pressed and laid out so that he had only to slip them on to be dressed and ready; my brother still dreaming whatever dreams a good boy is given—the crack of bat against ball, the car he might someday own, the girl whose blond hair fills his fingers.

  I thought of my grandmother, who would be awake, having slept the shallow sleep of the old—her lavender room, color of the flowers she loved, the lilacs that grew close by her door.

  Unreachable, that room, those people. I could never ask them to take me back, to accept me once again as their own. I had burned that bridge, and the gulf that stretched behind me could never be crossed.

  DID I BELIEVE that I deserved this final subservience, dues owed for the years I had fought to control my own existence? Punishment, after all, was my familiar, my most expected return. I look back and see how the rhythms of my life have followed this pattern: rebellion, punishment, submission, and then the cycle repeating. I would strike out, expecting the reprisal, perhaps even bringing it on. Always, I had understood the gravity of my actions, and always I knew what my actions would bring: the belt across my bottom, the switch across my legs, the open hand, eventually, the groundings and
loss of my already limited freedom, the threat of eternity in Hell. But the discipline and the warnings I had heard all my life had not had their desired effect. I seemed never to learn.

  Could it have been, then, that even as David punished me, drove me toward what he believed might be my point of breaking, I was preparing myself for battle, protecting that part of myself that yet remained outside his control, some fragment I had thrown to the sky, where it floated above me, quiet and invisible?

  Closed in behind locked doors and shaded windows, I drifted, aware only of the moments when I woke, then wished myself back into sleep. There were sounds outside that filtered in to me, traffic, the high laughter of children walking home from school, but the sounds were dreams and I liked them that way, let them weave into the deafness of my slumber.

  Escape, denial, depression—all of these, of course. But something else: I was resting, gathering my strength. When the loop of outside noise began to repeat itself, became something familiar, I realized I had slept through the beginnings and endings of several days.

  I rolled to my side, let my eyes focus on the simple shapes, the complex shadows of the dresser, the closet, the floor. There was nothing in the room that might hurt me, nothing except the blade of my own shame, my weakness and despair.

  Instead of dread, what I felt was a calm that I had never expected. Released from its constant vigil to defend, my mind had emptied itself, and what came back into me was a clarity so intense I could taste it, see its colors: icy and blue and deeply translucent, like the water come off the high mountains. As a child, I had mimicked my father as he knelt beside the spring’s course, dipped his hand and drank. The cold had shocked my teeth to numbness, but when I raised my head, the trees were distinctly drawn, newly made, strokes of charcoal against the sun’s unbearable brightness.