In the Wilderness (20 page)

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 father 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
.

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.