Hungry for the World (6 page)

When we passed the dam at Ahsahka, I studied the giant flatness of its face: in less than a year its construction would be complete, the water that flowed past our camps gathering at its base, turning back on itself, flooding the North Fork beneath fifty miles of manmade lake. Already the good smells were gone—fresh-cut cedar, wood smoke from the shadowed houses, the late wild cherry, the early syringa. At Spalding, where the Nez Perce had listened to the missionaries’ words, where some had begun to believe, we could already see the brown pall that covered Lewiston and crept up the valley floor. I held my nose against the sulfuric stench of the Potlatch pulp-and-paper mill. Red lights winked from its smokestacks, high above the perpetual light of its industry.

The ink in my palm bled into long blue lines, the boy’s name a smudged tattoo. I opened my Bible: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” I closed my eyes, and the stars, for a moment, were there, fading, then gone before I could name them.

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD LIFE IN
Lewiston, except for what went wrong. My grandmother was there, and we took shelter with her until my father could find work. My step-grandfather had been killed the year before, run over by a drunk driver while peddling ointment and spices, and now the care of their one-acre lot had fallen to Nan, twice widowed. She was our anchor, our point of stability, bedding us down beneath thick quilts, feeding us the potatoes and pot roast she believed would sustain us through anything.

Nan was a small woman, dark-haired, with eyes the color of smoke. Her greatest delight lay in her grandchildren, and I enjoyed long hours of her company and attention, playing checkers, watching forbidden TV shows, helping her in her meticulous rounds of housecleaning. That summer I shared her bed, wondrously soothed by the room’s pale lavender paint and sacheted pillows. She said two of the four walls were mine to decorate, and so I hung torn-out pages from
Teen Magazine
on my side: Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman, a group photo of the Partridge Family. My parents allowed this, an indulgence less of my particular whims, I think, than
of my grandmother’s: above her side of the headboard she’d taped a toothy Engelbert Humperdinck.

Each night I watched as she wrapped her beauty-shop hairdo in tissue paper, rubbed her feet and hands with Jergens. I would fall asleep to her quietly singing “Good Night, Irene,” comforted by her warm presence and soft perfume, while above us the airplanes flew low, headed for the runway a few blocks south. I would listen to the resonant thrum of engines, an unfamiliar and exotic sound, and I would try to imagine such travel, being held aloft by nothing but air. The thought would quicken my pulse, and I would burrow deeper beneath the covers, grateful for the touch of my grandmother’s feet against mine, the whisper of her nightly prayers.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
hard-timer in that house, below us in the downstairs bedroom. He was the son of my dead step-grandfather, and I called him Uncle, but I hardly knew him. Whenever he emerged, beetle-browed and growly, my brother and I gave him wide berth. Only when he left on some mysterious errand did I venture down into his corner room with its walls of painted concrete and its single, high window opened to air the musty smell.

Often it was my girl cousin Les, a year my junior, who accompanied me, who didn’t need to be dared. Meeting her for the first time may be my oldest memory: my uncle, her new stepfather, carrying in his arms a little girl of two, white-blond hair and green eyes. My being a year older than she was gave me the only advantage I would ever have over Les.
She ran faster, hit harder, bit deeper than any other child I knew. She won basketball free-throw contests when girls were not supposed to compete, set records in the one-hundred-yard dash, alternately pampered and beat her huge stallion, Smokey, and broke the hearts of any number of boys whose affections she relentlessly trashed.

While my grandmother took her afternoon nap, we would sneak to the basement and begin our sleuthing, uncovering clues as to the life of our fearsome relative. What we found was a wooden wardrobe, several shirts pressed into neatness by Nan, a pair of black wingtips. In the bureau drawer was a pocket watch, matchbooks advertising various bars, important-looking papers, several handkerchiefs, shoestrings, bottle openers, military insignia, and a fistful of foreign coins. Next to the metal bedstead, in the magazine rack made of black iron, we discovered something far removed from the airbrushed portraits of teen idols hanging on the walls in the room above our heads: copies of
True Detective
and
True Crime
, on their covers the colored illustrations of women clad in slips and garters, hands to their mouths to stifle the scream, their eyes wide and focused on the dark male figure in the doorway.

There were other magazines, too, but instead of drawings, they had black-and-white photographs. In my mind’s eye, I can no longer see the nude bodies or the settings or anything else that appeared in the smudgy pages—nothing except the black bars of ink covering the eyes, which I understood were meant to shield the men and women from shame, the shame I myself felt as Les and I lay on our uncle’s high-sprung bed, reading in the basement’s cool light, our skin tingling, our hearts racing with fear that we’d be caught.

It was there, in the room shut off from the drowsy heat of a summer afternoon, that Les and I found the book. On its cover was a woman, sitting on a chair, bound and gagged. Behind her, the men were dark and menacing silhouettes, shades of gray, sharp blue lines, black eyes and mouths. Les and I took turns reading the details aloud, how the rich, spoiled virgin had been kidnapped and held for ransom, how her captors raped her repeatedly and in all ways, how she had hated it at first, then how she came to want it more than anything. How foolish and childish she had been! Now she knew some part of herself she had never known before. She understood her truest nature.

And it must be true because I was dizzy with the buzz in my ears, the ache between my legs, and I knew it was sin and that sin came from what we should not know and feel.

Les and I read until we had memorized the most graphic pages, and then we foraged again and found another such book—the supposed diary of a Hong Kong madam. Whereas the first paperback taught us of a woman’s desperate need to be dominated, the second taught us how a woman might please a man: with her knowledge of sexual secrets, her store of coveted tricks.

I had no context for the emotions and physical yearnings the books incited, no one to ask or tell, no one who would not be horrified, who would not punish. I could never bear the shame of confession, nor could I deny that dark part of me that wanted, more than anything, to protect the books from confiscation.

It was a dividing point for me—between what I had not known and now knew, between what I feared and what I longed for. My new knowledge separated me from my
mother and father, from my grandmother, from my brother, whose face had not yet taken on the mask of guarded transgression. It was as though I were permanently stained, as though some part of me had gone underground.

Les and I made a pact that we would not tell anyone, ever. We cut our fingers with our uncle’s razor and swore blood truth. Now we were more sisters than cousins, and over the next decade, our lives would be informed and directed by those stories in ways we could not then imagine. By the time I left my grandmother’s house that summer, I possessed a knowledge of sexual deviation that would stun my friends years into the future. When they asked me how I knew, I would smile and shrug, thinking how it had always been with me, somewhere near the beginning, when I had first understood that women want what men give, that what power I might possess could be found by mastery of the erotic, that in submission lay the greatest pleasure of all.

But I could not submit—not then, not later, not when it was what my father demanded of me, not even when I believed it was what I must give or else be destroyed. Always, some part of me resisted. Yet even as I prided myself on the strength of my will and fierce independence, I heard the whisper, the oldest voice telling me that my time would come, that my woman’s fate would someday find me.

B
Y
A
UGUST
1970 my father had found nighttime work in Lewiston as a truck driver, hauling sawdust and chips, two or three trips upriver, back to that land we had left, where the smaller mills would load his trailer with wood scraps, which
he carried back down to Potlatch, Inc., to be ground and bleached and pressed into tissue paper and cardboard.

We left my grandmother’s and moved into a white, hacienda-style house with a patio and goldfish pond instead of a meadow and creek outside the door. It was more than we could afford, but my mother had swung a deal, bartering paint and yard work for low rent. I’d never lived in such a grand house, with a laundry chute and multiple toilets. The air inside felt hollow, the rooms too large and numerous for our sparse furnishings; our voices echoed from the walls. We could have danced in those rooms, but my father came home weary, his back stiff with the pain of hours behind the wheel, and I was too old to waltz atop his feet. I preferred to keep to my bedroom, where I secretly listened to the local rock-and-roll station and danced solo in front of my dresser mirror, imitating the miniskirted teenagers I’d watched on
American Bandstand
, moving my hips, my shoulders, gesturing seductively to my phantom love.

The house’s narrow kitchen provided the greatest sense of intimacy. Outside its single window, I could see nothing but the stark flatness of the neighbors’ house, only a few feet away, but above the sink my mother had pinned the trailing philodendron she tended from house to house, its variegated leaves shined each week with a wash of canned milk and water, its occasional cuttings rooted in jars on the sill.

Through the kitchen was the breakfast nook, the most privileged and exotic of the rooms, just large enough for a small and elegant table, had we one, but empty except for the telephone, which nested in its own miniature grotto. Around the room’s far wall ran a window seat, on which I could lie
and study the grapevines growing rampant across the greenhouse roof.

We spent only one year in that house, but I remember it as a time of sweetness and light, the kitchen steamy with boiling water and great pots of stewing grapes. I remember my mother, her fine hair caught up with a scarf, stray curls at her neck and temples. I helped her scald the little Ball jars, rings, and lids, dissolve the pectin, melt the paraffin. Pounds of sugar, a plastic lemon full of concentrate from which I sucked the last jaw-locking drops, a cone-shaped sieve and a wooden pestle worn smooth by generations of hands. I loved the efficiency and assemblage, and I loved the closeness of my mother, who was just turning thirty. There was not yet so much distance between us that we could not share such space and movement. In the years to come I would look back and remember the jars filled with syrupy fruit, the wax floated on top, the lids pinging as they sealed, the deep purple juice that stained our mouths black; I would remember the feeling of safety and sureness and provision and wonder when that closeness had been lost.

O
VER THE NEXT YEAR
, I watched as my father rose in the evening, took his meal, collected his calfskin gloves and lunch pail and walked into the darkness. Mornings, just as Greg and I woke for school, my father would come back through the door, bringing with him the remembered smells of diesel and cedar but none of the joy he once brought home from the wilderness.

It was all different. The water we drank was chlorinated,
our meat wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic. Our church, the Assembly of God, was progressive, allowing women to wear makeup and pants. My mother took a job checking groceries at McPherson’s; my brother began playing ball. Sometimes, when I came home from school, I was alone, except for my father dreaming in his shaded room. On still afternoons I would lie on the couch and sleep, startled when I woke to find my father in his chair, eating Saltines and cheese, reading his Bible, watching me.

We were in the world, and the world would destroy us. It was out there, waiting, biding its time. There were hippies and drug dealers, sex maniacs and pimps, Communists and big-city gangs. Even in Idaho, kids were being lured away by marijuana and LSD, flower power and peace marches. My father became more vigilant. What I
could
do was participate in church activities, go to school, and be with my family. What I couldn’t do was join drill team or play girls’ basketball, which required the wearing of indecent clothes. After I came back from a football game one evening, disoriented by the sensory overload of floodlights and the pep band’s deafening blare, my parents were frightened. Better that I remain at home, under supervision. The risks were simply too great.

Each schoolday, I walked the few blocks to Jenifer Junior High, where the girls wore fishnet stockings and blue eyeshadow, where the high school boys hung out in their GTO’s and Barracudas, smoking Marlboros and listening to Casey Kasem play the Top 40. For the first time in my life, I saw myself as others must: a plain-faced girl in home-sewn clothes, doing what was expected of her. I went to church, I
went to school. I brought home A’s and teachers’ commendations. I risked nothing, while all around me the world was on fire: Woodstock, Vietnam, Kent State, Haight-Ashbury. Race riots and Agent Orange. The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who. Men were burning their draft cards, women were burning their bras. Sin, sin everywhere, just as the Bible had warned, and yet, like Lot’s wife, I could not quit looking, hungry for one last glimpse before the judgment of the Lord descended.