Hungry for the World (9 page)

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
.

T
HE 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.

We were alone in his basement when he unwrapped the Bible, laid it aside, then pushed me down amid the colorful paper and ribbons. I laughed at first but then saw that he was not teasing. He pinned my arms above my head, held me with his weight. I remember how, at some point, I quit struggling, how I could not bear my own rising sense of helplessness or his growing brutality, how I turned my head so that I would not have to see who he had become, how it was easier to simply stop knowing and feeling and let that frantic part of me drift away.

Perhaps it was pity he felt for me then, or fear for his own soul, the slackness of my body beneath his that made him stop. I rolled to my knees, smoothed my clothes, focused my eyes on the wall behind him. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Even as I spoke, I let what had just happened float like bits of ash into the air around us. We would not have to remember,
would we? No one would have to know, no one would have to see the bracelet of bruises circling each wrist.

I drove my car down the backstreets, holding to the edge of the city. The reds and oranges of fall were crisp against the pale blue sky, the stones in the cemetery angled and sharp as blades. Everything was so defined, distinct in its place, yet I felt as though I had no borders, as though my skin had begun to dissolve, as though I were the watercolor painting drawn by a child, bleeding across the lines.

I was grateful for the emptiness of my house, the bathwater so hot I gritted my teeth to bear it. I did not think about what would happen next but gave myself to the weightlessness of water, to the nebulous cloud of steam and sleep, waking only to add more heat, to open the drain and let the cold flow away.

When Thane called several days later, he was crying. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please.”

Charity, forgiveness, compassion—I thought of all these things, Christ’s words of direction. I thought of the leather-bound book he held in his hands, even then, as we talked and made our plans to meet again, and I thought that this must have been what I had wanted all along, and that I could not blame him for anything.

S
OMETHING BROKE
in me then—I cannot say what or why exactly, except that the restrictions I had placed on myself seemed suddenly pointless and impossible. When I met Thane at his house, I didn’t feel anger or disgust or betrayal; I felt nothing I can remember except a kind of disconnectedness,
as though my world were being orchestrated in a way I could not control. I could lock myself in my house, sit pale and unsullied behind my father’s protective door, or I could go into the world, but I had begun to see the truth in my father’s teachings: to step through that passageway was to walk into the den of the lion.

I knew that I could never sacrifice myself to the life of a nun. There was too much I wanted to know, do, see. This, then, was the path I chose, knowing what dues would be demanded of me. There seemed no other way.

When Thane hid his face in shame, I stroked the bareness below his earlobe. I kissed the crown of his head, the thin ridge of his shoulder. How could I be angry, turn him away—he with his passion and humility, his grief-stricken face?
Here
, I said, and wrapped my arms around him, comforting, accepting that it was I who had brought him to this, after all, and that now I must be steadfast and strong so that he might rise and go on. My own penance was to do what he asked of me. Instead of him becoming the romantic teenage boyfriend I longed for, I became the secret lover he had fantasized. Instead of flying kites and going to matinees, we met for the moments he might take his pleasure before he left to share the evening with his truer love, and I returned to the house of my father, who slept the daylight hours and drove until dawn. Sometimes, during the course of our entrances and exits, my father and I met in the doorway, nodding our hellos or good-byes, something gone wrong between us, and no words to help understand why.

I
ATTENDED CHURCH
five times a week, kept up my grades, and worked after school at a local pharmacy. I had
friends and all the activities a Christian-bookstore calendar could hold. My daily life must have appeared ordinary enough to my family, although, except for those drives to and from the Assembly of God and the occasional Sunday dinner, there seemed little connection between us.

My father had all but disappeared, sinking deeper into his thoughts, his head weaving over the pages of his Bible, his blue eyes hazy with hours of reading. I may have thought him at peace, although I know better now, having come to understand how much our trek out of the wilderness had cost him. All those hours of study and prayer toward one end: keeping his own will at bay, teaching himself the second-by-second discipline of self-abnegation, emptying his mind and his body of any earthly desire or need, his only joy the pure pleasure of total immersion, spiritual prostration at the feet of God. His only movement through our house was that of necessity—toward work or bathroom or bed—as though he believed that even the friction of his body through air might distract him from his quest for perfect consumption.

The silence of the rooms, the impassive eating of meals, the inert solitude, the moth-colored light—I left the house each morning, gulping air, stunned by the school-bus yellow, the lurid sky, the pale pink rise of sun. Even as my father’s vision turned more and more inward, I was casting my eyes to the valley’s perimeters, gauging the pull of the river, the direction a wind-loosed leaf might sail.

M
AY
29, 1976: I sat in my lavender cap and gown, searching the stands for my family, some familiar face in the crowd
of parents and relatives gathered to celebrate the commencement of Lewiston’s senior class.

Perhaps they were there and I simply didn’t see them. Or have I forgotten, having just separated myself from them so fully, having walked from my father’s presence only hours before, vowing never to return?

I had wanted only to attend the supervised senior party given by the family of a classmate at their cabin 150 miles north on Coeur d’Alene Lake. My father would not give his permission, and I couldn’t make sense of his denial.

“I’m eighteen,” I’d said, shivering with the courage it took to question. “What if I go anyway?”

He looked at me from the brown recliner, looked at me with his cool-blue eyes, looked at me until I began to understand and not care. “Then you would have to take your things,” he said, “and never come back.”

I heard my mother crying in the next room. She could not defend me against her husband’s wishes, could not question his authority. I did not yet know how much she feared him, how much she feared for me. When I stepped out of that house and into the blue-green ocean of May with my bag of clothes and trinkets, I breathed in the air, sweet with locust and lilac. The day walloped me with its warmth and promise of a long summer ahead. I would forget about college for a while, find an apartment, a new job. I would buy a bikini and spend Saturdays at the beach with my girlfriends, burnished brown by the sun.

I left my family’s house with little regret, left my mother to her ineffectual sadness, my brother to his good boy’s life. I left the church, its ridiculous rules, its warnings of evil spirits
and perpetual damnation. I left my father to his silence. I no longer wanted his guidance, his iron sense of direction. It was a breach he could not bear—one, he said, he had expected all along.

The next day I traveled with my friends to Coeur d’Alene, giddy with new freedom. I wouldn’t know until later, when my mother whispered it over the phone, that my father had come after me, driven the long road in the dark. The lake stretches for miles, and still my father believed he could find me, somewhere in the hundreds of cabins and homes hidden among the pines. I wonder now if he came with words to mend the rift between us, or if it was anger that drove him, made him think to push me into his car like a runaway, take me home and keep me as he had done once before.

Had I known he was coming, I might have been afraid, sitting around the campfire, laughing with friends. But I didn’t know, and he did not find me, although he searched for hours. It was the first time I sensed some failure in my father’s ability to intuit my every move and motive. He was, after all, only human. In his weakness, I found my strength.

For a time, I would believe that there was nothing I missed about that home I had left. What memories I harbored were of the earlier years spent living in the woods, when harmony had existed between us, not of the years after—years when the rift between my father and me had widened into an un-crossable chasm.

Sometimes I would drive by my family’s house and see Greg putting up shots against the garage in the last light. He was a freshman, center on the basketball team, already six feet and still growing. He had reddish-blond hair, my
mother’s fair, Germanic complexion and light blue eyes. Like her, he chose to remain silent—he brought no dishonor to the household—yet I could not bring myself to envy him. I would slow my car a little, tap the horn, and wave as though I were just passing through, a passenger aboard a train, bound for distant places.

M
Y FIRST APARTMENT SAT ON
L
EWIS
ton’s Normal Hill, where the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen had first built their mansions before discovering the grander views and higher isolation of the Snake River bluffs to the west. The three-story house I lived in sprawled across two lots and must have been a grand home once, before the owners chopped its great rooms into studios for rent. Painted a dunny avocado, it sagged with the weight of old awnings and listing stairs.

Below the brow of the hill was downtown: the Lewis-Clark Hotel; the Bon Marche, where my mother had hurried me into Foundations and a training bra (the powdery saleswoman measuring and pinching until I thought I might faint from embarrassment); the Liberty Theater with its stage, orchestra pit, and balcony; the Roxy, where I’d snuck to see
Love Story
and felt the adolescent pangs of my own impending doom. Main Street, anchored to the west by the bridge connecting Lewiston to Clarkston, Washington, ended in East Lewiston, where the poorest and least permanent lived, where the logging train rumbled through at midnight, where the mill’s whistle meant shift change: days to swing,
swing to graveyard, graveyard back to days. Across the Clearwater was North Lewiston, where I seldom went, where the motels charged by the hour, where the drunks stumbled out after midnight and slept in the alleys until the doors opened again.