Hungry for the World (22 page)

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?

M
Y 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.

D
ID
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.

Is this what my father had been looking for all those years before, when he had gone into the shelter, denied his body its sustenance?
To see things more clearly
, he’d said.
To see what must be done
. All that he had taken with him on his journey had been pulled from that brook, filling enough jars to keep him alive for forty days and forty nights, until his blood ran pure as the snow-chilled water.

I remembered, on one of our last hunts together, how my
father had led my brother and me into the forest, marched us for hours along skidder trails, across the ridges and down the draws of the country he had logged for cedar. I’d been pleased to be in his company, believing we were making headway, working toward common ground. I meant to show him what I was made of, prove to him my stamina, demonstrate the accuracy of my eye. What came instead was the moment he had planned all along: Greg and I had not been paying attention, he said, had been depending on him for our sense of direction. There was a lesson we must learn. “Now,” he said, pointing at me, “you will lead us out.”

How could I? Walking the long miles in, I had noted only the lean of his back, the easy gait that carried him effortlessly over logs and through the thick buckbrush and vine maple. I had not marked the dog-legged red fir, slashed a V in the bark of pine, bled the carmine vein of wild plum. Clouds melded the sky to metal; there was no sun to guide my way.

We wandered for miles, my father pretending the role of meek and willing follower, while all the time I inwardly raged. Finally, as the pewter sky darkened to lead, I’d turned to him in defeat.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said. “I don’t know which direction is right.”

He’d only nodded, moved toward a log where we might all rest.

“You look down too much,” he said. “You haven’t been watching.”

He pointed the ember of his cigarette toward the horizon. “You’ve got to see it all, forward, backward, sides. You get lost in here, it’ll be a long time before someone finds you.”

I’d lowered my eyes, ashamed, fearful that he might see what I was thinking:
You
could.
You
could find me.

“You won’t always have the sun, or even stars. You have to make your own map. Memorize it.” He rose, stretched the stiffness from his back. “Now,” he said, “let’s go home.”

And we followed him, my brother and I, feeling his largeness before us, knowing we’d been lost and then found, each of us full of anger and gratitude, love and hate, and an awareness that wherever we walked in the world, we would carry this truth within us.

I lay in my bed and heard my father’s voice and the voices of others come back to me—the same voices that had promised consequence and retribution, that had prophesied my harvest of pain. What the voices offered now was not condemnation but the harsh encouragement that was also my legacy, the rough prod that had boosted me up from the playground when the bully knocked me down, that had made me despise self-pity and believe that I could withstand anything with the sheer will of my body and mind. It was my grandmother’s voice, pesky and absolute, jolting me from morning dreams because there were chores to be done, joshing me from bouts of poutiness with a chuck under the chin. “Possum, possum, ’coon, ’coon,” she would chide, and I knew this meant that I was “puttin’ on,” like a possum “sulled up,” only pretending injury. It was my father’s voice, unmoving in the face of my announcement that I could not walk another yard, or stand another allergy shot, or produce the answer to yet another of his obstinate questions: “Yes,” he’d say, “you
can.”
And that was the end of it, and I would go and do what I thought I could not, and I would feel strong. It was my
mother’s voice, when, ill with fever, I had fainted in the hallway. “Kim, what’s the matter with you! You get up from there!” she’d demanded, enraged by her own fear. And because she believed that I could rise and walk, I did.

There was some of this yet in me, composed of a faith I could not unlearn and a peevish belief in my own survival—and something else: my inherent willingness to disobey. I had suffered the consequences of disaffirming the authority of the church and my father. I had been shunned and shamed, prayed for and denounced. Always, I believed, I could survive.

That one fragment of will I had kept hidden from David came back into me, lodged itself in my breast. I saw clearly that things could not continue this way, but I had little sense of how they might change. Before, my boyfriends and I had “broken up,” given back class rings and sobbed our regrets for a night or two. But I knew I could not simply walk away from this. All I knew to do was confront, and that is what I planned, knowing that even as I rose from my bed and began gathering my clothes, I was risking something I could not name but recognized—the rage held deep, boiling, boiling.