In the Wilderness Read online

  I fell asleep listening to Kevin. When I woke the next morning the radio lay on my pillow, its battery drained. That weekend I dug through Nan’s basement until I found the old electric radio I’d seen there and asked her if I could have it. It kept me company from that night on, and I fell asleep to the sounds of Smokey Robinson and Cher, Rod Stewart and The Cowsills. I’m not sure my parents knew how much the music had become a part of me, for if they had they might have taken the radio and destroyed it. Years later, it would be the thing I imagined they pointed to: There. There is where the bad first started. Through the music of the world the evil entered her soul. That is how we almost lost her.

  We attended a different church each Sunday, trying to find the one that most closely resembled Cardiff Spur Mission, the one whose doctrine seemed most familiar. Some my father rejected because the minister was too soft on sin; others we did not return to because the pastor thought too much of himself and not enough of his flock. My father was absolutely set in his doctrine, much of which he had determined himself. If the board of elders allowed a divorced man to sit at its meeting table, the entire church was opening itself up to sin. Did the church embrace predestination? Healing? Glossolalia? Full-immersion baptism? What was the role of women? How did the preacher’s wife comport herself? Was the youth pastor overly progressive, given more to gaining the young people’s favor than directing them down the narrow path?

  Somehow, my parents settled on what I believed to be the least likely: the Assembly of God. Fundamental, certainly, but I didn’t see how this church could be any more different from the one we had left in Cardiff. The building itself was enormous: two double doors led into a foyer big enough to hold our former congregation; the sanctuary held hundreds. The choir wore purple robes, the preacher seldom lost himself in the throes of spiritual ecstasy, and the light shone through glass stained blue and green so that we all seemed to float in a landscape of water and grass.

  The Assembly shared many of the same codes with the more rigid Pentecostals, but like city cousins shrugging off their country kin, the believers in the big church forsook many of the dress and behavior guidelines in favor of a more worldly existence: knees showed indelicately beneath the hems of dresses; rouge and light lipstick colored the women’s faces. Others there my age peered at me from behind their parents’ shoulders, taking in my long skirt and heavy glasses, and instead of feeling welcomed, once again part of a people who thought, acted and dressed as I did, I felt hopelessly outcast.

  In Cardiff, we had been part of a community, a circle, joined with others who sang and prayed as we did. Even though our new fellow Christians spoke in tongues and professed to believe in miracles, they seemed less inclined to make a show of it all. My family bunched together at one end of a long and padded pew, holding tight to the belief that God could never approve of such giving in to the ways of the world. We sat straight-backed and lowered our voices, feeling compromised but somehow more civilized in moderation.

  I could not imagine then and still am not sure why my father chose this church as our new place of worship, but we attended faithfully. He has said he found peace there. He faced head-on one of his greatest tribulations, his shyness, in order to praise God, and stood in front of the audience of hundreds to sing “Satisfied Mind” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad.” I watched with nervous pride as he strummed his guitar on the big stage, his Wrangler slacks pressed to a fine shine, his Sunday boots—black eel skin—gleaming, his eyes closed.

  I joined the choir, volunteered to pass out tracts. Slowly I began to make friends. I was reminded each week that the world outside loomed larger, the city a den for greed, malice and lechery. Anywhere that people gathered with no intent to call on Christ’s name could only breed sin; every bar, movie house and dance floor became the foundation for another Sodom and Gomorrah.

  How can I describe the sense of fear my parents must have felt? They knew how Satan worked, tempting by degrees—first in smaller things, tiny manifestations of earthly desires: earrings, a glint of vanity, lips outlined to draw carnal attention, only a prelude to complete seduction. Each day the paper told the stories of children hooked on heroin, riots against our country, rock bands whose satanic lyrics and vulgar gyrating sent entire audiences of young people into fits of shameless sex. Having left the woods, my parents found they had entered into a whole other kind of wilderness.

  I felt I had entered another world. Each night I had my music. I started school at the local junior high, and from the teachers and books came a new kind of knowledge. In literature class we read stories of dragons and magic I had been taught to consider evil and demonic. In science we studied Darwin and evolution, and I was stunned by the gullibility of my fellow students, who seemed willing to believe our ancestors were monkeys (I could think only of Brother Lang years before, laughing: “My ancestors might have hung by their necks, but never by their tails”). History taught me something I had never considered: other civilizations had lived besides ours and those recorded in the Bible. Government, sociology, psychology—all things I knew to distrust, for the authority of man was weak and fallible, easily guided by Satan. Our authority came from God and the pulpit, and it could never be questioned.

  Current events I had never been aware of announced themselves each morning in the newspaper’s headlines. In 1970, when we first moved to Lewiston, I knew little of Vietnam, but I felt the waves it created as the conflict settled into the pooled American psyche. Even in Idaho, would-be hippies brandished their peace signs like silver crosses, and from our pulpit came the verdict: the peace sign was indeed a cross, but a cross broken by the forces of evil to resemble instead a witch’s foot. Behind the movement to make-love-not-war lay the unbridled desire of people doomed to self-destruction, not by bombs and guns, but by uninhibited copulation and drug use. The evangelist from Kansas called for a record burning, and the church’s teenagers lucky enough to own albums by The Beatles and Black Sabbath made a pyre in the parking lot, which the preacher saturated with gas and set afire, damning Satan back to His hell.

  Something in the drama thrilled me. Anything that warranted such protest held incredible power, although I could not then articulate it as such. But the lives of those my elders feared—the rock stars, hippies, gang members, runaways—seemed to hold some spark, some power my own life did not. Even while I prayed with the others for God to strike down the army of dissent rising from the ranks of the country’s youth, I found myself secretly wondering what it would be like to be among them. I knew that rock and roll promoted it all—disrespect for authority, anti-patriotism, drugs, sex, Satanism. “Strawberry Fields Forever” played backward was The Lord’s Prayer, and still I listened late into the night, unwilling to give up my radio.

  Maybe it was the music. Maybe what I heard in the lyrics and the rhythm and the deejay’s voice was what shook me, made me desire more of the world. I longed to be part of the group of girls at school who marched at half-time beneath the lights while their ruddy-faced parents applauded from the bleachers, but when I asked to try out for junior high drill team, my father said the skirts were too short. My brother was encouraged to participate in sports, but I could find nothing acceptable to fill my hours between school, church and sleep. No to the after-school dance, the movies, the swimming pool. The threat of assault from the outside world coupled with the laxity of the church’s concern with modesty and strict moral behavior burdened my father with even greater responsibility. He drew his family tight. He would protect us, be the gatekeeper of our souls—his duty as a man.

  My father became for me a wall of unreasonable denial, and I was unable to separate his distrust of the world from his distrust of me. He believed in absolute patriarchy and countenanced no questioning of his authority. His word was final. I chafed against his unwillingness to listen. I wanted only to assure him that I would be good—hadn’t I always been?—that I would not do anything wrong or sinful. His night job as a truck driver, hauli
ng wood chips from the forests he once loved to the mill at Lewiston to be made into paper and plywood, distanced my father even more. I saw little of him except on Sundays, when he drove us to church morning and evening and slept the hours between in his recliner.

  My mother too seemed to me more and more unreasonable. One afternoon, we stood together at the sink, rinsing the dark blue grapes that grew thick over the greenhouse. We were making jam, and the sweet steam that filled the kitchen made my mouth water. My mother hummed at her work, and I felt happy to be there with her.

  I didn’t feel like this very often, this close and intimate with my mother. There were things I wanted to ask her—questions about boys and babies, about her life at my age, about why my breasts hurt at night. But I didn’t know how to ask without embarrassing her or myself. Some things, she has always said, are better left unspoken.

  Perhaps because of the warmth and the way she hummed, I gathered my courage. “Mom, do you ever use tampons?”

  My mother stopped humming and without looking at me asked, “Why do you want to know?”

  I told her I hated the pads and uncomfortable elastic belt that caught and pinched. I wanted to try tampons, which seemed much more modern and unobtrusive. My mother looked horrified.

  “You can’t use them, Kim. Virgins can’t or they’ll … well, they might make themselves not virgins anymore.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I knew what a virgin was: a girl who had never had sex with a boy. I was confused and irritated. The way the conversation had turned out was making me feel nasty, and I worked myself out of the room, finding comfort in my grotto beside the fish pond.

  My cousin, Lezlie, had her own box of Tampax, and she was a year younger than I was. My uncle Barry had moved his family from the woods years earlier, and the tow-headed toddler was now a teenager with long dark hair and a coterie of cool friends who had shortened her name to Les. The next time I visited her house, I listened to her encouragement, then closed the bathroom door, alone with the thin cardboard tube. I studied the illustrations on the instruction sheet for a long time—the strange postures of the headless women and the simple blue drawings of their insides and orifices. When I emerged, Les looked at me expectantly. I grinned, feeling light and unburdened, triumphant and no less maidenly.

  It was not sin I longed for but rather a sense of identity, purpose. Who was I? A nice girl from Pierce, straight-A student, obedient daughter of a logger, someone anyone could just as easily not see. And what did my future hold? I never imagined it, never saw beyond my rigid schedule of school and church, other than to dream of someday marrying Luke and going to live with the Langs. I wondered if I would ever get back to them.

  I became more and more sensitive to the way the girls at school snickered behind their hands at my long dresses. The beige tights Sister Lang had bought me pilled and snagged until my mother threw them away and I was again reduced to wearing kneesocks. I envied the girls’ smooth legs and dark lashes, the carefree way they bounced across the field in their miniskirts. I felt a strange longing for the older boys who gathered around them at the bus stop, and I realized it was the same kind of feeling I had had for Luke but somehow more generalized, like the tingling I had felt when studying my madeup face in my grandmother’s mirror.

  Instead of smiling at others in the halls between classes, I began to lower my eyes and shuffle close to the wall. When I was noticed, it was to be pointed out as some kind of freak—the girl who wore her skirts long and her stockings short, the one who cringed behind her heavy-framed glasses and never made trouble. My only haven lay in silence, in stillness, and I hid behind my books, folded in on myself until I sat at my desk like a pretzel, a knot of elbows and knees.

  I walked home alone, usually behind Maria, a girl my age with full black hair and a chipped front tooth. She walked with Sam, her skinny blond boyfriend two years older, and they wrapped themselves together so tightly—his hand in her back jeans pocket, hers in his—I wondered at their ability to remain upright. Every other block they would stop, turn to each other and kiss deeply. I stopped then, too, maintaining my distance, embarrassed and entranced by their open intimacy.

  Maria was my neighbor, and I watched from my porch as she and Sam disappeared into the old white house across the street. Sam emerged later, tucking in his shirt and smoothing his hair before loping on toward his own home. The light that shone from the second-floor window I decided was hers, and I watched each night for some movement to reveal to me more of her life.

  She waited for me one day after school. Sam, a good foot-and-a-half taller, rested his arm across her shoulders. They both smoked Marlboros, and the cloud they exhaled filled the air around them so that they squinted to see.

  “Kim?”

  I clutched my books to my chest, fearing what she wanted from me or meant to do. She had never teased me about my dress or religion as the others had, but I couldn’t imagine why else she would call to me.

  “Want to walk home with us?”

  I looked from her up to Sam, whose expression had not changed. He seemed focused on some point just above my head.

  “You live by me, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Come on, then.”

  She turned and Sam pivoted with her. I followed several steps behind, still not sure what to make of this sudden and unexpected interest. Maria was not a cheerleader or drill team captain, and I seldom saw her with other girls. She often wore the same red skirt bunched at her waist to bring the hem higher, and her shoes were scuffed, the leather cracked.

  We walked for several blocks, and then Maria stopped. “What are you, weird? Come on.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me to her side. “Want a smoke?” I looked at the red-and-white pack she snapped between us. A single cigarette jutted out past the rest, perfect.

  “No.” I kept my eyes down, afraid to see how ridiculous she must think me.

  She shrugged and slid the pack back into Sam’s shirt pocket. We walked the rest of the way home in silence, but when we got to my house, she smiled and said, “See ya,” before guiding Sam like a Siamese twin through her own narrow door. That night in my bedroom I listened to the radio. I missed the Langs, Luke, the hollow. Nothing but the music seemed to fill the emptiness.

  The next afternoon, while my father slept and my mother was at the store, I rifled the ashtrays for smokeable butts. I opened the window in the bathroom and broke each ground-out cigarette at its base, rolling the blackened tobacco from the other end. Fitted together, the inch-long segments produced a manageable whole.

  It was as though I had practiced the movements all my life. I hardly felt dizzy, and as I sucked on the filter flattened by my fathers teeth, I took in what I saw in the mirror: no stranger, but a girl defined by familiar movements, in visible control of the air that she breathed. The next afternoon, I took the cigarette Maria offered. I knew its smell, knew the motions. It was easy.

  The next week, I asked if I could stay all night with Maria, lying to my parents for the first time: her father worked at the mill; her mother stayed home with the baby; she got good grades and didn’t cuss. Nothing was true.

  Once in her house I was stunned by the wreckage. Soiled diapers and cereal boxes were scattered across the floor. The dishes filling the sink and overflowing onto the counters were crusted with egg and ketchup. Flies rose and buzzed with our movement, then settled again onto the garbage swept to the room’s corners. There was no furniture. Maria dipped her finger into a jar of commodity peanut butter and sucked at it noisily.

  “Mom and the kids will be back soon. Let’s go up.”

  I followed her past the bathroom, holding my breath against the smell. I had never seen anything so unkempt, so completely used and ignored. I thought my incredulous silence might embarrass Maria, so I hummed a little as we ascended the narrow stairs.

  I was right. The light had come from her room. It must have been a grand house once, with second-floor balconies and gingerbread trim,
but now the floors were buckled, the wallpaper stained and peeling. Her window was a set of French doors that led out into air. Nothing hung in her closet except a few tangled hangers. No dresser, no desk or table. An old skillet sprouted cigarette butts. Empty Coors cans lined the mopboard, and a huge bleeding heart covered one wall, pierced through with an arrow, “Sam loves Maria” scrawled beneath. She plopped belly down on a thin mattress stained with urine and blood. “I had a tooth pulled,” she said, seeing my eyes fix on the dark blotches.

  I sat on the floor, feeling the breeze against my face as we smoked and talked. She told me that she didn’t remember her father, that they had moved from California with some jerk her mom was living with who left months ago, and she was glad he was gone because he beat them all and snuck in her room at night; her mother got welfare enough to keep them in food. She seemed old, resigned to her life, with none of the longing for a better house and family that I expected. I watched her pull the smoke deep into her lungs and hold it there, her eyes seeing something beyond the crowded houses and topped-off trees of our neighborhood. She came and went as she pleased, had a boyfriend who dogged her every step, drank beer and bought her own cigarettes, never hiding them from anyone. She painted hearts on her walls. She seemed less damned than I did.

  I told her everything I knew and could—about the church, about Luke, about our reasons for coming to Lewiston. I told her I wanted to do things like the other kids, that I hated my long skirts and plain face. She nodded as I talked. Nothing seemed to surprise her. The room darkened and our breath took form before us, flying out into the cooling air and rising. I didn’t think I could sleep there in the dirt and stink, but I did, waking only once to hear her mother banging the cupboards below, searching for the jar of peanut butter Maria had hidden on the ledge outside our room.