Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

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 mymother 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, whichhe 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 lieand 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