Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Page A

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 hadfriends 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 crowdof 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