Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Page B

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 spiritsand 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, mymother’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.
    I painted the