Free Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes

girlfriend reserved the even days, Tom and I the odd. Tom presented the key to me as a gift, pleased with himself for daring such adult maneuvers. I was amazed and frightened by such risk. What if my father were to find out? How could I ever explain?
    Tom interpreted my hesitation as an insult. He’d worked hard for the money, taken chances so that we could be together. I talked myself into believing that we deserved this hideaway, that the oppression of parents and church had driven us to take such a step, forced us to take our love into hiding.
    But if the idea of such a retreat was romantic, the reality was not. I remember the lack of light and the cold darkness.The rooms smelled of spoiled food and mildewed linens. There was a small wooden table and two chairs, a rough-edged counter, a rust-ridden sink. The bed was a thin mattress with blue-striped ticking, discolored with sweat and urine. When I told Tom that I could not lie on it, he scowled, then spread his shirt and coat to cover the most offensive stains. He was, I could tell, not happy with me. As I lay beneath him, I felt nothing of the liberation such space had promised. What I felt instead was disgust. How many others had lain in this same room, for an hour, a night? What kind of woman would come here? I felt cheap and dirty, as though the soiled bedding had bled onto my skin.
    “You’re ruining this,” Tom said. He sat up, his shoulder blades sharp in the shadows of afternoon light.
    “I’m sorry.” I did not know what else to say. His anger made me feel as though I could not breathe. Men were dangerous if made angry. It was my job to soothe, to make things right. I placed the palm of my hand against his spine, let two fingers trace the vertebrae’s path.
    “I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.” I pulled gently at his arms. “I’m cold.”
    “Maybe I should just take you home.”
    “No,” I said, “I want to stay here.” I moved my hand across his back. “Next time I’ll bring a blanket. We’ll have a picnic lunch. We’ll say we’re going to the river.” I imagined a checkered tablecloth, a Mason jar of dried flowers. Maybe I could sneak a sheet or two. Maybe I could find a curtain for the kitchen window, a rug for in front of the sink, bring softness and color to this place my lover had chosen. I thought of all the houses my mother had remade with little more than a swatch of gingham and a bucket of Pine-Sol.
    “Maybe,” I said, “I just need to learn how to
be
here, how to act.”
    “We can be whoever we want here. We can act however we want.” He pulled me against him roughly. “There are no rules.”
    There was a new insistence in him. Before, our times together had held a certain balance—both of us eager, both of us taking, both of us giving. But this was different. Now our roles were more defined: he the taker, I the giver. I felt disconnected, separated from my body, unable to feel the rush and rise of blood, unable to focus on anything other than the fly-specked ceiling, the room’s webbed corners, the bare bulb hung from its wire.
    When he was done, we lay together, listening to the sounds of traffic, the distant whistle of the mill train, and I had a sudden sense of impending loss. What if Tom were to become impatient, tire of me? What if I no longer pleased him? I was fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, and already I was wondering how I could keep this man—how I might reshape my own desire to more convincingly reflect his, become the lake he might fall into, enchanted by his own image in the mirroring surface.
    E VEN THOUGH HE MAY NOT HAVE KNOWN the intricacies of my relationship with Tom, there is no mystery to my father’s reasons for doing what he could to keep me home. It was not simply the obvious intimacy between Tom and me that alarmed my father but something perhaps even more dangerous. My father saw what I could not: Tom’s intensifyingpossessiveness, his demands that made my father’s rules seem