Free In the Kingdom of Men by Kim Barnes

remembering how, in Shawnee, I once had stepped off the porch without looking. The scorpion had hit my bare heel sharp and quick, not much more than a bee sting at first, but by midnight, I was burning with fever, my leg swollen to the knee. My grandfather began to pray and didn’t stop, right there beside me for two days and two nights, until the tremors lessened and I fell into sleep. When I woke, he stood from his hard chair, rested his hand against my cheek, and looked at me with his watery eyes. “What doesn’t kill you makes you strong,” he said, then turned for the door and the chores he had left undone.
    When I went inside and announced to Yash that I would walk to the commissary, he protested that shopping had always been a part of his job.
    “But I want to plant a garden,” I said, “and I need seeds.”
    “You’ll not find garden supplies at the grocery store,” he said.
    “Not okra?”
    “What is okra?”
    I described the small fibrous pods.
    “Ah,” he said,
“bhindi!”
His smile dropped to a frown. “You will not find that either.”
    When I insisted, he handed me a basket and the umbrella, its shade little help against the heat that rose from the blacktop, gumming the soles of my shoes. I stopped to peer out over the compound, its low-roofed houses, the young trees piecing the sidewalk into lacy shade, the homely fence, the stacks lifting their incendiary flares against the blazing sun. I checked out the recreation center with its swimming pool, the bowling alley where Bedouin boys set the pins, and the movie theater with its schedule of censored Hollywood films, traveling operas, symphonies, plays, and meetings held each Friday, one for Protestants, anotherfor Catholics, although, in deference to the laws of the land, the word
church
was never mentioned. The small auditorium seemed the heart of the compound, everything illegal all in one place.
    There was a small library inside the center, but I knew about small libraries—I could exhaust the stacks in no time if I weren’t careful to ration. When I walked into the single room with its few shelves of books, I saw that it wasn’t small but tiny, its volumes dog-eared and stained with coffee. I opened an issue of
Good Housekeeping
to find the pages limp and scissored, whether by the censors or wives hunting recipes, I wasn’t sure. I sighed and turned to see a young teenage girl watching me, her nose brindled with freckles, hair the color of flax.
    “Hi,” she said, her voice so high she sounded as though she had inhaled helium. “Is the new
Seventeen
in?”
    I smiled and shrugged. She plopped down cross-legged and groaned at the dated covers. When she turned back to me, I peered at the magazine in my hands.
    “Are you new?” she asked.
    “I’ve only been here a few days,” I said.
    She eyed me wisely. “You must be out of school.”
    “I just moved here with my husband,” I said.
    She wrinkled her nose. “I’m never getting married,” she said. “I’m going to be a stewardess for Pan Am.” She dusted off the seat of her pedal pushers, as though she’d been sitting in dirt, and left me in the library alone.
    I moved outside and walked to the playground, where I watched the younger children tussle. I wondered how my life might be different here if I had a son or a daughter to join the romp and holler of the group, some experience to share with the other young women. I felt in-between, somehow, out of rhythm with the world, and tried to remember whether I had ever known another childless woman, but only the biblical stories of Sarah and Rachel and Rebekah came to me—women who prayed and obeyed and believed until they were old and still their wombsopened and their sons were conceived. Sometimes I wondered why I had opened my own womb so soon, what had possessed me to give myself away. I remembered Mason, all that talk, all that sweetness, and couldn’t help but smile. Even knowing what it had cost me, it was a mistake I