Earthly Possessions (12 page)

“Not likely,” said Jake. His finger had found its mark and stopped. “Dorothea Whitman Home,” he said. “I’ll dial, you talk.”

“How come I have to talk?”

“You don’t think they’d let a man through.”

“I can’t imagine why not.”

“Well, I ain’t taking no chances. Ask for Mindy Callender, say it’s her aunt or something.”

He dropped in a dime and dialed. I pressed the receiver to my ear. A woman answered: “Whitman Home.”

“Mindy Callender, please,” I said.

“One moment.”

Something in the lines turned off and on. There was a pause and then a thin voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello. Mindy?”

“Who’s this?”

I handed the receiver to Jake. “Hey there,” he said. He grinned. “Yeah, yeah, it’s me. I’m here. No, that was just—well, I’m fine. How’re you?”

He listened a long time. His face grew serious again. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Really? Well, I’m sorry to … look here, Mindy, I need to know something. Has anybody been asking for me? Asking if you knew my whereabouts? You sure, now.
No
I’m not in no trouble, quit that. Just tell me where to come for you.”

I pressed my back against the glass of the booth, trying to get more room. I watched Jake’s fingers tap the directory and then grow still. “Why not?” he said. “It ain’t even dark yet.
Look, now, Mindy, we’re in sort of a hurry here, we … how’s that? Naw. What would I be doing with a ladder?”

He listened a while longer. “Yeah, well,” he said. “First left after the … sure.
Sure
I got it, I ain’t that stupid. Okay. Bye.”

He hung up and dug his fingers into his hair. “Shoot,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“First she says she can’t get free today, wants me to come at midnight instead and fetch her down a ladder. A ladder! I tell you, sometimes that Mindy is so … and when I say no, she says then maybe she’ll meet me at six tomorrow morning. Maybe, maybe not. What is she playing at now?”

“I would think a ladder would be sort of … risky,” I said.

“You don’t know Mindy, that’s just the kind of thing she admires,” he said. “I’m surprised she don’t want me charging up on a horse.”

We left the booth and went into the grocery store. Jake chose a Gillette, a can of lather, a giant bottle of Coke, and a bag of Doritos. I saw a freezer full of orange juice and developed a craving for some, but he said it would be too much trouble to mix. He was very short-tempered, I thought. He cruised the aisles, muttering to himself, hurrying me along whenever I slowed down. “Come on, come on, we ain’t got all night.”

“The way I see it, all night’s just what we do have,” I said.

“This is not the time to start acting smart,” he told me.

After we’d finished in the grocery store we drove on through Linex, which had turned a silvery color now that the sun was down. We traveled so far I wondered if we were going for good, giving up on Mindy. I thought that would be fine. (Even leaving someone
else’s
loved one could fill me with a
kind of wicked joy.) But then Jake slowed the car and peered at the woods to his right. He said, “This here will have to do, I guess.” A brown wooden sign spelled out
TUNSAQUIT KAMP-GROUNDS
in chiseled letters. We turned onto a dirt road and bounced along, passing an empty bulletin board, a Johnny-on-the-Spot, and several trashcans. Finally the road ended. Jake stopped the car and slumped back. “Well,” I said. “Yeah, well,” he said.

He rolled down the window. This deep in the woods it was already twilight, and a mushroom-smelling chill hit us like a faceful of damp leaves. He rolled the window up again. “I thought at least they’d have picnic tables,” he said.

“Maybe we could try further on.”

“Nah.”

I pulled my raincoat around me but Jake just sat there, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Finally I reached into the grocery bag and opened the Doritos. “Have some,” I said. He shook his head. I took a handful myself and ate them one by one. “They’re good,” I told him. “Try and see.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

“If we just had that orange juice they’d be perfect.”

“Now, how’d we mix orange juice way off here in the woods? Besides, I had to watch the money. We’re almost out.”

“If you’re watching the money, why’d you buy the razor?” I said. “I’d rather have orange juice.”

“Well, I would rather have a shave,” said Jake. He straightened up and checked his face in the mirror. “Death Row Jethro,” he said, and sank back. “She’d take one look and run. I can’t abide not shaving.”

“I can’t abide not eating fruit,” I told him. “I just have this craving; I believe I’m getting scurvy.”

“Will you quit that? Will you just stop dwelling on a thing?”

I quit. I ate some more Doritos and looked at the woods.
Once I got used to the bareness—slick brown needled floor, color washed out in the dusk—I thought it was sort of pleasant here. But Jake was so restless. He started crackling through the grocery bag. He took some Doritos after all and then brought out the Coke bottle, unscrewed the top, and sent a fine warm spray over both of us. “Oops. Sorry,” he said.

“That’s all right.”

“Have a drink.”

“No, thanks.”

“If you like,” he said, “you can sleep in the back tonight. I ain’t sleeping anyhow. I plan to just sit here and go crazy.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t see how you stand this,” he said.

“You forget,” I told him, “I’ve been married.”

We sat there munching Doritos, watching the trees grow taller and blacker as night came on.

I first left my husband in 1960, after an argument over the furniture. This was Alberta’s furniture that he’d stored instead of selling, for some reason, back when he sold her house. We hadn’t been married a month when he hired a U-Haul and brought everything home with him: her rickety bedroom suites, linoleum-topped table and worn-out chairs, her multicolored curtains and shawls and dresses … add to this her father-in-law’s belongings as well, all the props and costumes the old man had stashed in the dining room. Well, I thought Saul meant to hold a garage sale or something. Certainly I saw that we couldn’t go on paying the storage bills. But it seemed he had no such intention. He kept it, every bit of it. The house was overstuffed as it was, so he had to double things up: an end table in front of another end table, a second sofa backed against the first. It was crazy. Every piece of furniture had its
shadow, a Siamese twin. My mother didn’t seem to find it odd at all (she doted on him now, she thought he could do no wrong) but I did. He wouldn’t even open Alberta’s letters; what did he want with her furniture?

I myself thought of Alberta daily, and had coveted all she owned for years, but these were just her cast-offs. If she had managed to fling them away, so could I. “Saul,” I said, “we have to get rid of this clutter. I can’t move. I can’t breathe! It’s got to go.”

“Oh, we’ll sort it out eventually,” was what he said.

I believed him. I continued stumbling over crates of satin shoes and riding boots, bruising my shins in the tangle of chair legs, waiting for him to take some action. But then he started Bible College and became so preoccupied. At night he was studying, and any spare time he had was given to the radio shop. It was plain he’d forgotten that furniture utterly.

Along about October, I decided to dispose of it myself. I admit it: I went behind his back. I didn’t call Goodwill in an open and aboveboard way that he would notice but snuck things out, piece by piece, and set them by the trashcan. The truck came by on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday I put out a nightstand, Saturday a bookcase. I couldn’t discard more than one thing at a time because the town had a limit on bulk trash. This made me very impatient. I lay awake planning what to get rid of next; it was so hard to choose. The bureau? Or the end table? Part of me wanted to work my way through the kitchen chairs, but there were eight of them and that would be so boring, week after week. Part of me wanted to head straight for the sofa, the biggest thing in the house. But surely he would notice that. Wouldn’t he?

His attitude now was fond but abstracted—not what you look for in a husband. He’d settled me so quickly into his life; he’d moved on to other projects. I felt like something dragged on a string behind a forgetful child. I couldn’t understand how
we’d arrived so soon at the same muddy, tangled, flawed relationship that I had with everyone else.

I began to consider all our belongings with an eye to how they would look beside the trashcan. Not just Alberta’s things, but Mama’s and my own as well. After all, did we really need to write at desks, walk on rugs? In the middle of dinner I would freeze, staring at the china cupboard full of compote dishes. Why, they would even fit
inside
the trashcan, not lose me a single collection day. And how about my father’s Graflex that I had never used, and my baby clothes in the brassbound trunk and the files full of dead people’s passport photos? What good were they to me?

Wednesday morning I made my decision: Alberta’s bureau. I waited till Saul had gone to the radio shop, and then I lugged it down the stairs—first the drawers, one by one, and then the frame. The frame was hard to handle and it clumped quite a bit. My mother called from the kitchen: “Charlotte? Is that you?” I had to stop and rest the bureau on a step and steady my voice and say, “Yes, Mama.”

“What’s happening up there?”

“Nothing, Mama.”

I took it out the front, so she wouldn’t see. Dragged it around to the alley, slid all the drawers in and left it by the trashcan. Then I went to the grocery store, and on to Photo Supply for some bromide paper. So it was noon before I got home again. I stepped in the door, set down my packages, and came face to face with Alberta’s bureau.

Well, it was like meeting up with a corpse that I’d already buried. I was truly startled. And it didn’t help to have Saul looming behind it with his arms folded across his chest. “Why,” I said. “What is
this
doing here?”

“I found it by the trashcan,” he said.

“You did?”

“Luckily, it’s Columbus Day and nobody picked it up.”

“Oh. Columbus Day,” I said.

“How many other things have you thrown away?”

“Well …”

“It’s not yours to dispose of, Charlotte. What would make you chuck it out like that?”

“Well, I ought to have
some
say what’s in this house,” I told him. “And when I spoke to you about it you were too busy, oh, you couldn’t be bothered with earthly things.”

“I was working,” said Saul. “I’m falling asleep on my books every night. I can’t stop to rearrange the furniture at the drop of a hat.”

“Drop of a hat! I asked you in August. But no, you had to wait for the proper moment. And then went off muttering scripture somewhere, practicing handshakes or whatever it is you do in that place, I wouldn’t know.”

“Naturally you wouldn’t,” he said, “since you didn’t come to Opening Day at Hamden, where they explained it all.”

“But I don’t like Hamden,” I told him. “I hate the whole idea, and I would try to make you quit if I were sure that I had any right to change people.” ’

“Well, I don’t understand you,” he said.

“No, I know you don’t. Preachers never ask themselves that question, that’s what’s wrong with them.”

“What question? What are we talking about? Listen, all I want is for you to leave my things alone. Don’t touch them. I’ll tend to them sometime later.”

“Even if they’re breaking my neck?” I asked.

He brushed a hand across his forehead, like someone exhausted. “I never thought you’d turn out to be this kind of person, Charlotte,” he said. “That furniture is mine, and I’ll decide what to do with it. Meanwhile, I’m late for class. Goodbye.”

He left, closing the door too quietly. I heard the pickup start. I gathered my packages and took them to the kitchen,
where I found my mother sitting rigid in her lawn chair. These days she had packed down somewhat; she was merely a very stout, sagging woman, and could have sat anywhere she chose but returned to the lawn chair during moments of stress. She wore her old scared look and clutched the splintery arms with white-tipped fingers. I said, “Never mind, Mama. It’s all right.”

“You treat him so badly,” she said, “and he’s so fine and mannerly.”

She liked Saul a lot more than she’d ever liked me.

I said, “Mama, I have to defend myself.”

“But you don’t want to drive him off,” she said.

“Drive him off?” I said. “Ha!” It was exactly what I did want. I could see myself chasing him with a stick, like the girl on the Old Dutch Cleanser can: “Back away! Back away! Give me air!” This hopeless, powerless feeling would vanish like a fog, if I could just drive him off. I would be free then of his judging gaze that noted all my faults and sins, that widened at learning who I really was. I would be rid of his fine and mannerly presence, eternally showing me up. But I didn’t say any of that to my mother. I set the packages on the counter, kissed her cheek, and left, swinging my purse. Walked across town to Libby’s Grill. Ordered a bus ticket for New York City.

I believe that was the clearest, happiest moment of all my life.

But this was 1960, remember, when Clarion was still a sleepy little town and there weren’t all that many buses. “What day are you leaving?” Libby asked. (In 1960, there really was a Libby still.)

I said, “Day?”

“Bus comes through Mondays and Thursdays, Charlotte. Which do you want a ticket for?”

This place just wouldn’t let go of me. You’d think at least they’d get the bus schedule synchronized with the garbage schedule.

“Thursday, please,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

And then I had to empty out my purse. All she gave me back was eight dollars. But the ticket was worth it, I decided: long enough to tie around my waist. I folded it carefully, feeling slowed and chastened.

After that, I needed a place to stay till Thursday. It was ridiculous that Saul got to live at my mother’s. And Aunt Aster would never allow her guest room to be used. In the end, I had to go on over to the Blue Moon Motel—four dollars nightly, a joke for high school boys with fast ideas. Had to spend the afternoon lying on a mangy chenille bedspread in my stocking feet, not so much as a television to watch, not even a file to do my nails with. My life grew perfectly still, but I told myself it was the stillness that animals take on just before they spring into action.