Earthly Possessions (16 page)

I never know what’s needed. I gave him a Kleenex from my purse.

“Well, thanks a lot,” he said.

I said, “Or maybe a … do you want me to go get some water?”

He looked at Mindy, who only went on crying. I don’t know how I could have brought water anyway; the street was packed by now. Cars had drawn up all around us and behind us. People were getting out and sitting on their fenders in their shirtsleeves. A man came by with a whole fat tree of balloons. “Would you like a balloon?” I asked Mindy.

“Charlotte, for mercy’s sake,” Jake said. “Can’t you do no better than that?”

“Well, I was only … 
Selinda
would have,” I said. But that wasn’t the truth. Selinda wouldn’t have liked a balloon either. The truth was that I was grieving for Jake and Mindy both, and I didn’t know who I felt sadder for. I hate a situation where you can’t say clearly that one person’s right and one is wrong. I was cowardly; I chose to watch the parade. A team of Clydesdales clopped past with a beer wagon, and my eyes followed their billowing feet in a long restful journey of their own. The Clydesdales left great beehives of manure. I enjoyed noticing that. There are times when these
little
details can draw you on like spirals up a mountain, leading you miles.

Next came a flank of majorettes, and a flowered lady who tripped alongside them with a vanity case. “Watch those feet, girls!” she kept calling. “Turd ahead!” The majorettes might have been eyeless under their visored hats, but they sidestepped neatly when necessary. The soldiers were braver and slogged straight through. A little black boy marched beside them, carrying a grownup’s crutch like a rifle and swinging one rubbery arm, laughing and rolling his eyes at his friends. I had never in all my life seen anybody more delighted with himself.

“Now, where’d that Kleenex walk off to?” Jake asked me.

“Here’s another,” I said.

“Mindy? You ought to sit up and take notice, Mindy; they got a big float with a beauty queen on it. Top Touch sausage meat.
I’ve
eaten Top Touch before.”

Mindy hiccuped but didn’t raise her head. Jake looked over at me. “Well, what have I got to do?” he asked.

“Um …”

“You’re
supposed to know all this junk, what have I got to do?”

“Oh, it’s
Founder’s
Day,” I said. “Huh?”

I pointed to a tiny old lady with long blond hair, wearing a miniskirt, carrying a poster.
FOUNDER’S DAY 1876–1976
, it said, above four men’s pencil-drawn faces with much-erased mouths.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PROGRESS
.

“Well, I knew it wasn’t no standard holiday,” said Jake. “Lord, look at her hairdo. Reckon it’s real?”

“It couldn’t be. It’s a wig. Saran or something,” I said.

“Dynel, maybe. That’s what my sister’s got, Dynel.”

Mindy sat up, wiping her face with the backs of her hands. Muddy gray tear tracks ran down her cheeks and her mascara had turned her raccoon-eyed. “Mindy!” Jake said. “Want a Lifesaver? Want some chewing gum?”

She shook her head.

“I believe we got some Fritos left.”

“I don’t want your old Fritos, Jake Simms. I want to lie down and die.”

“Oh, now, don’t say that. Look, I’m trying my best here. Want me to do a magic trick? I do magic tricks,” he told me. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

“I believe you mentioned it,” I said, watching a float of chubby men in fezzes.

“I’m right good, aren’t I, Mindy? Tell her.”

Mindy mumbled something to the steering wheel.

“What’s that, Mindy? Speak up, I can’t hear you.” Mindy tilted her chin. “He makes things disappear,” she told the windshield.

“Right,” said Jake.

“He makes things vanish into nowhere. He undoes things. Houdini is his biggest hero.”

“Now at the moment I don’t have no equipment,” said Jake. “But bearing that in mind, Mindy, you just name any trick your heart desires and I will see what I can do. I mean that. Remember how you like magic?”

She didn’t answer. He looked over at me. His face was damp from the heat of the car, and his hair was coiled and springy. “She used to like magic a lot,” he told me.

“Well, I don’t any more!” Mindy said.

“I don’t know what’s got into her.”

The fezzes were at long last gone and here came another high school band. Everybody clapped and waved. But then there must have been a hitch of some kind, somewhere up front. They came to a halt, still playing, then finished their tune and fell silent and stood staring straight ahead. You could see the little pulses in their temples. You could see the silver chain linking a musician to his piccolo, giving me a sudden comical picture of the accident that must once have happened to make them think of this precaution. I laughed—the loudest sound on the street. For the clapping had stopped by now. There was some understanding between players and audience: each pretended the other wasn’t there. Till finally the parade resumed and so did the clapping, and the audience was filled with admiration all over again as if by appointment. The players marched on. Their legs flashed as steadily and evenly as scissors. I was sorry not to have them to watch any more.

“I would think a drum would be a right good instrument,” Jake told me, gazing after them.

“You just like whatever booms and damages,” said Mindy.

We looked at her.

“Oh! I was going to do my billfold trick,” Jake said.

“No, thank you.”

“Now, where’s my … shoot, my billfold.”

“Never mind,” said Mindy.

“Lend me your billfold, Charlotte,” Jake said.

I pulled it out of my purse and gave it to him, meanwhile watching a floatful of white-wigged men signing a paper that was scorched around the edges. “Look close, now,” Jake said to Mindy. “Maybe you’ll figure how I do it, finally. Here we have a empty billfold, see? Observe there ain’t no tricks to this, no hidden pockets, secret compartments …” I heard him riffling through it, flicking the plastic windows, snapping up some flap. There was a sudden silence.

“Why,” he said. “Why, what have we here. Charlotte? Charlotte, what
is
this?”

I took my eyes away from the parade and looked at what he held out. “It’s a traveler’s check,” I told him.

“A traveler’s check! Looky there, Mindy, a hundred-dollar traveler’s check! We’re rich! Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “What kind of sneaky way is that to act?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think,” I said.

“Didn’t think? Carrying around a hundred dollars and didn’t
think?”

“Well, I’ve had it for so long, you see. I mean I had it for just one purpose, I forgot it could be used for anything else.”

“What in hell purpose was that?” Jake asked.

“Why, for traveling,” I said.

“Charlotte,” Jake told me, “we
are
traveling.”

“Oh,” I said.

When Selinda was little, I tried to tell her the truth as much as possible. I told her that as far as I knew, when people die they die and that’s the end of it. But after church one day she asked, “How come you and me just die and other people get to go to heaven?”

“Well, there you are,” I told her. “You can take your choice.”

Selinda chose heaven. I didn’t blame her. She went to all those extras that I stayed home from: prayer meetings, Family Night, and so forth. I began to notice her absence. She was seven now and a whole separate person. Well, she always had been, really, but I thought of seven as the age when people come into their full identity. Sometimes it seemed to me that my own seven-year-old self was still looking out of its grownup hull, wary but unblinking. I asked Selinda, “Will you remember to pay me a visit now and then?”

“I live here,” Selinda said.

“Oh, I forgot.”

Up till then, I’d thought it would be a mistake to have another child. (More to take with me when I left.) But I changed my mind. And Saul, of course, had wanted more all along. So in January of 1969 I got pregnant. By March I was buying stacks of diapers and flannel nightgowns. In April I had a miscarriage. The doctor said it wouldn’t be wise for us to try again.

Nobody knew how much I’d already loved that baby. Not even Mama, who after all had never been consciously pregnant herself. She fussed around with my pillows, looking hopeful and puzzled. Miss Feather brought lots of fluids as if she thought I had a cold. Linus and Selinda acted scared of me; Julian suffered one of his lapses and lost three hundred dollars at the Bowie Racetrack. And Saul sat beside my bed, flattening my hands between his own. He looked not at me but at my fingernails, which had a bluish tinge. He didn’t say a word for hours. Wasn’t he supposed to? Wasn’t it a preacher’s job? I said, “Please don’t tell me this was God’s will.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said.

I said, “Oh.” I felt disappointed. “Because it’s not,” I said. “It’s biological.”

“All right.”

“This is just something my body did.”

“All right.”

I studied his face. I saw that he had two sharp lines pulling down the corners of his mouth, so deep they must have been there a long time. His hair was getting thin on top and sometimes now he wore reading glasses. He was thirty-two years old, but looked more like forty-five. I didn’t know why. Was it me? I started crying. I said, “Saul, do you think my body did this on purpose?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Because a baby would have kept me from leaving?”

“Leaving,” said Saul.

“Leaving
you.”

“No, of course not.”

“But I just keep thinking, you see. I’m so afraid that … I mean, sometimes it seems that we strain at each other so. We’re always tugging and chafing and … sometimes when we’re in the pickup, that rusty, creaky pickup, and Mama’s taking two thirds of the seat and Selinda’s irking my lap, and I am nagging over something I don’t even care about, as if I just want to see how far I can push you, and you’ve grown disgusted and backed off somewhere in your mind—well, then I think, ‘Really, we’re a very unhappy family. I don’t know why it should come as any surprise,’ I think. ‘It feels so natural. It’s my luck, I’m unlucky, I’ve lived in unhappy families all my life. I never really expected anything different.’ ”

I waited to see if Saul would argue, but he didn’t. He went on flattening my hands. He kept his head bowed. Already I was sorry I had said it all, but that’s the way my life was: I was eternally wishing to take everything back and start over. It was hopeless. I went on.

“Well,” I said, “I’m worried that my body thought, ‘Now, we don’t want to drag this thing out. We surely don’t want a
baby;
a baby would stop her from leaving for another whole seven years. So what we should do is just—’ ”

“Charlotte, you would never leave me,” Saul said.

“Listen a minute. I have this check, these shoes, I—”

“But you love me,” Saul said. “I know you do.”

I looked over at him, his long, steady eyes and set mouth. Why did he always put it that way? That time at the Blue Moon Motel, too. Shouldn’t he be telling me how
he
loved
me?

But what he said was, “I am certain that you care for me, Charlotte.”

And another thing: how come it always worked?

———

I’d been back on my feet six weeks or so when Saul walked into the kitchen one noontime carrying a baby and a blue vinyl diaper bag. Just that suddenly. This was a
large
baby, several months old. A pie-faced, stocky boy baby, looking very stern. “Here,” Saul said, and held him out.

“What’s that?” I asked, not taking him.

“A baby, of course.”

“I’m not supposed to carry heavy things,” I said, but I didn’t move away. Saul shifted the baby a little higher on his shoulder. He loved children but had never got the knack of holding them right; the baby’s nightgown was rucked up to his armpits and he tilted awkwardly, frowning beneath his spikes of hair like a fat blond Napoleon. “Can’t you take him? He’s not
that
heavy,” Saul said.

“But I … my hands are cold.”

“Guess what, Charlotte? We’re going to keep him a while.”

“Ah, Saul,” I said. You think I wasn’t expecting that? Nothing could surprise me any more. In this impermanent state of mine, events drifted in like passing seaweed and brushed my cheek and drifted out again. I saw them clearly from a great distance, both coming and going. “Thank you for the thought,” I said, “but it wouldn’t be possible,” and I moved on around the table, serenely setting out soupbowls.

“Charlotte, he hasn’t got a father, his mother ran off and left him with his grandmother, and this morning we found the grandmother dead. I assumed you’d want him.”

“But then his mother will come back,” I said. “We could lose him at any moment.” I started folding napkins.

“We could lose anybody at any moment. We could lose Selinda.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “He isn’t ours.”

“Nobody’s ours,” said Saul.

So I finished folding the last of the napkins, and warmed my hands in my apron a minute, and came back to where Saul was standing. There was some comfort in knowing I had no choice. Everything had been settled for me. Even the baby seemed to see that, and leaned forward as if he’d expected me all along and dropped like a stone into my waiting arms.

We called him Jiggs. His real name was something poor-white that I tried not ever to think about, and Jiggs seemed better suited anyway to his stubby shape and the thick, clear-rimmed spectacles that he very soon had to start wearing. Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.

We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. “Is he yours?” a customer might ask, and I would say, “Oh no, that’s Jiggs.”

“Ah.”

And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.

For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father’s formal composition. During the years stray props had moved it: flowers, swords, Ping-Pong paddles, overflow from Alberta’s clutter. People had a way of picking up odd objects when they entered, and then they got attached to them. They would sit down still holding them, absent-mindedly, and half the time I never even noticed. I wasn’t a chatty,
personal
kind of photographer. I would be occupied judging the light, struggling with the camera that had grown more crotchety than ever. Its bellows were all patched
with little squares of electrical tape. Its cloth was so frayed and dusty I got sneezing fits. Often I would have gone as far as printing up a negative before I really saw what I had taken. “Why,” I would say to Linus. “What on earth …?”