Earthly Possessions (2 page)

When she was in her mid-thirties—still a maiden lady teaching school, living in her dead father’s house beside the
Texaco station—a traveling photographer named Murray Ames came to take her students’ pictures. A stooped, bald, meek-looking man with a mustache like a soft black mouse. What did he see in her? Did he like her little feet, her fancy shoes? At any rate, they married. He moved into her dead father’s house and turned the library into a portrait studio—an L-shaped room with an outside entrance and a bay window facing the street. You can still see his huge old complicated camera there on its stand beside the fireplace. Also his painted backdrop—blue, blue sky and one broken-off Ionic column—which so many schoolchildren used to stand in front of so long ago.

She had to quit teaching; he didn’t want a wife who worked. (He was given to fits of cold, black moodiness that scared her to death, that made her flutter all around him wondering what she’d done wrong.) She sat home and ate chocolate caramels and made things—pincushions, Kleenex-box covers, Modess-pad lady-dolls to stand on bureau tops. This went on for years. Every year she got fatter and fatter, and had more trouble moving around. She tilted at each step, holding herself carefully like a very full jug of water. She grew listless, developed indigestion, felt short of breath, and started going through the Change. She was certain she had a tumor but would not see a doctor; only took Carter’s Little Liver Pills, her remedy for everything.

One night she woke up with abdominal spasms and became convinced that the tumor (which she seemed to picture as a sort of overripe grapefruit) had split open and was trying to pass. All around her the bed was hot and wet. She woke her husband, who stumbled into his trousers and drove her to the hospital. Half an hour later, she gave birth to a six-pound baby girl.

I know all this because my mother told me, a thousand times. I was her only audience. In some way, she’d grown separate
from the rest of the town—had no friends whatsoever. She lived her life alone behind her gauzy curtains. Yet I believe that once my mother’s family was very social, and filled that house with dances and dinner parties. (My grandfather was involved in politics somehow, something to do with the governor.) There are pictures of my mother in a pink tulle evening gown, looking like a giant hollyhock, playing hostess in the period after my grandmother’s death. In all the pictures she is smiling, and has her hands linked across her stomach as if hugging herself for joy.

But my grandfather was the only man who ever totally approved of her (he called her his biscuit, he loved her dimples, he was glad she wasn’t all skin and bones, he said) and once he had died, her social life began to thin out. Pretty soon only her father’s oldest, kindest friends asked her places, only to dull family dinners where there was no need to pair people; and then they died, too, and her one lone brother was married to a woman who didn’t like her; and the other teachers were so young and vivacious, they filled her with despair. Also, she got the feeling sometimes that the children at school were laughing at her. While they were her pupils they just loved her, oh, they loved to be rocked by her when they fell off the jungle gym and to smell the velvet rose fastened to her bosom, with its drop of L’Heure Bleu she put on a single petal every morning. But a year or two later, when they had passed on to other grades—well, several times she had noticed things. Little snickers, traded glances, rude limericks she wouldn’t lower herself to repeat.

Then after she was married there was a brief flurry of invitations, as if she had suddenly been declared alive after a long misunderstanding. But … what was the trouble, exactly? She couldn’t say. Couldn’t put her finger on it. Her husband just never had learned to fit in, maybe that was it. He wasn’t outgoing enough. He acted so glum, wouldn’t raise his eyes when spoken to and hardly spoke at all himself. Hung about as
if he didn’t own his body—shoulders sagging, middle caved in; he looked like an empty suit of clothes. No wonder their life had shrunk and dwindled so!

Yes, I wanted to say, but what about Alberta, the lady next door?
Her
husband was no good whatsoever, and still she had more friends than I could count.

I entered school, a whole new world. I hadn’t had any idea that people could be so light-hearted. I stood on the edge of the playground watching how the girls would gather in clumps, how they giggled over nothing at all and told colorful stories of family life: visits to circuses, fights with brothers. They didn’t like me. They said I smelled. I knew they were right because now when I walked into my house I could smell the smell too: stale, dark, ancient air, in which nothing had moved for a very long time. I began to see how strange my mother was. I noticed that her dresses were like enormous flowered undershirts. I wondered why she didn’t go out more; then once, from a distance, I watched her slow progress toward the corner grocery and I wished she wouldn’t go out at all.

I wondered why my father had so few customers, most of them soldiers or other transients, and why he had to talk to them in that mumbling, hangdog way that tore at my heart. I worried that he and my mother didn’t love each other and would separate, fly apart, forgetting me in the flurry. Why couldn’t they be like Ardle Leigh’s parents? The Leighs held hands every place they went, but my parents never touched at all. I seldom saw them look at each other. They seemed to be staring inward, like people cheated or disappointed somehow. And though they slept in the same great wooden bed, the middle of it stayed perfectly neat—a median strip unrumpled, undisturbed. Or sometimes they quarreled (irritable lashings-out, no issue you could
name
, exactly) and my father spent the night in his studio. Then I felt dislocated and sick to my stomach. I loved my father more than I loved my mother. My father
believed I was really their true daughter. My mother didn’t.

My mother believed there’d been a mix-up at the hospital. It was all such a shock, that whole business, she said; she’d been a little dazed. An unexpected birth is like—why, an earthquake! a tornado! Other natural disasters. Your mind hasn’t quite prepared a frame for it yet. “Besides,” she would say, plucking at the front of her dress, “they gave me some kind of laughing gas, I think. Then everything was a dream. My vision was affected and when they showed me the baby I assumed it was a roll of absorbent cotton. Mostly they kept her in the nursery. On the day I went home they handed me this bundle: a stark-naked child in a washed-out blanket. Why! I thought.
This
is not mine! But I was still so surprised, you see, and besides didn’t want to make trouble. I took what they gave me.”

Then she would study my face, with her forehead all ridged and sorrowful. I knew what she was wondering: what stranger’s looks had I inherited? I was thin and drab, with straight brown hair. Nobody else in the family had brown hair. There were peculiarities about me that no one could explain: my extremely high arches, which refused to be crammed into many styles of shoes; my yellowish skin; and my height. I was always tall for my age. Now where did that come from? Not from my father. Not from my mother’s side—my five-foot mother and her squat brother Gerard and her portly, baby-faced father beaming out of the photo frames, and certainly not from my Great-Aunt Charlotte, for whom I was named, whose pictures show her feet dangling comically when she is seated in an armchair. Something had gone wrong somewhere.

“But of course I love you anyway,” my mother said.

I knew she did. Love is not what we are talking about, here.

Unfortunately I was born in 1941, when Camp Aaron was filling up with soldiers and Clarion County Hospital suddenly
had more patients—mainly soldiers’ wives, giving birth—than at any other time before or since. All the hospital’s records for that period are skimpy, inaccurate, or just plain lost. I know, because my mother checked. She had nothing to go on. Somewhere out in the world her little blond daughter was growing up with a false name, a false identity, a set of false, larcenous parents. But my mother just had to live with that, she said. Her hands fluttered out, abandoning hope.

To her the world was large and foreign. I knew that it was small. Sooner or later her true daughter would be found. Then what?

My father, if asked directly, said that I was the true daughter. He didn’t go on and on about it; he just said, “Of course.” Once he took me into a guest room and showed me my baby clothes, packed away in a brassbound trunk. (I don’t know what he thought that proved.) He had had to buy those clothes himself, he said, while my mother was lying in the hospital. He had bought those clothes for
me
. He jabbed a finger at my chest, then scratched his head a moment as if trying to recall something and went off to the studio. I worried that he was building toward one of his moods. I barely glanced at the baby clothes (yellowed, wrinkled, packed together so long and so tightly you would have to peel them away like cigar leaves) before I left too and went to find him. I worked alongside him all afternoon, rinsing heavy glass negatives under running water, but he didn’t say anything more to me.

Meals were strained and silent: only the clinking of silverware. My parents didn’t speak, or if they did, it was in a hopeless, bitter way. “Bitter as acorns,” my father said, and he set the coffeecup down so sharply that it splashed across the mended tablecloth. Then my mother lowered her face to her hands, and my father jerked his chair back and went to wind the clock. I mashed my peas with my spoon. There was no point
in eating. Anything you ate in that house would sit on your stomach forever, like a stone.

These were my two main worries when I was a child: one was that I was not their true daughter, and would be sent away. The other was that I
was
their true daughter and would never, ever manage to escape to the outside world.

I was glad the robber had let me have the window seat. Even if it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart, at least I got to see the last of Clarion skating by. Followed by a string of housing developments, and then wide open fields where I could just sit back and let my eyes get lost. It was years since I had been anywhere.

Meanwhile there was this nylon jacket slicking around to one side of me, continually changing position. He was restless, I could tell. I mean restless in a permanent way, by nature. At all stop signs and traffic lights he resettled himself. When a woman rose to get off by a mailbox in the middle of nowhere I heard his fingers drumming, drumming, all the time the bus was stopped. Once we had to slow down behind a tractor and he actually groaned out loud. Then shifted his feet, scrunched his shoulders around, scratched his knee. With his left hand, of
course. His right hand was out of sight—arm folded across his stomach, gun jammed between my third and fourth ribs. He was taking no chances.

What did he think I would do? Jump out that little, sooty window? Ask the old lady in front of me for help? Scream? Well, scream, maybe; that might work. (If they didn’t just think I was a lunatic and pretend not to hear.) But I am not the kind to scream, I never have been. As a child I nearly drowned once, sinking in a panic beneath the lifeguard’s eyes with my lips clamped tightly together. I would rather die than make any sort of disturbance.

We rode alongside a freight train a ways. I counted the cars. If you’re stuck you’re stuck, I figure; might as well relax. I wondered why the B & O Railroad had changed its name to the Chessie System. Chessie could be a new kind of sandwich spread, or a lady gym instructor.

From time to time it occurred to me that I could possibly be killed in a while.

The soldier’s radio was playing a golden oldie, “Little Things Mean a Lot.” I could close my eyes and be dancing at the Sophomore Prom again if I wanted. Which I didn’t. The song broke off in the middle of a high note and a man said, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.”

The bank robber didn’t move a muscle, but he grew a surface of awareness that I could feel.

“Clarion police report that the Maryland Safety Savings Bank was robbed at around two thirty this afternoon. A white man in his early twenties, apparently working alone, escaped with two hundred dollars in one-dollar bills and a female hostage as yet unidentified. Fortunately, the bank’s automatic cameras were activated and police have every hope of—”

The soldier turned a dial on his radio. The announcer lost interest and wandered away. Olivia Newton-John drifted in.

“Shoot,” said the robber.

I jumped.

“What’s a two-bit place like that want with cameras?”

I risked a glance at him. There was a little muscle flickering near the corner of his mouth. “But listen—” I said. The pistol nudged me, like a thumb. “Listen,” I whispered. “You’re gone now! You’re out of there.”

“Sure. With my face all over a roll of film.”

“What does that matter?”

“They’ll identify me,” he said.

Identify? Did that mean he was a known criminal? Or paranoid, maybe—some maniac from Lovill State Hospital. Either way, it didn’t look good.

“It don’t look good,” he told me.

His voice was thin and gravelly—the voice of a man who doesn’t care what he sounds like. I wasn’t encouraged by it. I shut my mind and turned back to the window, where peaceful farms were rolling by.

“What are you staring at?” he asked.

“Cows,” I said.

“They’re going to meet me at the next town, wait and see. What’s the next town?”

“Now listen,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the radio? They know you have a hostage, that’s all they know yet. They’re looking for a man who’s traveling with a hostage. All you’ve got to do is let me go. Doesn’t that make sense? Next place we stop at, let me off. You stay on the bus. I won’t say a word, I promise. What do I care if they catch you or not?”

He didn’t seem to have heard. He gazed straight ahead of him with that muscle still working. “One thing I cannot abide is being locked up,” he said finally.

“Right.”

“Can’t take it.”

“Right.”

“You’re staying with me till I see that bank film.”