Earthly Possessions (20 page)

“There was nothing else possible,” Dr. Porter said. “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“It’s c.a.,” the surgeon told me.

“Oh
, yes,” I said. “Well, thank you very much.”

“You can see her in a while,” said Dr. Porter. “Are you by yourself?”

“Saul is coming.”

“Well. I’ll be in touch.”

I sank back onto the couch and watched them go. I thought that walking in those thick-soled shoes would be like wading through a sandbox. Then I noticed Saul plunging down the corridor, his face remote and luminous. He passed me, paused, raised a hand to his forehead and returned. “What’s c.a.?” I asked him.

“Cancer,” he said, sitting down.

“Oh, I see. Of course.”

He opened his Bible to the ribbon marker. Halfway down the page, he suddenly stopped and looked over at me. We stared at each other blankly, like two people at the windows of separate trains.

———

After my mother returned from the hospital, her bedroom became the center of the house. She was too sick to get up again and she hated to be left alone. In that large, gloomy room, with its rotted silk draperies and bowlegged furniture, Jiggs memorized his spelling list, Miss Feather balanced the books, Linus made miniature swings and hung them from the branches of his bonsai trees. And my mother sat propped against a mountain of pillows, because lying flat was uncomfortable now. She even slept propped—or rather, spent the night propped, for I don’t know when she really slept. Any time of night that I checked her she would just be sitting there, and the Texaco lights shining through the window lit the watchful hollows of her eyes. Bones that had been buried for the last fifty years were beginning to emerge in her face.

“When will I be up?” she asked at first.

“Soon, soon,” we told her.

I felt that we were cowardly, but Saul said we should protect her as long as possible. We had some arguments about it. (This dying business was pointing up all our differences.) Then one day she asked me, “Please. When exactly will I start getting better?”

It was Sunday, a bright white Sunday in December, and Saul was not around. My only witness was Amos, stapling music sheets over in the armchair. I took a deep breath. I said, “Mama, I don’t believe you’ll ever be getting better.”

My mother lost interest and turned away. She started smoothing the tufts on her quilt. “I hope you’re remembering to mist my ferns,” she said.

“Yes, Mama.”

“I dreamed the tips were browning.”

“They’re not.”

“Dr. Porter is a very fine person but I hated that surgeon man,” she said. “Dr.… Lewis? Loomis? I knew right away he
wasn’t worth much. Coming in ahead of time to get on my good side, cracking jokes, keeping his hands in his pockets—and plotting all along to rummage about in my innards. I think we ought to sue him, Charlotte.”

“Mama, we can’t do that.”

“Certainly we can. I want my lawyer.”

“You don’t have a lawyer,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said. “Well. In that case.”

She slumped a little. I thought the conversation had tired her. I stood up and said, “Why don’t you try and sleep now, I’ll go see about supper. Amos is here if you need something.”

“I need to know the name of my problem,” she said.

For a minute I didn’t understand. Her problem? How would I know? I was still trying to figure out the name of
my
problem. But then she said, “My illness, Charlotte.”

“It’s cancer,” I said.

She folded her hands on the quilt and grew still. I became aware of Amos; he had lowered his music sheets and was staring at me. His shucked-off moccasins lay gaping beneath his chair. I saw he had a hole in his sock that I would have to fix. Every thought seemed to come to me so clearly. “Don’t wear that sock again until I’ve darned it,” I said. I left.

Then there was a period when Mama didn’t care to see me, barely answered when I spoke to her, sent the others out of the room for making too much noise and littering the floor with their torn envelopes and tangerine peels. She asked only for Saul. Wanted him to read to her from her big old family Bible: Psalms. She didn’t like the rest of the Bible any more, people undertaking definite activities or journeying to specific towns. Saul would read until his voice cracked, and come downstairs pale and exhausted. “I did the best I could,” he would say. You would think this was
his
mother. First he’d had Alberta and now he had Mama, and here I was with nobody.

“What more could I have done?” he asked.

“If you don’t know, who does?” I said.

Her bedroom hung over our heads like some huge gray dirigible. She hulked in our minds; her absence filled the house.

I took to keeping the studio open at night. You’d be surprised at the people who decide to get photographed at ten or eleven p.m. if they pass by and see a place lit. They would stop at the bay window—solitary teenagers, men who couldn’t sleep, housewives going out for tomorrow morning’s milk. They would stare at my pictures, all my portraits of people bedecked with Alberta’s clutter and dimmed by the crackling, imperfect light that seeped through my father’s worn camera. Then they’d come inside and ask, “Are those your regular portraits?”

“What else?” I’d say.

“You mean I could have one like that too?”

“Of course.”

And while I was loading the plates they’d drift around the studio, picking up an ermine muff, a celluloid fan, a three-cornered hat with gold braid …

Some people I photographed over and over, week after week—whenever they fell into a certain mood, it seemed. And this boy Bando, at the Texaco station: he would come by the first of every month, as soon as he got his paycheck. A hoodlum type, really, but in his pictures, with that light on his cheekbones and Grandpa Emory’s fake brass sword at his hip, he took on a fine-edged, princely appearance that surprised me every time.
He
wasn’t surprised, though. He would study his proofs the next day with a smile of recognition, as if he’d always known he could look this way. He would purchase every pose and leave, whistling.

Our sleep requirements changed. Our windows were lit till early morning, often. You would think the whole household had developed a fear of beds. Julian might be out with some girl, our only night-wanderer, but the rest of us found reasons to sit in the living room—reading, sewing, playing the piano, Linus carving bedposts from Tinker Toy sticks. Sometimes
even the children got up, inventing urgent messages now that they had my attention. Selinda needed a costume; she’d forgotten to tell me. Jiggs had to ask, “Quick: what’s five Q and five Q?”

“Is this important?”

“Oh, come on, Mom. Five Q and five Q.”

“Ten Q.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

“Get it?”

“I
get
it, I get it,” I said, and kissed the small nook that was the bridge of his nose.

Upstairs, my mother sat propped like some ancient, stately queen and listened to her own private psalmist.

But then she banished him. She shouted at Saul one suppertime so that all of us could hear, and a minute later he came down the stairs with his heavy, pausing tread and sank into his chair at the head of the table. “She wants
you
, Charlotte,” he said.

“What happened?”

“She says she’s tired.”

“Tired of what?”

“Tired, just tired. I don’t know,” he said. “Pass the biscuits, Amos.”

I went upstairs. Mama was sitting against the pillows with her mouth clamped, like a child in a huff. “Mama?” I said.

“I want my hair brushed, please.”

I picked up her brush from the bureau.

“Those psalms, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “First so up and then so down, and then so up again.”

“We’ll find you something else,” I said.

“I want Selinda to have my tortoise-shell necklace,” said my mother. “It matches her eyes. I’m dying.”

“All right,” I said.

———

We greeted 1975 like an enemy. None of us had much hope for it. Saul lost several of his older members to the flu and had to be gone more than ever. The children were growing up without me. I spent all my time taking care of Mama. There was no position that felt right to her, nothing that sat easy on her stomach. She would get a craving for some food that was out of season or too expensive, and by the time I’d tracked it down she’d have lost her appetite and would only turn her face to the wall. “Take it away, take it away, don’t bother me with that.” Her pills didn’t seem to work any more and she had to have hypodermics, which Dr. Sisk administered. She developed an oddly detailed style of worrying. “I hear a noise in the kitchen, Charlotte; I’m certain it’s a burglar. He’s helped himself to that leftover chicken you promised you would save for me.” Or, “Why has Dr. Sisk not come? Go and check his room, please. He may have committed suicide. He’s hung himself from an attic rafter by that gold chain belt in the cedar chest.”

“Mama, I promise, everything’s under control,” I would tell her.

“That’s easy for
you
to say.”

It occurred to me that if I were the sullen spinster I had started out to be, this death would have meant the springing of my trap. Only it would have been useless even then; I’d have had a houseful of cats, no doubt, that I couldn’t bear to leave. Newspapers piled to the ceiling. Money stuffed in the mattress.

“You’re just waiting for me to die so that one of Saul’s strays can have my room,” she told me.

“Hush, Mama, drink your soup.”

Then she asked me to sort her bureau drawers. “There may be some things I want burned,” she said. I pulled out the drawers one by one and emptied them on her bed: withered elastic stockings, lemon verbena sachets, recipes torn from magazines and hairnets that clung to her fingers. She fumbled
through them. “No, no, take them back.” What was she looking for, love letters? Diaries?

She felt in the bottom of her smallest desk drawer, came up with something brown and stared at it a moment. Then, “Here,” she said. “Put this in the fire.”

“What is it?”

“Burn it. If there isn’t a fire, build one.”

“All right,” I said. I took it—some kind of photo in a studio folder—and laid it beside me. “Do you want me to bring the next drawer?”

“Go, Charlotte. Go burn it.”

When she was angry, her face bunched in now as if gathered at the center by a drawstring. She was finally looking her age: seventy-four, scooped out, caved in like a sunken pillow. She raised one white, shaking forefinger.
“Fast!”
she said. Her voice broke.

So I went. But as soon as I was out of the room I looked at what she’d given me. Stamped across the front was “Hammond Bros., Experienced Photographers”—surely no outfit in Clarion. The folder was cheap, and hastily cut. The corners didn’t quite match.

Inside was a picture of my mother’s true daughter.

I don’t know how I knew that so immediately. Something about the eyes, maybe—light-colored, triangular, expectant. Or the dimples in her cheeks, or the merry, brimming smile. The picture had been taken when she wasn’t more than ten, maybe younger. It was a soft-focus photo on unusually thin paper: head only, and a ruffle at the neck, and a draggled bit of ribbon holding back her pale, rather frowsy hair.

When had my mother found her? Why had she kept it a secret?

I took the picture to my bedroom, locked the door, and sat down in a wing chair to study it. The funny thing was that in a vague way I felt connected to this little girl. I almost knew
her. We could have been friends. But I guessed from her unkempt hair and overdone ruffle that she came from a poor class of people. Migrant workers, maybe, or tenants in a trailer camp. No doubt she had grown up on wheels, stayed footloose and unreliable and remained on wheels, and had long ago left these parts. It should have been my life. It
was
my life, and she was living it while I was living hers, married to her true husband, caring for her true children, burdened by her true mother.

I slid the photo into my pocket. (I never considered destroying it.) And from then on I slid it into every pocket, and slept with it under my pillow at night. She was with me permanently. Often now as I moved around the house with bedpans and rubbing alcohol I was dreaming of her sleazy, joyful world. I imagined we would meet someday and trade stories of the ways we’d spent each other’s life.

My mother began to ramble in her thoughts. I believe she just
allowed
herself to ramble, as a sort of holiday. Wouldn’t anyone, in her position? When she had to, she could be as lucid as ever. But in her presence most people faltered, the children fell dumb, and even Saul found reasons to leave. It was just me and Mama—back to the old days. Mama sat nodding at the wall, I sewed emblems on Selinda’s Girl Scout uniform. Little green stitches fastening down my mother’s foggy memories. I thought about the household tasks—the mending, cooking, story-reading, temperature-taking, birthday cakes, dentist’s and pediatrician’s appointments—necessary for the rearing of a child. All those things my mother had managed, middle-aged though she had been, crippled with high blood pressure and varicose veins, so clumsy and self-conscious that the simplest trip for new school shoes was something to dread for days beforehand. I had never put it all together before. It seemed that the other girl’s photo had released me in some way, let me step back to a
reasonable distance and finally take an unhampered view of my mother.

“He had never even kissed a girl,” she said. “I had to be the one to kiss him. He was so relieved.”

“Really, Mama?”

“I suppose you think we made a lot of mistakes with you.”

“Oh, no.”

“We didn’t give you a very happy childhood.”

“Nonsense, Mama, I had a happy childhood.”

In fact, maybe I did. Who knows?

“And his breath smelled of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. I have always considered Juicy Fruit a very trashy flavor.”

“Me too,” I said.

“My brother hardly ever comes to see me any more.”

“He died, Mama. Remember?”

“Of course I remember. What do you take me for?”