Earthly Possessions (22 page)

“I won’t hurry you,” Amos said.

I looked at him.

“I know what you’re going through,” he told me.

For we never met in vacant rooms any more—or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.

So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog. Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, comforting smell: chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father’s camera. I turned on the lights and took the
CLOSED
sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather’s: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?

“Certainly it’s real,” I told him. “You see it, you feel it: it’s real.”

“No, what I mean is …”

“Sit beside the lamp, please.”

As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, “Amos!”

“You’re back at work,” he said.

“Yes, well, only Bando.”

I hung the prints. Bando’s face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. “Isn’t it funny?” I said. “In ordinary life he’s not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these; they’re not really real, he would say.”

“What’s your father got to do with it?” Amos asked.

“Well …”

“This studio’s been yours for, what? Sixteen, seventeen years now. It’s been yours nearly as long as it was his.”

“Well,” I said. “Yes, but …” I turned and looked at him. “That’s true, it has,” I said.

“And still you act surprised when somebody wants you to take his picture. You have to decide if you’ll do it, every time. A seventeen-year temporary position! Lord God.”

It dawned on me finally that he was angry. But I didn’t know what for. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went over to him. “Amos?” I said.

He stepped back. He had suddenly grown very still.

“You’re not coming away with me, are you, Charlotte,” he said.

“Coming—?”

I realized that I wasn’t.

“You’re much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs.”

“No, it’s … what? No, it’s just that lately, Amos, it’s seemed to me I’m so tangled with other people here. More connected than I’d thought. Don’t you see that? How can I ever begin to get loose?”

“I’d assumed it was your mother,” he said. “I assumed it was
duty
, that you’d leave in an instant if not for her. Turns out I was wrong. Here you are, free to go, but then you always were, weren’t you? You could have left any day of your life, but hung around waiting to be sprung. Passive. You’re passive, Charlotte. You stay where you’re put. Did you ever really intend to leave?”

I didn’t think my voice would work, but it did. “Why, of course,” I said.

“Then I pity you,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t feel a bit of pity. He looked at me from a height, without bending his head. His hands in his pockets were fists. “It’s not only me you’ve fooled, it’s yourself,” he said. “I can get out, but you’ve let yourself get buried here and even helped fill in the grave. Every year you’ve settled for less, tolerated more. You’re the kind who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You’re proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it’s
their
business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own …”

He stopped, maybe because of the look on my face. Or maybe he had just run down. He took one fist from his pocket and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Well, thanks for the example,” he said finally. “I’m leaving, before the same thing happens to me.”

“Amos?”

But he was gone, not a pause or a backward glance. I heard the front door slam. I didn’t know what to do next. I stood looking all around me in a stunned, hopeless way—at my dusty equipment, stacks of props, Alberta’s furniture, which had never (I saw now) been sorted and discarded as Saul had promised but simply sifted in with our own. At the crumbling buildings across the street: the Thrift Shop, newsstand, liquor store, Pei Wing the tailor … not a single home in the lot, come to think of it. Everyone else had moved on, and left us stranded here between the Amoco and the Texaco.

I stood there so long I must have been in a kind of trance. I watched a soft snowstorm begin, proceeding so slowly and so vertically that it was hard to tell, at first, whether the snow was falling or the house was rising, floating imperceptibly into the starless blue night.

After Amos went away, I became very energetic. I had things to do; I was preparing to get out.

First I discarded clothing, books, knick-knacks, pictures. I lugged pieces of furniture across the street to the Thrift Shop. I gave my mother’s lawn chair to Pei Wing, the plants to Saul’s choir leader, the Sunday china to Holy Basis Church. I threw away rugs and curtains and doilies. I packed the doll things in cartons and put them in the attic. What I was aiming for was a house with the bare, polished look of a bleached skull. But I don’t know, it was harder than I’d thought. Linus kept making
new
doll things. I packed those away, too. The piano grew new layers of magazines and keys. I had the Salvation Army come and cart the piano off. Objects spilled out of the children’s bedrooms and down the stairs. I sent the objects back. Strangely enough, no one asked where all the furniture had gone.

The parlor became a light-filled, wallpapered cavern, containing a couch, two chairs, and a lamp, with blanched squares where the pictures used to hang. But still I wasn’t satisfied. I skulked around the echoing rooms, newly drab in a narrow gray skirt I had saved from the trashcan, discontentedly watching Jiggs skate the bare floors in his stocking feet.

Then I discarded people. I stopped answering the phone, no longer nodded to acquaintances, could not be waylaid in the grocery store. Skimming down the sidewalk, noticing someone I knew heading toward me, I felt my heart sink. I would cross the street immediately. I didn’t want to be bothered. They were using up such chunks of my life, with their questions, comments, gossip, inquiries after my health. They were siphoning me off into teachers’ conferences and charity drives. Before Selinda’s school play they made me waste twenty minutes, fiddling with my coat buttons and wondering when the curtain would go up. What did I have to do with Selinda, anyway? At this rate I would never get out.

I had some difficulty discarding what was in the studio and so I closed it off. I shut both doors and locked them. Sometimes when I was sitting in the living room I heard people
knock on the outside door and call for me. “Lady? Picture lady? What’s the matter, aren’t you working no more? I been counting on this!” I listened, with my hands folded in my lap. I was surprised by how many people counted on my pictures. I was surprised by a lot of things. The flurry of my life had died down, the water had cleared so that finally I could see what was there.

But no one else could. My family pestered me, hounded me. They thought I had something left to give them. Well, I
tried
to tell them. I said, “You’ll have to manage on your own from now on.” They just looked baffled. Asked me to cut their hair, sew buttons on their shirts. Saul kept trying to start these pointless conversations. Really, he’d only married me because he saw me sticking with my mother. He saw I wouldn’t have the gumption to leave a place. Him and his I-know-you-love-me’s, I-know-you-won’t-leave-me’s; I should have realized. “This marriage isn’t going well,” I told him.

But he said, “Charlotte, everything has its bad patches.”

“I need to take a wilderness course.”

“Wilderness?”

“Learn to live on my own with no equipment. Cover great distances. In the desert and the Alps and such.”

“But we don’t have any deserts here.”

“I know.”

“And we don’t have any Alps.”

“I know.”

“We don’t even have snow all that often.”

“Saul,” I said, “don’t you understand? I have never, ever been anywhere. I live in the house I was born in. I live in the house my
mother
was born in. My children go to the same school I did and one even has the same teacher. When I had that teacher she was just starting out and scared to death and pretty as a picture; now she’s a dried-up old maid and sends Selinda home for not wearing a bra.”

“Certainly,” said Saul. “Things keep coming around,
didn’t I tell you? You and I keep coming around, Charlotte, year by year, changed in little ways; we’ll work things through eventually.”

“It’s not worth it, though,” I said.

“Not worth it?”

“It takes too great a toll.”

He folded both my hands in his, with his face very calm and preacherly. Probably he didn’t know how hard he was gripping. “Wait a while,” he said. “This will pass. We all have … just wait a while. Wait.”

I waited. What was I waiting for? It seemed I hadn’t yet discarded all I should have. There were still some things remaining.

Jiggs reminded me of the P.T.A. meeting; he saw it on the
UNICEF
calendar. He was seven now and industrious, organizational, a natural-born chairman. “Eight o’clock, and wear your red dress,” he told me.

“I don’t have that dress any more and I don’t want to go to any meetings.”

“It’s fun, they serve cookies. Our class is making the Kool-Aid.”

“I have spent my life at the Clarion P.T.A. What’s the purpose?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure there is one,” said Jiggs. He peered at the calendar again. “The thirteenth is Muhammad’s birthday. The fifth was World Day of Prayer. Mother, did you enjoy World Day of Prayer?”

“I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t know they were having it.”

“You should have looked ahead of time.”

“My idea of a perfect day,” I told him, “is an empty square on the calendar. That’s all I ask.”

“Well, then,” said Jiggs. He adjusted his glasses and ran his finger across the page. “In the month of March, you’ll have three perfect days.”

“Three? Only three?”

I looked down at the back of his neck—concave, satiny. Very slowly, I began to let myself imagine his mother. She would ride into town on a Trailways bus, wearing something glorious and trashy spun of Lurex. I would meet her when she arrived. I would bring Jiggs with me. I would at long last give him up.

That morning Linus and Miss Feather were helping at the church bazaar; I had the place to myself. I sent the children to school and gave the house a final cleaning, dispensing with all the objects that had sprouted in the night—rolled socks, crumpled homework papers, and a doll’s toy dollhouse no bigger than a sugar cube, filled with specks of furniture. (I didn’t check to see what
kind
of furniture; I feared to find another dollhouse tucked inside that one.)

Then I took a bath and dressed in a fresh skirt and blouse. The mirror showed me someone stark and high-cheekboned, familiar in an unexpected way. My eyes had a sooty look and you would think from the spots of color on my cheeks that I was feverish. I wasn’t, though. I felt very cold and heavy.

The dog seemed to know that I was going and kept following me too closely, moaning and nudging the backs of my knees with his nose. He got on my nerves. I unlocked my studio door and pushed him inside. “Goodbye, Ernest,” I said. Then I straightened and saw the greenish light that filtered through the windows—a kind of light they don’t have anyplace else. Oh, I’ve never had the knack of knowing I was happy right while the happiness was going on. I closed the door and passed back through the house, touching the worn, smudged woodwork, listening to absent voices, inhaling the smell of school paste and hymnals. It didn’t look as if I’d be able to go through with this after all.

But once you start an action, it tends to bear you along.

All I could hope for was to be snagged somewhere. In the sunporch, maybe, circling the phone, waiting for news that Jiggs had a sniffle and was being sent home early. In the kitchen, taking forever to make a cup of instant coffee. Absently pouring a bowl of cereal. Something besides cereal fell from the box—a white paper packet. I plucked it out and opened it. Inside was a stamped tin badge, on which a cartoon man walked swiftly toward me with his feet the biggest part of him. And along the bottom, my own personal message.

Keep on truckin’.

We drove slowly, looking for a bank that stayed open Friday nights. We left Perth behind, entered the next town and then the next. These places were strung together like beads, no empty spots between them but ravelings of Tastee-Freezes, sea-shell emporiums, and drive-in movies. It was dark enough now so I could see the actors’ faces on the screens. But all I saw of Jake and Mindy was the gold line edging each of their profiles, sometimes lit other colors by the neon signs we passed. Mindy was craning forward, searching the buildings, biting her lower lip. Jake was sunk low in his seat like someone sick or beaten, and he hardly bothered to look out the window.

“Maybe in this state, banks don’t have Friday hours,” Mindy said.

Jake didn’t answer.

“Jake?”

He stirred. “Sure they do,” he said.

“How do you know? What if we end up driving all night, Jake, ride right off the bottom of Florida. Shouldn’t we stop and get a store to cash this thing?”

“Well, stores, now, they might tend to make more of a to-do,” Jake said. “Be more apt to remember us later.”

“But I’m tired! I got a crick in my neck.”

Jake let his head turn, following a likely-looking office building.

“If I don’t eat by six I faint,” said Mindy. “And look, it’s almost seven.”

“Well, there now, Mindy,” Jake said absently.

“You know I got low blood sugar.”

“Really? You want some sugar?”

“No
I don’t want sugar.”