Anne Tyler - Earthly Possessions

I dreamed about my husband, but he was younger and lacked those two vertical hollows in his cheeks. He had on a crewneck sweater I'd forgotten he ever owned.

His trousers were khaki, like the Army pants he wore while we were dating. The sight of him made me sad.

My husband was the boy next door, but to tell the truth we didn't grow up together. He was several years older than I was-old enough to make a difference, back in school. When I was in eighth grade he was a senior, one of the Emory boys, long-boned and lazy, up to no good. Anyone could tell you who Saul Emory was. While I was just getting my bearings, in those days. I still looked like a child. I'd been systematically starving myself ever since I'd discovered my breasts (two little pillows of fat, like my mother's chins), and you could see the blue veins in my temples and the finest details of articulation in my wrists and knees and elbows. I had a posture problem and no one could figure out what to do with my hair.

Saul Emory graduated and went away, and I moved on through the years until I was a senior myself, and secretary of the student body and first runner-up for Homecoming Queen. I had come into my own, by then. I deserved to; I worked so hard at it. The one thing I wanted most of all was for people to think that I was normal.

Through an enormous effort of will, I became known as the most vivacious girl in the senior class. Also best-groomed, with my Desert Flower cologne and my noose of Poppit pearls, and my Paint the Town Pink lipstick refreshed in the restroom hourly with a feathery little brush like the ones the models used. I had a few boyfriends, though nobody serious. And girlfriends too; we rolled each other's hair up at I don't know how many slumber parties. I never gave a slumber party myself, of course. No one ever asked me why not.

I would stay after school for sorority meetings, Honor Society, Prom Committee, cheerleading… but those things can only last so long. In the end I would find myself home again, walking into the overused air and my parents' eternal questions: Why hadn't I said goodbye that morning? What had kept me so late? Who was the boy who drove me home? And would I be staying in tonight, for once?

Then I would look down at them (for I was taller than both, by now) and everything came back to me: I remembered who I really was. In the smoky mirror behind my mother, my pearls were as outlandish as a string of bear claws. My face had a yellowed look around the edges.

I graduated from high school and got a part scholarship in mathematics at Markson College, over in Holgate. It seemed too simple. I kept wondering where the catch was.

Yet the day after Labor Day, there I sat in my father's pickup with my suitcases piled in the rear. My mother didn't come with us; it was hard for her to travel. As I waved to her out the window I had a sudden worry that she knew how glad I was that she was staying home. I wondered if that were why she was staying home. I waved all the harder, blew kisses. This was one time I didn't try to get out of saying goodbye.

Then my father drove me to Markson College, started to speak but gave up in. the end, and left me at the dormitory. I was almost the first one there because I'd been so anxious to arrive. My roommate hadn't come yet, whoever she was. It was noon but the cafeteria didn't open till suppertime, so I ate an apple I'd brought and some Fig Newtons that my mother had tucked in my suitcase. The Fig Newtons made me unexpectedly homesick. Each bite caused my chest to ache. I had to hide them away in a drawer, finally. Then I unpacked, and put sheets on one bed, and wandered up and down the hall a while peeking into deserted rooms.

After that I spent half an hour sitting at my desk, looking out the window at an empty sky. I'd brought along some curtains, but wasn't going to hang them till my roommate approved them. However, time was creeping. I decided I'd hang them anyway. I unfolded the curtains, took off my shoes, and climbed onto a radiator.

Spread-eagled against the window, I chanced to look down at the quadrangle. And there was my fat cousin Clarence, lumbering toward my dormitory in that ponderous; tilting way he had.

I had known all along that escape couldn't be so easy.

My father was in the hospital. He had had an accident while driving home.

The doctors weren't so much worried about his injuries as about the heart attack that had caused the accident in the first place. Or maybe the accident had caused the heart attack. I don't think they ever did get it straight.

For three weeks we stayed near his bed-Mama in her wooden lawn chair that Clarence had brought from home and me in an easy chair. We watched my father's face, which looked queer in horizontal position. His skin around his eyes had gone all crumpled. It tired him even to say a few words. Mostly he slept, and my mother cried, and I sat willing him awake again so that I could get to know him.

I couldn't stand to think how I had let him slide through my life all these years. I made a lot of promises; you know the kind. I brought my mother tea and glazed doughnuts, the only things that would sit on her stomach. I dealt with the doctors and nurses. I tried reading various women's magazines, but all that talk about make-up and weight control and other frills just made me sick. I don't remember eating any food whatsoever, though I suppose I must have.

Then they let him go home, but only by ambulance. We fixed a bed in his studio and laid him flat upon it. His face lost a little of its chalkiness. He started acting more natural, fussing at the itchy tape they had bound his broken ribs with. It worried him that customers were being turned away. "Charlotte," he said, "you know how to handle that camera. I want you to do it for a week or so, just till I'm back on my feet. Can you manage?" I said yes. I was numb by then.

Now that he was safe it had hit me finally where I was: home, trapped, no escape. My mother couldn't even sit him up without me there to help. I saw my life rolling out in front of me like an endless, mildewed rug.

It seemed to me that photos froze a person, pinned him to cardboard like a butterfly. Why would anyone want them? But people did, apparently. Poor-white mothers in rayon shifts, holding overdressed babies. Soldiers with their arms around their skinny, frizzy-haired girlfriends. I took their pictures indifferently. The camera was old and clumsy; almost anything you did to it had to take place in the dark. But I'd been using it most of my life, and couldn't see why my father became so anxious and critical all of a sudden. "Move that lamp off somewhat," he would teD me from his bed. "You don't want such a glare.

Now get yourself more of an angle. I never did like a head-on photograph." What he liked was a sideways look-eyes lowered^ face slanted downward. The bay window displaying my father's portraits resembled a field full of flowers, all being blown by the same strong breeze.

In the darkroom (a walk-in closet, remodeled) I had attacks of shortness of breath. I would grit my teeth and endure, meanwhile developing prints with the sensible half of my mind. Everything about that place was depressed: cluttered or leaking or peeling. All the labels had come off the bottles of chemicals.

Nothing was where it was supposed to be. It seemed my father didn't care any more than I did.

But you would never guess that from the way he acted. Fuss, fuss.

Questioning every little thing I did. When it came time to show him any prints he would have me hang them on the clothesline near his bed. Then there'd be this long, disapproving silence while he lay frowning and pinching his mustache. "Oh, well," he'd finally say, "most of these people have got no judgment anyway." Yet I didn't think I'd done so badly. In fact I think a lot of the customers preferred me to my father. My father had such set ideas, for one thing. He still photographed children against that Ionic column of his. Me, I would take a picture any way people asked. I had no feelings about it.