Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

What about my children, would they wonder where I was?

"I have to get off," I told the bank robber.

He blinked.

I've got children, I didn't make arrangements yet for after school. I have to get off."

"What you expect me to do?" he> said. "Look, lady, if it was up to me we'd be twenty miles apart by now. You think I planned this? How was I to know some clown would pull a gun?" He swung his eyes around, checking out the sleeping faces. "Nowadays just anybody's got them, people without a lick of sense. I could be clean free and you safe home with your kids by now if it wasn't for him. Guy like that ought to be locked up."

"But we're out. You've escaped," I told him.

I felt embarrassed; it seemed tactless to discuss the situation so openly.

But he didn't take offense.

"Wait and see," was all he said.

"Wait for what?"

"See if they can say who I was. If they can't I won't need you. Ill let you go. Right?" He gave me a sudden smile he didn't mean-short, even teeth, surprisingly white. Stubby black lashes veiling whatever look was in his eyes. I didn't smile back.

The driver climbed on, a man so heavy that we felt the tilt when he landed.

He pulled the door shut and ground the motor. Libby's Grill slipped away like something underwater. The child at the mailbox vanished. Then the laundromat, the hardware, the vacant lot, and finally the pharmacy with its mechanical lady lounging in the window, raising her arm to rub Coppertone on it and dropping it and raising it again, eternally laughing her faded laugh inside her dusty glass box.

I was born right here in Clarion; I grew up in that big brown turreted house next to Percy's Texaco. My mother was a fat lady who used to teach first grade.

Her maiden name was Lacey Debney.

Notice that I mention her fatness first. You couldn't overlook fatness like my mother's. It defined her, it radiated out from her, it filled any room she walked into. She was a mushroom-shaped woman with wispy blond hair you could see through, a pink face, and no neck; just a jaw sloping wider and wider till it turned into shoulders. All year round she wore sleeveless flowered shifts-a mistake. Her feet were the smallest I have ever seen on a grownup, and she owned a gigantic collection of tiny, elegant shoes.

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 student’s 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 die 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 air empty suit of clothes. No wonder their life had shrunk and dwindled sol 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.