Anne Tyler - Earthly Possessions

"What in hell purpose was that?" Jake asked.

"Why, for traveling," I said.

"Charlotte," Jake told me, "we are traveling."

"Oh," I said.

When Belinda was little, I tried to tell her the truth as much as possible.

I told her that as far as I knew, when people die they die and that's the end of it. But after church one day she asked, "How come you and me just die and other people get to go to heaven?"

"Well, there you are," I told her. "You can take your choice." Selinda chose heaven. I didn't blame her. She went to all those extras that I stayed home from: prayer meetings, Family Night, and so forth. I began to notice her absence. She was seven now and a whole separate person.

Well, she always had been, really, but I thought of seven as the age when people come into their full identity. Sometimes it seemed to me that my own seven-year-old self was still looking out of its grownup hull, wary but unblinking. I asked Selinda, "Will you remember to pay me a visit now and then?"

"I live here," Selinda said.

"Oh, I forgot." Up till then, I'd thought it would be a mistake to have another child. (More to take with me when I left.) But I changed my mind. And Saul, of course, had wanted more all along. So in January of 19xx I got pregnant. By March I was buying stacks of diapers and flannel nightgowns. In April I had a. miscarriage. The doctor said it wouldn't be wise for us to try again.

Nobody knew how much Td already loved that baby. Not even Mama, who after all had never been consciously pregnant herself. She fussed around with my pillows, looking hopeful and puzzled. Miss Feather brought lots of fluids as if she thought I had a cold. Linus and Belinda acted scared of me; Julian suffered one of his lapses and lost three, hundred dollars at the Bowie Racetrack. And Saul sat beside my bed, flattening my hands between his own. He looked not at me but at my fingernails, which had a bluish tinge. He didn't say a word for hours.

Wasn't he supposed to? Wasn't it a preacher's job? I said, "Please don't tell me this was God's will."

"I wasn't going to," he said.

I said, "Oh." I felt disappointed. "Because it's not," I said. "It's biological."

"All right."

"This is just something my body did."

"All right." I studied his face. I saw that he had two sharp lines pulling down the corners of his mouth, so deep they must have been there a long time. His hair was getting thin on top and sometimes now he wore reading glasses. He was thirty-two years old, but looked more like forty-five. I didn't know why. Was it me? I started crying. I said, "Saul, do you think my body did this on purpose?"

"I don't understand."

"Because a baby would have kept me from leaving?"

"Leaving," said Saul.

"Leaving you"

"No, of course not."

"But I just keep thinking, you see. I'm so afraid that… I mean, sometimes it seems that we strain at each other so.

We're always tugging and chafing and… sometimes when we're in the pickup, that rusty, creaky pickup, and Mama's taking two thirds of the seat and Belinda's irking my lap, and I am nagging over something I don't even care about, as if I just want to see how far I can push you, and you've grown disgusted and backed off somewhere in your mind-well, then I think, 'Really, we're a very unhappy family. I don't know why it should come as any surprise,' I think. 'It feels so natural. It's my luck, I'm unlucky, I've lived in unhappy families all my life. I never really expected anything different.'" I waited to see if Saul would argue, but he didn't. He went on flattening my hands. He kept his head bowed. Already I was sorry I had said it all, but that's the way my life was: I was eternally wishing to take everything back and start over. It was hopeless. I went on.

"Well," I said, "I'm worried that my body thought, "Now, we don't want to drag this thing out. We surely don't want a baby; a baby would stop her from leaving for another whole seven years. So what we should do is just-'"

"Charlotte, you would never leave me," Saul said.

"Listen a minute. I have this check, these shoes, I-"

"But you love me,"

Saul said. "I know you do." I looked over at him, his long, steady eyes and set mouth. Why did he always put it that way? That time at the Blue Moon Motel, too.

Shouldn't he be telling me how he loved me?

But what he said was, "I am certain that you care for me, Charlotte." And another thing: how come it always worked? Td been back on my feet six weeks or so when Saul walked into the kitchen one noontime carrying a baby and a blue vinyl diaper bag. Just that suddenly. This was a large baby, several months old.

A pie-faced, stocky boy baby, looking very stem. "Here," Saul said, and held him out.

"What's that?" I asked, not taking him.

"A baby, of course."

"I'm not supposed to carry heavy things," I said, but I didn't move away. Saul shifted the baby a little higher on his shoulder. He loved children but had never got the knack of holding them right; the baby's nightgown was rucked up to his armpits and he tilted awkwardly, frowning beneath his spikes of hair like a fat blond Napoleon. "Can't you take him? He's not that heavy," Saul said.

"But I… my hands are cold."

"Guess what, Charlotte? We're going to keep him a while."

"All, Saul," I said. You think I wasn't expecting that? Nothing could surprise me any more. In this impermanent state of mine, events drifted in like passing seaweed and brushed my cheek and drifted out again. I saw them clearly from a great distance, both coming and going. "Thank you for the thought," I said, "but it wouldn't be possible," and I moved on around the table, serenely setting out soupbowls.

"Charlotte, he hasn't got a father, his mother ran off and left him with his grandmother, and this morning we found the grandmother dead. I assumed you'd want him."

"But then his mother will come back," I said. "We could lose him at any moment." I started folding napkins.

"We could lose anybody at any moment. We could lose Selinda."

"You know what I mean," I said. "He isn't ours."

"Nobody's ours," said Saul.

So I finished folding the last of the napkins, and warmed my hands in my apron a minute, and came back to where Saul was standing. There was some comfort in knowing I had no choice. Everything had been settled for me. Even the baby seemed to see that, and leaned forward as if he'd expected me all along and dropped like a stone into my waiting arms.

We called him Jiggs. His real name was something poor-white that I tried not ever to think about, and Jiggs seemed better suited anyway to his stubby shape and the thick, clear-rimmed spectacles that he very soon had to start wearing.

Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.

We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. "Is he yours?" a customer might ask, and I would say "Oh no, that's Jiggs."

"Ah." And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.

For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father's formal composition. During the years stray props had moved it: flowers, swords, Ping-Pong paddles, overflow from Alberta's clutter. People had a way of picking up odd objects when they entered, and then they got attached to them.

They would sit down still holding them, absent-mindedly, and half the time I never even noticed. I wasn't a chatty, personal kind of photographer. I would be occupied judging the light, struggling with the camera that had grown more crotchety than ever. Its bellows were all patched with little squares of electrical tape. Its cloth was so frayed and dusty I got sneezing fits. Often I would have gone as far as printing up a negative before I really saw what I had taken. "Why," I would say to Linus. "What on earth…?" Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta's sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.