Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

My mother believed there'd been a mix-up at the hospital. It was all such a shock, that whole business, she said; she'd been a little dazed. An unexpected birth is like-why, an earthquake! a tornado! Other natural disasters. Your mind hasn't quite prepared a frame for it yet "Besides," she would say, plucking at the front of her dress, "they gave me some kind of laughing gas, I think. Then everything was a dream. My vision was affected and when they showed me the baby I assumed it was a roll of absorbent cotton. Mostly they kept her in the nursery. On the day I went home they handed me this bundle: a stark-naked child in a washed-out blanket. Why! I thought. This is not mine! But I was still so surprised, you see, and besides didn't want to make trouble. I took what they gave me." Then she would study my face, with her forehead all ridged and sorrowful. I knew what she was wondering: what stranger's looks had I inherited?

I was thin and drab, with straight brown hair. Nobody else in the family had brown hair. There were peculiarities about me that 'no one could explain: my extremely high arches, which refused to be crammed into many styles of shoes; my yellowish skin; and my height. I was always tall for my age. Now where did that come from? Not from my father. Not from my mother's side-my five-foot mother and her squat brother Gerard and her portly, baby-faced father beaming out of the photo frames, and certainly not from my Great-Aunt Charlotte, for whom I was named, whose pictures show her feet dangling comically when she is seated in an armchair. Something had gone wrong somewhere.

"But of course I love you anyway," my mother said.

I knew she did. Love is not what we are talking about, here.

Unfortunately I was born in, when Camp Aaron was filling up with soldiers and Clarion County Hospital suddenly had more patients-mainly soldiers' wives, giving birth-than at any other time before or since. All the hospital's records for that period are skimpy, inaccurate, or just plain lost I know, because my mother checked. She had nothing to go on. Somewhere out in the world her little blond daughter was growing up with a false name, a false identity, a set of false, larcenous parents. But my mother just had to live with that, she said.

Her hands fluttered out, abandoning hope.

To her the world was large and foreign. I knew that it was small. Sooner or later her true daughter would be found. Then what?

My father, if asked directly, said that I was the true daughter. He didn't go on and on about it; he just said, "Of course." Once he took me into a guest room and showed me my baby clothes, packed away in a brassbound trunk. (I don't know what he thought that proved.) He had had to buy those clothes himself, he said, while my mother was lying in the hospital. He had bought those clothes for me. He jabbed a finger at my chest, then scratched his head a moment as if trying to recall something and went off to the studio. I worried that he was building toward one of his moods. I barely glanced at the baby clothes (yellowed, wrinkled, packed together so long and so tightly you would have to peel them away like cigar leaves) before I left too and went to find him. I worked alongside him all afternoon, rinsing heavy glass negatives under running water, but he didn't say anything more to me.

Meals were strained and silent: only the clinking of silverware. My parents didn't speak, or if they did, it was in a hopeless, bitter way. "Bitter as acorns," my father said, and he set the coffeecup down so sharply that it splashed across the mended tablecloth. Then my mother lowered her face to her hands, and my father jerked his chair back and went to wind the clock. I mashed my peas with my spoon. There was no point in eating. Anything you ate in that house would sit on your stomach forever, like a stone.

These were my two main worries when I was a child: one was that I was not their true daughter, and would be sent away. The other was that I was their true daughter and would never, ever manage to escape to the outside world..

I was glad the robber had let me have the window seat. Even if it wasn't out of the kindness of his heart, at least I got to see the last of Clarion skating by. Followed by a string of housing developments, and then wide open fields where I could just sit back and let my eyes get lost. It was years since I had been anywhere.

Meanwhile there was this nylon jacket slicking around to one side of me, continually changing position. He was restless, I could tell. I mean restless in a permanent way, by nature. At all stop signs and traffic lights he resettled himself. When a woman rose to get off by a mailbox in the middle of nowhere I heard his fingers drumming, drumming, all the time the bus was stopped. Once we had to slow down behind a tractor and he actually groaned out loud. Then shifted his feet, scrunched his shoulders around, scratched his knee. With his left hand, of course. His right hand was out of sight-arm folded across his stomach, gun jammed between my third and fourth ribs. He was taking no chances.

What did he think I would do? Jump out that little, sooty window? Ask the old lady in front of me for help? Scream? Well, scream, maybe; that might work.

(If they didn't just think I was a lunatic and pretend not to hear.) But I am not the kind to scream, I never have been. As a child I nearly drowned once, sinking in a panic beneath the lifeguard's eyes with my lips clamped tightly together. I would rather die than make any sort of disturbance.

We rode alongside a freight train a ways. I counted the cars. If you're stuck you're stuck, I figure; might as well relax. I wondered why the B & O Railroad had changed its name to the Chessie System. Chessie could be a new kind of sandwich spread, or a lady gym instructor.

From time to time it occurred to me that I could possibly be killed in a while.

The soldier's radio was playing a golden oldie, "Little Things Mean a Lot."

I could close my eyes and be dancing at the Sophomore From again if I wanted.

Which I didn't. The song broke off in the middle of a high note and a man said, "We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin." The bank robber didn't move a muscle, but he grew a surface of awareness that I could feeL "Clarion police report that the Maryland Safety Savings Bank was robbed at around two thirty this afternoon. A white man in his early twenties, apparently working alone, escaped with two hundred dollars in one-dollar bills and a female hostage as yet unidentified. Fortunately, the bank's automatic cameras were activated and police have every hope of-" The soldier turned a dial on his radio. The announcer lost interest and wandered away. Olivia Newton-John drifted in.

"Shoot," said the robber. I jumped.

"What's a two-bit place like that want with cameras?" I risked a glance at him. There was a little muscle flickering near the corner of his mouth. "But listen-" I said. The pistol nudged me, like a thumb. "Listen," I whispered.

"You're gone now! You're out of there."

"Sure. With my face all over a roll of film."

"What does that matter?' "They'll identify me," he said.

Identify? Did that mean he was a known criminal? Or paranoid, maybe-some maniac from Lovill State Hospital. Either way, it didn't look good.

"It don't look good," he told me. ' His voice was thin and gravelly-the voice of a man who doesn't care what he sounds like. I wasn't encouraged by it.

I shut my mind and turned back to the window, where peaceful farms were rolling by.

"What are you staring at?" he asked.

"Cows," I said.

They're going to meet me at the next town, wait and see. What's the next town?"

"Now listen," I said. "Didn't you hear the radio? They know you have a hostage, that's all they know yet. They're looking for a man who's traveling with a hostage. All you've got to do is let me go. Doesn't that make sense? Next place we stop at, let me off. You stay on the bus. I won't say a word, I promise. What do I care if they catch you or not?" He didn't seem to have heard.