Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

I tell him, "Look, I don't have to belong to Holy Basis to be a good woman. I try my very best,' I say. s it my fault I'm not religious?' I never have been, not since I was seven and they gave me this book of children's Bible stories, this jealous God throwing tantrums, people having to sacrifice their children, everybody always in the wrong. I didn't like it. See, it's not that I don't believe. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, it depends on when you ask me. What the trouble is: I don't approve. Td rather not be associated with it. If s against my principles. 'I try to manage without all that,' I say, 'and really, it's harder to be good if you do it without religion. Give me an A for effort at least,' I tell him…"

"But then how come he said all that on TV?" Jake asked.

I had trouble breaking off my train of thought I said, "What?"

"Said you was a good woman."

"Oh… did he? I don't know, I guess he just meant I wouldn't have robbed a bank."

"Then why didn't he say you wouldn't have robbed a bank?" said Jake. "What his words were, you're a good woman." I looked at him.

"Maybe he sees things different now you've left," said Jake. "Or more likely, you just had him figured wrong to start with. I mean, it could be he really does believe you're good, and worries what that means for. his side. Ever thought of that?"

"Well, no," I said.

"Women," said Jake. "They can't understand the very simplest little things."

We rode along in silence, threading down an avenue of lights as blurred and dazzling as a double strand of jewels.

One morning in the fall of 19xx, I was mixing Jiggs some cocoa and dreaming at the kitchen sink. My mother said, "Charlotte, I don't feel so well," and I said, "Oh?" and reached for a spoon. Then I said, "What, Mama?"

"I don't feel so well."

"Is it flu?" I asked her.

"I think it's something more."

"I see," I said, and stirred the cocoa around and around, watching bubbles travel in circles. Then I said, "Well, the… yes, the doctor. We'll go to the doctor." I'm afraid to go to the doctor," my mother said.

I laid the spoon aside. I watched the bubbles continue to skate, slower and slower. Then I happened to glance over at my mother, who was sitting in her lawn chair hugging her stomach. It was true that she seemed unwell. Her face had sharpened; her eyes had moved closer together somehow. I didn't like the set of her shoulders. I said, "Mama?"

"Something is wrong with me, Charlotte," she said. I had Julian drive us to the doctor. By suppertime she'd been clapped in the hospital; by eight the next morning she'd been operated on. I waited for word on a vinyl couch that stuck to the backs of my legs. When Dr. Porter and the surgeon walked toward me, I jumped up with a smacking sound. The surgeon arrived first and developed a sudden interest in a still life hanging^ behind me. "All we did," he said over his shoulder, "was close her up again." I didn't like his choice of words. I stayed stubbornly silent, clutching my pocketbook.

"There was nothing else possible," Dr. Porter said. I'm sorry, Charlotte."

"That's all right," I said.

"It's c. a.," the surgeon told me.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Well, thank you very much."

"You can see hex in a while," said Dr. Porter. "Are you by yourself?"

"Saul is coming."

"Well. I'll be in touch." I sank back onto the couch and watched them go. I thought that walking in those thick-soled shoes would be like wading through a sandbox. Then I noticed Saul plunging down the corridor, his face remote and luminous. He passed me, paused, raised a hand to his forehead and returned. "What's c. a.?" I asked him.

"Cancer," he said, sitting down.

"Oh, I see. Of course." He opened his Bible to the ribbon marker. Halfway down the page, he suddenly stopped and looked over at me. We stared at each other blankly, like two people at the windows of separate trains.

After my mother returned from the hospital, her bedroom became the center of the house. She was too sick to get up again and she hated to be left alone. In that large, gloomy room, with its rotted silk draperies and bowlegged furniture, Jiggs memorized his spelling list, Miss Feather balanced the books, Linus made miniature swings and hung them from the branches of his bonsai trees. And my mother sat propped against a mountain of pillows, because lying flat was uncomfortable now. She even slept propped-or rather, spent the night propped, for I don't know when she really slept. Any time of night that I checked her she would just be sitting there, and the Texaco lights shining through the window lit the watchful hollows of her eyes. Bones that had been buried for the last fifty years were beginning to emerge in her face.

"When will I be up?" she asked at first.

"Soon, soon," we told her.

I felt that we were cowardly, but Saul said we should protect her as long as possible. We had some arguments about it. (This dying business was pointing up all our differences.) Then one day she asked me, "Please. When exactly will I start getting better?" It was Sunday, a bright white Sunday in December, and Saul was not around. My only witness was Amos, stapling music sheets over in the armchair. I took a deep breath. I said, "Mama, I don't believe you'll ever be getting better." My mother lost interest and turned away. She started smoothing-the tufts on her quilt. "I hope you're remembering to mist my ferns," she said.

"Yes, Mama."

"I dreamed the tips were browning."

"They're not."

"Dr. Porter is a very fine person but I hated that surgeon man," she said. "Dr…. Lewis?

Loomis? I knew right away he wasn't worth much. Coming in ahead of time to get on my good side, cracking jokes, keeping his hands in his pockets-and plotting all along to rummage about in my innards. I think we ought to sue him, Charlotte."

"Mama, we can't do that"

"Certainly we can. I want my lawyer."

"You don't have a lawyer," I told her.

"Oh," she said. 'Well. In that case." She slumped a little. I thought the conversation had tired her. I stood up and said, "Why don't you try and sleep now, I'll go see about supper. Amos is here if you need something."

"I need to know the name of my problem," she said.

For a minute I didn't understand. Her problem? How would I know? I was still trying to figure out the name of my problem. But then she said, "My illness, Charlotte."

"It's cancer," I said.

She folded her hands on the quilt and grew still. I became aware of Amos; he had lowered his music sheets and was staring at me. His shucked-off moccasins lay gaping beneath his chair. I saw he had a hole in his sock that I would have to fix. Every thought seemed to come to me so clearly. "Don't wear that sock again until I've darned it," I said. I left.

Then there was a period when Mama didn't care to see me, barely answered when I spoke to her, sent the others out of the room for making too much noise and littering the floor with their torn envelopes and tangerine peels. She asked only for Saul. Wanted him to read to her from her big old family Bible: Psalms.

She didn't like the rest of the Bible any more, people undertaking definite activities or journeying to specific towns. Saul would read until his voice cracked, and come downstairs pale and exhausted. "I did the best I could," he would say. You would think this was his mother. First he'd had Alberta and now he had Mama, and here I was with nobody.

"What more could I have done?" he asked.

"If you don't know, who does?" I said. Her bedroom hung over our heads like some huge gray dirigible. She hulked In our minds; her absence filled tine house.

I took to keeping the studio open at night. You'd be surprised at the people who decade to get photographed at tenor eleven p. m. if they pass by and see a place lit They would stop at the bay window-solitary teenagers, men who couldn't sleep, housewives going out for tomorrow morning's milk. They would stare at my pictures, all my portraits of people bedecked with Alberta's clutter and dimmed by the crackling, imperfect light that seeped through my father's worn camera.