Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

"How is she?"

"The same. You don't have to whisper." He cleared his throat.

He set his Bible on his lap, took out his reading glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. Then he put them on and opened the Bible. I went back to studying Mama. She reminded me of a withered balloon. All those cords were just to hold her down; without them she'd lift up, level and sedate, and go wafting out the window. I snickered. I glanced over at Saul, hoping he hadn't noticed.

He was looking not at the Bible but straight ahead of him. His face was grim.

"Saul?" I said.

His eyes came to rest on me.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm eternally visiting, deathbeds," he said. "Even more than other preachers."

"You do seem to go to a lot," I said.

"Maybe it's because I'm so poor at them."

"You are?"

"I don't know what to say at them. And I don't like dying people."

"Never mind," I told him.

"Sometimes," he said, "I believe we're given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us." I thought of a merry-go-round, little dappled horses. To me, it seemed soothing. But Saul clamped his Bible shut and leaned toward me, looking into my eyes. "'Til we get it straight," he said. "Forgive, or settle up, or make the proper choice. Whatever we failed to do the first time."

"Well, maybe so," I said.

"I keep telling myself that." I see.

He made me uneasy, a little. Maybe he sensed it, because he relaxed suddenly and sat back in his chair. "Well," he said, "that's what I wanted to say to you."

"I see," I said again.

"Will you come home with me, Charlotte?"

"I can't"

"You know she won't wake up. You heard what Dr. Porter said."

"Saul, I just can't," I said. "You go." And he did, after a minute. The rustle he made while getting himself together was an irritation. I waited, keeping my face turned aside, wondering why he paused so long at the door. But finally he was gone.

Then I had my mother to myself. For I couldn't let loose of her yet. She was like some unsolvable math problem you keep straining at, worrying the edges of, chafing and cursing. She had used me up, worn me out, and now was dying without answering any really important questions or telling me a single truth that mattered. A mound on the bed, opaque, intact. I was furious.

Around midnight, she said, There is too great a weight on my feet." I bent forward to look at her. In the bluish glow of the nightlight I could make out her small, dazed eyes. I said, "Mama?"

"What is this on my feet?" she asked. Her voice was parched and broken. "And my arms, they're all strung up to something.

What's happened?"

"You're in the hospital," I told her.

"Take that blanket or whatever off my feet, please, Charlotte."

"Mama, are you all the way awake?"

"My feet'." I stood up and searched my skirt pockets, my blouse pocket, and nearly panicked, till I remembered my cardigan. "Mama," I said, "look." I turned on the reading lamp at the head of her bed. She flinched and closed her eyes. I held the photograph in front of her face. "Look, Mama."

"But the light."

"It's important," I told her. "Who is this a picture of?" She rolled her head back and forth, protesting, but opened her eyes a slit. Then closed them. "Oh, me," she said.

"Who is it, Mama?"

"Me, I said. Me as a child." I took the picture away and stared at it "Are you sure?" I asked.

She nodded, uninterested.

"But… I thought it would be your true daughter. The one they mixed up in the hospital."

"Hospital?" she said. She opened her eyes again and let them travel in a slow, frowning arc across the shadowy ceiling. "I never gave my permission to be brought to any hospital."

"The one' you had a baby in, Mama.

Remember you had a baby?"

"A surprise," my mother said.

"That's right."

"Like a present. A doll in a box."

"Well…"

"I can't imagine how it happened, we hardly ever did much."

"Never mind that, Mama; the baby. You didn't think it was yours."

"It?" she said. She seemed to pull herself together. "It wasn't an it, it was you, Charlotte. The baby was you."

"But you said they mixed me up in the hospital."

"Why would,! say that? Oh, this is all so… it's much too bright in here." I turned the light off. "Let me get this straight," I said. "You never thought that I was someone else's. The notion never occurred to you."

"No, no. Maybe you misunderstood," she said. "Maybe…

I don't know…" She closed her eyes. "Please lighten my feet." I couldn't think what to ask next. I had lost my bearings. Oh, it wasn't that I doubted my memory; I was still sure of that. (Or almost sure.) But the picture! For now I saw that of course it was Mama. Obviously it was. And here I'd found so much in that little girl's eyes, imagined such a connection between us! "My feet, Charlotte." I slipped the picture back in my pocket, then, and went to the foot of her bed and lifted off the folded spread. I hung it over a chair. I returned to her, avoiding tubes and cords, careful not to jar her, and more gently than I'd ever done anything in my Me, I laid my cheek against my mother's.

She died a few days later, and was buried from Holy Basis Church with Saul officiating. Her coffin seemed oddly narrow. Maybe I'd made up her fatness, too.

The funeral was well attended because she was the preacher's mother-in-law.

None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn't come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I'd lost someone more important than I'd expected to lose.

After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather's tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk's little winter bouquets; even Saul's prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn't take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. "Are you all right?" he'd ask.

"I'm. fine."

"I thought something might be wrong."

"Oh, no."

"I woke and you weren't there."

"Are you all right?" I said.

"Yes, certainly."

"Don't catch cold." Then he'd wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.

I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, crisscrossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Belinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments.

And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people's shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.

"I won't hurry you," Amos said.

I looked at him.

"I know what you're going through," he told me.

For we never met in vacant rooms any more-or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.

So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog.

Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, v comforting smell: chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father's camera. I turned on the lights and took the CUSSED sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather's: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?