Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

"Certainly it's real," I told him. "You see it, you feel it: it's real."

"No, what I mean is…"

"Sit beside the lamp, please." As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, "AmosI"

"You're back at work," he said.

"Yes, well, only Bando." I hung the prints. Bando's face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. "Isn't it funny?" I said. "In ordinary life he's not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these; they're not really real, he would say."

"What's your father got to do with it?" Amos asked.

"Well…"

"This studio's been yours for, what? Sixteen, seventeen years now.

It's been yours nearly as long as it was his."

"Well," I said. "Yes, but…" I turned and looked at him. "That's true, it has," I said.

"And still you act surprised when somebody wants you to take his picture.

You have to decide if you'll do it, every time. A seventeen-year temporary position! Lord God." It dawned on me finally that he was angry. But I didn't know what for. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went over to him. "Amos?" I said.

He stepped back. He had suddenly grown very still.

"You're not coming away with me, are you, Charlotte," he said.

"Coming-?" I realized that I wasn't.

"Tfou're much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs."

"No, it's… what? No, if s Just that lately, Amos, it's seemed to me I'm so tangled with other people here. More connected than I'd thought. Don't you see that? How can I ever begin to get loose?"

"I'd assumed it was your mother," he said. "I assumed it was duty, that you'd leave in an instant if not for her.

Turns out I was wrong. Here you are, free to go, but then you always were, weren't you? You could have left any day of your life, but hung around waiting to be sprung. Passive. You're passive, Charlotte. You stay where you're put. Did you ever really intend to leave?" I didn't think my voice would work, but it did. "Why, of course," I said.

"Then I pity you," he said, but I could tell he didn't feel a bit of pity.

He looked at me from a height, without bending his head. His hands in his pockets were fists. "It's not only me you've fooled, it's yourself," he said. "I can get out, but you've let yourself get buried here and even helped fill in the grave. Every year you've settled for less, tolerated more. You're the land who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You're proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it's their business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own…" He stopped, maybe because of the look on my face. Or maybe he had just run down. He took one fist from his pocket and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Well, thanks for the example," he said finally. I'm leaving, before the same thing happens to me."

"Amos?" But he was gone, not a pause or a backward glance. I heard the front door slam. I didn't know what to do next. I stood looking all around me in a stunned, hopeless way-at my dusty equipment, stacks of props, Alberta's furniture, which had never (I saw now) been sorted and discarded as Saul had promised but simply sifted in with our own. At the crumbling buildings across the street: the Thrift Shop, newsstand, liquor store, Pei Wing the tailor… not a single home in the lot, come to think of it.

Everyone else had moved on, and left us stranded here between the Amoco and the Texaco.

I stood there so long I must have been in a kind of trance. I watched a soft snowstorm begin, proceeding so slowly and so vertically that it was hard to tell, at first, whether the snow was falling or the house was rising, floating imperceptibly into the starless blue night.

After Amos went away, I became very energetic. I had things to do; I was preparing to get out.

First I discarded clothing, books, knick-knacks, pictures. I lugged pieces of furniture across the street to the Thrift Shop. I gave my mother's lawn chair to Pei Wing, the plants to Saul's choir leader, the Sunday china to Holy Basis Church. I threw away rugs and curtains and doilies. I packed the doll things in cartons and put them in the attic. What I was aiming for was a house with the bare, polished look of a bleached skull. But I don't know, it was harder than I'd thought Linus kept making new doll things. I packed those away, too. The piano grew new layers of magazines and keys. I had the Salvation Army come and cart the piano off. Objects spilled out of the children's bedrooms and down the stairs. I sent the objects back. Strangely enough, no one asked where all the furniture had gone.

The parlor became a light-filled, wallpapered cavern, containing a couch, two chairs, and a lamp, with blanched squares where the pictures used to hang.

But still I wasn't satisfied. I skulked around the echoing rooms, newly drab hi a narrow gray skirt I had saved from the trashcan, discontentedly watching Jiggs skate the bare floors in his stocking feet Then I discarded people. I stopped answering the phone, no longer nodded to acquaintances, could not be waylaid in the grocery store. Skimming down the sidewalk, noticing someone I knew heading toward me, I felt my heart sink. I would cross the street immediately. I didn't want to be bothered. They were using up such chunks of my life, with their questions, comments, gossip, inquiries after my health. They were siphoning me off into teachers' conferences and charity drives. Before Selinda's school play they made me waste twenty minutes, fiddling with my coat buttons and wondering when the curtain would go up. What did I have to do with Selinda, anyway? At this rate I would never get out.

I had some difficulty discarding what was in the studio and so I closed it off. I shut both doors and locked them. Sometimes when I was sitting in the living room I heard people knock on the outside door and call for me. "Lady?

Picture lady? What's the matter, aren't you working no more? I been counting on this!" I listened, with my hands folded in my lap. I was surprised by how many people counted on my pictures. I was surprised by a lot of things. The flurry of my life had died down, the water had cleared so that finally J could see what was there.

But no one else could. My family pestered me, hounded me. They thought I had something left to give them. Well, I tried to tell them. I said, "You'll have to manage on your own from now on." They just looked baffled. Asked me to cut their hair, sew buttons on their shirts. Saul kept trying to start these pointless conversations. Really, he'd only married me because he saw me sticking with my mother. He saw I wouldn't have the gumption to leave a place. Him and his I-know-you-love-me's, I-know-you-won't-leave-me's; I should have realized. "This marriage Isn't going well," I told him.

But he said, "Charlotte, everything has its bad patches."

"I need to take a wilderness course."

"Wilderness?"

"Learn to live on my own with no equipment.

Cover great distances. In the desert and the Alps and such."

"But we don't have any deserts here."

"I know."

"And we don't have any Alps."

"I know."

"We don't even have snow all that often."

"Saul," I said, "don't you understand? I have never, ever been anywhere. I live in the house I was born in. I live in the house my mother was born in. My children go to the same school I did and one even has the same teacher. When I had that teacher she was just starting out and scared to death and pretty as a picture; now she's a dried-up old maid and sends Selinda home for not wearing a bra."

"Certainly," said Saul. "Things keep coming around, didn't I tell you? You and I keep coming around. Charlotte, year by year, changed in little ways; we'll work things through eventually."