Anne Tyler - Earthly Possessions

"It's not worth it, though," I said.

"Not worth it?"

"It takes too great a toll." He folded both my hands in his, with his face very calm and preacherly. Probably he didn't know how hard he was gripping. "Wait a while," he said. "This will pass. We all have… just wait a while. Wait." I waited. What was I waiting for? It seemed I hadn't yet discarded all I should have. There were still some things remaining.

Jiggs reminded me of the P. T. A. meeting; he saw it on the UNICEF calendar.

He was seven now and industrious, organizational, a natural-born chairman.

"Eight o'clock, and wear your red dress," he told me.

"I don't have that dress any more and I don't want to go to any meetings."

"It's fun, they serve cookies. Our class is making the Kool-Aid."

"I have spent my Me at the Clarion P. T. A. What's the purpose?"

"I don't know, but I'm sure there is one," said Jiggs. He peered at the calendar again. "The thirteenth is Muhammad's birthday. The fifth was World Day of Prayer. Mother, did you enjoy World Day of Prayer?"

"I'm sorry, honey, I didn't know they were having it"

"You should have looked ahead of tune."

"My idea of a perfect day," I told him, "is an empty square on the calendar. That's all I ask."

"Well, then," said Jiggs. He adjusted his glasses and ran his finger across the page. "In the month of March, youll have three perfect days."

"Three? Only three?" I looked down at the back of his neck-concave, satiny. Very slowly, I began to let myself imagine his mother. She would ride into town on a Trailways bus, wearing something glorious and trashy spun of Lurex. I would meet her when she arrived. I would bring Jiggs with me. I would at long last give him up.

That morning Linus and Miss Feather were helping at the church bazaar; I had the place to myself. I sent the children to school and gave the house a final cleaning, dispensing with all the objects that had sprouted in title night-rolled socks, crumpled homework papers, and a doll's toy dollhouse no bigger than a sugar cube, filled with specks of furniture. (I didn't check to see what Mnd of furniture; I feared to find another dollhouse tucked inside that one.) Then I took a bath and dressed in a fresh skirt and blouse. The mirror showed me someone stark and high-cheekboned, familiar in an unexpected way. My eyes had a sooty look and you would think from the spots of color on my cheeks that I was feverish. I wasn't, though. I felt very cold and heavy.

The dog seemed to know that I was going and kept following me too closely, moaning and nudging the backs of my knees with his nose. He got on my nerves. I unlocked my studio door and pushed him inside. "Goodbye, Ernest," I said. Then I straightened and saw the greenish light that filtered through the windows-a kind of light they don't have anyplace else. Oh, I've never had the knack of knowing I was happy right while the happiness was going on. I closed the door and passed back through the house, touching the worn, smudged woodwork, listening to absent voices, inhaling the smell of school paste and hymnals. It didn't look as if I'd be able to go through with this after all.

But once you start an action, it tends to bear you along. All I could hope for was to be snagged somewhere. In the sunporch, maybe, circling the phone, waiting for news that Jiggs had a sniffle and was being sent home early. In the kitchen, taking forever to make a cup of instant coffee. Absently pouring a bowl of cereal. Something besides cereal fell from the box-a white paper packet. I plucked it out and opened it. Inside was a stamped tin badge, on which a cartoon man walked swiftly toward me with his feet the biggest part of him. And along the bottom, my own personal message. Keep on truckin'.

We drove slowly, looking for a bank that stayed open Friday nights. We left Perth behind, entered the next town and then the next. These places were strung together like beads, no empty spots between them but ravelings of Tastee-Freezes, seashell emporiums, and drive-in movies. It was dark enough now so I could see the actors' faces on the screens. But all I saw of Jake and Mindy was the gold line edging each of their profiles, sometimes lit other colors by the neon signs we passed. Mindy was craning forward, searching the buildings', biting her lower lip. Jake was sunk low in his seat like someone sick or beaten, and he hardly bothered to look out the window.

"Maybe in this state, banks don't have Friday hours," Mindy said.

Jake didn't answer.

"Jake?" He stirred. "Sure they do," he said.

"How do you know? What if we end up driving all night, Jake, ride right off the bottom of Florida. Shouldn't we stop and get a store to cash this thing?"

"Well, stores, now, they might tend to make more of a to-do," Jake said. "Be more apt to remember us later."

"But I'm tired! I got a crick in my neck." Jake let his head turn, following a likely-looking office building.

"If I don't eat by six I faint," said Mindy. "And look, it's almost seven."

"Well, there now, Mindy," Jake said absently.

"You know I got low blood sugar."

"Really? You want some sugar?"

"No I don't want sugar."

"No trouble at all, Mindy, I got it right here." He searched his jacket, accidentally poking me with one elbow. "Look at here. Domino sugar." The packets were worn and grimy by now. He held them out, a double handful. "Never say I don't come prepared."

"Jake Simms," said Mindy, "don't you know anything?

It's not sugar I need, that would be stupid." He lowered his hands. He looked over at me. "Can you figure that?" he asked.

"Well…"

"She's got low blood sugar, but she don't want to eat sugar."

"She must know, I guess." He shook his head, looking down at the packets. "I just don't see this, Mindy," he said. "You don't even make sense. How come you run after me so hard if it turns out there's no way I can please you?"

"Me run after you"?" said Mindy. "Oh, go ahead, gripe and groan. Blame it all on me. Then ask yourself what you told me last Fourth of July. Go on, ask yourself." He gave me a quick glance, sideways, from under his blunt lashes.

"What'd you tell her?" I asked. He set his mouth, crammed the sugar back into his pockets.

"Told me he never had come to rest with anyone but me," said Mindy. "Said he didn't know why, it was just the way he felt. We were eating a picnic lunch, he had done right poorly in a demolition derby. I told him that derby didn't matter a bit. 'To my mind,' I told him, 'you will always be like the first time I saw you driving: real swift and fine, in your white western jacket that got tore up later in that derby over by Washington.' And that's when he said what he said.

Asked if I would marry him."

"I never did," said Jake.

"Well, you said you could see that it might someday come to pass."

"You just got it all twisted around to suit your purposes."

"No, Jake," she said. "Believe me, i do not. Ifs you that twists. Can't you see what spits you in the face? For every time you run from me, there's another time you run after me, deliver yourself up to me. You say, 'Mindy, I'm yours. You're all I got.' You call out under my window, you drive by my house in the night and I see your headlights slide across my ceiling. You get me on the telephone: 'Everybody's mad at me and the world don't look so hot. Can't you come on out and keep me company?"' "You just like to exaggerate," said Jake.

"What you said was, 'I can see that we might someday find ourselves married.'"

"If I did, I don't recall it."

" 'Like, if you was to end up pregnant or something,' you said." There was a silence.

"You said, 'What do I want to keep buffeting back and forth for, anyhow? Why don't I just give up?"