Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

Sometimes, when Saul can't sleep, he turns his head on the pillow and asks if I'm awake. We may have had a hard time that day: disagreed, misunderstood, come to one more invisible parting or tiny, jarring rearrangement of ourselves.

He lies on his back in the old sleigh bed and starts to wonder: will everything work out? Is he all right, am I all right, are we happy, at least in some limited way? Maybe we ought to take a trip, he says. Didn't I use to want to?

But I tell him no. I don't see the need, I say. We have been traveling for years, traveled all our lives, we are traveling still. We couldn't stay in one place if we tried. Go to sleep, I say.

And he does.

The End

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and considers herself a Southerner. She was graduated at nineteen from Duke University, where she twice won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing, and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She has done graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University and worked for a year as the Russian bibliographer at the Duke University Library. Miss Tyler has published seven novels, and her stories have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, Harper's, and The Southern Review.

She is married to a psychiatrist, Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, and she and her husband now live in Baltimore, Maryland, with their two young children.