Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

"What you got in here?" he asked me.

"Pardon?"

"Any weapons?"

"Any-no!" He undid the catch and opened it. He pulled out my billfold, frayed and curling. Inside was a pathetic bit of paper money. Small change and bobbypins. A library card. He glanced at it. "Charlotte Emory," he said. He studied a photo of me holding Belinda, back when she was a baby. Then he looked into my face. I knew what he was thinking: lately I had let myself go. However, he didn't comment on it.

He pulled out a rubber-banded stack of grocery coupons, which made him snort; a pack of tissues, an unclean hairbrush, and a pair of nail scissors. He tested the point of the scissors with his thumb and then looked at me. I was still focused on the hair- brash; it had disgraced me. I didn't connect. "No weapons, huh," he said.

"What?" The waitress brought our order and presented him with the bill.

While he was rummaging in his pocket I sent her silent messages: Doesn't this look odd to you, this man emptying out a lady's purse? Don't we make a strange couple? Shouldn't you be mentioning this to someone? The waitress merely stood there, gazing dreamily into the marbled mirror above us and holding out her little plastic change tray.

When she had left, Jake Simms dropped the scissors under the table and gave them a kick. I heard them scuttle across the floor. Then he reached into my purse again. This time it was a paperback-my Survival book, worn to shreds. How to get along in the desert. He frowned. Turned the purse upside down, shook it-and out clattered something shiny which he trapped immediately. "What's this?" he said, holding it up.

Oh, Lord, my badge. Little tin badge, shield-shaped, like something official or military. I'll take that" I told him.

He looked suspicious.

"Can I have it, please?"

"What is it?"

"Well, ifs just a-like a lucky piece or something. Can I have it?" He squinted at the writing across its face. "Keep on truckin'?" he said.

"I believe it's from a cereal box."

"Kind of trashy, for a lucky piece."

"Well, it's just from a box of… something or other, what does it matter?" I asked him. "Most lucky pieces are trashy. Rabbits' feet, two-headed pennies…

I found it in a cereal box while I was eating lunch today. I think if s some kind of popular saying.

I was going to throw it out except-oh, you know how your mind works. I took it as a sign. Not seriously, of course. I just thought, what if this was trying to tell me something? Like to get on the road, not sit around any longer, take some action."

"Now, how'd you come to that meaning?" he said.

"I thought it was a sign to leave my husband," I said.

There was a silence.

I asked, "Could I have my badge back?"

"Let me get this straight," he said.

"You were leaving your husband."

"Well, you know…" I held out my hand for the badge. He ignored it. "Ill be damned," he said. "Things've finally started going my way."

"What?"

"And here I was cursing my luck! Thinking I had put myself in some bind here! Waiting for your people to set the FBI on me! Oh, your fortune's changing, Jake, old man."

"Well, I don't see how-how-"

"Things are looking up, it seems to me."

"I want my badge back," I said.

"Nope. Think I'll keep it. Medals have pins, pins are deadly weapons." 'It's not a medal. It's a little old, dull-pointed cereal-box…" But he dropped it in his shirt pocket, and I had to watch it go.

Then suddenly-I got scared. I don't know why. I mean I don't know why then, just at that particular moment. But all at once I felt short of breath and shaky, and it didn't seem to me that I had any way out of this. Nothing had prepared me! I was so peaceful, hated loud noises, passed sharp objects handle first. And I didn't like confronting people face to face, even, let alone fist to fist. I took a tight hold on the table. I tried to get my air back, I fixed my eyes very hard upon the TV, which was no help at all: bandits on thundering horses. Old-fashioned train wheels clacketing past, a man leaping from saddle to baggage car in a slow high arc that was nearly miraculous. Some of the people at the bar started cheering.

"Yeah, well," said Jake Simms, "that's the trouble with these things. You watch long enough, you start expecting some adventures of your own." I let out my breath and stared at him. From this close I could see the graininess of his skin, the smudges under * his eyes, and his thin, chapped, homely-looking mouth.

But he was concentrating on the TV still, and he didn't notice me.

By the time we got outside again it was really night. I rebuttoned my coat.

He turned up his collar. We trudged down a corridor of neon signs and music, took a right turn onto a darker street. Now — we passed pawnshops, luncheonettes, cleaning establishments. We saw a laundromat where solitary people were folding up their bedsheets.

In the window of an appliance store, six TV sets showed a woman shampooing her hair. Then a news announcer mouthed something grave. Then Jake and I came on the screen and backed away: our same old soundless, hobbled dance. We stood at the window watching ourselves through the outline of our reflections. We were locked together forever. There was no escape.

This wasn't the first time I'd been kidnapped. It had happened once before.

Here's how it came about: I was entered in a Beautiful Child Contest at the Clarion County Fair. I was entered because the first step was to send in the child's photo. If I won, it would be good advertising for my father. In fact I remember the large white letters that ran across the bottom of my picture: PHOTO BY AMES STUDIOS. Ordinarily, he just rubber-stamped that on the back.

In this picture my hair was wetted down, hanging in neat straight clumps to my jawbone. My expression was meant to be fierce but came out sad. (Nothing they could do would make me smile.) I wore a dark jumper over a puff-sleeved blouse.

My mother thought puffed sleeves would make me I ok younger. I was seven at the time, the top age permitted in the contest. There was a lot of talk about how I'd been much rounder-faced and-well, cuter, really, when I was six. My mother wished with all her heart that there'd been such a contest when I was six.

But even so, a letter came saying fd been chosen for the finals. I had to show up at ten a. m. on the opening day of the fair, they said. Right before the Miss Clarion Contest. After the Beautiful Babies.

My mother made me a dress of white eyelet. Although she hadn't been anyplace in years, she said she was coming with me to the fair. She told me this while she was pinning up my hem. I went rigid. How would she manage such a thing? She sweated and puffed even crossing a room; she traveled in a casing of thick, blind differentness. And lately she'd started breaking whatever she sat upon.

Horrible things had happened at our house that would have been very embarrassing if witnessed by an outsider. She would have to take her special chair along-her heavy white slatted one with the stolid legs, the kind you ordinarily see in people's yards. She would not be able to climb any wooden steps or stand on any platforms. "Let me out!" I cried.

Her arms fell to her sides. Since I was standing on the dining room table at the time, she had to tilt back to gape at me. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"Let me but! Let me out! Let me out of this!" And I began tearing at the billow of white eyelet.

"Charlotte? Char, darling? Sweetheart," she said, batting my hands down.

"Charlotte, what's happened to you?" Then my father came in, shuffling along in his corduroy bedroom slippers. He was sunk in one of his moods. You could tell by his face, which seemed to have stopped trying. He turned his droopy eyes in my direction. "I have to get out of this!" I told him.