Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions

"I think traveling would be fun," I said.

"Fun," she echoed.

We stared at our laps a while.

"You were the first," she said finally. "After that, the baby fell ill, I don't know with what. Then Anna said, 'I won't go on.'

'You must, it's such a short way now,' I told her. In truth, I had no idea how far it was. We had been walking for days, weeks, I don't know. Perhaps months. The bottoms of our feet were bloody. We were eating grasses. When we heard a noise and hid I wasn't frightened any more. What did it matter? But Anna was frightened. One day I looked around and she was gone. Maybe she had been gone a long time. I had nothing left. I had only my dress. Then I started traveling for its own sake and would put first this foot, then that foot. Then this foot, then that foot. I must tell you that I didn't think of you at all any more."

"That's all right," I said.

"I was so, you see, so interested in putting one foot and another. I would say to myself, 'I have nothing.' I liked that. I enjoyed it. Did you know all this?" I shook my head.

She turned, so suddenly she startled me, and took my face in both her hands and drew me close. I hadn't realized how shaky she was. "Say it," she said. "Do you forgive me?" I said, "Sure." Her hands dropped and she sank back.

Then she said, "Well!" She was smiling. She sat up, tossed back her hair.

"We must find something for you to do," she said. "It's boring for you, no? We will see if he has anything interesting.'

' She began stalking around the trailer, assembling objects. "Scissors. Paper," she said. She spread them on the coffee table. "Colors. No, he would never have colors." Still, she looked for some, opening and slamming doors at the dark end of the trailer. "No. No. We will have to use pencils," she said. "This man is poorly supplied." She returned with two stubby pencils, one of which she handed to me. "We are making paper dolls," she told me. "You love making paper dolls."

"Yes," I said. I didn't question how she knew.

I cut dolls in strips, the way I'd been taught in kindergarten-rows of children in triangular dresses, holding hands. But the woman made hers one by one, and each was different. First a man, then a girl, then an old lady with skinny ankles. She drew in their features with a pencil. She gave them the simplest clothing-just a line here and there to show a sleeve or a hem. As each was finished she set it down to join the others on the coffee table, all those white paper legs striding in the same direction. It seemed we were seeing people off, somehow. But I didn't know what it meant.

Then the door burst open and a big blond man stepped in, wearing a black leather jacket. "That goddam Bobby Joe," he said. "What time is it? I told him, I said, 'Bobby Joe He stopped. He looked at me. The woman went on with her work.

He said, "Now, what in…?" The only sound was the cool metal chewing of the scissors.

"Oh, Jesus," he said. He dragged his hand across his face; he might have been wiping off spiderwebs. "You're that little girl," he said.

"Huh?"

"Aren't you? You're that little girl that everyone's been looking for." He turned back to the woman. "Jesus," he told her.

She went on snipping. In the curve of her lids I read the truth: she wasn't going to save me. She felt herself to be somehow in the wrong. She was like certain children who grow deaf and closed in and stubbornly silent when a grownup scolds them. It was up to me.

"I live here," I told the man.

He grunted, gazing out the dark window as if there were something there that mattered more.

"I do! I live here! She's my true mother. I'm her true daughter."

"Did you have a coat?" he asked me.

I glanced down at myself. "No."

"Jesus. Come on." If the woman had said one word, or held out a hand or given me a single look, I would have fought him. But she was concentrating on the curls of a paper child. When the man took my arm, I went quietly.

We made our way through a deeper darkness than I had expected, toward a blur of red and blue lights. Now the midway had a whole new crowd of people and louder music, but the man rushed me so that I barely had time to see. We went to an office in a Quonset hut. (I had thought we were headed toward Farm Products.)

In a tiny cold room that smelled of cigars, my parents sat before a desk where a man was talking on the telephone. My father leapt up as soon as he saw me. My mother's mouth fell open and she held out her hands. Tears were streaming down her face. I went to kiss her, but my mind was on her chair-a wooden desk chair.

Would it hold her? Would it break, would she find herself stuck between its great curved arms when she rose to go? Now, when I think back on that reunion, the only thing I remember clearly is that breathless moment when my mother shifted her weight, rocking on those four matchstick legs, and collected" herself and rose-oh, working free after all! — to totter over to my father and ask him for his handkerchief.

I rode home in the pickup, on the slippery seat between my mother and father. My mother kept stroking my hair, talking on and on, sometimes losing her thread. "You see first we thought you were just… oh, and they hardly bothered, I mean ordinary people don't care really, do they? 'Now, getting excited never helped a thing,' was all they'd say, "Excited?* I said. 'She's been kidnapped! You tell me not to get excited?" But I wasn't listening, at least not with both ears. I was letting a thought start to form in my mind. A plan. A picture of my future. How was I to know this picture would stay with me forever after, never go away, haunt me even when I was grown and married and supposedly sensible, occupy all nights I couldn't sleep and all empty moments every day of my life?

In this picture, I am walking down a dusty road that I have been walking for months. The sky is deep gray, almost black. The air is greenish. From time to time a warm and watery wind blows up. I am carrying nothing, not even a bite to eat or a change of clothes. The soles of my feet hurt and I am stringy-haired, worn down to bone and muscle. There is no house or landmark in sight, no sign of life. Though sometimes I have an impression of other, anonymous people traveling in the same direction.

Since October, I have been trying to get rid of all belongings that would weigh me down on a long foot-march. I loved, in, a woolly gray doll, once blue, with a plastic face-a Sleepy Doll, it was called, because its eyes were eternally shut, two painted crescents of lashes-and I planned to take it with me, but as I grew older I gave up on that idea. Later I was going to take my charm bracelet, with its tiny silver hourglass containing real sand, but the bracelet got lost during a school trip to Washington. In a way, I was relieved.

It would only have been a burden.

My life has been a history of casting off encumbrances, paring down to the bare essentials, stripping for the journey. Possessions make me anxious. When Saul gave me my engagement ring, I worried for mouths. How would I hide it? For surely I should take it with me; I could sell it for food. But wouldn't it tempt bandits as I lay sleeping by the roadside? In their haste they might cut off my finger, and I carried no medical supplies. I was glad when times got hard and we had to sell the ring back to Arldn's Jewelers.

A husband was another encumbrance; I often thought that. And children even more so. (Not to mention their equipment: their sweaters, Band-Aids, stuffed animals, vitamins.) How did I end up with so much, when I had thrown so much away? I looked at my children with the same mixture of love and resentment that I used to feel for my Sleepy Doll. I would have liked to strip myself of people, too. I was pleased when I lost any friends.

My only important belonging since I have grown up is a pair of excellent walking shoes.