Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

When Joan had finished with the closet, the cardboard box was only two-thirds full. The closet was bare, and the floor had just a few hangers and bubble gum wrappers scattered over it. It looked worse that way. She reached over and slammed the closet door shut, and then she dragged the box over to the dresser and began on that.

Upstairs, a door slammed. She straightened up and listened, hoping it was only the wind, but there were Simon's footsteps down the stairs. For a minute she was afraid he was coming to find her, but then she heard the soft puffing sound that the leather chair made when someone sat in it, and she relaxed. He must not want to be with people right now. She pushed her hair off her face and opened the next dresser drawer.

Janie Rose had more sachet bags than Joan thought existed. They cluttered every drawer, one smell mixed with another – lemon verbena and lavender and rose petals. And tossed in here and there were her mother's old perfume bottles with the tops off, adding their own heavy scent, so that Joan became confused and couldn't tell one smell from another any more. She wondered why Janie Rose, wearing all this fragrant underwear, had still smelled only of Ivory soap and Crayolas. Especially when she wore so much underwear. On Janie Rose's bad days, when she thought things were going against her or she was frightened, she would pile on layer upon layer of undershirts and panties. Her jeans could hardly be squeezed on top of it all, and if she wore overalls the straps would be strained to the breaking point over drawersful of undershirts. Sometimes her mother made her take them off again and sometimes she didn't ('She's just hopeless,' she would say, and give up), but usually, if the day turned better, Janie peeled off a few layers of her own accord. On the evenings of her bad days, when Simon came in for supper, he had a habit of reaching across the table and pinching her overall strap to see how many other straps lay beneath it. It was his way of asking how she was doing. If Janie was feeling all right by then she would just giggle at him, and he would laugh. But other days she jumped when he touched her and hunched up her shoulders, and then Simon would say nothing and fix all his attention on supper.

Out in the parlour now Joan heard the squeaking of leather as Simon rose, and the sound of his shoes across the scatter rug. She stopped in the act of closing the box and waited, silently; his footsteps came closer, and then he appeared in the doorway. 'Hey, Joan,' he said. There was something white on his face.

'Hey.'

He looked at the cardboard boxes without changing expression, and then he went over to the bed and sat down, picking up the teddy bear in one hand. 'Hey, Ernest,' he said. He laid Ernest face down across his lap, circling the bear's neck with one hand, and leaned forward to watch Joan.

'I'm packing things away,' she told him.

'Well, I see you are.'

She folded the flaps of the box down, one corner over another so as to lock them, and then stood up and pushed the box toward the closet. 'Some of your things're on the shelves there,' she told Simon while she was opening the closet door. The box grated across the hangers on the floor. 'You better take out what's yours, before I pack it away.'

'None of it is,' said Simon, without looking at the shelves.

'Some is. That xylophone.'

'I don't play that any more. Don't you know I've stopped playing with that kind of thing?'

'All right, 'Joan said.

'I gave it for keeps.'

'All right.'

'Unliving things last much longer than living.'

"That's true,' Joan said. She chose an armload of things from the shelves – dolls, still shining and unused, a pack of candy Chesterfields, and an unbreakable yellow plastic record ordered off a cereal box. She dumped them helter-skelter into a second box and returned for another armload. 'James give you a good lunch?' she asked.

'No.'

'What was wrong with it?'

'Nothing,' said Simon. "There just wasn't any. Because I didn't eat it.'

'Oh.'

'If I had eaten it, it would have been a pizza.'

'I see.'

She dumped another armload in the box. It was half full now, and junky-looking, with the arms of dolls and the wheels of cars tangled together.

'I better make you a sandwich,' she said finally.

'Naw.'

'You want an apple?'

'Naw.'

He crossed over to where she was standing and laid the bear gently on top of the other things. 'James has got this photograph,' he said, and went back to sit on the bed. "That Ansel, boy.'

'What about him?'

'I just hate him. I hate him.'

When it looked as if he weren't going to say any more, Joan began removing the last few things from the shelf. Every now and then she looked Simon's way, but he sat very quiet with his back against the wall and his face expressionless. Finally she said, 'Well, Ansel has his days. You know that.' But Simon remained silent.

The room was bare now; all that remained were the things on the clothesline. She pushed the second box into the closet and then said, 'I'm going out back a minute. After that I'll fix you a sandwich.' Simon stood up to follow her. 'I'm only going for a minute,' she said, but Simon came with her anyway, and they went down the hall and through the kitchen and out the back screen door.

It was hot and windy outside, with the acres of grass behind the house rumpling and tangling together. The few things on the line – Simon's bathing suit and Janie Rose's crinoline and Sunday blouse – were being whipped about by the wind so that they made little cracking sounds. While Joan unpinned Janie's things, Simon wandered _ nearby snapping the heads off the weeds.

'Simon,' she called to him, 'what kind of sandwich you want?'

'I ain't hungry.'

'I'll just make you a little one. And go call your mama and daddy; they have to eat too.'

'I wish you would.'

'Come on, Simon.'

He shrugged and started toward the house, still walking aimlessly and kicking at things. 'All right,' he said. 'But I'll tell them it's your fault I came.'

'They won't mind you coming.'

'You think not?'

He banged the screen door behind him. After he was gone Joan stood in the yard awhile, clutching Janie's things against her stomach, feeling the dampness soak into her stocking feet. She wished she could just walk off. If it were't for Simon, she would; she would go find some place to sit alone and think things out. But her feet were growing cold, and there were sandwiches to make; she shook her hair off her forehead and started back toward the house. The closer to the house she came the quieter the wind sounded, and when she stepped back into the kitchen there was a sudden silence in her ears that felt odd.

She put the things from the clothesline into the closet, and then she returned to the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator while she planned a meal. The room was so cluttered it made thinking difficult. Small objects lay here and there, gathering dust because no one had ever found a place for them. The kitchen windows were curtainless, and littered with lost buttons and ripening tomatoes. And the wall behind the stove was covered with twenty or thirty drawings, scotch-taped so closely together they might have been wallpaper. Most of them were Simon's – soldiers and knights and masked men with guns. His mother thought he might be an artist someday. Scattered among them were Janie Rose's drawings, all of the same lollipop-shaped tree with hundreds of tiny round apples on it. She said it was the tree out back, but that was only a tiny scrubby tree with no leaves; it had never borne fruit and wouldn't have borne apples even if it had, since it was some other kind of tree. Once her mother said, 'Janie, honey, why don't you draw something else?_ and Janie had run out crying and wouldn't come down from the attic. But the next day she had said she would draw something different. She came into the kitchen where they were all sitting, carrying a box of broken crayons and a huge sheet of that yellow pulpy paper she always used. 'What else is there to draw?" she asked, and her mother said, 'Well, a house, for instance. Other children draw houses.' Then they all hung over her, and she drew a straight up-and-down line and a window, and then a green circle above it with lots of red apples on it. Everybody sat back and looked at her; she had drawn an apple tree with a window in it. 'Oh, my,' she said apologetically, and then she smiled and began filling in the circle with green crayon. After that she never tried houses again. She laboured away at apple trees, and signed them, 'Miss J. R. Pike' in the corner, in large purple letters. Simon never signed his, but that was because his mother said she would recognize his style anywhere in the world.