Earthly Possessions (4 page)

But even so, a letter came saying I’d 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 out! 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.

“Lord yes, you look like a chimpanzee in a ball gown,” he said.

He went on through to the kitchen.

My mother slowly, gently helped me free of my dress, while I stood still as a statue. She folded it and laid it on the table. She stroked the ruffle that edged one puffed sleeve. I knew what she was thinking: if only it were her
true
daughter entering this contest!

Both of us wished it could have been.

We rode to the fair with our only relatives—my fat Uncle Gerard, his wife Aster who didn’t like us, and Clarence, their son, a huge lumbering marshmallow ten years old. Uncle Gerard drove us in his Cadillac, which felt so close and tightly sealed I wasn’t sure we’d have enough air for the trip. We didn’t take Mama’s chair because for that we would have needed the pickup. She was just going to stay on her feet the whole time. And I had to sit next to Clarence, who breathed through his mouth. He had adenoid trouble. I looked hard out the window, pretending I was somewhere else.

It was 1948 and the countryside, now that I think back on it, was as peaceful and well-ordered as an illustration from a Dick-and-Jane book. Lone gasoline pumps, fields flowered over like bedspreads. Trees turning perfectly red and perfectly yellow. At the entrance to the fairgrounds, a billboard showed a lipsticked, finger-waved housewife holding up a jar of homemade preserves.
CLARION COUNTY FAIR, OCT. 9–16
, the billboard said.
A TIME FOR PRIDE
. My uncle slowed down at the ticket booth and held a fistful of dollars out the window. “Four adults, one child,” he told the attendant. “We won’t need a ticket for this other child. She’s here by invitation, going to be in a beauty pageant. My niece.”

He believed every word he read; he really did think it was a time for pride.

The contest was held in the Farm Products Building, amongst the eggplants and butter pats. I don’t remember the
contest itself but I do remember the building, with its cavernous, echoing roof and bare steel rafters. The little girl next to me had speckled legs because of the cold; she worried that the judges would think she was
always
speckled. There was a smell of roses. No, the roses came later. They were set in my arms when I won. My picture was taken by a man who was not my father.

I know that picture line for line, by now; it used to hang in the upstairs hall. An 8 × 10 glossy showing a blur of children in white or light-colored organdy, eyelet, and dotted swiss; and front center (stiller than the others, and therefore clearer) a dark little girl in a dark plain school dress, carrying roses. Actually, she doesn’t seem all that beautiful. I believe the secret of my success was the orphanish clothing, the straight hair that my mother had given up on, and my expression of despair. The Little Match Girl. How could they bear to hurt my feelings?

The winner of the Baby Contest was packed in her carriage and sent on home, never to be heard from again. Miss Clarion appeared on stage every night before the rodeo. But the Beautiful Child was not so lucky. I had to stay in the Farm Products Building. Every day from three to six (after-school hours) for a solid week I had to take my place on the splintery gold-painted chair in the center of the platform. I wore a paper crown and held a scepter, actually a hot-dog skewer covered with flaky glitter. I can see it all still; I remember everything. The pumpkins on the pumpkin table below me, each on its separate paper plate. The hatted, aproned farm wives casting sideways glances at the jams, where prizes had already been awarded. The children carrying balloons with “Hess Fine Fertilizer” swelling across them. And the dark-haired woman who stood in front of me hour after hour, day after day, staring up into my face without a hint of a smile.

She was pretty in a stark, high-cheekboned way that wasn’t yet fashionable. Her coat was long and narrow, and I
had never seen legs so slender. I liked her two feverish spots of rouge but I wasn’t so sure of her eyes, which had a sooty appearance. You couldn’t help wondering what had gone wrong, looking into eyes like that.

People swirled past her like water around a rock. She ignored them. She stood with her hands jammed deep in her pockets and gazed only at me.

Meanwhile, ladies came up to tell me how cute I was. Children made faces at me. Cousin Clarence (my only chaperone, now that the contest was over) washed in on a tide of old men from the nursing home and washed out again, splayfooted. The woman and I continued to stare at each other.

On the afternoon of my last day at the fair, when it was almost time for my parents to arrive, the woman stepped forward and raised her arms. I rose and laid aside my scepter. I removed my crown and set it on the throne. Came down the stairs to meet her. She took my hand. We left by the end door.

We cut across the midway, passing various booths where you could win a teddy bear by ringing bottles, piercing balloons, or throwing nickels into slippery china plates. So far I’d seen only the educational exhibits and I was hoping the woman would stop here, but she didn’t. Nor did she offer me a ride on the Ferris wheel. One glance at her face told me it was out of the question; she had something serious on her mind. She walked quickly, frowning a little. I took a tighter hold on her hand and scurried to keep pace.

We went on to where the fields took over and a wind blew up to make me shiver in my short-sleeved dress. The sun had set by now. Against the flat gray sky I could make out a group of trailers. They must have been there all week; the ground around them was churned and hardened. Some flew strings of flapping shirts, some had motorcycles beside them, some were lit with soft yellow lights. The trailer the woman took me to was dark. It had no clotheslines or other appurtenances anchoring
it down. The woman flung back the door and reached inside to switch on a lamp. I stood looking into what might have been a doctor’s waiting room—bare and neat, upholstered in shades of tan.

“Go in, please,” the woman said.

I stepped inside. The woman closed the door behind us and walked to the dark end of the trailer, still wearing her coat, briskly rubbing her fingers together. “It’s so cold!” she said. “I will make us some tea.” I could tell she had a foreign accent but I didn’t know what kind. We didn’t have any foreigners in Clarion. “Do you drink tea now?” she said.

“No,” I said.

Instead of offering anything else, she stopped rubbing her fingers and came back to the living room. She sank onto the edge of the daybed and I sat down beside her. She turned and searched my face. “Do you like it here?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“It means nothing to me,” she said.

I could see that it wouldn’t.

“Anyway, everything is his. I require a bureau drawer, only a bureau drawer. I keep even my shoes in the drawer, even my coat, my dress. So, if I am a little wrinkled you will understand why.”

I took a quick look at her coat. It didn’t seem wrinkled. To me, she was perfect. She had set her feet together so neatly they looked like empty shoes beside a bed. Her hair was darker than mine, but I recognized it by the way it hung.

“He himself has
three
drawers, and a closet,” she said. “He has offered me another drawer but I tell him I don’t need it.”

I nodded. I thought she was right.

“But do you believe this of me? When you remember how much I
used
to have? My life has changed. He says, ‘You must get another dress, my God, you’re not a refugee any more.’ ‘I
don’t have room for another dress,’ I tell him. I let him buy me only things that won’t take space—meals in restaurants and trips to beautiful scenery. I love to travel. Oh, don’t you love to travel?”

I blinked.

“You think I’m mad,” she said.

What would she be mad about?

“You suppose I would be tired of travel forevermore.”

“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.