Earthly Possessions (7 page)

I would stay after school for sorority meetings, Honor Society, Prom Committee, cheerleading … but those things can only last so long. In the end I would find myself home again, walking into the overused air and my parents’ eternal questions: Why hadn’t I said goodbye that morning? What had kept me so late? Who was the boy who drove me home? And would I be staying in tonight, for once?

Then I would look down at them (for I was taller than both, by now) and everything came back to me: I remembered who I really was. In the smoky mirror behind my mother, my pearls were as outlandish as a string of bear claws. My face had a yellowed look around the edges.

I graduated from high school and got a part scholarship in mathematics at Markson College, over in Holgate. It seemed too simple. I kept wondering where the catch was.

Yet the day after Labor Day, there I sat in my father’s
pickup with my suitcases piled in the rear. My mother didn’t come with us; it was hard for her to travel. As I waved to her out the window I had a sudden worry that she knew how glad I was that she was staying home. I wondered if that were
why
she was staying home. I waved all the harder, blew kisses. This was one time I didn’t try to get out of saying goodbye.

Then my father drove me to Markson College, started to speak but gave up in the end, and left me at the dormitory. I was almost the first one there because I’d been so anxious to arrive. My roommate hadn’t come yet, whoever she was. It was noon but the cafeteria didn’t open till suppertime, so I ate an apple I’d brought and some Fig Newtons that my mother had tucked in my suitcase. The Fig Newtons made me unexpectedly homesick. Each bite caused my chest to ache. I had to hide them away in a drawer, finally. Then I unpacked, and put sheets on one bed, and wandered up and down the hall a while peeking into deserted rooms. After that I spent half an hour sitting at my desk, looking out the window at an empty sky. I’d brought along some curtains, but wasn’t going to hang them till my roommate approved them. However, time was creeping. I decided I’d hang them anyway. I unfolded the curtains, took off my shoes, and climbed onto a radiator. Spread-eagled against the window, I chanced to look down at the quadrangle. And there was my fat cousin Clarence, lumbering toward my dormitory in that ponderous, tilting way he had.

I had known all along that escape couldn’t be so easy.

My father was in the hospital. He had had an accident while driving home. The doctors weren’t so much worried about his injuries as about the heart attack that had caused the accident in the first place. Or maybe the accident had caused the heart attack. I don’t think they ever did get it straight.

For three weeks we stayed near his bed—Mama in her wooden lawn chair that Clarence had brought from home and
me in an easy chair. We watched my father’s face, which looked queer in horizontal position. His skin around his eyes had gone all crumpled. It tired him even to say a few words. Mostly he slept, and my mother cried, and I sat willing him awake again so that I could get to know him. I couldn’t stand to think how I had let him slide through my life all these years. I made a lot of promises; you know the kind. I brought my mother tea and glazed doughnuts, the only things that would sit on her stomach. I dealt with the doctors and nurses. I tried reading various women’s magazines, but all that talk about make-up and weight control and other frills just made me sick. I don’t remember eating any food whatsoever, though I suppose I must have.

Then they let him go home, but only by ambulance. We fixed a bed in his studio and laid him flat upon it. His face lost a little of its chalkiness. He started acting more natural, fussing at the itchy tape they had bound his broken ribs with. It worried him that customers were being turned away. “Charlotte,” he said, “you know how to handle that camera. I want you to do it for a week or so, just till I’m back on my feet. Can you manage?”

I said yes. I was numb by then. Now that he was safe it had hit me finally where I was: home, trapped, no escape. My mother couldn’t even sit him up without me there to help. I saw my life rolling out in front of me like an endless, mildewed rug.

It seemed to me that photos froze a person, pinned him to cardboard like a butterfly. Why would anyone want them? But people did, apparently. Poor-white mothers in rayon shifts, holding overdressed babies. Soldiers with their arms around their skinny, frizzy-haired girlfriends. I took their pictures indifferently. The camera was old and clumsy; almost anything you did to it had to take place in the dark. But I’d been using it most of my life, and couldn’t see why my father became so
anxious and critical all of a sudden. “Move that lamp off somewhat,” he would tell me from his bed. “You don’t want such a glare. Now get yourself more of an angle. I never did like a head-on photograph.”

What he liked was a sideways look—eyes lowered, face slanted downward. The bay window displaying my father’s portraits resembled a field full of flowers, all being blown by the same strong breeze.

In the darkroom (a walk-in closet, remodeled) I had attacks of shortness of breath. I would grit my teeth and endure, meanwhile developing prints with the sensible half of my mind. Everything about that place was depressed: cluttered or leaking or peeling. All the labels had come off the bottles of chemicals. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. It seemed my father didn’t care any more than I did.

But you would never guess that from the way he acted. Fuss, fuss. Questioning every little thing I did. When it came time to show him any prints he would have me hang them on the clothesline near his bed. Then there’d be this long, disapproving silence while he lay frowning and pinching his mustache. “Oh, well,” he’d finally say, “most of these people have got no judgment anyway.” Yet I didn’t think I’d done so badly. In fact I think a lot of the customers preferred me to my father. My father had such set ideas, for one thing. He still photographed children against that Ionic column of his. Me, I would take a picture any way people asked. I had no feelings about it.

We lived in a smaller and smaller area of the house, now—shutting off floors my father couldn’t climb to, rooms we couldn’t afford to heat. Our neighborhood had narrowed too. The pickup was on cinderblocks out back, and anyway neither Mama nor I could drive, so we did all our shopping on foot. And nobody came to visit us. The Emorys next door had moved away by then; the other neighbors thought we were
peculiar. All my friends were in college or married, divided from me forever after. It got so I would welcome the most random customers like long-lost relatives. But I saw how oddly they looked at us. I knew the picture we made: fat mother in elastic stockings, shriveled father, sullen spinster daughter. House where everything was mislaid under something else, and bats were surely hanging in the turret.

Markson College sent me a letter saying I could enter in January, if I liked. I don’t know what I’d been hoping—maybe for them to close the school completely till I could get there. But they didn’t even tell me who my roommate was, and I guessed anyway that she’d found somebody else by now. I felt nothing would ever go right for me again. Every customer standing on his head in my camera seemed happier than I was.

By December, the doctors said my father could start getting up. His first piece of action was to take my photographs off the clothesline and set out some of his own. You could tell he’d been just itching to do that. He stood there in his corduroy slippers, with his sweater tucked accidentally into his trousers, pointing to photos he had taken twenty years ago. “Now, here is a fine … this was a very important man as I recall, rose high in the county government later on in life. I believe he came to me because I take an honest portrait. You see, Charlotte, I never have held with these fancied-up photographs. No sense pretending someone is what he isn’t.”

His clothes swallowed him; his gray hair had taken on a tobacco tint and his skin was loose and sagging. But I couldn’t get him to rest a while. He pulled out more and more photos, tacking them to the bulletin board, propping them on shelves and along the picture rails. Businessmen, high school graduates, ladies’ circles from the old days, thinning out to the soldiers and the overdressed babies. But even the babies looked serious in these pictures, and the soldiers stood stiff as family men beside their girls. Everyone’s expression was bemused and
veiled; everyone’s posture was perfect. Nobody smiled. I hadn’t noticed that before. I said, “Look! It’s like some old-fashioned photo album.”

“It is never old-fashioned to take an honest portrait,” my father said.

I was afraid he was working up to one of his moods. I saw now that he was hanging new prints too fast, not even looking at them, hauling out more and more from the rusty green file beside his bed. “See, here is a … this was … this man ordered forty prints from me, that’s how much he liked what I did.”

“It’s very nice, Daddy,” I said. I just wanted him to stop moving around so much. I didn’t care two cents about anybody’s photos, his or mine either one. I said, “Shouldn’t you be resting now?”

“Ask your mother what she did with those old plates of mine,” he told me.

I went to find my mother, who was watching TV in her lawn chair in the kitchen. “Daddy wants his old negatives,” I said.

“What negatives? Why ask me? I don’t know why he keeps all that stuff anyway,” she said. “They sit around cracking under their own weight, by and by. And you know those people aren’t going to reorder, most of them are dead now.”

I went back to the studio. “She hasn’t seen them,” I said. My father was sorting a shoebox full of church groups. From the look he gave me, you would think I’d lost his negatives myself. I didn’t know why he was so angry with me.

That night I dreamed I went to Markson College and found it locked and abandoned, its quadrangles echoing; but after I woke up I felt all right again. I put on my bathrobe and went down to the kitchen to start the coffee. While it was perking I looked out the window at the sun coming up through a tangle of frosty trees. Then I poured two cups of coffee, one for me and one for my father, and carried them into the studio. My
father lay in bed under a perfectly smooth blanket. He wasn’t breathing. All around him and above him were pictures of unsmiling people, but none was any stiller than my father was.

Uncle Gerard saw to the funeral. Then he and Aunt Aster attended it (I don’t know who else, if anyone) while I stayed home with my mother, who was going to pieces. I thought of it as going to pieces because she seemed to be taking everything else to pieces right along with her. She would sit in her chair and pluck, pluck at the cushion till little bits of stuffing were scattered all over the rug. She would pick the houseplants purely bald and roll each leaf and shred it up. Sometimes she ran her fingers dreamily through her hair and pulled out strands, one by one. I didn’t know what to do with her. All I could think of was to hold her hands and say, “Stop, now.”

“I always guessed that this was going to happen,” she told me. Her voice had lost its tone. You can’t imagine how scary it is to hear someone just printing out words like that. “This was the one thing I always dreaded,” she said, “and now it’s come, I’ve been left without a husband forever.”

It seemed to me that she ought to be relieved, then. She had nothing more to dread. But of course I didn’t say so out loud. I patted her arm. Fetched her tea. And went to my uncle’s as soon as she had fallen asleep. I was desperate; January was just around the corner. “Uncle Gerard, I have got to go to college,” I told him.

“College?” he said, and lit one of his terrible-smelling black cigars.

“They gave me just a part scholarship and you know we’re short on money. I’ll have to ask you for a loan.”

“Well, money, sweetheart, certainly,” said Uncle Gerard, “but what’re you going to do about your mama?”

“I can’t stay with Mama all my life.”

“Why, girl! She’s
stricken
. You want to leave her at a time like this?”

“Maybe she could move in with you,” I said.

“With
Aster
and me?”

“Or maybe you could just look in on her from time to time. Or send Clarence over. I mean, just to—”

“Now, here is what I would suggest,” said Uncle Gerard, and he braced his hands on his stubby thighs and leaned toward me, breathing burnt rubber. “You’re, what. Seventeen? Eighteen? Look at you, got all the time in the world. Take a year out. Start school next fall. What’s a year to somebody your age?”

“It’s one-eighteenth of my life,” I said.

“And I tell you what I’m going to do: you wait till next September and I’ll pay your bills myself. Outright. No loans. It’s a deal, you got that?”

“Well, thank you, Uncle Gerard,” I said, because I could see he meant well. He wasn’t really so rich, after all; he owned a dry-cleaning establishment. But when I left I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye to Aunt Aster, with her golden hair and her pampered skin. I pretended not to hear her when she called to me from the kitchen.

Mama was not improving. In fact I wondered if even September would be long enough. I felt locked in a calendar; time was turning out to be the most closed-in space of all. I had to help Mama into her clothes every day and tell her things over and over. All she would talk about was my father. “I married him out of desperation,” she told me. “I settled for what I could get. Don’t ever
settle
, Charlotte.”

“No, Mama.”

She didn’t have to tell me that.

“From the beginning, he held something against me. I still don’t know what it was. He liked a hefty woman, he said, but after a while he started nagging for me to cut down on my eating. ‘How come?’ I asked him. I was so surprised that he would be like that. But I tried, oh, for his sake I … all those times I went without meals, and got weak and dizzy just trying
to reduce some. Then, I don’t know, I would have to start eating again. I’m just made that way, I just need more nourishment than other people. Oh, and it wouldn’t have changed things anyhow. He wasn’t a satisfied man, Charlotte. What more could I have done?”