Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [0]
“One of the most beguiling and mesmerizing writers in America.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Not merely good … She is wickedly good!”
—John Updike
“A novelist who knows what a proper story is … A very funny writer … Not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well.”
—Newsweek
“Tyler’s characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks, and harmonic longings.”
—Time
“Her people are triumphantly alive.”
—The New York Times
By Anne Tyler
IF MORNING EVER COMES
THE TIN CAN TREE
A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE
THE CLOCK WINDER
CELESTIAL NAVIGATION
SEARCHING FOR CALEB
EARTHLY POSSESSIONS
MORGAN’S PASSING
DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT
THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
BREATHING LESSONS
SAINT MAYBE
LADDER OF YEARS
A PATCHWORK PLANET
BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS
THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE
DIGGING TO AMERICA
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1977 by Anne Tyler Modarressi
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96691
eISBN: 978-0-307-78839-9
This edition published in arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
By Anne Tyler
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
1
The marriage wasn’t going well and I decided to leave my husband. I went to the bank to get cash for the trip. This was on a Wednesday, a rainy afternoon in March. The streets were nearly empty and the bank had just a few customers, none of them familiar to me.
Time was when I knew everybody in Clarion, but then they opened the lipstick factory and strangers started moving in. I was glad. I have lived in this town all my life, thirty-five years, forever. I liked having new people around. I liked standing in that bank feeling anonymous, with some business-suited stranger ahead of me in line and someone behind me wearing a slithery-sounding, city-type nylon jacket. I didn’t know the teller either. Though she might have been one of the Benedict girls, just grown up a little. She had that Benedict voice that turned off and on in the middle of words. “How would you like that, sir?” she asked the man ahead of me.
“Fives and ones,” he said.
She counted out the fives, then reached into some inconvenient place and came up with a couple of stacks of ones in brown paper bellybands. Just at that moment, the nylon jacket started up behind me. Somebody pushed me, somebody stumbled. There was this sudden flurry all around. A nylon sleeve swooped over my shoulder. A hand fastened on the stacks of bills. I was extremely irritated. Now look, I wanted to say, don’t be so grabby; I was here before you were. But then the teller gave a squawk and the man ahead of me spun in my direction, unbuttoning his suit coat. One of those plumpish men, puffy-faced as if continually, just barely, holding in his anger. He fumbled at his chest and pulled out something stubby. He pointed it at the nylon jacket. Which was black—the sleeve, at any rate. The sleeve darted back (the hand clutching money) and circled my neck. For a moment I was almost flattered. I curved to make way for the object pressing into my ribs. I smelled the foggy smell of new dollars.
“Anybody move and I’ll kill her,” said the nylon jacket.
It was me he meant.
We backed out, with his sneakers squeaking on the marble floor. Like a camera zooming away I saw first a few people and then more and more, all their faces very still and turned on me. My view grew even wider, took in the whole gloomy, paneled interior of the Maryland Safety Savings Bank. We lurched backward out the door.
“Run,” he told me.
He gripped my sleeve and we ran together,