Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [13]
“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 16, 1948, I have been trying to get rid of all belongings that would weigh me down on a long foot-march. I loved, in 1948, 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 months. 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 Arkin’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