Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [14]
My only important belonging since I have grown up is a pair of excellent walking shoes.
Nobody, of course, knew anything about this trip of mine, but often when I was thinking of it my mother complained that my eyes had turned flat. “I don’t understand you,” she used to say. “What makes you get that expression? It seems you’ve … folded up your looks, Charlotte. What’s happened? You weren’t always like this. Why, ever since, I don’t know …”
Ever since my kidnapping, was what she meant. Except she didn’t call it a kidnapping. She confused me. Sometimes she said I’d wandered to the midway out of contrariness; sometimes she said the fair people had maliciously lost me. Till I didn’t really know any more: what had happened? What did it mean?
I had been kidnapped, I was almost certain, but when I tried to remember I was not so sure who had done it. I’d been kidnapped and placed on a dining room table, imprisoned in an eyelet dress; set on a splintery gold-painted throne; rushed through a field by a man in a leather jacket; hurried into a pickup truck by a fat lady who talked on and on: “I never had such a fright in my life. I thought we had lost you. Our only, single child, our little girl. I thought, ‘How will we ever …’ I thought you were dead, smothered maybe or strangled. You’re so thin, it wouldn’t take much to … you were thin even as a baby and I worried night and day over you. Thin as a stick. Thin as a wire. When they brought you to me I said, ‘She’s so thin!’ You had this very straight dark hair, I had never seen so much hair on a baby. You had a forceps mark on your temple that stayed there till you were two years old. Remember, Murray? I said, ‘What is that mark? My baby didn’t have forceps, she slipped right out. The doctor told me so himself.’ Oh, why don’t they answer your questions?”
She let her hands fall into her lap. My father sighed. The two of them stared out at the night while the pickup rattled on, stealing me away.
5
We came to one of those city-type service stations, all fluorescent lights, scroungy blue-jeaned boy pumping gas, German shepherd in the plate glass window. Jake Simms walked slowly and kept looking it over, I didn’t know what for. Then he said, “This’ll do.” He cut in across the concrete, pushing me ahead of him. “I got to go to the john,” he said. “Got some other things to do besides. Ask the boy for the keys.”
“What?”
“The keys, keys. Ask him for the keys to the john.”
I asked. The boy was washing a windshield now and he stopped and listened, as if he couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. His ruffled yellow head tilted toward me; his knuckles were soiled and leathery. “I want the key,” I told him.
“Keys!” Jake hissed behind me.
“Both keys. One for him too.”
The boy set his cloth aside and dug down in his jeans, which were so tight he had to suck in his breath before he could get a hand in his pocket. One key was attached to a huge metal washer, the other to a wooden disc. “Don’t forget to give them back,” the boy said.
“Sure thing,” Jake told him.
We went around to the restrooms, where the doors were chained and padlocked, and he opened up the Ladies’ and shoved me in. I was uncertain what was going on. Was this the end of the road? Was he planning to leave for good now? Till he said, “Don’t go away,” and shut the door on me. I heard the key turning, then his footsteps growing fainter. For a long time after he was gone the chain went on swinging against the door like a handful of marbles being thrown down, over and over again.
Well, of course I was glad to see the inside of a bathroom. I peed ten gallons, washed my hands, looked at my face in the speckled mirror. My hair was a little stringy but other than that I seemed the same as usual. Evidently these things don’t show on a person the way you’d think they would.
But then I glanced up and saw how dim and tiny the ceiling was, hung with cobwebs—oh, this was a closed-in space, all right. One little window high up the cinderblock wall, chicken wire and milky glass, slanted partway open. I climbed