Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [2]
And then the bus had to wheeze up the moment we arrived at the curb, not giving me two seconds to look around for someone familiar. Though I was calmer now. It didn’t seem so likely he would shoot me with people around—even these numb, dumb people lining the bus, half of them asleep with their mouths open, old lady talking to herself, soldier with a transistor radio pressed to the side of his head. Dolly Parton was singing “My Life Is Like Unto a Bargain Store.” The vanity case on the old lady’s lap was meowing. I decided there was hope. I sank into a seat and felt suddenly light-hearted, as if I were expecting something. As if I were going on a trip, really. Then the bank robber sat down beside me. “You keep on behaving and you’re going to be fine,” he whispered. (He was a little out of breath himself, I saw.) He reached over, palm down. His hand was square and dark. What did he want? I shrank away, but he just took hold of my purse. “I’ll be needing that,” he said.
I disentangled the strap from my shoulder and gave it to him. He held it loosely, between his knees. I looked away. Outside my window was Libby’s Grill, the bus driver joking with the waitress on the stoop, a child mailing a letter. What about my children, would they wonder where I was?
“I have to get off,” I told the bank robber.
He blinked.
“I’ve got children, I didn’t make arrangements yet for after school. I have to get off.”
“What you expect me to do?” he said. “Look, lady, if it was up to me we’d be twenty miles apart by now. You think I planned this? How was I to know some clown would pull a gun?” He swung his eyes around, checking out the sleeping faces. “Nowadays just anybody’s got them, people without a lick of sense. I could be clean free and you safe home with your kids by now if it wasn’t for him. Guy like that ought to be locked up.”
“But we’re out. You’ve escaped,” I told him.
I felt embarrassed; it seemed tactless to discuss the situation so openly. But he didn’t take offense.
“Wait and see,” was all he said.
“Wait for what?”
“See if they can say who I was. If they can’t I won’t need you. I’ll let you go. Right?”
He gave me a sudden smile he didn’t mean—short, even teeth, surprisingly white. Stubby black lashes veiling whatever look was in his eyes. I didn’t smile back.
The driver climbed on, a man so heavy that we felt the tilt when he landed. He pulled the door shut and ground the motor. Libby’s Grill slipped away like something underwater. The child at the mailbox vanished. Then the laundromat, the hardware, the vacant lot, and finally the pharmacy with its mechanical lady lounging in the window, raising her arm to rub Coppertone on it and dropping it and raising it again, eternally laughing her faded laugh inside her dusty glass box.
2
I was born right here in Clarion; I grew up in that big brown turreted house next to Percy’s Texaco. My mother was a fat lady who used to teach first grade. Her maiden name was Lacey Debney.
Notice that I mention her fatness first. You couldn’t overlook fatness like my mother’s. It defined her, it radiated out from her, it filled any room she walked into. She was a mushroom-shaped woman with wispy blond hair you could see through, a pink face, and no neck; just a jaw sloping wider and wider till it turned into shoulders. All year round she wore sleeveless flowered shifts—a mistake. Her feet were the smallest I have ever seen on a grownup, and she owned a gigantic collection of tiny, elegant shoes.
When she was in her mid-thirties—still a maiden lady teaching school, living in her dead father’s house beside the Texaco station—a traveling photographer named Murray Ames came to take her students’ pictures. A stooped, bald, meek-looking man with a mustache like a soft black mouse. What did he see in her? Did he like her little feet, her fancy shoes? At any rate, they married. He moved into her dead father’s house and turned the library into a portrait studio—an L-shaped room with an outside entrance