Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [23]
“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?”
“I don’t know, Mama.”
“Do you think he felt he had settled?”
“Of course not, Mama.”
“He said it, all the time. ‘Oh, why am I stuck in this life,’ he said, and then I said, ‘Go, go, who asked you to stay? Go someplace else if you don’t like it here. Marry some floozy,’ I told him; but he would just look at me from under his eyebrows and not say another word. ‘I’ll find you a bride myself!’ I said. Yet it would have killed me, Charlotte. Isn’t that comical? Laugh. He had the softest, saddest expression. He had this way of tipping his head when he listened to people. Oh, Charlotte, was he happy at all, do you think?”
“Of course he was, Mama,” I said, and then I would have to leave, I just had to. I would go to the studio where my father’s photographs still averted their eyes and his dented metal sign still swung