Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [31]
Then Saul caught a bus to Colorado. He went to see an old Army buddy; they were going to talk about a partnership in something. Maybe some kind of a shop where they could work with their hands. I should keep my fingers crossed, he told me. He was aiming for a June wedding.
That was terrible, that time he was gone. I felt I’d just waked from some long, pillowy dream and taken a look at where I was: still friendless, sallow, peculiar, living alone with my mother, surrounded by monstrous potted plants taller and older than I was. Rubber trees and Chinese palms that hadn’t put out a new leaf since I was born. Mildewed sets of the classics locked in glass-fronted bookshelves, dusty candy in pedestaled dishes. And Mama newly anxious over this trip to Colorado, fretting and mumbling and letting my wedding gown fall apart on the dress form in the dining room. Would I really consider going so far? she asked. Was I taking her along?
I would consider going anywhere, anywhere at all. And I wasn’t taking Mama.
I moved to Saul’s room. (Mama was shocked.) Saul had a lot of clutter too but at least there was life in his clutter. All his Army things smelled salty and wild. What little he had saved from Alberta’s house—a green metal toolchest and two hunting rifles—had a self-contained look. I stared for hours at a group photo of Edwin, the four boys, and a birthday cake, with a clipped-out square at the center of the picture. I slept in his hard sleigh bed, I wrapped up in his terrycloth bathrobe, and occasionally I slipped my feet into a pair of his shoes. But still I couldn’t seem to step inside his life. Clomping along, trailing an extra six inches of terrycloth sleeve, I would wade to the window and lean out to memorize his view: Alberta’s house, with the panes gone now and the roof ripped off. I opened his closet just to breathe in his clothing, and once even heaved a rifle onto my shoulder and laid my cheek against the oiled wood of the handle. Squinting along the bluish barrel, resting my finger on a trigger no more complicated than a camera button, I could easily imagine shooting someone. It’s the completed action: once you’ve taken aim, how can you resist the pull to follow through?
Saul was gone ten days, but came back with nothing settled. He hadn’t liked his friend as much as he’d remembered. He didn’t know; they just hadn’t hit it off, somehow. He would rather keep on looking. Rather wait for whatever felt right.
That evening I put on a floating nightgown, and listened for Mama’s door to close. Then I went skimming through the dark to his salty-smelling room, to his hard sleigh bed, to his window full of moonlight and Alberta’s tottering house.
In the morning, he said maybe we should go on ahead with the wedding.
It wasn’t a June wedding after all. We got married in July. That’s because we had to go to Holy Basis Church for a month before the preacher there would marry us. Holy Basis was this total-dunking, hellfire place where Edwin Emory used to be a deacon, and Saul had conceived the notion that he’d like to hold the wedding there. Well, I had no church, wasn’t religious in any way at all; and Mama’d quit Clarion Methodist some twenty years back over an insult she’d overheard. So for four Sundays straight we went to Holy Basis, with its fake-brick tarpaper and its smoky wooden ceiling, hymn numbers scrawled on a slate up front and Reverend Davitt just droning and intoning—a beak-nosed man in black who clung to the pulpit for dear life. Saul and I sat very near the front. (We wanted to be counted.) We were close enough