Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [39]
I quit. I ate some more Doritos and looked at the woods. Once I got used to the bareness—slick brown needled floor, color washed out in the dusk—I thought it was sort of pleasant here. But Jake was so restless. He started crackling through the grocery bag. He took some Doritos after all and then brought out the Coke bottle, unscrewed the top, and sent a fine warm spray over both of us. “Oops. Sorry,” he said.
“That’s all right.”
“Have a drink.”
“No, thanks.”
“If you like,” he said, “you can sleep in the back tonight. I ain’t sleeping anyhow. I plan to just sit here and go crazy.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t see how you stand this,” he said.
“You forget,” I told him, “I’ve been married.”
We sat there munching Doritos, watching the trees grow taller and blacker as night came on.
10
I first left my husband in 1960, after an argument over the furniture. This was Alberta’s furniture that he’d stored instead of selling, for some reason, back when he sold her house. We hadn’t been married a month when he hired a U-Haul and brought everything home with him: her rickety bedroom suites, linoleum-topped table and worn-out chairs, her multicolored curtains and shawls and dresses … add to this her father-in-law’s belongings as well, all the props and costumes the old man had stashed in the dining room. Well, I thought Saul meant to hold a garage sale or something. Certainly I saw that we couldn’t go on paying the storage bills. But it seemed he had no such intention. He kept it, every bit of it. The house was overstuffed as it was, so he had to double things up: an end table in front of another end table, a second sofa backed against the first. It was crazy. Every piece of furniture had its shadow, a Siamese twin. My mother didn’t seem to find it odd at all (she doted on him now, she thought he could do no wrong) but I did. He wouldn’t even open Alberta’s letters; what did he want with her furniture?
I myself thought of Alberta daily, and had coveted all she owned for years, but these were just her cast-offs. If she had managed to fling them away, so could I. “Saul,” I said, “we have to get rid of this clutter. I can’t move. I can’t breathe! It’s got to go.”
“Oh, we’ll sort it out eventually,” was what he said.
I believed him. I continued stumbling over crates of satin shoes and riding boots, bruising my shins in the tangle of chair legs, waiting for him to take some action. But then he started Bible College and became so preoccupied. At night he was studying, and any spare time he had was given to the radio shop. It was plain he’d forgotten that furniture utterly.
Along about October, I decided to dispose of it myself. I admit it: I went behind his back. I didn’t call Goodwill in an open and aboveboard way that he would notice but snuck things out, piece by piece, and set them by the trashcan. The truck came by on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday I put out a nightstand, Saturday a bookcase. I couldn’t discard more than one thing at a time because the town had a limit on bulk trash. This made me very impatient. I lay awake planning what to get rid of next; it was so hard to choose. The bureau? Or the end table? Part of me wanted to work my way through the kitchen chairs, but there were eight of them and that would be so boring, week after week. Part of me wanted to head straight for the sofa, the biggest thing in the house. But surely he would notice that. Wouldn’t he?
His attitude now was fond but abstracted—not what you look for in a husband. He’d settled me so quickly into his life; he’d moved on to other projects. I felt like something dragged on a string behind a forgetful child. I couldn’t understand how we’d arrived so soon at the same muddy, tangled, flawed relationship that I had with everyone else.
I began to consider all our belongings with an eye to how they would look beside the trashcan. Not just Alberta’s things, but Mama’s and my own as well. After all, did we really need to write at desks, walk on rugs? In the middle of dinner I would freeze, staring at the china cupboard full of compote