Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [47]
“See, I left home without my wallet,” Jake said.
“How could you do a thing like that?”
“Never mind how, it just happened that way. How much you got?”
Mindy opened her purse and riffled through it. “Ten, fifteen … sixteen dollars and some cents, it looks like.”
“That ain’t very much,” said Jake.
“Well, la-de-da to you, mister.”
We passed a truckful of crated chickens. There was a silence. Then Jake said, “They let you carry money around that place?”
“Sure.”
“But what would you use it for?”
“Oh, like if we want to walk into town or something. Buy us a soda or shampoo or movie magazine.”
“You just walk on into town,” said Jake. “Any old time you want.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I took tight hold of the door handle and waited. But Jake didn’t say a thing, not a word. He merely drove on, with his face as still as a stone.
In the restroom of the diner where we stopped for breakfast, Mindy had me put her hair into ponytails. “I was scared to do it myself,” she said, “and my roommate was asleep.”
“What were you scared of?” I asked.
“Why, you know I shouldn’t raise my arms that high. I might strangle the baby on its cord.”
“But—”
“How do I look?” she asked me.
She looked about twelve years old, younger than my daughter even, with her two perky ponytails and her blue, trusting gaze. In the mirror beside her I was suddenly dimmed: an older woman, flat-haired, wearing a raincoat that had clearly been slept in. “Don’t you have no lipstick?” Mindy said.
“Lipstick? No.”
“Well, maybe you’d like to borrow mine.”
She handed it to me, already unrolled—something pink and fruity-smelling. I handed it back. “Thanks anyway,” I told her.
“Come on, you could use a little color.”
“No, really, I—”
“You want me to do it?”
“No. Please.”
“But listen, at the Home I made up everybody. I mean a lot of those girls just never had learned what to do with theirselves, you know? Keep still a minute.”
“Stop!” I said.
She looked startled. She took a step backward, still holding the lipstick.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I told her.
“That’s all right,” she said. She rolled and capped the lipstick in silence, and dropped it into her purse. “Well!” she said. But when she looked up again I saw that her face was white and stricken, smaller somehow than before.
“Please don’t feel bad,” I told her. “It’s just that I didn’t want to be put in someone else’s looks. I mean,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, “what if I got stuck that way? Like crossing your eyes; didn’t your mother ever warn you about that?”
Mindy said, “Oh, Charlotte, do you think he’s at all glad to see me?”
“Of course he is,” I said.
Driving was slower now because we had to stop so often. First of all, the cat kept getting carsick. From time to time he would give this low moan, and then Jake would curse and brake and swerve to the side of the road. The trouble was, the cat wouldn’t come out of the car then. We’d all be calling, “Plymouth? Here, Plymouth,” but he only crouched down beneath the seat, and we’d have to sit helpless and listen to his little choking sounds. “This is therapeutic?” Jake asked.
Then Mindy had so many foot cramps. Every time one hit her, we’d have to stop and let her walk it off. We stood leaning against the car, watching her hobble through some field littered with flowers and beer bottles. It was truly warm now, and so bright I had to squint. Mindy looked like a little sunlit robot.
“It’s easing!” she would call back. “I feel it starting to ease up some!”
“Now’s the kind of time I wish I smoked,” Jake said. “I can feel those muscles slacking!”
Jake’s jacket ballooned in the wind. He slouched beside me. Our elbows touched. We were like two parents exercising a child in the park. “You had children,” he said suddenly, as if reading my mind.
I nodded.
“Ever get foot cramps?”
“Well, no.”
“It’s all in her head,” he told me.
“Oh, I doubt that.”
I could feel him watching me. I looked away. Then he asked, “How many?”
“What?”
“How many children.”
“Two,” I said.
“Your husband like kids?”
“Well, of course.”
“What’s he do?