Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [49]
“Now, don’t you dare say I should go after her,” Jake told me.
I was surprised. “Me?” I said.
“Isn’t that what women do? ‘Oh, go after her, Jake. Go see if you can help.’ ”
“But—I haven’t opened my mouth,” I said. “You were about to.”
“I was not!”
Mindy stumbled in her little sandals. She went down on one knee.
“Go after her,” Jake told me.
I ran and caught up with her. By the time I arrived she was on her feet again. “Mindy?” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, brushing at her skirt. She kept her eyes lowered; her lashes were long and white, clumsily tipped with little blotches of mascara. “I’m supposed to just point my heels,” she said. “That’s what helps the cramps. If I just, like, jab my heels in the gravel, here …”
She stopped and looked up at me. “Charlotte,” she said, “it wasn’t a lie. Can’t you explain to him? He doesn’t understand. I mean, it really is a prison if you got no place else to go to. Isn’t it?”
“Well, naturally,” I said. “You want to turn around now?”
“I just don’t have any choice; he’ll have to go through with this,” she said, letting me lead her back. “It’s not any picnic for me, you know. Long about the fifth or sixth month, why, I got so mad and so tired of waiting for him I believe I just stopped loving him. I really believe I might not love him any more. But what else is there for me to do?”
We walked along the strip of gravel, wading through cellophane bags and candy wrappers. Jake had got back in the car to wait for us, I saw. He was sitting in the passenger seat, with his head bowed low and buried in his hands.
From Pariesto on, Mindy did the driving. She said it helped her foot cramps. I sat in my usual place, and Jake moved to the middle. Although it was hot now, he kept his jacket on and his collar up, as if for protection. The wind ruffled his hair into loose damp curls and turned my face stiff and salty. Only Mindy, working on her own peculiar little thermostat, seemed comfortable. She kept her elbows out and her chin up, and drove at a fast, smooth pace that gradually raised her spirits. Before long, she was humming. Then she started singing. She sang “Love Will Keep Us Together.” When her accelerator foot began beating in rhythm, Jake said, “You want to cool it a little?” But the rest of the time he let her do as she pleased. He slid down in his seat, with his arms folded across his chest and his head tilted back. I would have said he was asleep, if I hadn’t looked closely and seen the gray slits of his eyes.
Late in the afternoon, in a town I didn’t catch the name of, we stopped at a Woolworth’s. Mindy wanted to get a glass of milk at the soda fountain. She said she had to have at least a quart a day. “Yeah, well,” Jake said, “but the way I figure it, we’re not but a couple of hours from Perth. Can’t you hold out till then?”
“It’s not for me, it’s for the baby,” Mindy told him. “If it was for me I could hold out forever. I hate milk. You coming?”
She stepped from the car in a swirl of pink, and we followed her into Woolworth’s. This was an old Woolworth’s, with creaky dark floors and a smell of popcorn. There were counters full of Spray-Net, eyelash curlers, harlequin reading glasses, and mustard-seed pendants—objects I thought had vanished long ago. Mindy got waylaid by a salt-and-pepper set shaped like kerosene lanterns, and stopped to buy it. I expected Jake to hurry her but he didn’t. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets, his face slack and lifeless, gazing at a Batman comic on the floor. Then we went on to the soda fountain where Mindy ordered her milk. “Ugh,” she said when it came. “It’s so white. It’s so thick.” The waitress took offense and flounced off, slapping things with a dishrag as she went. “Well, this is for your sake, Elton,” Mindy said, and she patted her stomach and started drinking, one sip at a time. “We’re naming him for Elton John,” she told me. Jake studied a picture of a gray milkshake and a pink plastic hot dog from the forties. I flipped through someone’s cast-off newspaper hunting “Peanuts,” but