Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [53]
“Why,” he said. “Why, what have we here. Charlotte? Charlotte, what is this?”
I took my eyes away from the parade and looked at what he held out. “It’s a traveler’s check,” I told him.
“A traveler’s check! Looky there, Mindy, a hundred-dollar traveler’s check! We’re rich! Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “What kind of sneaky way is that to act?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think,” I said.
“Didn’t think? Carrying around a hundred dollars and didn’t think?”
“Well, I’ve had it for so long, you see. I mean I had it for just one purpose, I forgot it could be used for anything else.”
“What in hell purpose was that?” Jake asked.
“Why, for traveling,” I said.
“Charlotte,” Jake told me, “we are traveling.”
“Oh,” I said.
12
When Selinda was little, I tried to tell her the truth as much as possible. I told her that as far as I knew, when people die they die and that’s the end of it. But after church one day she asked, “How come you and me just die and other people get to go to heaven?”
“Well, there you are,” I told her. “You can take your choice.”
Selinda chose heaven. I didn’t blame her. She went to all those extras that I stayed home from: prayer meetings, Family Night, and so forth. I began to notice her absence. She was seven now and a whole separate person. Well, she always had been, really, but I thought of seven as the age when people come into their full identity. Sometimes it seemed to me that my own seven-year-old self was still looking out of its grownup hull, wary but unblinking. I asked Selinda, “Will you remember to pay me a visit now and then?”
“I live here,” Selinda said.
“Oh, I forgot.”
Up till then, I’d thought it would be a mistake to have another child. (More to take with me when I left.) But I changed my mind. And Saul, of course, had wanted more all along. So in January of 1969 I got pregnant. By March I was buying stacks of diapers and flannel nightgowns. In April I had a miscarriage. The doctor said it wouldn’t be wise for us to try again.
Nobody knew how much I’d already loved that baby. Not even Mama, who after all had never been consciously pregnant herself. She fussed around with my pillows, looking hopeful and puzzled. Miss Feather brought lots of fluids as if she thought I had a cold. Linus and Selinda acted scared of me; Julian suffered one of his lapses and lost three hundred dollars at the Bowie Racetrack. And Saul sat beside my bed, flattening my hands between his own. He looked not at me but at my fingernails, which had a bluish tinge. He didn’t say a word for hours. Wasn’t he supposed to? Wasn’t it a preacher’s job? I said, “Please don’t tell me this was God’s will.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said.
I said, “Oh.” I felt disappointed. “Because it’s not,” I said. “It’s biological.”
“All right.”
“This is just something my body did.”
“All right.”
I studied his face. I saw that he had two sharp lines pulling down the corners of his mouth, so deep they must have been there a long time. His hair was getting thin on top and sometimes now he wore reading glasses. He was thirty-two years old, but looked more like forty-five. I didn’t know why. Was it me? I started crying. I said, “Saul, do you think my body did this on purpose?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because a baby would have kept me from leaving?”
“Leaving,” said Saul.
“Leaving you.”
“No, of course not.”
“But I just keep thinking, you see. I’m so afraid that … I mean, sometimes it seems that we strain at each other so. We’re always tugging and chafing and … sometimes when we’re in the pickup, that rusty, creaky pickup, and Mama’s taking two thirds of the seat and Selinda’s irking my lap, and I am nagging over something I don’t even care about, as if I just want to see how far I can push you, and you’ve grown disgusted and backed off somewhere in your mind—well, then I think, ‘Really, we’re a very unhappy family. I don’t know