Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [67]
“What else?” I’d say.
“You mean I could have one like that too?”
“Of course.”
And while I was loading the plates they’d drift around the studio, picking up an ermine muff, a celluloid fan, a three-cornered hat with gold braid …
Some people I photographed over and over, week after week—whenever they fell into a certain mood, it seemed. And this boy Bando, at the Texaco station: he would come by the first of every month, as soon as he got his paycheck. A hoodlum type, really, but in his pictures, with that light on his cheekbones and Grandpa Emory’s fake brass sword at his hip, he took on a fine-edged, princely appearance that surprised me every time. He wasn’t surprised, though. He would study his proofs the next day with a smile of recognition, as if he’d always known he could look this way. He would purchase every pose and leave, whistling.
Our sleep requirements changed. Our windows were lit till early morning, often. You would think the whole household had developed a fear of beds. Julian might be out with some girl, our only night-wanderer, but the rest of us found reasons to sit in the living room—reading, sewing, playing the piano, Linus carving bedposts from Tinker Toy sticks. Sometimes even the children got up, inventing urgent messages now that they had my attention. Selinda needed a costume; she’d forgotten to tell me. Jiggs had to ask, “Quick: what’s five Q and five Q?”
“Is this important?”
“Oh, come on, Mom. Five Q and five Q.”
“Ten Q.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
“Get it?”
“I get it, I get it,” I said, and kissed the small nook that was the bridge of his nose.
Upstairs, my mother sat propped like some ancient, stately queen and listened to her own private psalmist.
But then she banished him. She shouted at Saul one suppertime so that all of us could hear, and a minute later he came down the stairs with his heavy, pausing tread and sank into his chair at the head of the table. “She wants you, Charlotte,” he said.
“What happened?”
“She says she’s tired.”
“Tired of what?”
“Tired, just tired. I don’t know,” he said. “Pass the biscuits, Amos.”
I went upstairs. Mama was sitting against the pillows with her mouth clamped, like a child in a huff. “Mama?” I said.
“I want my hair brushed, please.”
I picked up her brush from the bureau.
“Those psalms, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “First so up and then so down, and then so up again.”
“We’ll find you something else,” I said.
“I want Selinda to have my tortoise-shell necklace,” said my mother. “It matches her eyes. I’m dying.”
“All right,” I said.
———
We greeted 1975 like an enemy. None of us had much hope for it. Saul lost several of his older members to the flu and had to be gone more than ever. The children were growing up without me. I spent all my time taking care of Mama. There was no position that felt right to her, nothing that sat easy on her stomach. She would get a craving for some food that was out of season or too expensive, and by the time I’d tracked it down she’d have lost her appetite and would only turn her face to the wall. “Take it away, take it away, don’t bother me with that.” Her pills didn’t seem to work any more and she had to have hypodermics, which Dr. Sisk administered. She developed an oddly detailed style of worrying. “I hear a noise in the kitchen, Charlotte; I’m certain it’s a burglar. He’s helped himself to that leftover chicken you promised you would save for me.” Or, “Why has Dr. Sisk not come? Go and check his room, please. He may have committed suicide. He’s hung himself from an attic rafter by that gold chain belt in the cedar chest.”
“Mama, I promise, everything’s under control,” I would tell her.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
It occurred to me that if I were the sullen spinster I had started out to be, this death would have meant the springing of my trap. Only it would have been useless even then; I’d have had a houseful of cats, no doubt, that I couldn’t bear to leave. Newspapers piled to the ceiling. Money stuffed