Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [68]
“You’re just waiting for me to die so that one of Saul’s strays can have my room,” she told me.
“Hush, Mama, drink your soup.”
Then she asked me to sort her bureau drawers. “There may be some things I want burned,” she said. I pulled out the drawers one by one and emptied them on her bed: withered elastic stockings, lemon verbena sachets, recipes torn from magazines and hairnets that clung to her fingers. She fumbled through them. “No, no, take them back.” What was she looking for, love letters? Diaries?
She felt in the bottom of her smallest desk drawer, came up with something brown and stared at it a moment. Then, “Here,” she said. “Put this in the fire.”
“What is it?”
“Burn it. If there isn’t a fire, build one.”
“All right,” I said. I took it—some kind of photo in a studio folder—and laid it beside me. “Do you want me to bring the next drawer?”
“Go, Charlotte. Go burn it.”
When she was angry, her face bunched in now as if gathered at the center by a drawstring. She was finally looking her age: seventy-four, scooped out, caved in like a sunken pillow. She raised one white, shaking forefinger. “Fast!” she said. Her voice broke.
So I went. But as soon as I was out of the room I looked at what she’d given me. Stamped across the front was “Hammond Bros., Experienced Photographers”—surely no outfit in Clarion. The folder was cheap, and hastily cut. The corners didn’t quite match.
Inside was a picture of my mother’s true daughter.
I don’t know how I knew that so immediately. Something about the eyes, maybe—light-colored, triangular, expectant. Or the dimples in her cheeks, or the merry, brimming smile. The picture had been taken when she wasn’t more than ten, maybe younger. It was a soft-focus photo on unusually thin paper: head only, and a ruffle at the neck, and a draggled bit of ribbon holding back her pale, rather frowsy hair.
When had my mother found her? Why had she kept it a secret?
I took the picture to my bedroom, locked the door, and sat down in a wing chair to study it. The funny thing was that in a vague way I felt connected to this little girl. I almost knew her. We could have been friends. But I guessed from her unkempt hair and overdone ruffle that she came from a poor class of people. Migrant workers, maybe, or tenants in a trailer camp. No doubt she had grown up on wheels, stayed footloose and unreliable and remained on wheels, and had long ago left these parts. It should have been my life. It was my life, and she was living it while I was living hers, married to her true husband, caring for her true children, burdened by her true mother.
I slid the photo into my pocket. (I never considered destroying it.) And from then on I slid it into every pocket, and slept with it under my pillow at night. She was with me permanently. Often now as I moved around the house with bedpans and rubbing alcohol I was dreaming of her sleazy, joyful world. I imagined we would meet someday and trade stories of the ways we’d spent each other’s life.
My mother began to ramble in her thoughts. I believe she just allowed herself to ramble, as a sort of holiday. Wouldn’t anyone, in her position? When she had to, she could be as lucid as ever. But in her presence most people faltered, the children fell dumb, and even Saul found reasons to leave. It was just me and Mama—back to the old days. Mama sat nodding at the wall, I sewed emblems on Selinda’s Girl Scout uniform. Little green stitches fastening down my mother’s foggy memories. I thought about the household tasks—the mending, cooking, story-reading, temperature-taking, birthday cakes, dentist’s and pediatrician’s appointments—necessary for the rearing of a child. All those things my mother had managed, middle-aged though she had been, crippled with high blood pressure and varicose veins, so clumsy and self-conscious that the simplest trip for new school shoes was something to dread for days beforehand. I had never put it all together before. It seemed that the other girl’s photo had released me in some way, let me step back to a reasonable distance