Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [73]
“What’s your father got to do with it?” Amos asked.
“Well …”
“This studio’s been yours for, what? Sixteen, seventeen years now. It’s been yours nearly as long as it was his.”
“Well,” I said. “Yes, but …” I turned and looked at him. “That’s true, it has,” I said.
“And still you act surprised when somebody wants you to take his picture. You have to decide if you’ll do it, every time. A seventeen-year temporary position! Lord God.”
It dawned on me finally that he was angry. But I didn’t know what for. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went over to him. “Amos?” I said.
He stepped back. He had suddenly grown very still.
“You’re not coming away with me, are you, Charlotte,” he said.
“Coming—?”
I realized that I wasn’t.
“You’re much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs.”
“No, it’s … what? No, it’s just that lately, Amos, it’s seemed to me I’m so tangled with other people here. More connected than I’d thought. Don’t you see that? How can I ever begin to get loose?”
“I’d assumed it was your mother,” he said. “I assumed it was duty, that you’d leave in an instant if not for her. Turns out I was wrong. Here you are, free to go, but then you always were, weren’t you? You could have left any day of your life, but hung around waiting to be sprung. Passive. You’re passive, Charlotte. You stay where you’re put. Did you ever really intend to leave?”
I didn’t think my voice would work, but it did. “Why, of course,” I said.
“Then I pity you,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t feel a bit of pity. He looked at me from a height, without bending his head. His hands in his pockets were fists. “It’s not only me you’ve fooled, it’s yourself,” he said. “I can get out, but you’ve let yourself get buried here and even helped fill in the grave. Every year you’ve settled for less, tolerated more. You’re the kind who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You’re proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it’s their business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own …”
He stopped, maybe because of the look on my face. Or maybe he had just run down. He took one fist from his pocket and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Well, thanks for the example,” he said finally. “I’m leaving, before the same thing happens to me.”
“Amos?”
But he was gone, not a pause or a backward glance. I heard the front door slam. I didn’t know what to do next. I stood looking all around me in a stunned, hopeless way—at my dusty equipment, stacks of props, Alberta’s furniture, which had never (I saw now) been sorted and discarded as Saul had promised but simply sifted in with our own. At the crumbling buildings across the street: the Thrift Shop, newsstand, liquor store, Pei Wing the tailor … not a single home in the lot, come to think of it. Everyone else had moved on, and left us stranded here between the Amoco and the Texaco.
I stood there so long I must have been in a kind of trance. I watched a soft snowstorm begin, proceeding so slowly and so vertically that it was hard to tell, at first, whether the snow was falling or the house was rising, floating imperceptibly into the starless blue night.
After Amos went away, I became very energetic. I had things to do; I was preparing to get out.
First I discarded clothing, books, knick-knacks, pictures. I lugged pieces of furniture across the street to the Thrift Shop. I gave my mother’s lawn chair to Pei Wing, the plants to Saul’s choir leader, the Sunday china to Holy Basis Church. I threw away rugs and curtains and doilies. I packed the doll things in cartons and put them in the attic. What I was aiming for was a house with the bare, polished look of a bleached skull. But I don’t know, it was harder than I’d thought. Linus kept making new doll things. I packed those away, too. The piano grew new layers of magazines and keys. I had the Salvation Army come and cart the piano off. Objects spilled out of the children’s bedrooms and down the stairs. I sent the objects back. Strangely enough, no one asked where all the furniture