Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [74]
The parlor became a light-filled, wallpapered cavern, containing a couch, two chairs, and a lamp, with blanched squares where the pictures used to hang. But still I wasn’t satisfied. I skulked around the echoing rooms, newly drab in a narrow gray skirt I had saved from the trashcan, discontentedly watching Jiggs skate the bare floors in his stocking feet.
Then I discarded people. I stopped answering the phone, no longer nodded to acquaintances, could not be waylaid in the grocery store. Skimming down the sidewalk, noticing someone I knew heading toward me, I felt my heart sink. I would cross the street immediately. I didn’t want to be bothered. They were using up such chunks of my life, with their questions, comments, gossip, inquiries after my health. They were siphoning me off into teachers’ conferences and charity drives. Before Selinda’s school play they made me waste twenty minutes, fiddling with my coat buttons and wondering when the curtain would go up. What did I have to do with Selinda, anyway? At this rate I would never get out.
I had some difficulty discarding what was in the studio and so I closed it off. I shut both doors and locked them. Sometimes when I was sitting in the living room I heard people knock on the outside door and call for me. “Lady? Picture lady? What’s the matter, aren’t you working no more? I been counting on this!” I listened, with my hands folded in my lap. I was surprised by how many people counted on my pictures. I was surprised by a lot of things. The flurry of my life had died down, the water had cleared so that finally I could see what was there.
But no one else could. My family pestered me, hounded me. They thought I had something left to give them. Well, I tried to tell them. I said, “You’ll have to manage on your own from now on.” They just looked baffled. Asked me to cut their hair, sew buttons on their shirts. Saul kept trying to start these pointless conversations. Really, he’d only married me because he saw me sticking with my mother. He saw I wouldn’t have the gumption to leave a place. Him and his I-know-you-love-me’s, I-know-you-won’t-leave-me’s; I should have realized. “This marriage isn’t going well,” I told him.
But he said, “Charlotte, everything has its bad patches.”
“I need to take a wilderness course.”
“Wilderness?”
“Learn to live on my own with no equipment. Cover great distances. In the desert and the Alps and such.”
“But we don’t have any deserts here.”
“I know.”
“And we don’t have any Alps.”
“I know.”
“We don’t even have snow all that often.”
“Saul,” I said, “don’t you understand? I have never, ever been anywhere. I live in the house I was born in. I live in the house my mother was born in. My children go to the same school I did and one even has the same teacher. When I had that teacher she was just starting out and scared to death and pretty as a picture; now she’s a dried-up old maid and sends Selinda home for not wearing a bra.”
“Certainly,” said Saul. “Things keep coming around, didn’t I tell you? You and I keep coming around, Charlotte, year by year, changed in little ways; we’ll work things through eventually.”
“It’s not worth it, though,” I said.
“Not worth it?”
“It takes too great a toll.”
He folded both my hands in his, with his face very calm and preacherly. Probably he didn’t know how hard he was gripping. “Wait a while,” he said. “This will pass. We all have … just wait a while. Wait.”
I waited. What was I waiting for? It seemed I hadn’t yet discarded all I should have. There were still some things remaining.
Jiggs reminded me of the P.T.A. meeting; he saw it on the UNICEF calendar. He was seven now and industrious, organizational, a natural-born chairman. “Eight o’clock, and wear your red dress,” he told me.
“I don’t have that dress any more and I don’t want to go to any meetings.”
“It’s fun, they serve cookies. Our class is making the Kool-Aid.”
“I have spent my life at the Clarion P.T.A. What’s the purpose?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure there is one,” said Jiggs. He peered at the calendar again. “The thirteenth is