Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [9]
“Well, I don’t see how—how—”
“Things are looking up, it seems to me.”
“I want my badge back,” I said.
“Nope. Think I’ll keep it. Medals have pins, pins are deadly weapons.”
“It’s not a medal! It’s a little old, dull-pointed, cereal-box …”
But he dropped it in his shirt pocket, and I had to watch it go.
Then suddenly I got scared. I don’t know why. I mean I don’t know why then. just at that particular moment. But all at once I felt short of breath and shaky, and it didn’t seem to me that I had any way out of this. Nothing had prepared me! I was so peaceful, hated loud noises, passed sharp objects handle first. And I didn’t like confronting people face to face, even, let alone fist to fist. I took a tight hold on the table. I tried to get my air back. I fixed my eyes very hard upon the TV, which was no help at all: bandits on thundering horses. Old-fashioned train wheels clacketing past, a man leaping from saddle to baggage car in a slow high arc that was nearly miraculous. Some of the people at the bar started cheering.
“Yeah, well,” said Jake Simms, “that’s the trouble with these things. You watch long enough, you start expecting some adventures of your own.”
I let out my breath and stared at him. From this close I could see the graininess of his skin, the smudges under his eyes, and his thin, chapped, homely-looking mouth. But he was concentrating on the TV still, and he didn’t notice me.
By the time we got outside again it was really night. I rebuttoned my coat. He turned up his collar. We trudged down a corridor of neon signs and music, took a right turn onto a darker street. Now we passed pawnshops, luncheonettes, cleaning establishments. We saw a laundromat where solitary people were folding up their bedsheets.
In the window of an appliance store, six TV sets showed a woman shampooing her hair. Then a news announcer mouthed something grave. Then Jake and I came on the screen and backed away: our same old soundless, hobbled dance. We stood at the window watching ourselves through the outline of our reflections. We were locked together forever. There was no escape.
4
This wasn’t the first time I’d been kidnapped. It had happened once before.
Here’s how it came about: I was entered in a Beautiful Child Contest at the Clarion County Fair. I was entered because the first step was to send in the child’s photo. If I won, it would be good advertising for my father. In fact I remember the large white letters that ran across the bottom of my picture: PHOTO BY AMES STUDIOS. Ordinarily, he just rubber-stamped that on the back.
In this picture my hair was wetted down, hanging in neat straight clumps to my jawbone. My expression was meant to be fierce but came out sad. (Nothing they could do would make me smile.) I wore a dark jumper over a puff-sleeved blouse. My mother thought puffed sleeves would make me look younger. I was seven at the time, the top age permitted in the contest. There was a lot of talk about how I’d been much rounder-faced and—well, cuter, really, when I was six. My mother wished with all her heart that there’d been such a contest when I was six.
But even so, a letter came saying I’d been chosen for the finals. I had to show up at ten a.m. on the opening day of the fair, they said. Right before the Miss Clarion Contest. After the Beautiful Babies.
My mother made me a dress of white eyelet. Although she hadn’t been anyplace in years, she said she was coming with me to the fair. She told me this while she was pinning up my hem. I went rigid. How would she manage such a thing? She sweated and puffed even crossing a room; she traveled in a casing of thick, blind differentness. And lately she’d started breaking whatever she sat upon. Horrible things had happened at our house that would have been very embarrassing if witnessed by an outsider. She would have to take her special chair along—her heavy white slatted one with the stolid legs, the kind you ordinarily see in people