Earthly Possessions

Fourteen

One morning in the fall of 19xx, I was mixing Jiggs some cocoa and dreaming at the kitchen sink. My mother said, "Charlotte, I don't feel so well," and I said, "Oh?" and reached for a spoon. Then I said, "What, Mama?"

"I don't feel so well."

"Is it flu?" I asked her.

"I think it's something more."

"I see," I said, and stirred the cocoa around and around, watching bubbles travel in circles. Then I said, "Well, the… yes, the doctor. We'll go to the doctor." I'm afraid to go to the doctor," my mother said.

I laid the spoon aside. I watched the bubbles continue to skate, slower and slower. Then I happened to glance over at my mother, who was sitting in her lawn chair hugging her stomach. It was true that she seemed unwell. Her face had sharpened; her eyes had moved closer together somehow. I didn't like the set of her shoulders. I said, "Mama?"

"Something is wrong with me, Charlotte," she said. I had Julian drive us to the doctor. By suppertime she'd been clapped in the hospital; by eight the next morning she'd been operated on. I waited for word on a vinyl couch that stuck to the backs of my legs. When Dr. Porter and the surgeon walked toward me, I jumped up with a smacking sound. The surgeon arrived first and developed a sudden interest in a still life hanging^ behind me. "All we did," he said over his shoulder, "was close her up again." I didn't like his choice of words. I stayed stubbornly silent, clutching my pocketbook.

"There was nothing else possible," Dr. Porter said. I'm sorry, Charlotte."

"That's all right," I said.

"It's c. a.," the surgeon told me.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Well, thank you very much."

"You can see hex in a while," said Dr. Porter. "Are you by yourself?"

"Saul is coming."

"Well. I'll be in touch." I sank back onto the couch and watched them go. I thought that walking in those thick-soled shoes would be like wading through a sandbox. Then I noticed Saul plunging down the corridor, his face remote and luminous. He passed me, paused, raised a hand to his forehead and returned. "What's c. a.?" I asked him.

"Cancer," he said, sitting down.

"Oh, I see. Of course." He opened his Bible to the ribbon marker. Halfway down the page, he suddenly stopped and looked over at me. We stared at each other blankly, like two people at the windows of separate trains.

After my mother returned from the hospital, her bedroom became the center of the house. She was too sick to get up again and she hated to be left alone. In that large, gloomy room, with its rotted silk draperies and bowlegged furniture, Jiggs memorized his spelling list, Miss Feather balanced the books, Linus made miniature swings and hung them from the branches of his bonsai trees. And my mother sat propped against a mountain of pillows, because lying flat was uncomfortable now. She even slept propped-or rather, spent the night propped, for I don't know when she really slept. Any time of night that I checked her she would just be sitting there, and the Texaco lights shining through the window lit the watchful hollows of her eyes. Bones that had been buried for the last fifty years were beginning to emerge in her face.

"When will I be up?" she asked at first.

"Soon, soon," we told her.

I felt that we were cowardly, but Saul said we should protect her as long as possible. We had some arguments about it. (This dying business was pointing up all our differences.) Then one day she asked me, "Please. When exactly will I start getting better?" It was Sunday, a bright white Sunday in December, and Saul was not around. My only witness was Amos, stapling music sheets over in the armchair. I took a deep breath. I said, "Mama, I don't believe you'll ever be getting better." My mother lost interest and turned away. She started smoothing-the tufts on her quilt. "I hope you're remembering to mist my ferns," she said.

"Yes, Mama."

"I dreamed the tips were browning."

"They're not."

"Dr. Porter is a very fine person but I hated that surgeon man," she said. "Dr…. Lewis?

Loomis? I knew right away he wasn't worth much. Coming in ahead of time to get on my good side, cracking jokes, keeping his hands in his pockets-and plotting all along to rummage about in my innards. I think we ought to sue him, Charlotte."

"Mama, we can't do that"

"Certainly we can. I want my lawyer."

"You don't have a lawyer," I told her.

"Oh," she said. 'Well. In that case." She slumped a little. I thought the conversation had tired her. I stood up and said, "Why don't you try and sleep now, I'll go see about supper. Amos is here if you need something."

"I need to know the name of my problem," she said.

For a minute I didn't understand. Her problem? How would I know? I was still trying to figure out the name of my problem. But then she said, "My illness, Charlotte."

"It's cancer," I said.

She folded her hands on the quilt and grew still. I became aware of Amos; he had lowered his music sheets and was staring at me. His shucked-off moccasins lay gaping beneath his chair. I saw he had a hole in his sock that I would have to fix. Every thought seemed to come to me so clearly. "Don't wear that sock again until I've darned it," I said. I left.

Then there was a period when Mama didn't care to see me, barely answered when I spoke to her, sent the others out of the room for making too much noise and littering the floor with their torn envelopes and tangerine peels. She asked only for Saul. Wanted him to read to her from her big old family Bible: Psalms.

She didn't like the rest of the Bible any more, people undertaking definite activities or journeying to specific towns. Saul would read until his voice cracked, and come downstairs pale and exhausted. "I did the best I could," he would say. You would think this was his mother. First he'd had Alberta and now he had Mama, and here I was with nobody.

"What more could I have done?" he asked.

"If you don't know, who does?" I said. Her bedroom hung over our heads like some huge gray dirigible. She hulked In our minds; her absence filled tine house.

I took to keeping the studio open at night. You'd be surprised at the people who decade to get photographed at tenor eleven p. m. if they pass by and see a place lit They would stop at the bay window-solitary teenagers, men who couldn't sleep, housewives going out for tomorrow morning's milk. They would stare at my pictures, all my portraits of people bedecked with Alberta's clutter and dimmed by the crackling, imperfect light that seeped through my father's worn camera.

Then they'd come inside and ask, "Are those your regular portraits?"

"What else?" Fd 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 fineedged, 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 itr 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's 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 pfl-lows 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." 'Well find you something else," I said. "I want Belinda to have my tortoise-shell necklace," said my mother. "It matches her eyes. I'm dying."

"All right," I said.

We greeted 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 in the mattress.

"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. "Fasti" 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 and finally take an unhampered view of my mother.

"He had never even kissed a girl," she said. "I had to be the one to kiss him. He was so relieved."

"Really, Mama?"

"I suppose you think we made a lot of mistakes with you."

"Oh, no."

"We didn't give you a very happy childhood."

"Nonsense, Mama, I had a happy childhood." In fact, maybe I did. Who knows?

"And his breath smelled of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. I have always considered Juicy Fruit a very trashy flavor."

"Me too," I said.

"My brother hardly ever comes to see me any more."

"He died, Mama.

Remember?"

"Of course I remember. What do you take me for?"

"Aunt Aster sent you a card, though." She tossed, as if throwing off some annoyance.

"If you like, I'll read it to you," I said.

She said, "How long am I going to be ruled by physical things? When do I get to be rid of this body?"

"I don't know, Mama."

"Bring me my cigarettes," she said.

(She didn't smoke.) I laid aside my sewing and slipped out of the room.

Sometimes I just had to. I went swiftly down the stairs, keeping my mind very blank and cold. But in the living room I found rumpled magazines, cast-off shoes, Linus's doll chairs needling the floor, Amos sprawled on the couch with a newspaper. I stopped and pressed a hand to my forehead. Amos looked up. He said, "Shall I go sit with her a while?"

"No, that's all right," I said.

"Aren't you tired?"

"No." He studied me. I never really knew you before," he said finally.

I had a feeling that he didn't know me now, either.

For I was numb, and observed my life as calmly as a woman made of ice, but Amos thought I was strong and brave. He told me so. A thousand times-peering into Mama's darkened room, bringing me coffee, sending me out for a walk in a world that was, surprisingly, going through summer-he would pause and say, "I don't know how you manage this."

"There isn't any managing to be done," I told him.

"I used to think you were only beautiful," he said now.

"Only what?"

"I didn't understand you. Now I see everyone grabbing for pieces of you, and still you're never diminished. Clutching on your skirts and they don't even slow you down. And you're the one who told her the truth; I heard you. Said the word out loud. Cancer. You sail through this house like a. moon, you're strong enough for all of them." I should have argued. (I should have laughed.) But all I said was, "No…" and paused. Then Amos laid aside his paper, and unfolded himself from the couch and took hold of my shoulders and kissed me. He was so slow and deliberate, I could have stopped him any time; but I didn't. His mouth was softer than Saul's. His hands were warmer. He lacked Saul's gaunt, driven intenseness, and made me see that everything was simpler than I'd realized.

My life grew to be all dreams; there was no reality whatsoever. Mama fell into stupors and could not be roused. The children looked like faded little sketches of themselves. My customers drifted in and out again, oddly attired in feather boas, top hats, military medals. Saul didn't talk any more and often when I woke in the night I'd find him sitting on the edge of the bed, unnaturally still, watching me.

Amos met me in vacant rooms, in the steamy attic, in the bend of an unused stairway. We could be discovered at any time and so we held back, for now; but without even moving he could reel me in to him. It was the end of summer and his skin had a polished, brassy glow. His face had grown sleek and well-fed looking.

When he lifted me up in his arms I felt I had left all my troubles on the floor beneath me like gigantic concrete shoes.

I loved him for not being Saul, I suppose. Or for being a younger, happier Saul. He carried no freight of past wrongs and debts; that was why I loved him.

"When this is over with your mother, I'll take you away," he said. "I understand that you can't leave now." Actually, he didn't understand. I would have left. I wanted to get out, throw all the old complexities off, make a clean start. But I was trying to stay faithful to his picture of me and so I only nodded.

"We'll go walking down the street together in a town we've never been to," he said. "People will ask me, "Where'd you get her? How'd you find her? 'She's been sleeping,' TO tell them. 'She's been waiting. My brother was keeping her for me.'" We looked at each other. We were not cruel people, either one of us.

We weren't unkind. So why did we take such joy in this? My wickedness made me feel buoyant, winged. Gliding past a mirror, I was accompanied by someone beautiful: her hair filled with lights, eyes deep with plots, gypsyish dress a splash of color in the dusk. When Amos and I met in public, our hands touched, clung, slid off each other and parted, while we ourselves went our separate ways blank-faced and gloating like thieves.

I photographed Miss Feather swathed in a black velvet opera cape, holding a silver pistol that was actually a table lighter. "This will be for my great-niece LaRue, who never comes to visit," she said. "Make up several prints, if you will."

"All right," I said.

"For my other great-nieces, too. Who also never come to visit." I'll have them by tomorrow," I said.

It was night. I was tired. Mama had dropped off and I was trying to catch up on my work. But I could hardly see to focus the camera; everything was haloed.

"I believe I'll go to bed," I told Miss Feather.

"No, wait, please."

"I need some sleep."

"But what about Saul? I mean to say," said Miss Feather, "Saul is not himself these days."

"Who is?" She fumbled at her throat, cast off her cape, and rushed at me. A tiny, excitable roman waving a silver pistol. "Now listen, please," she told me. "I had this in mind to say for some time: he's your husband. Would you like to take a little vacation together? I could stay with the children."

"Vacation, Miss Feather. I consider it a vacation if I can make it out of Mama's bedroom."

"But… dear heart-"

"Thank you anyway," I told her, I went upstairs, took off my shoes, and sagged on the edge of Hie bed. Saul wasn't there. He had taken to going on long walks in the dark. I was on my own, and felt free to slip a hand in my skirt pocket and pull out my true self's photograph. She smiled back at me, carefree and reckless, but my eyes were too tired to make any sense of her. It seemed she had arrived unassembled. I couldn't put her together.

How did you turn out, finally? What kind of grownup are you now?

Late in December they took Mama away and put her in the hospital. I had hoped to avoid that but Dr. Porter said I was getting strange-looking. Besides, he said, she might not even notice. She was hardly ever conscious any more. They hooked her up to a number of cords and dials. She lay silent, with her eyes tight shut. I imagined she was doing it deliberately-not sleeping or comatose but closing me out, hugging her secret clawed monster. I felt jealous. The nurses told me to go on home but I stayed, stubbornly gripping the arms of my chair.

Amos brought me a Big Mac-the smell of beautiful, everyday life. When I wouldn't come away with him he laid it on the table beside me and loped off down the corridor. His moccasins made a gentle scolding sound. Then Julian danced in all edgy and skittish, dressed up as if for a night at the races. He gave me a note from Linus: I can't visit hospitals. Can't manage. Taking the Children to pizza palace, is my sympathy gift to YOM. I thanked Julian and he danced out again.

Saul stooped in the doorway, took stock of the room and then entered. He settled in the armchair next to mine, tugging at his bony black cloth knees. His head lunged forward awkwardly* "Have you eaten?" he whispered.

"Yes," I said.

The Big Mac sat untouched on the table; the smell of it had made me full.

"How is she?"

"The same. You don't have to whisper." He cleared his throat.

He set his Bible on his lap, took out his reading glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. Then he put them on and opened the Bible. I went back to studying Mama. She reminded me of a withered balloon. All those cords were just to hold her down; without them she'd lift up, level and sedate, and go wafting out the window. I snickered. I glanced over at Saul, hoping he hadn't noticed.

He was looking not at the Bible but straight ahead of him. His face was grim.

"Saul?" I said.

His eyes came to rest on me.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm eternally visiting, deathbeds," he said. "Even more than other preachers."

"You do seem to go to a lot," I said.

"Maybe it's because I'm so poor at them."

"You are?"

"I don't know what to say at them. And I don't like dying people."

"Never mind," I told him.

"Sometimes," he said, "I believe we're given the same lessons to learn, over and over, exactly the same experiences, till we get them right. Things keep circling past us." I thought of a merry-go-round, little dappled horses. To me, it seemed soothing. But Saul clamped his Bible shut and leaned toward me, looking into my eyes. "'Til we get it straight," he said. "Forgive, or settle up, or make the proper choice. Whatever we failed to do the first time."

"Well, maybe so," I said.

"I keep telling myself that." I see.

He made me uneasy, a little. Maybe he sensed it, because he relaxed suddenly and sat back in his chair. "Well," he said, "that's what I wanted to say to you."

"I see," I said again.

"Will you come home with me, Charlotte?"

"I can't"

"You know she won't wake up. You heard what Dr. Porter said."

"Saul, I just can't," I said. "You go." And he did, after a minute. The rustle he made while getting himself together was an irritation. I waited, keeping my face turned aside, wondering why he paused so long at the door. But finally he was gone.

Then I had my mother to myself. For I couldn't let loose of her yet. She was like some unsolvable math problem you keep straining at, worrying the edges of, chafing and cursing. She had used me up, worn me out, and now was dying without answering any really important questions or telling me a single truth that mattered. A mound on the bed, opaque, intact. I was furious.

Around midnight, she said, There is too great a weight on my feet." I bent forward to look at her. In the bluish glow of the nightlight I could make out her small, dazed eyes. I said, "Mama?"

"What is this on my feet?" she asked. Her voice was parched and broken. "And my arms, they're all strung up to something.

What's happened?"

"You're in the hospital," I told her.

"Take that blanket or whatever off my feet, please, Charlotte."

"Mama, are you all the way awake?"

"My feet'." I stood up and searched my skirt pockets, my blouse pocket, and nearly panicked, till I remembered my cardigan. "Mama," I said, "look." I turned on the reading lamp at the head of her bed. She flinched and closed her eyes. I held the photograph in front of her face. "Look, Mama."

"But the light."

"It's important," I told her. "Who is this a picture of?" She rolled her head back and forth, protesting, but opened her eyes a slit. Then closed them. "Oh, me," she said.

"Who is it, Mama?"

"Me, I said. Me as a child." I took the picture away and stared at it "Are you sure?" I asked.

She nodded, uninterested.

"But… I thought it would be your true daughter. The one they mixed up in the hospital."

"Hospital?" she said. She opened her eyes again and let them travel in a slow, frowning arc across the shadowy ceiling. "I never gave my permission to be brought to any hospital."

"The one' you had a baby in, Mama.

Remember you had a baby?"

"A surprise," my mother said.

"That's right."

"Like a present. A doll in a box."

"Well…"

"I can't imagine how it happened, we hardly ever did much."

"Never mind that, Mama; the baby. You didn't think it was yours."

"It?" she said. She seemed to pull herself together. "It wasn't an it, it was you, Charlotte. The baby was you."

"But you said they mixed me up in the hospital."

"Why would,! say that? Oh, this is all so… it's much too bright in here." I turned the light off. "Let me get this straight," I said. "You never thought that I was someone else's. The notion never occurred to you."

"No, no. Maybe you misunderstood," she said. "Maybe…

I don't know…" She closed her eyes. "Please lighten my feet." I couldn't think what to ask next. I had lost my bearings. Oh, it wasn't that I doubted my memory; I was still sure of that. (Or almost sure.) But the picture! For now I saw that of course it was Mama. Obviously it was. And here I'd found so much in that little girl's eyes, imagined such a connection between us! "My feet, Charlotte." I slipped the picture back in my pocket, then, and went to the foot of her bed and lifted off the folded spread. I hung it over a chair. I returned to her, avoiding tubes and cords, careful not to jar her, and more gently than I'd ever done anything in my Me, I laid my cheek against my mother's.

She died a few days later, and was buried from Holy Basis Church with Saul officiating. Her coffin seemed oddly narrow. Maybe I'd made up her fatness, too.

The funeral was well attended because she was the preacher's mother-in-law.

None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn't come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I'd lost someone more important than I'd expected to lose.

After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather's tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk's little winter bouquets; even Saul's prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn't take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. "Are you all right?" he'd ask.

"I'm. fine."

"I thought something might be wrong."

"Oh, no."

"I woke and you weren't there."

"Are you all right?" I said.

"Yes, certainly."

"Don't catch cold." Then he'd wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.

I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, crisscrossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Belinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments.

And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people's shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.

"I won't hurry you," Amos said.

I looked at him.

"I know what you're going through," he told me.

For we never met in vacant rooms any more-or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.

So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog.

Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, v comforting smell: chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father's camera. I turned on the lights and took the CUSSED sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather's: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?

"Certainly it's real," I told him. "You see it, you feel it: it's real."

"No, what I mean is…"

"Sit beside the lamp, please." As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, "AmosI"

"You're back at work," he said.

"Yes, well, only Bando." I hung the prints. Bando's face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. "Isn't it funny?" I said. "In ordinary life he's not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these; they're not really real, he would say."

"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.

"Tfou're much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs."

"No, it's… what? No, if 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 land 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 had gone.

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 hi 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 J 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 Me 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 Muhammad's birthday. The fifth was World Day of Prayer. Mother, did you enjoy World Day of Prayer?"

"I'm sorry, honey, I didn't know they were having it"

"You should have looked ahead of tune."

"My idea of a perfect day," I told him, "is an empty square on the calendar. That's all I ask."

"Well, then," said Jiggs. He adjusted his glasses and ran his finger across the page. "In the month of March, youll have three perfect days."

"Three? Only three?" I looked down at the back of his neck-concave, satiny. Very slowly, I began to let myself imagine his mother. She would ride into town on a Trailways bus, wearing something glorious and trashy spun of Lurex. I would meet her when she arrived. I would bring Jiggs with me. I would at long last give him up.

That morning Linus and Miss Feather were helping at the church bazaar; I had the place to myself. I sent the children to school and gave the house a final cleaning, dispensing with all the objects that had sprouted in title night-rolled socks, crumpled homework papers, and a doll's toy dollhouse no bigger than a sugar cube, filled with specks of furniture. (I didn't check to see what Mnd of furniture; I feared to find another dollhouse tucked inside that one.) Then I took a bath and dressed in a fresh skirt and blouse. The mirror showed me someone stark and high-cheekboned, familiar in an unexpected way. My eyes had a sooty look and you would think from the spots of color on my cheeks that I was feverish. I wasn't, though. I felt very cold and heavy.

The dog seemed to know that I was going and kept following me too closely, moaning and nudging the backs of my knees with his nose. He got on my nerves. I unlocked my studio door and pushed him inside. "Goodbye, Ernest," I said. Then I straightened and saw the greenish light that filtered through the windows-a kind of light they don't have anyplace else. Oh, I've never had the knack of knowing I was happy right while the happiness was going on. I closed the door and passed back through the house, touching the worn, smudged woodwork, listening to absent voices, inhaling the smell of school paste and hymnals. It didn't look as if I'd be able to go through with this after all.

But once you start an action, it tends to bear you along. All I could hope for was to be snagged somewhere. In the sunporch, maybe, circling the phone, waiting for news that Jiggs had a sniffle and was being sent home early. In the kitchen, taking forever to make a cup of instant coffee. Absently pouring a bowl of cereal. Something besides cereal fell from the box-a white paper packet. I plucked it out and opened it. Inside was a stamped tin badge, on which a cartoon man walked swiftly toward me with his feet the biggest part of him. And along the bottom, my own personal message. Keep on truckin'.