Earthly Possessions

Six

I dreamed about my husband, but he was younger and lacked those two vertical hollows in his cheeks. He had on a crewneck sweater I'd forgotten he ever owned.

His trousers were khaki, like the Army pants he wore while we were dating. The sight of him made me sad.

My husband was the boy next door, but to tell the truth we didn't grow up together. He was several years older than I was-old enough to make a difference, back in school. When I was in eighth grade he was a senior, one of the Emory boys, long-boned and lazy, up to no good. Anyone could tell you who Saul Emory was. While I was just getting my bearings, in those days. I still looked like a child. I'd been systematically starving myself ever since I'd discovered my breasts (two little pillows of fat, like my mother's chins), and you could see the blue veins in my temples and the finest details of articulation in my wrists and knees and elbows. I had a posture problem and no one could figure out what to do with my hair.

Saul Emory graduated and went away, and I moved on through the years until I was a senior myself, and secretary of the student body and first runner-up for Homecoming Queen. I had come into my own, by then. I deserved to; I worked so hard at it. The one thing I wanted most of all was for people to think that I was normal.

Through an enormous effort of will, I became known as the most vivacious girl in the senior class. Also best-groomed, with my Desert Flower cologne and my noose of Poppit pearls, and my Paint the Town Pink lipstick refreshed in the restroom hourly with a feathery little brush like the ones the models used. I had a few boyfriends, though nobody serious. And girlfriends too; we rolled each other's hair up at I don't know how many slumber parties. I never gave a slumber party myself, of course. No one ever asked me why not.

I would stay after school for sorority meetings, Honor Society, Prom Committee, cheerleading… but those things can only last so long. In the end I would find myself home again, walking into the overused air and my parents' eternal questions: Why hadn't I said goodbye that morning? What had kept me so late? Who was the boy who drove me home? And would I be staying in tonight, for once?

Then I would look down at them (for I was taller than both, by now) and everything came back to me: I remembered who I really was. In the smoky mirror behind my mother, my pearls were as outlandish as a string of bear claws. My face had a yellowed look around the edges.

I graduated from high school and got a part scholarship in mathematics at Markson College, over in Holgate. It seemed too simple. I kept wondering where the catch was.

Yet the day after Labor Day, there I sat in my father's pickup with my suitcases piled in the rear. My mother didn't come with us; it was hard for her to travel. As I waved to her out the window I had a sudden worry that she knew how glad I was that she was staying home. I wondered if that were why she was staying home. I waved all the harder, blew kisses. This was one time I didn't try to get out of saying goodbye.

Then my father drove me to Markson College, started to speak but gave up in. the end, and left me at the dormitory. I was almost the first one there because I'd been so anxious to arrive. My roommate hadn't come yet, whoever she was. It was noon but the cafeteria didn't open till suppertime, so I ate an apple I'd brought and some Fig Newtons that my mother had tucked in my suitcase. The Fig Newtons made me unexpectedly homesick. Each bite caused my chest to ache. I had to hide them away in a drawer, finally. Then I unpacked, and put sheets on one bed, and wandered up and down the hall a while peeking into deserted rooms.

After that I spent half an hour sitting at my desk, looking out the window at an empty sky. I'd brought along some curtains, but wasn't going to hang them till my roommate approved them. However, time was creeping. I decided I'd hang them anyway. I unfolded the curtains, took off my shoes, and climbed onto a radiator.

Spread-eagled against the window, I chanced to look down at the quadrangle. And there was my fat cousin Clarence, lumbering toward my dormitory in that ponderous; tilting way he had.

I had known all along that escape couldn't be so easy.

My father was in the hospital. He had had an accident while driving home.

The doctors weren't so much worried about his injuries as about the heart attack that had caused the accident in the first place. Or maybe the accident had caused the heart attack. I don't think they ever did get it straight.

For three weeks we stayed near his bed-Mama in her wooden lawn chair that Clarence had brought from home and me in an easy chair. We watched my father's face, which looked queer in horizontal position. His skin around his eyes had gone all crumpled. It tired him even to say a few words. Mostly he slept, and my mother cried, and I sat willing him awake again so that I could get to know him.

I couldn't stand to think how I had let him slide through my life all these years. I made a lot of promises; you know the kind. I brought my mother tea and glazed doughnuts, the only things that would sit on her stomach. I dealt with the doctors and nurses. I tried reading various women's magazines, but all that talk about make-up and weight control and other frills just made me sick. I don't remember eating any food whatsoever, though I suppose I must have.

Then they let him go home, but only by ambulance. We fixed a bed in his studio and laid him flat upon it. His face lost a little of its chalkiness. He started acting more natural, fussing at the itchy tape they had bound his broken ribs with. It worried him that customers were being turned away. "Charlotte," he said, "you know how to handle that camera. I want you to do it for a week or so, just till I'm back on my feet. Can you manage?" I said yes. I was numb by then.

Now that he was safe it had hit me finally where I was: home, trapped, no escape. My mother couldn't even sit him up without me there to help. I saw my life rolling out in front of me like an endless, mildewed rug.

It seemed to me that photos froze a person, pinned him to cardboard like a butterfly. Why would anyone want them? But people did, apparently. Poor-white mothers in rayon shifts, holding overdressed babies. Soldiers with their arms around their skinny, frizzy-haired girlfriends. I took their pictures indifferently. The camera was old and clumsy; almost anything you did to it had to take place in the dark. But I'd been using it most of my life, and couldn't see why my father became so anxious and critical all of a sudden. "Move that lamp off somewhat," he would teD me from his bed. "You don't want such a glare.

Now get yourself more of an angle. I never did like a head-on photograph." What he liked was a sideways look-eyes lowered^ face slanted downward. The bay window displaying my father's portraits resembled a field full of flowers, all being blown by the same strong breeze.

In the darkroom (a walk-in closet, remodeled) I had attacks of shortness of breath. I would grit my teeth and endure, meanwhile developing prints with the sensible half of my mind. Everything about that place was depressed: cluttered or leaking or peeling. All the labels had come off the bottles of chemicals.

Nothing was where it was supposed to be. It seemed my father didn't care any more than I did.

But you would never guess that from the way he acted. Fuss, fuss.

Questioning every little thing I did. When it came time to show him any prints he would have me hang them on the clothesline near his bed. Then there'd be this long, disapproving silence while he lay frowning and pinching his mustache. "Oh, well," he'd finally say, "most of these people have got no judgment anyway." Yet I didn't think I'd done so badly. In fact I think a lot of the customers preferred me to my father. My father had such set ideas, for one thing. He still photographed children against that Ionic column of his. Me, I would take a picture any way people asked. I had no feelings about it.

We lived in a smaller and smaller area of the house, now-shutting off floors my father couldn't climb to, rooms we couldn't afford to heat. Our neighborhood had narrowed too. The pickup was on cinderblocks out back, and anyway neither Mama nor I could drive, so we did all our shopping on foot. And nobody came to visit us. The Emorys next door had moved away by then; the other neighbors thought we were peculiar. All my friends were in college or married, divided from me forever after. It got so I would welcome the most random customers like long-lost relatives. But I saw how oddly they looked at us. I knew the picture we made: fat mother in elastic stockings, shriveled father, sullen spinster daughter. House where everything was mislaid under something else, and bats were surely hanging in the turret.

Markson College sent me a letter saying I could enter in January, if I liked. I don't know what I'd been hoping-maybe for them to close the school completely till I could get there. But they didn't even tell me who my roommate was, and I guessed anyway that she'd found somebody else by now. I felt nothing would ever go right for me again. Every customer standing on his head in my camera seemed happier than I was.

By December, the doctors said my father could start getting up. His first piece of action was to take my photographs off the clothesline and set out some of his own. You could tell he'd been just itching to do that. He stood there in his corduroy slippers, with his sweater tucked accidentally into his trousers, pointing to photos he had taken twenty years ago. "Now, here is a fine… this was a very important man as I recall, rose high in the county government later on in life. I believe he came to me because I take an honest portrait. You see, Charlotte, I never have held with these fancied-up photographs. No sense pretending someone is what he isn't." His clothes swallowed him; his gray hair had taken on a tobacco tint and his skin was loose and sagging. But I couldn't get him to rest a while. He pulled out more and more photos, tacking them to the bulletin board, propping them on shelves and along the picture rails.

Businessmen, high school graduates, ladies' circles from the old days, thinning out to the soldiers and the overdressed babies. But even the babies looked serious in these pictures, and the soldiers stood stiff as family men beside their girls. Everyone's expression was bemused and veiled; everyone's posture was perfect. Nobody smiled. I hadn't noticed that before. I said, "Look! It's like some old-fashioned photo album."

"It is never old-fashioned to take an honest portrait," my father said.

I was afraid he was working up to one of his moods. I saw now that he was hanging new prints too fast, not even looking at them, hauling out more and more from the rusty green file beside his bed. "See, here is a… this was… this man ordered forty prints from me, that's how much he liked what I did."

"It's very nice, Daddy," I said. I just wanted him to stop moving around so much. I didn't care two cents about anybody's photos, his or mine either one. I said, "Shouldn't you be resting now?"

"Ask your mother what she did with those old plates of mine," he told me.

I went to find my mother, who was watching TV in her lawn chair in the kitchen. "Daddy wants his old negatives," I said.

"What negatives? Why ask me? I don't know why he keeps all that stuff anyway," she said. "They sit around cracking under their own weight, by and by.

And you know those people aren't going to reorder, most of them are dead now." I went back to the studio. "She hasn't seen them," I said. My father was sorting a shoebox full of church groups. From the look he gave me, you would think I'd lost his negatives myself. I didn't know why he was so angry with me.

That night I dreamed I went to Markson College and found it locked and abandoned, its quadrangles echoing; but after I woke up I felt all right again.

I put on my bathrobe and went down to the kitchen to start the coffee. While it was perking I looked out the window at 'the sun coming up through a tangle of frosty trees. Then I poured two cups of coffee, one for me and one for my father, and carried them into the studio. My father lay in bed under a perfectly smooth blanket. He wasn't breathing. All around him and above him were pictures of unsmiling people, but none was any stiller than my father was.

Uncle Gerard saw to the funeral. Then he and Aunt Aster attended it (I don't know who else, — if anyone) while I stayed home with my mother, who was going to pieces. I thought of it as going to pieces because she seemed to be taking everything else to pieces right along with her. She would sit in her chair and pluck, pluck at the cushion till little bits of stuffing were scattered all over the rug. She would pick the houseplants purely bald and roll each leaf and shred it up. Sometimes she ran her fingers dreamily through her hair and pulled out strands, one by one. I didn't know what to do with her. All I could think of was to hold her hands and say, "Stop, now."

"I always guessed that this was going to happen," she told me. Her voice had lost its tone. You can't imagine how scary it is to hear someone just printing out words like that. "This was the one thing I always dreaded," she said, "and now it's come, I've been left without a husband forever." It seemed to me that she ought to be relieved, then.

She had nothing more to dread. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I patted her arm. Fetched her tea. And went to my uncle's as soon as she had fallen asleep. I was desperate; January was just around the corner. "Uncle Gerard, I have got to go to college," I told him.

"College?" he said, and lit one of his terrible-smelling black cigars.

"They gave me just a part scholarship and you know we're short on money.

I'll have to ask you for a loan."

"Well, money, sweetheart, certainly," said Uncle Gerard, "but what're you going to do about your mama?"

"I can't stay with Mama all my life."

"Why, girl! She's stricken. You want to leave her at a time like this?"

"Maybe she could move in with you," I said.

"With Aster and me?"

"Or maybe you could just look in on her from time to time. Or send Clarence over. I mean, just to-"

"Now, here is what I would suggest," said Uncle Gerard, and he braced his hands on his stubby thighs and leaned toward me, breathing burnt rubber. "You're, what Seventeen? Eighteen?

Look at you, got all the time in the world. Take a year out. Start school next fall. What's a year to somebody your age?"

"It's one-eighteenth of my life," I said.

"And I tell you what I'm going to do: you wait till next September and I'll pay your bills myself. Outright. No loans. It's a deal, you got that?"

"Well, thank you, Uncle Gerard," I said, because I could see he meant well. He wasn't really so rich, after all; he owned a dry-cleaning establishment. But when I left I couldn't bring myself to say goodbye to Aunt Aster, with her golden hair and her pampered skin. I pretended not to hear her when she called to me from the kitchen.

Mama was not improving. In fact I wondered if even September would be long enough. I felt locked in a calendar; time was turning out to be the most closed-in space of all. I had to help Mama into her clothes every day and tell her things over and over. All she would talk about was my father. "I married him out of desperation," she told me. "I settled for what I could get. Don't ever settle, Charlotte."

"No, Mama." She didn't have to tell me that.

"From the beginning, he held something against me. I still don't know what it was. He liked a hefty woman, he said, but after a while he started nagging for me to cut down on my eating. 'How come?' I asked him. I was so surprised that he would be like that. But I tried, oh, for his sake I… all those times I went without meals, and got weak and dizzy just trying to reduce some. Then, I don't know, I would have to start eating again. I'm just made that way, I just need more nourishment than other people. Oh, and it wouldn't have changed things anyhow. He wasn't a satisfied man, Charlotte. What more could I have done?"

"I don't know, Mama."

"Do you think he felt he had settled?"

"Of course not, Mama."

"He said it, all the time. 'Oh, why am I stuck in this life,' he said, and then I said, 'Go, go, who asked you to stay? Go someplace else if you don't like it here. Marry some floozy,' I told him; but he would just look at me from under his eyebrows and not say another word. I'll find you a bride myself!' I said.

Yet it would have killed me, Charlotte. Isn't that comical? Laugh. He had the softest, saddest expression. He had this way of tipping his head when he listened to people. Oh, Charlotte, was he happy at all, do you think?"

"Of course he was, Mama," I said, and then I would have to leave, I just had to. I would go to the studio where my father's photographs still averted their eyes and his dented metal sign still swung outside the window: AMES STUDIOS. FINE POHTBATTS. Sometimes people came and rang at the outer entrance and I would let them in, for lack of anything better to do. I would take whatever pictures they asked. "Could you do my poodle? He's old and we want a memento in case he passes on." I could feel my father wince. But I won't say it really bothered me and, besides, we needed the money.

We made barely enough to keep us fed, that winter. Uncle Gerard slipped us ten-dollar bills from time to time but that just paid for Mama's blood pressure medicine. Finally in desperation I put up a ROOMS TO LET sign, and a factory watchman named Mr. Robb took the east front bedroom.-He didn't like it much, though. He said we kept the house too cold, and he moved out three weeks later.

The sign just gathered dust. I tried a little harder in the studio and asked all customers if they would tell their friends about us, but that didn't help. I think the sight of Mama put them off. She had this way of wandering in sometimes, halfway through a sitting-pulling herself along by clutching at pieces of furniture. I could tell when she was coming by the sudden startled look on a customer's face. "It's amazing," she would say in the doorway, "how every comer of the world agrees simultaneously that someone's dead. Don't you think so? I mean if a man dies in one room then his meal in another room goes untouched; he doesn't show up for his doctor appoinI'ment; the photos he was sorting just stay in a heap. There's never a slip-up; the world has everything so well arranged."

"My mother," I would tell the customer. "Look a little toward the light, please."

"But then I never did place much faith in physical things," said my mother. "Oftentimes I've set a cup down and left it somewhere, and been surprised to see it there two weeks later. You would think just once there'd be a lapse of some kind; the cup would forget and be back on the shelf when I looked at it again. Or gravity: you'd think you could take gravity by surprise, just once, and set a tray very suddenly on air and have it stay. Wouldn't you?"

The customer would clear his throat.

"I see now I didn't give the world enough credit," my mother said, and then she wandered out again.

On certain evil days I had thoughts of running away, but of course I never did.

One afternoon in late March, the front bell rang and I opened the door to a very tall soldier with his cap in his hand. He had straight black hair and that sealed kind of face that keeps its own counsel. An Emory face. Only I wasn't sure which one. I said, "Amos?"

"Saul," he told me.

"Saul!"

"Hello, Charlotte." He didn't smile. (Emorys seldom do; they just look peaceful.) "I saw your sign," he said. "I came to town to settle the property and I wondered if I could room and board with you till I get it taken care of."

"Of course," I said. "We'd be glad to have you."

"I hear you've had some trouble this winter."

"Well, some," I said.

Saul only nodded. The Emorys were used to trouble; they didn't have to make a big to-do about it The way we knew the Emorys was this: the mother, Alberta, was a woman who kept no secrets. She would tell her business to anyone, even us.

She would bring us a pie or a bowl of fresh berries and stand half the morning in our kitchen doorway, talking on and on in her lush soft voice. Discussing her husband, Edwin Emory the radio repairman, who drank far more than he worked. And her four strapping sons: Amos, Saul, Linus, and Julian. Julian was my age; the others were older. The men in that family were wicked and mysterious, but thanks to Alberta we always knew what they were up to. Amos kept running away; Saul got in trouble with girls a lot. Linus was subject to unexplainable rages and Julian had a tendency to gamble. I don't believe there was a day in their Hves that something complicated wasn't happening to them.

This Alberta was a gypsyish type, beautiful in certain lights and carelessly dressed, slouchy, surprisingly young. In the summer she often went barefoot.

Needless to say, I loved her. I hung on everything she told me: "Then what? Then what?" I wished she would adopt me. I longed for her teeming house and remarkable troubles. For on Alberta, troubles sat like riches. "Look," she seemed to be saying, "at how important my life is. See how I've been blessed with eventfulness?" And she would lift her warm brown hands, spilling wealth.

"She's got no common sense, that woman," my mother said.

I think what Mama meant was, sense to realize when she was badly off. Mama might have liked her better if Alberta would only come crying sometime. But Alberta never cried. She told her news between breaths of laughter: scandals, disasters, miracles, mysteries. Someone broke into the radio shop and wiped it out, left a note behind: "Sorry for the inconvenience." In Julian's handwriting.

Her father-in-law arrived on the doorstep with all his worldly goods, sixty years' worth of clippings and old theatrical costumes, and since there were no extra bedrooms he slept in the dining room surrounded by fake ermine mantles, military uniforms, swords and crowns and boxes of hats. At any hour of the day or night he would call to her for health food snacks.

"That house ought to be boarded up and condemned," my mother said.

The winter of my junior year in high school, Alberta eloped with her father-in-law.

Well, it wasn't exactly your everyday occurrence. Edwin Emory staggered around looking stunned, but no more stunned than I was. I couldn't understand why she'd left them that way. (Left me.) I had thought she was so happy. But then, I also used to think that barbershop quartets on the radio were one man with a hoarse voice. What I mean to say is, I was easily fooled by appearances.

Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them. Maybe Alberta was secretly as sad as my mother. Or maybe, as Mama said, "That woman just wanted to be envied for everything, even her scruffy old father-in-law." I never had looked at it that way before.

For a while I brought the Emorys cookies and casseroles, but I never got much response. Their house sank in on itself and went silent. Edwin sat around drinking muscatel wine in his thermal underwear while Linus tried to run the shop. (Saul and Amos had left home years ago.) But mechanical things were depressing to Linus, and he had some kind of nervous breakdown and was sent to live with an aunt. Then Julian dropped out of school. He had a fight about a gambling debt and wasn't heard from again. And last of all, Edwin left. We didn't know exactly when, or for where. He just wasn't around any more. One day I chanced to look out the window and see a stranger boarding up the Emory house, just as Mama had always said they should. And that was the end of that.

Or seemed to be, till Saul came home. Saul wore a uniform so crisp it looked metallic; he stood in a room as if planted there. It was clear the Emorys hadn't dwindled away to nothing just because I had lost sight of them. Though he couldn't say exactly where a couple of his brothers were, he knew they were all alive-even Julian. And Alberta and her father-in-law were someplace in California, or had been as of last Christmas; not that Saul cared. Only Edwin was gone forever. He'd died of liver trouble while visiting his sister in New Jersey. Now Amoco was going to buy the house and tear it down for a filling station, beat out Texaco, and Saul was here to settle the sale and put the money into back taxes. He wanted to sell the radio shop as well. He would take the first offer, sign the papers, and go, he said. He'd just got out of the Army, had a life to start. He couldn't afford to spend much time on this.

But he did. The settling of the house took longer than he'd expected-you know how complicated just the title search could get, with Emorys-and then a broken-down radio shop is not all that much in demand. He stayed on through March, April. I was glad. With Saul around, life seemed more definite. We had to get on a schedule, give him his meals at predictable hours. Also, he was good at fixing things and he made repairs we'd been needing for years. In the evenings, he watched TV with me and Mama (who wouldn't say boo to him, in spite of his careful manners) or he took me out We went to movies, or restaurants, or the B & B Soda Shop. He acted like a brother, never so much as held my hand, but there was a measuring look in his eyes. I didn't know what he was waiting for. At the end of an evening I would climb to my bedroom, and there in the mirror was this college-age girl in a sweater and skirt-not a sullen old spinster after all.

Well, of course I fell in love with him. How could I avoid it? With that serene, pure face of his, those heavy-lidded eyes. It hit me for maybe the first time in my life that someone could have a whole world inside his head that I would never guess at. I was desperate to know what he thought about things. What was it like to have a family like his, a mother like Alberta? How did he feel passing his house now, with the shutters sagging off their hinges? He never said. I couldn't ask. Every time I saw him I wanted to ask, but I had such a sense of his separateness that it didn't seem possible. We stayed locked in this friendly small talk about mortgage assumptions and leaky faucets. The real conversation was carried on in silence: he helped me into my sweater as if wrapping a breakable gift. He somehow knew to lift my hair and settle it over my collar in just the right way. And I threw out three bowls of batter, trying to make Alberta's buckwheat pancakes. Even my mother took part in this conversation, for when we were all together now she grew stiff and still. She sent us little rodenty glances. The three of us were strung on elastic, and not a person could move without joggling the others.

Then one night in April we were coming home from a movie, Lana Turner in something or other. We happened to walk past his father's radio shop. A narrow, dismal wooden place set between a sandwich joint and a shoe repair, vacant all this time, black as a toothless mouth. I could have cried just looking at it, so how must Saul have felt? I reached out and touched his arm, and instantly he stopped and took hold of my hand and looked down at me. "Listen," he said.

He scared me. I thought he was mad that I had touched him; Fd upset the balance, some way. But what he said was, "You know I don't have a job yet, Charlotte." I said, "Jobr "And I don't seem to have any interests. I don't know what I'm going to do in life. So I'm waiting to see what just lands, but so far nothing has." I couldn't tell what he was getting at. I said, "Urn-"

"It's you and me I'm talking about, Charlotte."

"Oh " I said.

"I feel I have to have some land of a future before I can say anything to you." I still didn't understand. It seemed like an excuse, to tell the truth. I was used to high school dates, where the future had no bearing whatsoever.

"Well," I said, "is that all you're waiting for? I hike you better without a future." But I might as well not have spoken, because his face stayed troubled the rest of the walk home. Though he did keep hold of my hand, and on our front porch he kissed me-but only once, and very gravely, like somebody much, much older than me. Which he was, in a way. I was so young! I didn't think ahead at all. I only thought how strange it felt to touch surfaces like this, from behind our two private selves. I could have stood there all night with my head against his woolen shoulder. It was Saul who finally said we should go in.

My mother started condensing somehow, shrinking and drying. She was scared.

I saw how she watched Saul with her bright, webbed eyes. The kinder he was to her, the more carefully she watched him. When he asked her a question it took her a long time to answer; she had to rise up through so many layers of fear. At night, when I helped her into bed, she clutched my wrist hard and peered into my face and moved her lips but said nothing. Then I would go downstairs and Saul would grip that very same wrist and draw me toward him. For a second I always felt confused and panicky. "What is it?" he would ask me, but I never told.

I kept trying to understand him. It wasn't easy. He lacked the recklessness that I had expected of him- had hoped of him, even. If anything, he was too serious. (When I was in high school, they always told you to look for a sense of humor.) He treated me in a stern, unsmiling way that made me shy. Also, I couldn't figure out this job business. It seemed he was waiting for his life's work to be issued like a fate. Really, he was so trustful. "Maybe you ought to just set out and seek your fortune," I said, only half joking. "That's what I would do. Oh, I'd love to go with you! Take off tomorrow, travel anywhere."

"No, you wouldn't," he said. "Leave your mother? At this point in her life?" I don't know how a man like that could have been a son of Alberta's.

In May, he bought me an engagement ring. He took it out of his pocket one night when the three of us were eating supper-a little diamond. I hadn't known anything about it. I just stared at him when he slipped it on my finger.

"I thought it was time," he told me. I'm sorry, Mrs. Ames," he said. "I can't wait any longer, I want to marry her." Mama said, "But I-"

"It won't be right away," he said. "I'm not taking her off tomorrow. I don't even know what my work will be yet. We'll stay here as long as you need us, believe me. I promise you."

"But-" Mama said.

That was all, though.

I should have refused. I wasn't helpless, after all, I should have said, "I'm sorry, I can't fit you in. I never planned to take a second person on this trip." But I didn't. He was sitting next to me, and the leathery, foreign smell of his skin called up so much love that I seemed to be damaged by it. Everything he said was peculiarly clear, as if spoken in crackling cold air. It really didn't occur to me to turn him down.