Earthly Possessions

Eight

After Saul and I were engaged, my mother made some adjusI'ments in her thinking. I suppose she imagined ways of keeping us with her forever, somehow.

She acted friendlier toward him. She grew more animated and had to be taken to look at wedding gowns. Her heart's desire was a real church wedding, she said.

Saul said that would be fine. Not a one of us belonged to a church, but why point that out? I just drifted along. There was a satisfying heaviness in my hands and feet that made me move unusually slowly. Though sometimes I'd sit up with my heart pounding; I'd wonder: Am I really going to do this? Go on through with this? What can I be thinking of? But then I'd make my mind go blank. My muscles would loosen, and the heaviness would swim back over me.

Taking pictures now, I froze so long behind the camera that you might ask who was getting preserved here: my customers or me. Sitting with Saul in the evenings, I sheltered under his arm and listened to him plot our lives. He wanted six children. I assumed I couldn't have any (having inherited, in some illogi- cal way, my mother's non-pregnancy and untrue baby) but I nodded, even so. I imagined six dark, unreadable little boys with Saul's straight nose, hanging onto my skirts. I imagined myself suddenly as colorful, rich, and warm as Alberta, my narrow, parched life opening like a flower. All I had to do was give myself up. Easy. I let him lead me. I agreed to everything. It was such a pleasure that I felt soothed and sleepy, like a cat in sunshine.

Mama said there was nothing fit to wear in the bridal shops, and she started making my dress at home. White satin, high-necked, with buttoned sleeves.

Evidently she wasn't planning on a summer wedding. It was almost June by then.

Saul's money was running low. He still hadn't found what he wanted to do. All I wanted to do was sleep with Saul, but that went against his convictions. He had tomcatted long enough, he said, and was looking now for a home, a family, a steady way of life. And he wouldn't marry me till he found a job; everything had to be perfect. I myself would rather have been married immediately, but I didn't argue. In this new mood of mine, I only smiled. My hands and feet grew heavier every day; my eyes took on the pearly glow of someone in a trance.

Then Saul caught a bus to Colorado. He went to see an old Army buddy; they were going to talk about a partnership in something. Maybe some kind of a shop where they could work with their hands. I should keep my fingers crossed, he told me. He was aiming for a June wedding, That was terrible, that time he was gone. I felt Td just waked from some long, pillowy dream and taken a look at where I was: still friendless, sallow, peculiar, living alone with my mother, surrounded by monstrous potted plants taller and older than I was. Rubber trees and Chinese palms that hadn't put out a new leaf since I was born. Mildewed sets of the classics locked in glass-fronted bookshelves, dusty candy in pedestaled dishes. And Mama newly anxious over this trip to Colorado, fretting and mumbling and letting my wedding gown fall apart on the dress form in the dining room.

Would I really consider going so far? she asked. Was I taking her along?

I would consider going anywhere, anywhere at all. And I wasn't taking Mama.

I moved to Saul's room. (Mama was shocked.) Saul had a lot of clutter too but at least there was life in his clutter. All his Army things smelled salty and wild. What little he had saved from Alberta's house- a green metal toolchest and two hunting rifles-had a self-contained look. I stared for hours at a group photo of Edwin, the four boys, and a birthday cake, with a clipped-out square at the center of the picture. I slept in his hard sleigh bed, I wrapped up in his terrycloth bathrobe, and occasionally I slipped my feet into a pair of his shoes. But still I couldn't seem to step inside his life. Clomping along, trailing an extra six inches of terrycloth sleeve, I would wade to the window and lean out to memorize his view: Alberta's house, with the panes gone now and the roof ripped off. I opened his closet just to breathe in his clothing, and once even heaved a rifle onto my shoulder and laid my cheek against the oiled wood of the handle. Squinting along the bluish barrel, resting my finger on a trigger no more complicated than a camera button, I could easily imagine shooting someone. It's the completed action: once you've taken aim, how can you resist the pull to follow through?

Saul was gone ten days, but came back with nothing settled. He hadn't liked his friend as much as he'd remembered. He didn't know; they just hadn't hit it off, somehow. He would rather keep on looking. Rather wait for whatever felt right That evening I put on a floating nightgown, and listened for Mama's door to close. Then I went skimming through the dark to his salty-smelling room, to his hard sleigh bed, to his window full of moonlight and Alberta's tottering house.

In the morning, he said maybe we should go on ahead with the wedding.

It wasn't a June wedding after all. We got married in July. That's because we had to go to Holy Basis Church for a month before the preacher there would marry us. Holy Basis was this total hellfire place where Edwin Emory used to be a deacon, and Saul had conceived the notion that he'd like to hold the wedding there. Well, I had no church, wasn't religious in any way at all; and Mama'd quit Clarion Methodist some twenty years back over an insult she'd overheard. So for four Sundays straight we went to Holy Basis, with its fake-brick tarpaper and its smoky wooden ceiling, hymn numbers scrawled on a slate up front and Reverend Davitt just droning and intoning-a beak-nosed man in black who clung to the pulpit for dear life. Saul and I sat very near the front. (We wanted to be counted.) We were close enough to see the tears of the people on the mourners' bench, and the fluttering of their eyelids when they raised their faces in prayer. "What are they mourning?" I asked Saul once when we were walking home, and he said, "Their sins."

"Why not call it the rejoicing bench," I said, "if that's where they go to be reborn."

"Yes, but first they have to repent their past ways."

"You certainly know a lot about it," I said.

"Oh, I've been on the mourner's bench."

"You have?"

"Of course."

"You've been… saved?"

"Saved and repented and dunked in Clarion Lake," he told me.

"Before I joined the Army." I couldn't get over it. I walked the rest of the way home in total silence. I just never had realized how very different from me he really was.

Mama wouldn't finish my gown. I suspected her of pulling out seams every night. The day before my wedding I said, "Look here, Mama, it's all the same to me if I get married in my black lace slip. I mean, not having that dress won't stop the wedding." So she got down to work then, sewed all afternoon and then had me stand on the dining room table while she pinned up the hem. I revolved slowly, like a bride on a music box. Mama talked on and on about Grandma Debney's china, which I was to have, but I didn't really then. Some little string of sadness kept pulling at my mind.

After that we went to the studio and I set up the camera. Then Mama took a picture of Saul and me. We stood very straight, like an old-fashioned couple, while Mama said, "Where is it? What do I pull out? How do I go about this?" Then I took a picture of Saul with his arm around Mama. "Oh no, please, Ma not photogenic," she said, but he said, "Mother Ames, you're a member of my family now, and I need your portrait for my family album."

"It's sweet of you to be so nice to her," I told him later.

"Nice? Who's being nice?" he said. "I meant it" And I could see that he did.

It was a small wedding. No bridesmaids, no best man. (Saul had wanted one of his brothers, but none could make it.) He wouldn't let me invite Alberta, but my uncle's family came and so did a few Holy Basis members who'd seen the announcement in the bulletin. Later we drove to Ocean City in my father's old pickup, which Saul had repaired and repainted. We hardly swam at all, though.

Saul spent his days pacing by the edge of the water while I lay flat on the sand, recuperating from the years of loneliness, warming and glowing and deepening all week long.

I remember the date: July. A Thursday. We'd been back from Ocean City five days. I was in the studio, cropping an enlargement. Mama was knitting on the couch. Saul walked in the door with an envelope. He said he would like to talk to me a minute.

"Why, surely," I said.

Already I felt uneasy.

I followed him up the stairs to his room. Our room, it was now. I sat on the sleigh bed. He started walking back and forth, slapping the envelope against one palm. "Listen to what I'm going to say," he told me. I swallowed and sat up straighter.

"All along," he said, "I've been wondering why things are working out like this. Finding you, I mean, just at this point in my life. Oh, I did plan that when I got out of the Army I'd like a wife and home. But first I had to make a living. So that day when you opened the door, and wore that faded soft sweater-well, why now? I wanted to know. When I've got no means to support her and nothing steady to offer. Couldn't this have waited? Then I tried believing I should let you pass by, but it wasn't possible. Well, now I have the answer, Charlotte. I know what it's all about." He stopped pacing, and turned and smiled down at me. I felt more puzzled than ever. I said, "You do?"

"Charlotte," Saul said, "I've been called to preach."

"Been-what?"

"Don't you see? That's what it was. If I hadn't met you I wouldn't have gone back to Holy Basis Church, I might never have known what I was supposed to do. Now it's plain." Well. I was so stunned I couldn't even take in air. I mean I just wasn't prepared for this, nothing that had happened up till now had given me the faintest inkling. I said, "But… but, Saul…"

"Let me tell you how it came about," he said. "Remember that Sunday I helped pack the hymn-books? I carried a box to the basement. I passed the preschool room where I used to stay when I was a kid. Had its same old blue linoleum and those pipes they were always telling us not to swing on.

Then I heard this song: me and my three brothers singing 'Love Lifted Me.' I swear it. Do you believe me? Our identical voices, I couldn't mistake them. I just stood there with my mouth open. I even heard that lisp of Julian's he lost when his second teeth came in. We sang two lines and got fainter on the third and then drifted off, still singing."

"Well, wait," I said. "The four of you together? In the preschool room? Surely that never happened, there's too much difference hi your ages."

"This is not all that logical," Saul told me.

"No, it certainly isn't," I said.

"Reverend Davitt felt it was an experience of a religious nature." I didn't like the way he phrased it. Certain parts of him suddenly began to seem preacherly-even his bone structure, the echo in his voice, the tranquil gaze that could also be viewed as complacent, I saw now. Why hadn't I noticed before?

I'd been too busy gathering other messages, that's why. I hadn't even had a warning twinge.

Still, I held out. "But listen, Saul" I said. "Maybe it was leftover sound waves or something, have you thought of that?"

"He felt it might be a call to preach. We had several talks about it," Saul said.

I watched him open the envelope, with long brown fingers that could easily be pictured turning the pages of a Bible. Although I didn't believe in God, I could almost change my mind now and imagine one, for who else would play such a joke on me? The only place more closed-in than this house was a church. The only person odder than my mother was a hellfire preacher. I nearly laughed. I took a mild, amused interest in the sheet of paper he pulled from the envelope.

"This is what came in the mail today. I didn't want to tell you till I got it," he said. "A letter of acceptance from the Hamden Bible College."

"Bible College," I said.

"Oh, I know it takes money. The Army won't pay for a school that's not accredited-pure prejudice. But look at the advantages: Hamden's just a two-year school, and half an hour away. We can live right here with your mother! I'll reopen Dad's radio shop and that'll pay the tuition. For I know I'm meant to stay in Clarion, Charlotte. This all came to me; it's what I have to do. Don't you see?" All I saw was the view from his window: a cross-section of Alberta's house with flowered wallpaper, copper pipes writhing toward the sky, and a medicine cabinet wide open and empty. It was very clear: they were tearing down the rest of the world completely. They were leaving no place standing but my mother's. They were keeping me here forever, all the long, slow days of my life.