Earthly Possessions

Nine

We drove through an endless afternoon, passing scenery that appeared to have wilted. Crumbling sheds and unpainted houses, bony cattle drooping over fences.

"Whereabouts is this?" I finally asked.

"Georgia," said Jake.

"Georgia!" I sat up straighter and looked around me. I had never imagined finding myself in Georgia. But still there wasn't much to see. "Well," I said, "I tell you what. I think I'll go in the back and take a nap."

"No," said Jake.

"Why not?"

"I ain't going to have you slipping away from me. You would open that door and slip right away."

"Well, for goodness sake," I said. I felt insulted. "Why would I do that? All I want is a little sleep. Lock the door, if you like."

"No way of doing that."

"Get another chain from somewhere."

"What, and lock myself in too?"

"You could keep a key. Find one of those-"

"Lay off of me, Charlotte." I was quiet for a while. I studied snuff ads. Then I said, "You really ought to get over this thing about locks, you know."

"Lay off, I said." I looked for a radio, but there wasn't one. I opened the glove comparI'ment to check the insides: road maps, a flashlight, cigarettes, boring things like that.

I slammed it shut. I said, "Jake."

"Hmm."

"Where're we going, anyway?" He glanced over at me. "Now you ask," he said. "I was starting to think you had something missing."

"Missing?"

"Some nut or bolt or something. Not to wonder be-/fore now where we was headed."

"Well, I had no idea we were heading to some point," I said.

"You thought I was doing all this driving for the fun of it."

"Where are we going, Jake?"

"Perth, Florida," said Jake.

"Perth?"

"That's where Oliver lives. My friend from training school."

"Oh, Oliver."

"See, his mother moved him to Florida to get him out of trouble. Opened her a motel there. A widow lady. She never did think much of me, moved Oliver clean away from me. Now we're going to look him up, with a stop-off first in Linex, Georgia."

"What's in Linex?" I asked.

He started rummaging through his pockets. First his jacket, then his trouser pockets. Finally he came up with a piece of notebook paper. He held it out to me. "What's this?" I said.

"Read it" I unfolded it and smoothed the creases. The writing had been done with a hard lead pencil-one of those that leaves the other side of the paper embossed. All the i's were dotted with fat hearts.

Dear Jake, Honey please come get me soon! Its like a prison here. I had been expecting you long ago. Didn't you get my letter? I called your home but your mother said she didn't know where you were. Do you want for your son to be born in a prison?

Love and xxx! Mindy.

I read it twice. Then I looked at Jake.

"Now, that I couldn't abide," said Jake.

"What's that?"

"My son to be born in a prison."

"What's she in prison f or?"

"She ain't in prison, she's in a home for unwed mothers."

"Oh, I see," I said.

"Her mother is this devil, real devil. Sent her off to this home her church runs, never let me hear word one about it till Mindy was packed and gone. Mindy is a minor," he said.

I was slow: I thought he meant she worked in a mine. I saw a rich, black, underground world opening at my feet, where everyone was in some deep and dramatic trouble. I felt too pale for all this and I drew away, folding the letter primly. "She's too young to have a say," said Jake, but even after I understood I kept picturing her in someplace dark. "She's not but seventeen years old. But in my estimation they should have let her decide for herself, and me as well. I mean me and her been going together for three whole years, off and on."

"Well, wait," I said. "Three years?"

"She was fourteen," said Jake, "but right well developed."

"I never heard of such a thing."

"Okay, Miss Priss, but it wasn't my fault. She just set her heart on me. She just fixed on me and" wouldn't let go. See, she lived down the road from me and my mom a ways, Route Four outside of Clarion on the Pimsah River. Know the place? We'd been half acquainted for years, but not to speak to. Then her and her family come to watch this derby, and it just so happened I was driving in it and won. I guess in her eyes that must have made me some kind of a. hero. After that she commenced to following me around, calling me on the telephone and bringing me picnic lunches and beers she had stole from her daddy. Her daddy was Darnell Callender, owns a. feed store, you may have heard of him. Always wears a Panama hat. Well, at first I thought she was too young and besides I didn't like her all that much but I couldn't seem to shake her. She was forever hanging around and didn't take offense when I sent her away but went off smiling, made me feel bad. Just a little gal, you know? It was summer and she wore these sandals like threads, real breakable-looking. Finally it just seemed like I might as well go on out with her.

"But we weren't never what you would call steady," he said. "I would oftentimes be seeing other girls and all. I would ask myself, "Now how did I get mixed up with this Mindy anyhow, what's the point of it?* She talked too much, and not about nothing I cared for. Sometimes it seemed like she was so boring I just couldn't find enough air to breathe when I was around her. But sometimes, why, she'd say something to me direct that showed me how she watched me, how she saw me, you know? And I would think, This person is bound to have something to do with me. I mean it ain't love, but what is it? Worse than love, harder to break. Like we had to wear each other through, work something out, I don't know.

I swear, she like to drove me crazy. I'd say to myself, I'd say, "Why, she ain't nothing but a hindrance. I don't need to put up with this.' Then we would part.

But like always, she'd go smiling. And then later she'd keep coming around and coming around, and somehow I'd end up in the same old situation again. You understand?" I nodded. I could see it all happening but had not, up till now, imagined that it could happen to Jake.

"Then last fall, she calls me on the phone. Tells me she's expecting. A fluke: we were having one of our partings. I hadn't been near her since August.

Ordinarily I would try not to tamper with her anyway, but you know how it is sometimes. And I toitt say she had some part in it. A big part. I mean she would just… so there I was. What could I do? It had come up so sudden. Well, if she had wrote a letter maybe, give me time to think. But no, she has to telephone.

'Going to have a baby, Jake.' Happy as a queen. Says to me, 'I think we better get married.' "I was surprised, that's all. If I'd have thought I would have said, 'Now cool down, Mindy, well figure some other way of doing this.' But I was surprised. I said, 'Are you out of your flipping mind? Have you lost your marbles? Do you really believe I would get married, go that whole soft-living route?' I said. "Let alone marry you' Then I hung up. I was fit to be tied, I was as mad as I could get. But I know I should have handled it better than what I did."

"You were just startled," I told him.

I didn't mean to take his side like that. But I was touched by the tense, despairing way his hands were gripping the steering wheel. His bitten fingernails pained me. "I would have said the same thing," I told him.

"Well," said Jake. "Week or two passes, month or two passes, I get to thinking. I hadn't seen her in all that time and was starting to notice she was missing. Pictures would pop into my mind. Them perky little bandannas she wore.

Way she was always after me to do my magic tricks, and clapped when I was through. Like she was really just a child, you know? Always humming, skipping, swinging my hand when we walked… then I got to wondering how she would stay with her mother, devil of a mother; they hadn't never hit it off too good. So I thought, Well, least I could do is be of some help to her in this. It's true I never asked for it but I would hate to feel to blame in any way.' I mean, I'm not a bad man. Am I?"

"Of course not," I said.

"I called her house. Her mother says, Too late, Jake Simms.' Took me three full weeks to track her down. I had to ask her Cousin Cobb. Then I wrote her a letter. I wanted to know if she was okay and needed anything sent. And she wrote back, "What I need is out. Please come and get me.' "Well, I could do that.

Question was, where to put her after I got her. If she was just older she might have some married girlfriend or such that she could stay with, but I don't guess she does and so I thought I would take her on to Florida and look up O. J. Him and me have always kept in touch, you see. He sends me these Christmas cards.

And I like to think about him a lot and him reading his books no matter who locks him up.

"I figured Mindy could stay in Florida till the baby comes and then we'd give it out for adoption. I don't think Mindy would make such a hot mother anyhow. Then she could go on back but I might stay in Florida. They have very fine derbies in Florida. Maybe Oliver and me could room together, like the old days.

"But to get to Florida first you got to have the money, right? And I didn't have none. I was unemployed; this body shop where I sometimes work had fired me unfairly. Derby season was over and I hadn't done so good there anyhow. I was having to hang around the house, just rising late and hunting in the icebox and watching TV. Soap operas. Game shows. People winning a thousand tins of cat food or a heart-shaped bed, and all you got to fill your mind is, Wonder where they'll find the sheets to fit it?' Stuff like that. I'd always been the kind to spend what I got when I got it and now I didn't have no savings, couldn't even help on the groceries. It was sorry times.

"And friends? Used to be you could borrow from your friends, but I don't know, lately it seems to me like all my friends have gone and married on me.

Some of my coolest, finest friends have up and married. I can't get over it.

Leaving me right lonesome, and you know how little cash a married man would have free to lend. Seems like they're always saving up for a automatic grill and such. There wasn't no hope there.

"Well, I tell you what I did. I went to my brother-in-law, Marvel Hodge. He runs Marvelous Chevrolet. I'm sure you've heard of him. Anytime anything gets to happening on the "Late Show' they break it off and here comes Marvel, wide-faced man with scalloped hair, grinning and slapping a fender. Why my sister married him never know. I can't stand the sight of him, myself.

"But I went to him. I drove in to see him in Mom's old Ford. (Has he ever given her a free Chevy? No. No, nor not even a used one.) I found him out on the lot, kidding around with some customers in this ho-ho way he has. I said, 'Marvel, like to talk with you a minute.' "He says, 'Go ahead, Jake.' "Right in front of all those people, that's the kind of man he is.

"I said, 'Marvel, even though you're supposed to be some relation to me I'm not such a fool as to ask you for a gift or a loan. I do need money bad but I ain't going to ask that. All I want is a job, fair and square. Just to tide me over,' I said. 'You know full well I'm smarter when it comes to cars than any three men you got. How about it.' "Know what he did? He started laughing. Starts laughing and shaking his head. Right in front of these customers, whole family: man and wife and two little girls and some kind of uncle or something. 'Boy,' he says, 'now I've heard everything. A job, you say. Give Jake Simms a job, that never was out of trouble since the very first day he was born. Why, I'd have to be a total fool.' "I kept my temper, I will say that. I said, 'Marvel, I may have done one or two hasty things in my younger days but you got no right to hold that over my head. I'm a grown man now,' I said, 'and never get in no more trouble than taking a extra drink or two*on a Saturday night. I'd like you to reconsider your words, if you please.' " 'Grown?' says Marvel. 'Grown? I doubt live to see the day,' he says. 'Go on, boy, leave me to these good people here.'

"Well, I still kept my temper. Walked back to my Ford, real quiet-felt like I was about to burst but I didn't say a word. Climbed in, started the engine, fixed the rear-view mirror a little straighter so as I could prepare to back out. But I didn't back out, I went forward. Well, I don't know how it happened.

I mean I did intend to do it but I didn't know I was going to do it. I just raced full forward into the car lot, and Marvel sprang left and his customers sprang right. Hit a new Bel Air, buckled in the whole right side. Backed off and hit a Vega. Set on down the row of them, crushing everything I come upon.

Fenders was crumpled like paper, bumpers curled, doors falling off-and this crunchy feeling every time I hit and everybody screaming and dancing. Of course my own car got dented some too, but not what you would expect. I believe I could've drove her on home, in fact, till I took this notion to hit a Monza head-on. See, in a derby you just don't hit head-on. The rules don't allow it.

So I got this urge. I hit head-on and the two of them cars went up like the Fourth of July, and I rolled out as quick as I could and was picked off the concrete by three cops." I laughed. Jake glanced over at me as if he'd forgotten I was there.

"Later they all tore into me," he said, "even Mom, asking how come I hadn't held my temper. But I kept telling them I did hold my temper, for I could have mowed down Marvel and his customers as well but I restrained myself.

"I restrained myself in the jail too and tried hard hot to escape. I had determined to be a reasonable man, you see. I just sat tight and waited for my trial. No one that knew me would bail me out, and my mom didn't have no cash. I had to stay in. It wasn't easy. I had these funny kinds of sweats at times and hives come up over nine-tenths of my body, but still I held back from escaping.

"Now, this lawyer they got me said I ought to plead guilty. He said there wasn't no question about it. I said I would be telling a falsehood if I did that. I said I had been forced to wreck that place, had no choice in the" matter whatsoever; Marvel Hodge just drove me to it. 'Call that guilty?" I said. No sir, I'm pleading innocent.' We argued back and forth some over that. And time was passing. Understand that every day was just stretching me one more inch beyond the breaking point. But I held tight, I held tight.

"Day before the trial, Mom brought me this letter. She was my only visitor, see. Sally, my sister, she wasn't speaking to me. And naturally Marvel didn't come. If he had of I'd have killed him. Broke out of my cell and killed him.

"Mom brought this letter from Mindy, one I showed you. Addressed to the house. Evidently Mindy hadn't heard about my trouble. Her mother either didn't know or hadn't passed the news on, one; though I can't imagine her missing the chance. Anyhow, here's this letter, asking if I wanted for my son to be born in a prison. That tore me up, I tell you. Seems like I just went wild. How come this world has so many ways of tying a person down? Now there is no way I would sit by and let that happen.

"Next morning they come to take me to the courthouse and on Harp Street I slipped loose, with this one guard's gun handy in my pocket. Nothing to it. They watch you less careful on the way to a trial; they know you're thinking far ahead, got some hope of being cleared. Except me. I didn't have no hope at all.

I was like, barred, boxed in. Everybody carried such a set notion of me. I knew the only hope I had was to get away.

"How did I go so wrong? I thought I would clear a thousand at least, hitting that bank. Thought I would be free then and unencumbered. But here we are. Seems like everything got bungled. Every step was stupid, every inch of the way. Every move I made was worse than the one before."

"You were just unlucky," I told him.

"Never mind."

"When you think," said Jake, "that I set all this in motion f ust to show t ain't a bad man, don't it make you want to laugh?" Late in the afternoon we arrived in Linex, which seemed to be one very wide, empty street We stopped in front of a grocery store to use the phone booth. "Now the name of this place is the Dorothea WhiI'man Home," said Jake. He was leafing through the directory, which was no thicker than a pamphlet. His stubby finger slid down the columns. He had kept the door open and I looked past his shoulder to see, of all things, butterflies, spangling the yellow air. We truly had traveled; we'd left that cold false Maryland spring behind and found a real one. "Lookl" I said, and Jake spun toward the door. "Butterflies," I told him.

"Will you let me get on with this?" I wasn't wearing my raincoat any more and he had unzipped his jacket. We were showing whole new layers: identical white shirts. Glassed in the way we were, under the last of the sunlight, we both had a thin shine of sweat like plants in a greenhouse. "In Clarion, it may be snowing," I said.

"Not likely," said Jake. His finger had found its mark and stopped.

"Dorothea WhiI'man Home," he said. I'll dial, you talk."

"How come I have to talk?"

"You don't think they'd let a man through."

"I can't imagine why not."

"Well, I ain't taking no chances. Ask for Mindy Callender, say ifs her aunt or something." He dropped in a dime and dialed. I pressed the receiver to my ear. A woman answered: "Whitman Home."

"Mindy Callender, please," I said. "One moment."

Something in the lines turned off and on. There was a pause and then a thin voice said, "Hello?"

"Hello. Mindy?"

"Who's this?" I handed the receiver to Jake. "Hey there," he said. He grinned. "Yeah, yeah, it's me. I'm here. No, that was just-well, I'm fine. How're you?" He listened a long time. His face grew serious again. "Sony to hear that," he said. "Really? WeD, I'm sorry to… look here, Mindy, I need to know something. Has anybody been asking for me? Asking if you knew my whereabouts? You sure, now. No I'm not in no trouble, quit that.

Just tell me where to come for you." I pressed my back against the glass of the booth, trying to get more room. I watched Jake's fingers tap the directory and then grow still. "Why not?" he said. "It ain't even dark yet. Look, now, Mindy, we're in sort of a hurry here, we… how's that? Naw. What would I be doing with a ladder?" He listened a while longer. "Yeah, well," he said. "First left after the… sure. Sure I got it, I ain't that stupid. Okay. Bye." He hung up and dug his fingers into his hair. "Shoot," he said.

"What's the inatter?"

"First she says she can't get free today, wants me to come at midnight instead and fetch her down a ladder. A ladderl I tell you, sometimes that Mindy is so… and when I say no, she says then maybe she'll meet me at six tomorrow morning. M^ybe, maybe not What is she playing at now?"

"I would think a ladder would be sort of… risky," I said.

"You don't know Mindy, that's just the kind of thing she admires," he said.

"I'm surprised she don't want me charging up on a horse." We left the booth and went into the grocery store. Jake chose a Gillette, a can of lather, a giant bottle of Coke, and a bag of Doritos. I saw a freezer full of orange juice and developed a craving for some, but he said it would be too much trouble to mix.

He was very short-tempered, I thought. He cruised the aisles, — muttering to himself, hurrying me along whenever I slowed down. "Come on, come on, we ain't got all night."

"The way I see it, all night's just what we do have," I said.

"This is not tihe time to start acting smart," he told me.

After we'd finished in the grocery store we drove on through Linex, which had turned a silvery color now that the sun was down. We traveled so far I wondered if we were going for good, giving up on Mindy. I thought that would be fine. (Even leaving someone else's loved one could fill me with a kind of wicked joy.) But then Jake slowed the car and peered at the woods to his right. He said, "This here will have to do, I guess." A brown wooden sign spelled out TUNSAQUTT KAMPGROUNDS in chiseled letters. We turned onto a dirt road and bounced along, passing an empty bulletin board, a Johnny-on-the-Spot, and several trashcans. Finally the road ended. Jake stopped the car and slumped back. "Well," I said.

"Yeah, well," he said.

He rolled down the window. This deep in the woods it was already twilight, and a mushroom-smelling chill hit us like a faceful of damp leaves. He rolled the window up again. "I thought at least they'd have picnic tables," he said.

"Maybe we could try further on." *Nah." I pulled my raincoat around me but Jake just sat there, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Finally I reached into the grocery bag and opened the Doritos. "Have some," I said. He shook his head. I took a handful myself and ate them one by one. They're good,"

I told him. "Try and see."

"I ain't hungry."

"If we just had that orange juice they'd be perfect."

"Now, how'd we mix orange juice way off here in the woods?

Besides, I had to watch the money. We're almost out."

"If you're watching the money, why'd you buy the razori^' I said. "I'd rather have orange juice."

"Well, I would rather have a shave," said Jake. He straightened up and checked his face in the mirror. "Death Row Jethro," he said, and sank back. "She'd take one look and run. I can't abide not shaving."

"I can't abide not eating fruit," I told him. "I just have this craving; I believe I'm getting scurvy."

"Will you quit that? Will you just stop dwelling on a thing?" I quit. I ate some more Doritos and looked at the woods. Once I got used to the bareness-slick brown needled floor, color washed out in the dusk-I thought it was sort of pleasant here. But Jake was so restless. He started crackling through the grocery bag. He took some Doritos after all and then brought out the Coke bottle, unscrewed the top, and sent a fine warm spray over both of us. "Oops. Sorry," he said.

"That's all right."

"Have a drink."

"No, thanks."

"If you like," he said, "you can sleep in the back tonight. I ain't sleeping anyhow. I plan to just sit here and go crazy."

"Okay."

"I don't see how you stand this," he said. "You forget," I told him, "I've been married." We sat there munching Doritos, watching the trees grow taller and blacker as night came on.

Ten

I first left my husband in 19xx, after an argument over the furniture. This was Alberta's furniture that he'd stored instead of selling, for some reason, back when he sold her house. We hadn't been married a month when he hired a U-Haul and brought everything home with him: her rickety bedroom suites, linoleum-topped table and worn-out chairs, her multicolored curtains and shawls and dresses… add to this her father-in-law's belongings as well, all the props and costumes the old man had stashed in the dining room. Well, I thought Saul meant to hold a garage sale or something. Certainly I saw that we couldn't go on paying the storage bills. But it seemed he had no such intention. He kept it, every bit of it. The house was overstaffed as it was, so he had to double things up: an end table in front of another end table, a second sofa backed against the first. It was crazy. Every piece of furniture had its shadow, a Siamese twin. My mother didn't seem to find it odd at all (she doted on him now, she thought he could do no wrong) but I did. He wouldn't even open Alberta's letters; what did he want with her furniture?

I myself thought of Alberta daily, and had coveted all she owned for years, but these were just her cast-offs. If she had managed to fling them away, so could I. "Saul," I said, "we have to get rid of this clutter. I can't move. I can't breathe! It's got to go."

"Oh, well sort it out eventually," was what he said.

I believed him. I continued stumbling over crates of satin shoes and riding boots, bruising my shins in the tangle of chair legs, waiting for him to take some action. But then he started Bible College and became so preoccupied. At night he was studying, and any spare time he had was given to the radio shop. It was plain he'd forgotten that furniture utterly.

Along about October, I decided to dispose of it myself. I admit it: I went behind his back. I didn't call Goodwill in an open and aboveboard way that he would notice but snuck things out, piece by piece, and set them by the trashcan.

The truck came by on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday I put out a nightstand, Saturday a bookcase. I couldn't discard more than one thing at a time because the town had a limit on bulk trash. This made me very impatient I lay awake planning what to get rid of next; it was so hard to choose. The bureau? Or the end table? Part of me wanted to work my way through the kitchen chairs, but there were eight of them and that would be so boring, week after week. Part of me wanted to head straight for die sofa, the biggest thing in the house. But surely he would notice that. Wouldn't he?

His attitude new was fond but abstracted-not what you look for in a husband.

He'd settled me so quickly into his life; he'd moved on to other projects. I felt like something dragged on a string behind a forgetful child. I couldn't understand how we'd arrived so soon at the same muddy, tangled, flawed relationship that I had with everyone else.

I began to consider all our belongings with an eye to how they would look beside the trashcan. Not just Alberta's things, but Mama's and my own as well.

After all, did we really need to write at desks, walk on rugs? In the middle of dinner I would freeze, staring at the china cupboard full of compote dishes.

Why, they would even fit inside the trashcan, not lose me a single collection day. And how about my father's Graflex that I had never used, and my baby clothes in the brassbound trunk and the files full of dead people's passport photos? What good were they to me?

Wednesday morning I made my decision: Alberta's bureau. I waited till Saul had gone to the radio shop, and then I lugged it down the stairs-first the drawers, one by one, and then the frame. The frame was hard to handle and it clumped quite a bit. My mother called from the kitchen: "Charlotte? Is that you?" I had to stop and rest the bureau on a step and steady my voice and say, "Yes, Mama"

"What's happening up there?"

"Nothing, Mama." I took it out the front, so she wouldn't see. Dragged it around to the alley, slid all the drawers in and left it by the trashcan. Then I went to the grocery store, and on to Photo Supply for some bromide paper. So it was noon before I got home again. I stepped in the door, set down my packages, and came face to face with Alberta's bureau.

Well, it was like meeting up with a corpse that I'd already buried. I was truly startled. And it didn't help to have Saul looming behind it with his arms folded across his chest. "Why," I said. "What is this doing here?"

"I found it by the trashcan," he said. "You "Luckily, it's Columbus Day and nobody picked it up."

"Oh. Columbus Day," I said.

"How many other tilings have you thrown away?"

"Well…"

"It's not yours to dispose of, Charlotte. What would make you chuck it>out like that?"

"Well, I ought to have some say what's in this house," I told him. "And when I spoke to you about it you were too busy, oh, you couldn't be bothered with earthly things."

"I was working," said Saul. "I'm falling asleep on my books every night. I can't stop to rearrange the furniture at the drop of a hat."

"Drop of a hat! I asked you in August. But no, you had to wait for the proper moment. And then went off muttering scripture somewhere, practicing handshakes or whatever it is you do in that place, I wouldn't know."

"Naturally you wouldn't," he said, "since you didn't come to Opening Day at Hamden, where they explained it all."

"But I don't like Hamden," I told him. "I hate the whole idea, and I would try to make you quit if I were sure that I had any right to change people."

"Well, I don't understand you," he said.

"No, I know you don't. Preachers never ask themselves that question, that's what's wrong with them."

"What question? What are we talking about? Listen, all I want is for you to leave my things alone. Don't touch them. I'll tend to them sometime later."

"Even if they're breaking my neck?" I asked.

He brushed a hand across his forehead, like someone exhausted. "I never thought you'd turn out to be this kind of person, Charlotte," he said. "That furniture is mine, and I decide what to do with it. Meanwhile, I'm late for class. Goodbye." He left, closing the door too quietly. I heard the pickup start. I gathered my packages and took them to the kitchen, where I found my mother sitting rigid in her lawn chair. These days she had packed down somewhat; she was merely a very stout, sagging woman, and could have sat anywhere she chose but returned to the lawn chair during moments of stress. She wore her old scared look and clutched the splintery arms with white-tipped fingers. I said, "Never mind, Mama. It's all right."

"You treat him so badly," she said, "and he's so fine and mannerly." She liked Saul a lot more than she'd ever liked me.

I said, "Mama, I have to defend myself,"

"But you don't want to drive him off," she said.

"Drive him off?" I said. "Ha!" It was exactly what I did want. I could see myself chasing him with a stick, like the girl on the Old Dutch Cleanser can: "Back away! Back away! Give me air!" This hopeless, powerless feeling would vanish like a fog, if I could just drive him off. I would be free then of his judging gaze that noted all my faults and sins, that widened at learning who I really was. I would be rid of his fine and mannerly presence, eternally showing me up. But I didn't say any of that to my mother. I set the packages on the counter, kissed her cheek, and left, swinging my purse. Walked across town to Libby's Grill. Ordered a bus ticket for New York City.

I believe that was the clearest, happiest moment of all my life.

But this was 19xx, remember, when Clarion was still a sleepy little town and there weren't all that many buses. "What day are you leaving?" Libby asked. (In 19xx, there really was a Libby still.) I said, "Day?"

"Bus comes through Mondays and Thursdays, Charlotte. Which do you want a ticket for?" This place just wouldn't let go of me. You'd think at least they'd get the bus schedule synchronized with the garbage schedule.

"Thursday, please," I said, "Tomorrow." And then I had to empty out my purse. All she gave me back was eight dollars. But the ticket was worth it, I decided: long enough to tie around my waist. I folded it carefully, feeling slowed and chastened.

After that, I needed a place to stay till Thursday. It was ridiculous that Saul got to live at my mother's. And Aunt Aster would never allow her guest room to be used. In the end, I had to go on over to the Blue Moon Motel-four dollars nightly, a joke for high school boys with fast ideas. Had to spend the afternoon lying on a mangy chenille bedspread in my stocking feet, not so much as a television to watch, not even a file to do my nails with. My life grew perfectly still, but I told myself it was the stillness that animals take on just before they spring into action.

This was when they hadn't yet opened the lipstick factory, so when Saul got home from class I don't think it took him twenty minutes to track me down.

Everybody knew where I'd gone; everybody'd seen me tearing off down the street on a brisk October day without a coat on. Or so they said. (Actually I'd been walking, very calmly.) Saul came to the motel and knocked on my door, two sharp knocks. "Charlotte, let me in. What's the matter with you?" I was suddenly filled with strength. I was jubilant. I wanted to laugh.

"Charlotte!" It was clear from the self-assured tone of his voice that he didn't know what he was up against. I refused to answer him.

After a while he went away.

Then everything buckled and crumbled. I felt so sad, I thought something inside me was breaking. I wished I could erase all I'd ever done, give up and die. So when the phone rang, I pounced on it It was Saul. He said, "Charlotte, quit this, please." I'll never quit," I said.

"You want me to get a key from Mrs. Baynes and come in after you?"

"You can't, I've got the chain on the door."

"Look. I know you wouldn't leave me," he said.

"I wouldn't?"

"I know you love me."

"I don't love you at all."

"I think this must have something to do with your condition," he said.

"Condition? What condition?"

"You're pregnant. Aren't you."

"Don't be ridiculous," I told him.

"You can't fool me, I remember from when my brothers were born. Lots of times I… Charlotte?" I was counting. I looked around for a calendar but there wasn't one. I had to count on my fingers, whispering dates to myself. Saul said, "Charlotte?"

"Oh, my God in heaven," I said.

Saul said, "Charlotte, I wish you wouldn't take the Lord's name in vain like that." Being pregnant affected me in ways I hadn't foreseen. For one thing, I became very energetic. I would dash around the studio, shoving heavy cartons aside, wheeling that old camera on its creaky stand till the soldier or whoever rose from his chair looking anxious: "Uh, ma'am, do you think this is wise?" I was stronger and needed less sleep. Long into the night sometimes Td be pacing the floor. But I was also easily hurt, and things could make me cry for no reason. Julian, for instance.

Julian was Saul's youngest brother, the handsomest and most shiftless of all. He had a sulky, rumpled, Italian look that used to charm all the girls in school, and his weakness was gambling. But gambling men are not as dashing as the folk songs make them out to be; they tend to break down when they're on a losing streak. Julian showed up at our door one morning unwashed, ragged, with a string of bad checks trailing clear back to Texas. He fell into one of Alberta's old beds and slept a week, waking only for meals. When finally he got up he seemed purified, like somebody recovering from a fever. He said he would do anything-change his ways completely, make up every cent he owed. He started work at the radio shop, and Saul wrote on Bible School stationery to everybody holding one of Julian's bad checks, promising to send the money as soon as we had it.

On my daily walk that the doctor had ordered, I would pass the radio shop and see Julian bent low over tubes and wires, dimmed by a picture window as grainy as an old photograph. In the well of this window was the same display they'd had when I was a child: a plastic knob, a twist of wastepaper, and the dusty innards of an RCA Victor phonograph. I wanted to go in and pull Julian out of there. I almost did, sometimes.

But Julian said he had settled down, was here forever, planned to join the church, even. "In Texas," he said one night, "I thought about church a lot. I thought about those songs they sing, all those hymns I never used to care for.

One morning I woke up in jail, not even knowing how I'd landed there, and I said to myself, 'If I get out of this I'm going back where I came from, join the church and straighten out my life. Going to stay with my brother till I die of old age,' I said to myself." I looked at Saul.

"You tell them that on Sunday," Saul said.

"I got to know a few of the prisoners. Why, they'd been in and out of jail all their lives, had no hope any more. Know how they passed the time? They'd chew up their bread and make it into statues, get the guards to sell it outside."

"Stop," I said.

"Little statues of Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, people like that. Little chewed-up statues."

"I don't want to hear about this," I said, and started crying. Everybody stared at me. "Why, Charlotte," said Saul, and my mother fumbled at her bosom for a Kleenex.

I really was very peculiar during those months.

Our daughter was born June 19xx, at the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul's.

From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn't worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda's toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Belinda's place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend named Catherine that none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anesthesia after all.

They have this free offer on the radio sometimes: you send them a self-addressed envelope and they'll send you a pamphlet called "What If Christ Had Never Come?" That always makes me laugh. I can think of a lot we'd have missed if Christ had never come. The Spanish Inquisition, for one thing. For another, losing my husband to the Hamden Bible College.

Oh, I did lose him. He wasn't the old Saul Emory. He'd adopted a whole new set of rules, attitudes, platitudes, judgments; he didn't even need to think. In any situation, all he had to do was rest back on his easy answers. He could reach for his religion and pull it around him like his preacher's robe.

When I was in the hospital having Selinda, Reverend Davitt lay dying one floor above me. (Lung cancer: one of God's little jokes. Reverend Davitt didn't hold with tobacco.) By the fall of 'xx, Saul was pastor of Holy Basis. He wouldn't be ordained till June but already had his own little flock, his tarpaper church and cubby-sized office where people could discuss with him their various forms of unhappiness. What's more, he said he would like me to start attending the services now. I refused. I told him I had my rights; and lie said, yes, I did, but he hoped I would come anyway because it was very important to him.

Well, I went. The first Sunday I left Selinda in the pre-school room downstairs and sat in a pew between Julian and my mother. I wore a powder-blue suit, a pillbox hat, little white gloves. For the sake of the congregation, I tried to look as rapt as I was expected to. I tried not to show my shock when Saul came out in his robes like a stranger and read the morning's scripture in a firm, authoritative voice. Older members of the congregation said, "Amen"; the others merely kept a hushed silence. Then we all stood up and sang a hymn. We resettled ourselves and Saul arranged various papers on his pulpit. "I have here," he said finally, "a clipping from last Wednesday's newspaper: "Dr. Tate's Answer Column.'" His words echoed slightly, as if spoken in a train station.

" 'Dear Dr. Tate: I am writing about this problem I have in talking with my physician. I mention this to show what I think of physicians and how much they expect of a person. Every Thursday my doctor has me come in to see him and he wonders why my diabetes is always getting worse. I tell him I just don't know.

Well, Dr. Tate, the fact is that I do eat quite a bit of pastry that I don't admit to. I just get this urge to stuff sometimes. Also I overdo on the wine. I know that wine isn't really liquor but I feel bad anyway drinking in the daytime and so I don't tell him. Dr. Tate, my husband doesn't love me any more and goes with someone else and my only son died of a bone disease when he was barely three years old. I weigh two hundred and thirty-one pounds and my skin's all broken out though they say that stops at twenty and I am forty-four. Yet somehow I can't tell any of this to my doctor and do you know why? Because a doctor sets himself up so and acts like he won't even like you if you eat the wrong kind of nutrition. So how does he think I could admit all this to him? And what I want to ask anyway is, Where's the fairness to this, Dr. Tate?/" I was interested. I folded my gloves and looked up at Saul, waiting for Dr. Tate's answer. But instead of reading it, Saul laid the clipping aside and gazed out over his congregation. "The woman who wrote that letter," he told them, "is not alone.

She could be you or me. She lives in fear of disapproval, in a world where love is conditional. She wonders what the point is. The only one she can think of to ask is a licensed physician.

Is this what we've come to, finally? Are we so far removed from God?" I yawned, and wove the fingers of my gloves together.

That was the last sermon of Saul's I ever listened to.

Which is not to say I didn't go to church. Oh, no, I showed up every Sunday morning, sitting between my mother and Julian, smiling my glazed wifely smile. I believe I almost enjoyed it; I took some pleasure in his distance, in my own dreamy docility and my private, untouchable deafness. His words slipped past me like the sound of a clock or an ocean. Meanwhile I watched his hands gripping the pulpit, I admired his chiseled lips. Plotted how to get him into bed with me. There was something magical about that pew that sent all my thoughts swooning toward bed. Contrariness, I suppose. He was against making love on a Sunday. I was in favor of it. Sometimes I won, sometimes he won. I wouldn't have missed Sunday for the world.

I had a lot of foolish hopes, those first few years. I imagined that one day he might lose his faith, just like that, and go on to something new. Join a motorcycle gang. Why not? We'd travel everywhere, Belinda and I perched behind him. I would be hugging his waist, laying my cheek against his black cloth back.

Black cloth?

Oh, it was ingrained, by now: even on a motorcycle, he'd be wearing his seedy suit and carrying his Bible. He would never stop being a preacher. And even if he did, I wasn't so sure any more that it would make a difference.

Often Saul invited people for Sunday dinner-homeless visitors, sinners from the mourners' bench. Sometimes they stayed. We had an old lady named Miss Feather, for instance, up on our third floor-evicted froja her aparI'ment the spring of 'xx, just borrowing a room until she found another. Which she never did. Never will, I suppose. We had soldiers, hitchhikers, traveling salesmen-country people lonesome for their family churches, passing through, glad for a taste of my buckwheat pancakes. And one Sunday, a bearded man in work clothes came to the mourners' bench while the congregation was singing "Just As I Am." Saul stopped his singing and descended from the pulpit. He set his hands on the man's shoulders. Then he hugged him, gripping the dark, shiny head which was-why, of course! An Emory head. Linus Emory, the one who'd had the nervous breakdown, freed by his aunt's death to wander back. Depressed as ever, but lit by this reunion like a bone china cup held up to a candle. We took him home for dinner. He spent all the mealtime looking around the table at us, staring into Selinda's face, hanging on our words so closely that he almost seemed to be speaking them with us. Even Mama-even old Miss Feather, passing him the beaten biscuits-could make his eyes too shiny. It was so good to be home, he told us.

Then he went upstairs and claimed another of Alberta's old beds, and unpacked his cardboard suitcase into a bureau.

Are you keeping track? There were seven of us now, not counting those just passing through. Amos was still in Iowa, teaching music, I believe. And Alberta was someplace in California. But otherwise we'd transplanted that house of theirs lock, stock, and barrel. We had their beds, their hats, their sons, their one-way window eyes. Even my mother appeared to have solidified into someone darker, and Miss Feather had taken on their proud way of standing, and Selinda's face was as seraphic as something in a locket. "Have you noticed?" I asked Saul.

There seem to be so many Emorys here." But Saul only nodded, thumbing through his date-book, no doubt hunting another funeral or Youth Group meeting. "I always did want a place for my brothers to come home to," he said.

That was what he'd always wanted?

Oh, I saw it now. Finally I could sum him up: he'd only been a poor, homesick G. I., longing for house, wife, family, church. A common type. Every mourners' bench has one. "You're just looking for a way not to be alone," I told him.

But Saul said, "There is no way not to be alone," and shut his datebook and looked out across the dark hallway. Then I was unsure again, and saw that I couldn't sum him up after all. Whatever he was once, it had taken me all these years to find it out and now I couldn't say what he was today. I would be several steps behind forever.

"And the-and the money!" I cried, to keep from being drawn to him. "How can we feed them?" (Thinking meanwhile of the shallow brass collection plates, his only income; of the nickel-and-dime studio; and the radio shop that barely paid Julian's gambling debts, which shrank and swelled like something alive according to his lapses.) The Lord will provide," said Saul. He left for his meeting.

I gave up hope. Then in order not to mind too much I loosened my roots, floated a few feet off, and grew to look at things with a faint, pleasant humorousness that spiced my nose like the beginnings of a sneeze. After a while the humor became a habit; I couldn't have lost it even if I'd tried. My world began to seem… temporary. I saw that I must be planning to leave, eventually. Surely I wouldn't be with him very much longer. At all times now I carried a hundred-dollar traveler's check in the secret compartment of my billfold. I had bought my walking shoes. I planned to take nothing else but Selinda-my excess baggage, loved and burdensome. When would the proper current come to bear us away?

In the studio, sometimes, I found myself stopping work as if to listen for its arrival, raising my head and growing dazed and still. Then the customer would clear his throat or shuffle his feet, and I would say, "Hmm?" and quickly wheel closer the camera that I still didn't think of as my own. It was my father's. This was his room. Those were his yellowed, brittle prints curling off the walls. I was only a transient. My photos were limpid and relaxed, touched with that grace things have when you know they're of no permanent importance.