Earthly Possessions (23 page)

“No trouble at all, Mindy, I got it right here.” He searched his jacket, accidentally poking me with one elbow. “Look at here. Domino sugar.”

The packets were worn and grimy by now. He held them out, a double handful. “Never say I don’t come prepared.”

“Jake Simms,” said Mindy, “don’t you know anything? It’s not sugar I need, that would be stupid.”

He lowered his hands. He looked over at me. “Can you figure that?” he asked.

“Well …”

“She’s got low blood sugar, but she don’t want to
eat
sugar.”

“She must know, I guess.”

He shook his head, looking down at the packets. “I just don’t see this, Mindy,” he said. “You don’t even make sense. How come you run after me so hard if it turns out there’s no way I can please you?”

“Me
run after
you?”
said Mindy. “Oh, go ahead, gripe and groan. Blame it all on me. Then ask yourself what you told me last Fourth of July. Go on, ask yourself.”

He gave me a quick glance, sideways, from under his blunt lashes.

“What’d you tell her?” I asked.

He set his mouth, crammed the sugar back into his pockets.

“Told me he never had come to rest with anyone but me,” said Mindy. “Said he didn’t know why, it was just the way he felt. We were eating a picnic lunch, he had done right poorly in a demolition derby. I told him that derby didn’t matter a bit. ‘To
my
mind,’ I told him, ‘you will always be like the first time I saw you driving: real swift and fine, in your white western jacket that got tore up later in that derby over by Washington.’ And that’s when he said what he said. Asked if I would marry him.”

“I never did,” said Jake.

“Well, you said you could see that it might someday come to pass.”

“You just got it all twisted around to suit your purposes.”

“No, Jake,” she said. “Believe me, I do not. It’s
you
that twists. Can’t you see what spits you in the face? For every time you run from me, there’s another time you run
after
me, deliver yourself up to me. You say, ‘Mindy, I’m yours. You’re all I got.’ You call out under my window, you drive by my house in the night and I see your headlights slide across my ceiling. You get me on the telephone: ‘Everybody’s mad at me and the world don’t look so hot. Can’t you come on out and keep me company?’ ”

“You just like to exaggerate,” said Jake.

“What you said was, ‘I can see that we might someday find ourselves married.’ ”

“If I did, I don’t recall it.”

“ ‘Like, if you was to end up pregnant or something,’ you said.”

There was a silence.

“You said, ‘What do I want to keep buffeting back and forth for, anyhow? Why don’t I just give up?’ ”

In the sudden glow of a movie marquee Jake’s face appeared sallow, unhealthy. The skin beneath his eyes was a bruised color.

“Isn’t that the truth?” Mindy asked him.

“Hold it, I found us a bank. Pull over.”

She slammed on the brakes, throwing both of us forward, and veered into a parking space. Jake held himself upright with a hand on the dashboard. “There was something I was meaning to ask,” he said slowly. “All this crazy talk has put it right out of my head.”

We waited.

Then his face cleared. “How much money you got?” he said to Mindy.

“Is that all you can think about?”

“I mention it in case you want a hot dog or something, while me and Charlotte are in the bank.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I got enough.”

“See that little diner joint? Meet you there in five minutes. Maybe ten.”

“You want me to order
you
two something?”

“Naw,” said Jake.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Oh, why, well sure,” he said, “but that hot dog is just to hold you, Mindy. After we get our money we’re going somewheres good. Isn’t that right, Charlotte. Charlotte?”

“A steak place would be nice,” said Mindy.

“Steak place, any place, I don’t care,” he told her. “Scoot.”

Mindy opened the door and slid out. We followed. Jake touched a finger to Mindy’s wrist. “Bye,” he said.

“Bye,” she said, and left, swinging her heart-shaped purse. It was a warm, buggy night that smelled of caramel. The
streets were nearly deserted. To our right was a beige brick cube with aluminum letters across the front:
SECOND FEDERAL
. We climbed the steps and spun through the revolving door. My face felt tight in the sudden coolness. Tubes of harsh white light made us blink, and our feet were hushed by fuzzy carpeting. I took my place behind a man in a business suit.

“Why this
here
line?” Jake asked me. “This is the longest.”

Of course it was longest. I was going to be leaving soon and I didn’t want events to move too quickly. As if he guessed that, Jake moved in closer behind me. “Charlotte,” he said in my ear.

“Hmm?”

“I don’t want you pulling nothing funny. Understand?”

I nearly laughed. I wondered what he imagined I could do. Leap the teller’s grate in a single bound? Sign my check in some suspicious way?
Charlotte Emory, hostage
. The teller wouldn’t even raise her eyebrows. She would glance at my signature indifferently, as if I’d stated some natural condition or occupation. Oh, I knew better by now than to count on other people for help. “Don’t be silly,” I said to Jake. He must have seen that I meant it; he dropped back. His nylon jacket rustled. The man in the business suit left, folding a sheaf of bills.

“I’d like to cash a traveler’s check,” I said to the teller. She looked bored. I signed my name with a chained ball-point pen and passed the check through the grate. In return she counted out a hundred dollars in twenties. I counted once more and then gave my place up to a red-headed lady who was dabbing her nose with a Kleenex.

Out on the street, Jake said, “Well, that wasn’t so hard.”

“No,” I said.

“Nothing to it.”

“No.”

We passed a shoestore, darkened now, and then a florist’s
where ugly tropical flowers glowed behind glass. We reached the diner—a railroad car surrounded by a picket fence. Through one long, greasy window we saw Mindy with her back to us, her elbows on the counter, twisting idly on her stool so her skirt belled out and swirled. We stood watching as if we had nowhere else to go, no plans in mind at all. Jake gave a sudden, sharp sigh.

“I was fixing to leave her,” he said.

I nodded.

“But I can’t,” he said. “She’s right, you know. I have some ties to her.”

Mindy hoisted a hot dog into the air; she was wiping her face in the crook of her elbow, which from here seemed as delicate as a vine or tendril.

“I’m going to end up married to her, ain’t I, Charlotte.”

“Well, I guess that maybe you are, Jake,” I said.

“I’ve done myself in. Ain’t I? Just going to end up trucking along in that life she wants.”

I looked at him.

“Gold and avocado,” said Jake. “Patricia curtains. Babies. See what I’ve come to? What you staring at?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Here.”

“What’s this?”

It was money, as he could plainly see. Five new twenty-dollar bills. I had to fold his fingers around them. He said, “Charlotte?”

“I’m leaving now,” I told him.

His mouth fell open.

“I can’t stay on forever, Jake. You knew I’d have to go sometime.”

“No, wait,” he said. His voice had turned harsh and raspy.

“Tell Mindy goodbye for me.”

“Charlotte, but … see, I can’t quite manage without you just yet. Understand? I’ve got this pregnant woman on my
hands, got all these … Charlotte, it ain’t so bad if you’re
with
us, you see. You act like you take it all in stride, like this is the way life really does tend to turn out. You mostly wear this little smile. I mean, we know each other, Charlotte. Don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And anyhow!” he said. He suddenly lifted his chin. He thrust the money in his pocket and stood straighter, teetering slightly from heel to toe. “I don’t know why I’m
begging
, you can’t leave anyhow. I’ve got your money.”

“You can have it,” I told him.

“Then how would you travel? Just tell me that.”

“Oh well, I’ll … go to Travelers’ Aid,” I said.

“And your medal!”

“What?”

“I guess you want it back, don’t you.”

“Medal? Oh, the—”

“Well, you won’t get it. I aim to keep it.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

I held out my hand. I didn’t want to just walk away without shaking hands. But Jake wouldn’t take it. His chin was still tilted and he watched me from across the two polished planes of his cheekbones. In the end I had to give up.

“Well, goodbye,” I told him.

And I turned and set off in the direction we’d come from, where it seemed most likely I’d find a bus terminal.

Then Jake said, “Charlotte?”

I stopped.

“Keep going and I’ll shoot you, Charlotte.”

I started walking again.

“I’m aiming now. Hear? I’ve took the safety off. It’s loaded. It’s pointed at your heart.”

My footsteps had a steady sound, like rain.

“Charlotte!”

I continued up the street, already feeling the hole that
would open in my back. I passed an elderly couple in evening clothes. Still no shot rang out. I saw now that it never would. I released my breath, marveling at my slipperiness: I had glided through so many dangers and emerged unscathed. As smooth as silk I swerved around a child, passed a glass-boxed woman in front of a theater. I reached the end of the block and looked back. There he stood, surprisingly small, still watching me. His collar was raised, his shoulders were hunched. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets. Come to think of it, I wasn’t so unscathed after all.

The police never did recapture Jake Simms. As far as I know, they’ve given up the search. I told them he was going to Texas, anyway.

There is somebody new in Mama’s old room: a drunk from the mourners’ bench who used to be an opera singer. His name is Mr. Bentham. On good days his voice is beautiful. And Miss Feather is with us the same as always, though Dr. Sisk has moved away. He married a woman from the church last July and lives in a ranch house on the other side of town.

Julian still works at the radio shop, in between his lapses; Selinda still floats in and out of our lives, and no one has yet come for Jiggs. But Linus has stopped building dollhouse furniture and moved on to the dolls themselves: diminutive wooden people, fully jointed. Their joints are little fragments of straight pins. Their faces are drawn with a needle dipped in ink. They
have distinctive features, coloring, and clothes, but share an expression of surprise, as if wondering how they got here.

And I still wheel my camera around, recording upside-down people in unexpected costumes. But I’ve come to believe that their borrowed medals may tell more truths than they hide. While Saul grips his pulpit as firmly as always, and studies his congregation. No doubt they are suspended in a lens of his own, equally truthful, equally flawed.

Sometimes, when Saul can’t sleep, he turns his head on the pillow and asks if I’m awake. We may have had a hard time that day: disagreed, misunderstood, come to one more invisible parting or tiny, jarring rearrangement of ourselves. He lies on his back in the old sleigh bed and starts to wonder: will everything work out? Is he all right, am I all right, are we happy, at least in some limited way? Maybe we ought to take a trip, he says. Didn’t I use to want to?

But I tell him no. I don’t see the need, I say. We have been traveling for years, traveled all our lives, we are traveling still. We couldn’t stay in one place if we tried. Go to sleep, I say.

And he does.

A
NNE
T
YLER
was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941, but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Anne Tyler has written thirteen novels.
Breathing Lessons
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She and her husband, Taghi Modarressi, live in Baltimore, Maryland.