Earthly Possessions, Page 2

  My mother believed there’d been a mix-up at the hospital. It was all such a shock, that whole business, she said; she’d been a little dazed. An unexpected birth is like—why, an earthquake! a tornado! Other natural disasters. Your mind hasn’t quite prepared a frame for it yet. “Besides,” she would say, plucking at the front of her dress, “they gave me some kind of laughing gas, I think. Then everything was a dream. My vision was affected and when they showed me the baby I assumed it was a roll of absorbent cotton. Mostly they kept her in the nursery. On the day I went home they handed me this bundle: a stark-naked child in a washed-out blanket. Why! I thought. This is not mine! But I was still so surprised, you see, and besides didn’t want to make trouble. I took what they gave me.”

  Then she would study my face, with her forehead all ridged and sorrowful. I knew what she was wondering: what stranger’s looks had I inherited? I was thin and drab, with straight brown hair. Nobody else in the family had brown hair. There were peculiarities about me that no one could explain: my extremely high arches, which refused to be crammed into many styles of shoes; my yellowish skin; and my height. I was always tall for my age. Now where did that come from? Not from my father. Not from my mother’s side—my five-foot mother and her squat brother Gerard and her portly, baby-faced father beaming out of the photo frames, and certainly not from my Great-Aunt Charlotte, for whom I was named, whose pictures show her feet dangling comically when she is seated in an armchair. Something had gone wrong somewhere.

  “But of course I love you anyway,” my mother said.

  I knew she did. Love is not what we are talking about, here.

  Unfortunately I was born in 1941, when Camp Aaron was filling up with soldiers and Clarion County Hospital suddenly had more patients—mainly soldiers’ wives, giving birth—than at any other time before or since. All the hospital’s records for that period are skimpy, inaccurate, or just plain lost. I know, because my mother checked. She had nothing to go on. Somewhere out in the world her little blond daughter was growing up with a false name, a false identity, a set of false, larcenous parents. But my mother just had to live with that, she said. Her hands fluttered out, abandoning hope.

  To her the world was large and foreign. I knew that it was small. Sooner or later her true daughter would be found. Then what?

  My father, if asked directly, said that I was the true daughter. He didn’t go on and on about it; he just said, “Of course.” Once he took me into a guest room and showed me my baby clothes, packed away in a brassbound trunk. (I don’t know what he thought that proved.) He had had to buy those clothes himself, he said, while my mother was lying in the hospital. He had bought those clothes for me. He jabbed a finger at my chest, then scratched his head a moment as if trying to recall something and went off to the studio. I worried that he was building toward one of his moods. I barely glanced at the baby clothes (yellowed, wrinkled, packed together so long and so tightly you would have to peel them away like cigar leaves) before I left too and went to find him. I worked alongside him all afternoon, rinsing heavy glass negatives under running water, but he didn’t say anything more to me.

  Meals were strained and silent: only the clinking of silverware. My parents didn’t speak, or if they did, it was in a hopeless, bitter way. “Bitter as acorns,” my father said, and he set the coffeecup down so sharply that it splashed across the mended tablecloth. Then my mother lowered her face to her hands, and my father jerked his chair back and went to wind the clock. I mashed my peas with my spoon. There was no point in eating. Anything you ate in that house would sit on your stomach forever, like a stone.

  These were my two main worries when I was a child: one was that I was not their true daughter, and would be sent away. The other was that I was their true daughter and would never, ever manage to escape to the outside world.

  3

  I was glad the robber had let me have the window seat. Even if it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart, at least I got to see the last of Clarion skating by. Followed by a string of housing developments, and then wide open fields where I could just sit back and let my eyes get lost. It was years since I had been anywhere.

  Meanwhile there was this nylon jacket slicking around to one side of me, continually changing position. He was restless, I could tell. I mean restless in a permanent way, by nature. At all stop signs and traffic lights he resettled himself. When a woman rose to get off by a mailbox in the middle of nowhere I heard his fingers drumming, drumming, all the time the bus was stopped. Once we had to slow down behind a tractor and he actually groaned out loud. Then shifted his feet, scrunched his shoulders around, scratched his knee. With his left hand, of course. His right hand was out of sight—arm folded across his stomach, gun jammed between my third and fourth ribs. He was taking no chances.

  What did he think I would do? Jump out that little, sooty window? Ask the old lady in front of me for help? Scream? Well, scream, maybe; that might work. (If they didn’t just think I was a lunatic and pretend not to hear.) But I am not the kind to scream, I never have been. As a child I nearly drowned once, sinking in a panic beneath the lifeguard’s eyes with my lips clamped tightly together. I would rather die than make any sort of disturbance.

  We rode alongside a freight train a ways. I counted the cars. If you’re stuck you’re stuck, I figure; might as well relax. I wondered why the B & O Railroad had changed its name to the Chessie System. Chessie could be a new kind of sandwich spread, or a lady gym instructor.

  From time to time it occurred to me that I could possibly be killed in a while.

  The soldier’s radio was playing a golden oldie, “Little Things Mean a Lot.” I could close my eyes and be dancing at the Sophomore Prom again if I wanted. Which I didn’t. The song broke off in the middle of a high note and a man said, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.”

  The bank robber didn’t move a muscle, but he grew a surface of awareness that I could feel.

  “Clarion police report that the Maryland Safety Savings Bank was robbed at around two thirty this afternoon. A white man in his early twenties, apparently working alone, escaped with two hundred dollars in one-dollar bills and a female hostage as yet unidentified. Fortunately, the bank’s automatic cameras were activated and police have every hope of—”

  The soldier turned a dial on his radio. The announcer lost interest and wandered away. Olivia Newton-John drifted in.

  “Shoot,” said the robber.

  I jumped.

  “What’s a two-bit place like that want with cameras?”

  I risked a glance at him. There was a little muscle flickering near the corner of his mouth. “But listen—” I said. The pistol nudged me, like a thumb. “Listen,” I whispered. “You’re gone now! You’re out of there.”

  “Sure. With my face all over a roll of film.”

  “What does that matter?”

  “They’ll identify me,” he said.

  Identify? Did that mean he was a known criminal? Or paranoid, maybe—some maniac from Lovill State Hospital. Either way, it didn’t look good.

  “It don’t look good,” he told me.

  His voice was thin and gravelly—the voice of a man who doesn’t care what he sounds like. I wasn’t encouraged by it. I shut my mind and turned back to the window, where peaceful farms were rolling by.

  “What are you staring at?” he asked.

  “Cows,” I said.

  “They’re going to meet me at the next town, wait and see. What’s the next town?”

  “Now listen,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the radio? They know you have a hostage, that’s all they know yet. They’re looking for a man who’s traveling with a hostage. All you’ve got to do is let me go. Doesn’t that make sense? Next place we stop at, let me off. You stay on the bus. I won’t say a word, I promise. What do I care if they catch you or not?”

  He didn’t seem to have heard. He gazed straight ahead of him with that muscle still working. “One thing I cannot abide is be
ing locked up,” he said finally.

  “Right.”

  “Can’t take it.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re staying with me till I see that bank film.”

  “What?”

  “Half the time them things’re all blurry anyhow,” he said. “Why panic? We’ll wait and see. If the film’s no good, if they lose my tracks, why, then I let you go.”

  “Well—how will you know the film is no good?”

  “They show it on the tube,” he said. “Evening news, I bet you anything.”

  “But where will you get to watch it?”

  “Baltimore, where’d you think.”

  He let his head fall back against the seat. I returned to looking at farms. I thought I had never seen anything so heartless as the calm, indifferent way those cows were grazing.

  We must have been on the most local kind of bus it is possible to get, because we stopped at towns I’d never heard of before and a lot of other places besides. Crossroads, trailer parks, lean-tos covered with election posters. By the time we reached Baltimore it was twilight. I could look out the window and see my own reflection gazing back at me, more interesting-looking than in real life. Beyond was the outline of the bank robber, constantly shifting and fidgeting.

  At the terminal, our headlights colored a wallful of black men in crocheted caps and satin coats, lounging around chewing toothpicks. “Balmer!” the driver said, and the passengers rose and collected their things. All but me and the bank robber; he held me down. He made me wait till the others were past. Now it was my turn to get fidgety. I have a little trouble with closed-in spaces. If a bus isn’t running its motor it is definitely a closed-in space. “I need to get off,” I told him.

  “You’ll get off when I say so.”

  “But I can’t stand it here.”

  His eyes flicked over at me.

  “Do you want me to have hysterics?”

  I wouldn’t really have had hysterics, but he didn’t know that. He stood up and motioned me into the aisle with a gleam of his pistol. We followed the soldier, whose radio was playing “Washington Square.” For some reason I always get “Washington Square” mixed up with “Midnight in Moscow” and it wasn’t till I was all the way off the bus, standing in a daze on the concrete and teetering from the long ride, that I decided it was “Washington Square.”

  “Will you move it?” the robber said.

  Couples were meeting and kissing in the gray light between buses. We dodged them and headed toward the street. There were a lot of people milling around there, mostly men, mostly no-account. It was the hour for getting off work but that wasn’t what they were doing here, surely—standing about in packs, loitering in front of cocktail lounges and peep shows and “Girls! Nitely!” There was a strong smell of French fries. Everybody looked dangerous. But I had this robber and his warm heavy gun, and anyway, what was left to lose? He was the one with the purse. I slid through the crowds as easily as a fish, unhampered, guided by that nudge in the small of my back.

  “Stop,” he said.

  We had come to a dingy little place with a neon sign sizzling in the window: BENJAMIN’S. A red wooden door so thickly painted I could have scratched my name on it with a fingernail. He pulled it open and we went inside. A TV set turned the air blue and dusty; rows of bottles topped with silver globes glittered before a mirror. We felt our way to the bar and sat down. I unbuttoned my raincoat. A man in an apron turned his cheek to us, while his eyes stayed fixed on the television.

  “What’ll you have?” the robber asked me.

  At our house, nobody drinks; but I didn’t want to seem unfriendly. “Pabst Blue Ribbon,” I said at random.

  “One Pabst, one Jack Daniel’s neat,” said the robber.

  The bartender poured Jack Daniel’s blindly, while watching a commercial for potato chips. But he had to turn away to hunt a glass for my beer. Then the news began and he gave up, passed me a stark tall can unopened and held out his palm for whatever money the robber put into it.

  Various politicians were traveling around the countryside. We saw them getting off airplanes, setting right in to shake hand after hand like people hauling rope. We saw a man who’d been acquitted by a jury. He believed in the American system of justice, he said. There was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.

  “Hit me again,” the robber told the bartender, holding out his glass. I opened and took a sip of my beer. The good thing about sitting at a counter was that I didn’t have to look at him. We could each pretend the other wasn’t there.

  My eyes were used to the dark by now and I could see that this place was hardly better than a barn—barren, dirty, cold. It would have been cold even in July; no sunlight ever reached it, surely. I wondered what the restrooms were like. I needed to go to one but I wasn’t certain of the procedure.

  They had never covered this problem on those cops-and-robbers shows.

  In the local news, there was a school board meeting. A policeman’s funeral. A drug arrest. A five-car accident in Pearl Bay. A bank robbery in Clarion.

  The announcer’s face gave way to film of a different quality, blurred and shadowy. On this film a small group of people stumbled in line, like dominoes. The foremost person, a squat man in a business suit, tore something from his chest. An arm loomed out. Another man backed jerkily away, half hidden by a tall, thin woman in a light-colored raincoat. The man and woman disappeared. Several faces swam forward, and someone put a white scarf or handkerchief to his or her eyes. I was fascinated. I’d never before been able to observe a room after I had left it.

  The announcer returned, a little blank of face as if he’d been caught unawares. “So,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Well, that was … and remember you saw it here first, folks, a genuine bank robbery in progress. Police have identified the suspect as Jake Simms, Jr., a recent escapee from the Clarion County Jail, but so far no one has stepped forward to name his hostage. However, roadblocks have been set up and Clarion’s police chief Andrews feels confident that the suspect is still in the area.”

  “Come on,” said Jake Simms.

  We slid off our stools and left. In the doorway I glanced back at the bartender, but his eyes were still on the screen.

  “I knew it would work out like this,” the robber told me.

  “But you’re past all the roadblocks.”

  “They’re looking for me by name.”

  We threaded our way through even larger crowds than before, none of them apparently going anywhere at all. As far as I could tell, the gun wasn’t jammed in my back any more. Was I free? I stood still.

  “Keep moving,” he told me.

  “I want to find the bus station.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  We stood square in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the flow of pedestrians. He needed a shave, I saw. It made me uneasy to be at eye level with him; I distrust compactly built men. I reached out a hand, careful to make no sudden moves. “Could I have my purse, please?” I said.

  “Look,” he told me. “It ain’t me keeping you, it’s them. If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways, and believe me, lady, there ain’t nothing I’d like better. But now they have my name, see, and will track me down, and I need you for protection till I get to safety. Understand?”

  We went to another bar, as dark as the first but with some customers in it. This time we sat at a little wooden table in the corner. “Now let me think. Just let me think,” he told me, although I hadn’t said a word. Then he gave his order to the waitress: “One Jack Daniel’s neat, one Pabst. Couple bags of pretzels.” I decided not to drink the Pabst because of the restroom problem. I folded my arms on the table and craned my neck to see the TV—this one in color, a man reeling off the weather. Meanwhile, Jake Simms set my purse on the table between us. “What you got in here?” he asked me.

  “Pardon?”

  “Any weapons?” br />
  “Any—no!”

  He undid the catch and opened it. He pulled out my billfold, frayed and curling. Inside was a pathetic bit of paper money. Small change and bobbypins. A library card. He glanced at it. “Charlotte Emory,” he said. He studied a photo of me holding Selinda, back when she was a baby. Then he looked into my face. I knew what he was thinking: lately I had let myself go. However, he didn’t comment on it.

  He pulled out a rubber-banded stack of grocery coupons, which made him snort; a pack of tissues, an unclean hairbrush, and a pair of nail scissors. He tested the point of the scissors with his thumb and then looked at me. I was still focused on the hairbrush; it had disgraced me. I didn’t connect. “No weapons, huh,” he said.

  “What?”

  The waitress brought our order and presented him with the bill. While he was rummaging in his pocket I sent her silent messages: Doesn’t this look odd to you, this man emptying out a lady’s purse? Don’t we make a strange couple? Shouldn’t you be mentioning this to someone? The waitress merely stood there, gazing dreamily into the marbled mirror above us and holding out her little plastic change tray.

  When she had left, Jake Simms dropped the scissors under the table and gave them a kick. I heard them scuttle across the floor. Then he reached into my purse again. This time it was a paperback—my Survival Book, worn to shreds. How to get along in the desert. He frowned. Turned the purse upside down, shook it—and out clattered something shiny which he trapped immediately. “What’s this?” he said, holding it up.

  Oh, Lord, my badge. Little tin badge, shield-shaped, like something official or military. “I’ll take that,” I told him.

  He looked suspicious.

  “Can I have it, please?”

  “What is it?”