Earthly Possessions (14 page)

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.

The Dorothea Whitman Home was a mansion on a hill, landscaped, framed by trees. “Sheesh!” Jake said, peering at it through the windshield. We had parked at the gateposts, which were topped with spongy stone balls. It was six o’clock in the morning, and both of us were half asleep and chilled through. Also, we hadn’t had breakfast yet. We
could
have, but Jake had spent the time shaving instead. He had shaved without water and his face had a new, raw, inadequate look. I thought we’d have done much better going to a Toddle House. And there wasn’t a sign of Mindy Callender.

“Now, here is what she told me,” said Jake. “Said, ‘Park at the gatepost and I’ll come on down.’ Well, ain’t this a gatepost? Ain’t it?”

“Looks like one to
me,”
I said.

“Maybe she meant the front door.”

“Why would she call the front door a gatepost?”

“But if she has to make a fast getaway, see. Then we ought to be parked a mite nearer.”

“I would stay by the gatepost,” I said.

“Well, I tell you this much,” said Jake. “Five minutes more and I’m going. I can think of lots of places I’d rather be than here.”

High on the hill, the great scrolled door of the mansion opened and someone stepped out. From this far away she looked like one of those little figures in a weather house. Her stomach was circular, flower-shaped, preceding the rest of her by a good two feet. She wore a straw hat and a pink dress, and carried a suitcase and a bundle of something dark. While she was walking toward us she never once looked in our direction, but picked her way carefully with her head lowered so that all we saw was the crown of her hat. “Is that Mindy?” I asked Jake.

“Naw, it’s the warden.”

“Well, I don’t know what Mindy looks like.”

“It’s Mindy, all right,” he said. “She never did dress like she had any common sense.”

For she was close enough now so that we could see what she was wearing: a print sundress not meant for anyone so pregnant, with straps as thin as the joint lines on a Barbie Doll’s shoulders. Her hat was ringed with little embroidered hearts. The bundle in her arms turned out to be a cat. “Cripes, a cat!” Jake said.

Mindy raised her head then and looked at us. She had a childish round face with a pointed chin, and white-blond hair that streamed to her waist. Some ten feet from the car she stopped and set her suitcase down, not smiling. “Well,” Jake sighed, and he opened the door and got out. “Hey there, Mindy,” he called.

“Who’s that you got with you.”

“Hmm?”

“Who’s that
lady
, Jake?”

“Oh, why, she’s just going to ride with us a spell,” Jake said. “Get on in, now.”

“How’m I going to get in with the doors chained shut?”

“Use my side. Move it, Mindy, they’ll be after you.”

“Oh, everybody’s still sleeping,” Mindy said. She came around the car, lugging the suitcase stiff-armed and just barely hanging on to her cat. Jake drew away from her, but without actually stepping back.

“Now I am not going to drive no
cat
about,” he told her.

“But he’s mine.”

“Look here, Mindy.”

“He
belongs
to me.”

Jake rubbed his nose. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Make sure he stays in your lap, though.” He opened the back door, shoved her suitcase in, and stood aside to let her follow it. Mindy stayed where she was. “Aren’t I going to sit in the front?” she asked him.

“How come?”

“We been separated all these months and now you want to ask how
come?”

She stood on tiptoe suddenly and twined her free arm around his neck. She really was a tiny girl. The biggest thing about her was that stomach, which Jake carefully wasn’t looking at. “We got a lot of plans to make,” she said, and kissed the corner of his mouth. Then she slid into the car, bounced a little, and turned to me. “I’m Mindy Callender,” she told me.

“I’m Charlotte Emory.”

“Pee-ew! Where’d this old car come from? Smells like a dustbin.”

Maybe it did, but all I could smell was her perfume: Sugared strawberries. As soon as Jake had settled in the driver’s
seat, he rolled down the window a crack. “Won’t you be cold?” I asked Mindy.

“Oh no, I’ve got the hot flashes.”

“The what?”

“Been hot as Hades the whole seven months. Can’t stand a blanket, won’t wear sweaters. It only happens with some rare few women.” She cast a sudden look at Jake, who didn’t say anything. He started the car and set off down the road. “What’s that funny noise?” Mindy asked him.

“What noise?”

“Jake, I just don’t know about this car. Where’d you say you got it?”

“Off a friend,” Jake said. “Some friend.”

She settled back, hugging the cat. This cat was a marbled brown color, with glaring yellow eyes and chipped ears. It was plain he didn’t like to be held. First he tried to struggle free and then he gave up, but not really: his eyes were squared, the tip of his tail twitched, and every time Mindy patted him he would shrug her off. “I believe that Plymouth would rather he hadn’t come,” said Mindy.

Jake said, “Who?”

“Plymouth. My cat.”

“Well, I go along with Plymouth,” said Jake. “What you want a cat for? You never used to like them.”

“At the Home there’s a pet for everyone,” Mindy told him. “They say it’s therapeutic.”

“Therapeutic.”

“Some of the girls have dogs. Some have birds.”

“Well, I don’t hold with having birds,” said Jake. “We make things, too; that’s therapeutic. And we have a lot of activities, speeches and lessons and things. Last night we had Child Care; that’s why I couldn’t meet you. We were going to give a bath to a rubber doll and I didn’t want to miss it.”

Jake slammed on the brakes, though the highway was deserted. He turned and stared at Mindy. “Watch the
road
, Jake,” Mindy said.

“Now, let me get this straight,” said Jake. “You couldn’t meet us last evening because you had to give a doll a bath.”

“Well, there was a lot of other stuff too,” Mindy said.

“Mindy Callender, do you know where we spent last night? Sleeping out. Shut in a car in the middle of the woods, and with no hot flashes to warm us, neither.”

“Well, who is ‘us’?” Mindy asked.

“Me and Charlotte, who’d you think?”

She gave me a closer look. Deep down, her eyes were speckled. “I didn’t quite catch it,” she said.
“Where
is it you come from?”

“Clarion,” said Jake.

“She been riding all this way with you?”

“She’s, ah, going as far as Florida,” Jake told her. “Then she’ll be saying goodbye.”

“Florida! Oh, Jake, is that where we’re headed?” And she rose up to hug him, covering my lap with a billow of skirts, pulling Jake sideways. The car swerved. The cat made a leap and landed in the back seat, shaking various parts of himself and looking insulted.

“Watch it, will you,” Jake said. “Well, I figure we might as well be
warm
the next two months, no harm in that. Besides, Oliver’s in Florida.”

“Oh, Oliver, Oliver, always Oliver,” said Mindy, picking brown hairs off her dress. Now that the cat was gone I could see that she also had a purse: shiny white vinyl, heart-shaped, like something a child would carry to Sunday School. She caught me looking at it and spun it by its strap. “Like it?” she asked me. “It’s new.”

“It’s very nice,” I said.

“I thought it would match my other stuff.”

She raised a thin, knobby wrist, with a bracelet dangling heart-shaped charms in all different colors and sizes. The pink stone in her ring was heart-shaped too, and so was the print of her dress. “Hearts are my
sign,”
Mindy said. “What’s yours?”

“Well, I don’t really have a sign,” I told her.

“You married, Charlotte?”

“Of course she’s married, leave off of her,” Jake said.

“I was just asking.”

“She don’t want all your busybody questions.”

“Look here, Jake, we were just having this ordinary conversation about my purse and all, and the only thing I asked her was—”

“You got any money in that purse?” Jake said.

“Huh? I don’t know. A little, I guess.”

“How much?”

“Well, talk about busybody!”

“See, I left home without my wallet,” Jake said.

“How could you do a thing like that?”

“Never mind how, it just happened that way. How much you got?”

Mindy opened her purse and riffled through it. “Ten, fifteen … sixteen dollars and some cents, it looks like.”

“That ain’t very much,” said Jake.

“Well, la-de-da to
you
, mister.”

We passed a truckful of crated chickens. There was a silence. Then Jake said, “They let you carry money around that place?”

“Sure.”

“But what would you use it for?”

“Oh, like if we want to walk into town or something. Buy us a soda or shampoo or movie magazine.”

“You just walk on into town,” said Jake. “Any old time you want.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I took tight hold of the door handle and waited. But Jake didn’t say a thing, not a word. He merely drove on, with his face as still as a stone.

In the restroom of the diner where we stopped for breakfast, Mindy had me put her hair into ponytails. “I was scared to do it myself,” she said, “and my roommate was asleep.”

“What were you scared of?” I asked.

“Why, you know I shouldn’t raise my arms that high. I might strangle the baby on its cord.”

“But—”

“How do I look?” she asked me.

She looked about twelve years old, younger than my daughter even, with her two perky ponytails and her blue, trusting gaze. In the mirror beside her I was suddenly dimmed: an older woman, flat-haired, wearing a raincoat that had clearly been slept in. “Don’t you have no lipstick?” Mindy said.

“Lipstick? No.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to borrow mine.”

She handed it to me, already unrolled—something pink and fruity-smelling. I handed it back. “Thanks anyway,” I told her.

“Come on, you could use a little color.”

“No, really, I—”

“You want me to do it?”

“No. Please.”

“But listen, at the Home I made up everybody. I mean a lot of those girls just never had learned what to do with theirselves, you know? Keep still a minute.”

“Stop!”
I said.

She looked startled. She took a step backward, still holding the lipstick.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I told her.

“That’s all right,” she said. She rolled and capped the lipstick
in silence, and dropped it into her purse. “Well!” she said. But when she looked up again I saw that her face was white and stricken, smaller somehow than before.

“Please don’t feel bad,” I told her. “It’s just that I didn’t want to be put in someone else’s looks. I mean,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, “what if I got
stuck
that way? Like crossing your eyes; didn’t your mother ever warn you about that?”

Mindy said, “Oh, Charlotte, do you think he’s at all glad to see me?”

“Of course he is,” I said.

Driving was slower now because we had to stop so often. First of all, the cat kept getting carsick. From time to time he would give this low moan, and then Jake would curse and brake and swerve to the side of the road. The trouble was, the cat wouldn’t come out of the car then. We’d all be calling, “Plymouth? Here, Plymouth,” but he only crouched down beneath the seat, and we’d have to sit helpless and listen to his little choking sounds. “This is
therapeutic?”
Jake asked.

Then Mindy had so many foot cramps. Every time one hit her, we’d have to stop and let her walk it off. We stood leaning against the car, watching her hobble through some field littered with flowers and beer bottles. It was truly warm now, and so bright I had to squint. Mindy looked like a little sunlit robot.

“It’s easing!” she would call back. “I feel it starting to ease up some!”

“Now’s the kind of time I wish I smoked,” Jake said. “I can feel those muscles slacking!”

Jake’s jacket ballooned in the wind. He slouched beside me. Our elbows touched. We were like two parents exercising a child in the park.
“You
had children,” he said suddenly, as if reading my mind.

I nodded.

“Ever get foot cramps?”

“Well, no.”

“It’s all in her head,” he told me.

“Oh, I doubt that.”

I could feel him watching me. I looked away. Then he asked, “How many?”

“What?”

“How many children.”

“Two,” I said.

“Your husband like kids?”

“Well, of course.”

“What’s he do?”

“Do?”

“Do for a
living
, Charlotte. Where’s your mind at?”

“Oh. He’s a … well, he’s a preacher,” I said.

Jake whistled.

“You’re putting me on,” he told me.

“No.”

Mindy wandered back to us, trailing strands of flowers. “They’re gone now,” she said. But Jake only looked at her blankly, as if wondering what it was that was supposed to have gone.

Along about noontime, we passed a billboard showing a clump of plastic oranges, welcoming us to Florida. “Whoopee!” Mindy said. “Now, how much further?”

“Forever,” Jake told her. “Ain’t you ever seen a U.S. map? We are driving down its great old long big toe.”

“But I’m tired of riding. Can’t we stop at a motel or something? Miss Bohannon says long drives aren’t good for us.”

“Who’s Miss Bohannon?”

“She’s a nurse, she teaches Child Care.”

Jake frowned and speeded up. “Well, another thing,” he said. “I don’t
understand
why they have this Child Care business.”