Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler Page B

last so long. In the end I would find myself home again, walking into the overused air and my parents’ eternal questions: Why hadn’t I said goodbye that morning? What had kept me so late? Who was the boy who drove me home? And would I be staying in tonight, for once?
    Then I would look down at them (for I was taller than both, by now) and everything came back to me: I remembered who I really was. In the smoky mirror behind my mother, my pearls were as outlandish as a string of bear claws. My face had a yellowed look around the edges.
    I graduated from high school and got a part scholarship in mathematics at Markson College, over in Holgate. It seemed too simple. I kept wondering where the catch was.
    Yet the day after Labor Day, there I sat in my father’spickup with my suitcases piled in the rear. My mother didn’t come with us; it was hard for her to travel. As I waved to her out the window I had a sudden worry that she knew how glad I was that she was staying home. I wondered if that were
why
she was staying home. I waved all the harder, blew kisses. This was one time I didn’t try to get out of saying goodbye.
    Then my father drove me to Markson College, started to speak but gave up in the end, and left me at the dormitory. I was almost the first one there because I’d been so anxious to arrive. My roommate hadn’t come yet, whoever she was. It was noon but the cafeteria didn’t open till suppertime, so I ate an apple I’d brought and some Fig Newtons that my mother had tucked in my suitcase. The Fig Newtons made me unexpectedly homesick. Each bite caused my chest to ache. I had to hide them away in a drawer, finally. Then I unpacked, and put sheets on one bed, and wandered up and down the hall a while peeking into deserted rooms. After that I spent half an hour sitting at my desk, looking out the window at an empty sky. I’d brought along some curtains, but wasn’t going to hang them till my roommate approved them. However, time was creeping. I decided I’d hang them anyway. I unfolded the curtains, took off my shoes, and climbed onto a radiator. Spread-eagled against the window, I chanced to look down at the quadrangle. And there was my fat cousin Clarence, lumbering toward my dormitory in that ponderous, tilting way he had.
    I had known all along that escape couldn’t be so easy.
    My father was in the hospital. He had had an accident while driving home. The doctors weren’t so much worried about his injuries as about the heart attack that had caused the accident in the first place. Or maybe the accident had caused the heart attack. I don’t think they ever did get it straight.
    For three weeks we stayed near his bed—Mama in her wooden lawn chair that Clarence had brought from home andme in an easy chair. We watched my father’s face, which looked queer in horizontal position. His skin around his eyes had gone all crumpled. It tired him even to say a few words. Mostly he slept, and my mother cried, and I sat willing him awake again so that I could get to know him. I couldn’t stand to think how I had let him slide through my life all these years. I made a lot of promises; you know the kind. I brought my mother tea and glazed doughnuts, the only things that would sit on her stomach. I dealt with the doctors and nurses. I tried reading various women’s magazines, but all that talk about make-up and weight control and other frills just made me sick. I don’t remember eating any food whatsoever, though I suppose I must have.
    Then they let him go home, but only by ambulance. We fixed a bed in his studio and laid him flat upon it. His face lost a little of its chalkiness. He started acting more natural, fussing at the itchy tape they had bound his broken ribs with. It worried him that customers were being turned away. “Charlotte,” he said, “you know how to handle that camera. I want you to do it for a week or so, just till I’m back on my feet. Can you manage?”
    I said yes. I was numb by then.