Free Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler Page B

evenings, he watched TV with me and Mama (who wouldn’t say boo to him, in spite of his careful manners) or he took me out. We went to movies, orrestaurants, or the B & B Soda Shop. He acted like a brother, never so much as held my hand, but there was a measuring look in his eyes. I didn’t know what he was waiting for. At the end of an evening I would climb to my bedroom, and there in the mirror was this college-age girl in a sweater and skirt—not a sullen old spinster after all.
    Well, of course I fell in love with him. How could I avoid it? With that serene, pure face of his, those heavy-lidded eyes. It hit me for maybe the first time in my life that someone could have a whole world inside his head that I would never guess at. I was desperate to know what he thought about things. What was it like to have a family like his, a mother like Alberta? How did he feel passing his house now, with the shutters sagging off their hinges? He never said. I couldn’t ask. Every time I saw him I
wanted
to ask, but I had such a sense of his separateness that it didn’t seem possible. We stayed locked in this friendly small talk about mortgage assumptions and leaky faucets. The real conversation was carried on in silence: he helped me into my sweater as if wrapping a breakable gift. He somehow knew to lift my hair and settle it over my collar in just the right way. And I threw out three bowls of batter, trying to make Alberta’s buckwheat pancakes. Even my mother took part in this conversation, for when we were all together now she grew stiff and still. She sent us little rodenty glances. The three of us were strung on elastic, and not a person could move without joggling the others.
    Then one night in April we were coming home from a movie, Lana Turner in something or other. We happened to walk past his father’s radio shop. A narrow, dismal wooden place set between a sandwich joint and a shoe repair, vacant all this time, black as a toothless mouth. I could have cried just looking at it, so how must Saul have felt? I reached out and touched his arm, and instantly he stopped and took hold of my hand and looked down at me. “Listen,” he said.
    He scared me. I thought he was mad that I had touchedhim; I’d upset the balance, some way. But what he said was, “You know I don’t have a job yet, Charlotte.”
    I said, “Job?”
    “And I don’t seem to have any interests. I don’t know what I’m going to do in life. So I’m waiting to see what just
lands
, but so far nothing has.”
    I couldn’t tell what he was getting at. I said, “Um—”
    “It’s you and me I’m talking about, Charlotte.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “I feel I have to have some kind of a future before I can say anything to you.”
    I still didn’t understand. It seemed like an excuse, to tell the truth. I was used to high school dates, where the future had no bearing whatsoever. “Well,” I said, “is that all you’re waiting for? I like you better without a future.”
    But I might as well not have spoken, because his face stayed troubled the rest of the walk home. Though he did keep hold of my hand, and on our front porch he kissed me—but only once, and very gravely, like somebody much, much older than me. Which he was, in a way. I was so young! I didn’t think ahead at all. I only thought how strange it felt to touch surfaces like this, from behind our two private selves. I could have stood there all night with my head against his woolen shoulder. It was Saul who finally said we should go in.
    My mother started condensing somehow, shrinking and drying. She was scared. I saw how she watched Saul with her bright, webbed eyes. The kinder he was to her, the more carefully she watched him. When he asked her a question it took her a long time to answer; she had to rise up through so many layers of fear. At night, when I helped her into bed, she clutched my wrist hard and peered into my face and moved her lips but said nothing. Then I would go