Earthly Possessions Read Free

parents never touched at all. I seldom saw them look at each other. They seemed to be staring inward, like people cheated or disappointed somehow. And though they slept in the same great wooden bed, the middle of it stayed perfectly neat—a median strip unrumpled, undisturbed. Or sometimes they quarreled (irritable lashings-out, no issue you could
name
, exactly) and my father spent the night in his studio. Then I felt dislocated and sick to my stomach. I loved my father more than I loved my mother. My fatherbelieved I was really their true daughter. My mother didn’t.
    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 suddenlyhad 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