Earthly Possessions Read Free Page A

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 pointin 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, ofcourse. 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