None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn't come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I'd lost someone more important than I'd expected to lose.
After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather's tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk's little winter bouquets; even Saul's prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn't take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. "Are you all right?" he'd ask.
"I'm. fine."
"I thought something might be wrong."
"Oh, no."
"I woke and you weren't there."
"Are you all right?" I said.
"Yes, certainly."
"Don't catch cold." Then he'd wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.
I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, crisscrossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Belinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments.
And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people's shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.
"I won't hurry you," Amos said.
I looked at him.
"I know what you're going through," he told me.
For we never met in vacant rooms any more-or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.
So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog.
Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, v comforting smelclass="underline" chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father's camera. I turned on the lights and took the CUSSED sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather's: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?
"Certainly it's real," I told him. "You see it, you feel it: it's real."
"No, what I mean is…"
"Sit beside the lamp, please." As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, "AmosI"
"You're back at work," he said.
"Yes, well, only Bando." I hung the prints. Bando's face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. "Isn't it funny?" I said. "In ordinary life he's not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these; they're not really real, he would say."
"What's your father got to do with it?" Amos asked.
"Well…"
"This studio's been yours for, what? Sixteen, seventeen years now.
It's been yours nearly as long as it was his."
"Well," I said. "Yes, but…" I turned and looked at him. "That's true, it has," I said.
"And still you act surprised when somebody wants you to take his picture.
You have to decide if you'll do it, every time. A seventeen-year temporary position! Lord God." It dawned on me finally that he was angry. But I didn't know what for. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went over to him. "Amos?" I said.
He stepped back. He had suddenly grown very still.
"You're not coming away with me, are you, Charlotte," he said.
"Coming-?" I realized that I wasn't.
"Tfou're much too content the way you are. Snow White and the four dwarfs."
"No, it's… what? No, if s Just that lately, Amos, it's seemed to me I'm so tangled with other people here. More connected than I'd thought. Don't you see that? How can I ever begin to get loose?"
"I'd assumed it was your mother," he said. "I assumed it was duty, that you'd leave in an instant if not for her.
Turns out I was wrong. Here you are, free to go, but then you always were, weren't you? You could have left any day of your life, but hung around waiting to be sprung. Passive. You're passive, Charlotte. You stay where you're put. Did you ever really intend to leave?" I didn't think my voice would work, but it did. "Why, of course," I said.
"Then I pity you," he said, but I could tell he didn't feel a bit of pity.
He looked at me from a height, without bending his head. His hands in his pockets were fists. "It's not only me you've fooled, it's yourself," he said. "I can get out, but you've let yourself get buried here and even helped fill in the grave. Every year you've settled for less, tolerated more. You're the land who thinks tolerance is a virtue. You're proud of letting anyone be anything they choose; it's their business, you say, never mind whose toes they step on, even your own…" He stopped, maybe because of the look on my face. Or maybe he had just run down. He took one fist from his pocket and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Well, thanks for the example," he said finally. I'm leaving, before the same thing happens to me."
"Amos?" But he was gone, not a pause or a backward glance. I heard the front door slam. I didn't know what to do next. I stood looking all around me in a stunned, hopeless way-at my dusty equipment, stacks of props, Alberta's furniture, which had never (I saw now) been sorted and discarded as Saul had promised but simply sifted in with our own. At the crumbling buildings across the street: the Thrift Shop, newsstand, liquor store, Pei Wing the tailor… not a single home in the lot, come to think of it.
Everyone else had moved on, and left us stranded here between the Amoco and the Texaco.
I stood there so long I must have been in a kind of trance. I watched a soft snowstorm begin, proceeding so slowly and so vertically that it was hard to tell, at first, whether the snow was falling or the house was rising, floating imperceptibly into the starless blue night.
After Amos went away, I became very energetic. I had things to do; I was preparing to get out.
First I discarded clothing, books, knick-knacks, pictures. I lugged pieces of furniture across the street to the Thrift Shop. I gave my mother's lawn chair to Pei Wing, the plants to Saul's choir leader, the Sunday china to Holy Basis Church. I threw away rugs and curtains and doilies. I packed the doll things in cartons and put them in the attic. What I was aiming for was a house with the bare, polished look of a bleached skull. But I don't know, it was harder than I'd thought Linus kept making new doll things. I packed those away, too. The piano grew new layers of magazines and keys. I had the Salvation Army come and cart the piano off. Objects spilled out of the children's bedrooms and down the stairs. I sent the objects back. Strangely enough, no one asked where all the furniture had gone.
The parlor became a light-filled, wallpapered cavern, containing a couch, two chairs, and a lamp, with blanched squares where the pictures used to hang.
But still I wasn't satisfied. I skulked around the echoing rooms, newly drab hi a narrow gray skirt I had saved from the trashcan, discontentedly watching Jiggs skate the bare floors in his stocking feet Then I discarded people. I stopped answering the phone, no longer nodded to acquaintances, could not be waylaid in the grocery store. Skimming down the sidewalk, noticing someone I knew heading toward me, I felt my heart sink. I would cross the street immediately. I didn't want to be bothered. They were using up such chunks of my life, with their questions, comments, gossip, inquiries after my health. They were siphoning me off into teachers' conferences and charity drives. Before Selinda's school play they made me waste twenty minutes, fiddling with my coat buttons and wondering when the curtain would go up. What did I have to do with Selinda, anyway? At this rate I would never get out.