Earthly Possessions Read Online Free PDF Page A

thick, blind differentness. And lately she’d started breaking whatever she sat upon. Horrible things had happened at our house that would have been very embarrassing if witnessed by an outsider. She would have to take her special chair along—her heavy white slatted one with the stolid legs, the kind you ordinarily see in people’s yards. She would not be able to climb any wooden steps or stand on any platforms. “Let me out!” I cried.
    Her arms fell to her sides. Since I was standing on the dining room table at the time, she had to tilt back to gape at me. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
    “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out of this!” And I began tearing at the billow of white eyelet.
    “Charlotte? Char, darling? Sweetheart!” she said, batting my hands down. “Charlotte, what’s happened to you?”
    Then my father came in, shuffling along in his corduroy bedroom slippers. He was sunk in one of his moods. You could tell by his face, which seemed to have stopped trying. He turned his droopy eyes in my direction. “I have to get out of this!” I told him.
    “Lord yes, you look like a chimpanzee in a ball gown,” he said.
    He went on through to the kitchen.
    My mother slowly, gently helped me free of my dress, while I stood still as a statue. She folded it and laid it on the table. She stroked the ruffle that edged one puffed sleeve. I knew what she was thinking: if only it were her
true
daughter entering this contest!
    Both of us wished it could have been.
    We rode to the fair with our only relatives—my fat Uncle Gerard, his wife Aster who didn’t like us, and Clarence, their son, a huge lumbering marshmallow ten years old. Uncle Gerard drove us in his Cadillac, which felt so close and tightly sealed I wasn’t sure we’d have enough air for the trip. We didn’t take Mama’s chair because for that we would have needed the pickup. She was just going to stay on her feet the whole time. And I had to sit next to Clarence, who breathed through his mouth. He had adenoid trouble. I looked hard out the window, pretending I was somewhere else.
    It was 1948 and the countryside, now that I think back on it, was as peaceful and well-ordered as an illustration from a Dick-and-Jane book. Lone gasoline pumps, fields flowered over like bedspreads. Trees turning perfectly red and perfectly yellow. At the entrance to the fairgrounds, a billboard showed a lipsticked, finger-waved housewife holding up a jar of homemade preserves. CLARION COUNTY FAIR, OCT. 9–16 , the billboard said. A TIME FOR PRIDE . My uncle slowed down at the ticket booth and held a fistful of dollars out the window. “Four adults, one child,” he told the attendant. “We won’t need a ticket for this other child. She’s here by invitation, going to be in a beauty pageant. My niece.”
    He believed every word he read; he really did think it was a time for pride.
    The contest was held in the Farm Products Building, amongst the eggplants and butter pats. I don’t remember thecontest itself but I do remember the building, with its cavernous, echoing roof and bare steel rafters. The little girl next to me had speckled legs because of the cold; she worried that the judges would think she was
always
speckled. There was a smell of roses. No, the roses came later. They were set in my arms when I won. My picture was taken by a man who was not my father.
    I know that picture line for line, by now; it used to hang in the upstairs hall. An 8 × 10 glossy showing a blur of children in white or light-colored organdy, eyelet, and dotted swiss; and front center (stiller than the others, and therefore clearer) a dark little girl in a dark plain school dress, carrying roses. Actually, she doesn’t seem all that beautiful. I believe the secret of my success was the orphanish clothing, the straight hair that my mother had given up on, and my expression of despair. The Little Match Girl. How could they bear to hurt my feelings?
    The winner of the Baby Contest was