Earthly Possessions Read Online Free PDF Page B

bureau drawer, only a bureau drawer. I keep even my shoes in the drawer, even my coat, my dress. So, if I am a little wrinkled you will understand why.”
    I took a quick look at her coat. It didn’t seem wrinkled. To me, she was perfect. She had set her feet together so neatly they looked like empty shoes beside a bed. Her hair was darker than mine, but I recognized it by the way it hung.
    “He himself has
three
drawers, and a closet,” she said. “He has offered me another drawer but I tell him I don’t need it.”
    I nodded. I thought she was right.
    “But do you believe this of me? When you remember how much I
used
to have? My life has changed. He says, ‘You must get another dress, my God, you’re not a refugee any more.’ ‘Idon’t have room for another dress,’ I tell him. I let him buy me only things that won’t take space—meals in restaurants and trips to beautiful scenery. I love to travel. Oh, don’t you love to travel?”
    I blinked.
    “You think I’m mad,” she said.
    What would she be mad about?
    “You suppose I would be tired of travel forevermore.”
    “I think traveling would be fun,” I said.
    “Fun,” she echoed.
    We stared at our laps a while.
    “You were the first,” she said finally. “After that, the baby fell ill, I don’t know with what. Then Anna said, ‘I won’t go on.’ ‘You must, it’s such a short way now,’ I told her. In truth, I had no idea how far it was. We had been walking for days, weeks, I don’t know. Perhaps months. The bottoms of our feet were bloody. We were eating grasses. When we heard a noise and hid I wasn’t frightened any more. What did it matter? But Anna was frightened. One day I looked around and she was gone. Maybe she had been gone a long time. I had nothing left. I had only my dress. Then I started traveling for its own sake and would put first this foot, then that foot. Then this foot, then that foot. I must tell you that I didn’t think of you at all any more.”
    “That’s all right,” I said.
    “I was so, you see, so interested in putting one foot and another. I would say to myself, ‘I have nothing.’ I liked that. I enjoyed it. Did you know all this?”
    I shook my head.
    She turned, so suddenly she startled me, and took my face in both her hands and drew me close. I hadn’t realized how shaky she was. “Say it,” she said. “Do you forgive me?”
    I said, “Sure.”
    Her hands dropped and she sank back.
    Then she said, “Well!” She was smiling. She sat up, tossed back her hair. “We must find something for you to do,” she said. “It’s boring for you, no? We will see if he has anything interesting.”
    She began stalking around the trailer, assembling objects. “Scissors. Paper,” she said. She spread them on the coffee table. “Colors. No, he would never have colors.”
    Still, she looked for some, opening and slamming doors at the dark end of the trailer. “No. No. We will have to use pencils,” she said. “This man is poorly supplied.” She returned with two stubby pencils, one of which she handed to me. “We are making paper dolls,” she told me. “You love making paper dolls.”
    “Yes,” I said. I didn’t question how she knew.
    I cut dolls in strips, the way I’d been taught in kindergarten—rows of children in triangular dresses, holding hands. But the woman made hers one by one, and each was different. First a man, then a girl, then an old lady with skinny ankles. She drew in their features with a pencil. She gave them the simplest clothing—just a line here and there to show a sleeve or a hem. As each was finished she set it down to join the others on the coffee table, all those white paper legs striding in the same direction. It seemed we were seeing people off, somehow. But I didn’t know what it meant.
    Then the door burst open and a big blond man stepped in, wearing a black leather jacket. “That goddam Bobby Joe,” he said. “What time is it? I told him, I said, ‘Bobby Joe