There were any number of answers she could give, all true. She said, sometimes, that she thought their marriage had something badly wrong with it, something out of step, she couldn’t say just what. Maybe so, said Leon, but what did she want him to do about it? He did not believe, he said, that there was anything in the world that would make her really happy. Unless, perhaps, she could bring the whole solar system into line exactly her way, not a planet disobeying. What was it that she expected of him? he would ask. She was silent.
Or sometimes she said that she worried about Gina. It didn’t seem right for a nine-year-old to act so serious, she said. It broke her heart to see her so unswervingly alert to their moods, watching from a distance, smoothing over quarrels. But Leon said Gina was growing up, that was all. Naturally, he said. Let her be, he said.
Also, Emily said, their puppet shows never went well any more. Running through every play was some kind of dislocation—characters stepping on each other’s speeches, unsynchronized, ragged, or missing cues and gawking stupidly. Fairytales fell into fragments, every line a splinter. When Cinderella danced with the Prince, their cloth bodies clung together, but the hands inside them shrank away. Emily believed that the audience could guess this. She was certain of it. Leon said that was ridiculous. They were making more money than they ever had before; they had to turn down invitations. Things were going wonderfully, Leon said.
In her sleep, she dreamed she walked a revolving pavement like a merry-go-round, and she was still tired when she woke.
Often, when she had some work that could be done by hand, she’d spend her mornings down in Crafts Unlimited. She’d perch on a stool behind the counter and listen to Mrs. Apple while she sewed. Mrs. Apple knew hundreds of craftsmen, all their irregular, colorful lives, and she could talk on and on about them in her cheery way, stringing together people Emily had never heard of. Emily relaxed, expanded, watched well-dressed grandmothers buying her puppets. Once Mrs. Apple’s son Victor came to visit. He was living in D.C. now and had driven over unannounced. He’d gained a good deal of weight and shaved off his mustache. His wife, a pretty woman with flossy blond hair, carried their small son in her arms. “Well, well, well,” Victor said to Emily, and he hooked his thumbs into the tiny pockets of his vest. “I see you’re still making puppets.”
She felt she had to defend herself. “Yes,” she said, “but they’re much different now. They’re a whole different process.”
Getting off her stool, though, going to a table to show him a king with a gnarled face, she was conscious of how dreary she must seem to him—still in the same building, the same occupation, wearing the same kind of clothes. Her braids, she felt suddenly, might as well have solidified on her head. She wished she had not let Morgan Gower persuade her to go back to ballet slippers. She wished she had Gina here—all the change that anyone could ask for. Victor bounced slightly on the balls of his feet, examining the king. Melissa, Emily thought suddenly. Melissa Tibbett—that was the name of the birthday child at their very first show, when Victor had been the doll-voiced father wondering what to bring back from his travels. Melissa must be in her teens by now—sixteen years old, at least; long past puppets. Emily set the king back on the table and smoothed his velvet robe.
“How about Leon?” Victor asked. “Is he doing any acting?”
“Oh, well, not so very much. No, not so much at the moment,” she said.
He nodded. She hated the understanding way he looked into her eyes.
That afternoon she pulled a cardboard box from the closet and unpacked her marionettes. She’d been experimenting with marionettes for several years. She liked the challenge: they were harder to work. She had figured out her own arrangement of strings, suspended from a single cross of Popsicle sticks. There were two strings for the hands, two more for the knees, and one each for the head and the lower back. (At fairs she’d seen double and triple crosses, like biplanes, and half a dozen additional strings, but none of it seemed essential.) She took a Red Riding Hood, her most successful effort, and went into the living room. Leon was on the couch, reading the afternoon paper. Gina was writing a book report. “Look,” Emily said.
Leon glanced up. Then he said, “Oh, Emily, not those marionettes again.”
“But look: see how easy?”
She pranced Red Riding Hood across the floor, up the couch, into Gina’s lap. Gina giggled. Then Red Riding Hood skipped away, swinging a small yellow basket that snapped cleverly over her arm. “What do you think?” Emily asked Leon.
“Very nice, but not for us,” Leon said. “Emily, our old puppets can do that, and more besides. They can set the basket down and pick it up again. They don’t have all those strings in the way.”
“Oh, it’s just like with my shadow puppets. You won’t try anything new,” she said. “I’m tired of the old ones.”
“So?” he asked her. “You can’t just switch the universe around, any time you’re tired of it.”
She packed the marionettes in their box. She went for a walk, though she ought to be starting supper. At the corner of Crosswell and Hartley she paused for a traffic light and Morgan Gower came up beside her. He was wearing a tall black suit, a high-collared shirt, and a bowler hat so ancient it looked rusty. He bowed and tipped his hat. She laughed. A grin spread behind his beard, but he seemed to guess her mood and he didn’t speak. In fact, when the light turned green he dropped back again, though she was conscious of his presence-keeping a measured distance behind, humming a little tune and watching over her.
3
In October, Emily’s second cousin Claire called to say that her great-aunt had died in her sleep. She’d donated her remains to the cause of medical science, Claire said (just like Aunt Mercer; she would put it in just those words), but still there’d be a service at the Meetinghouse. Emily thought she ought to attend it. She hadn’t seen Aunt Mercer in twelve years—not since before her marriage. They had only exchanged Christmas cards, with polite, fond notes beneath the signatures. Going now, of course, was pointless; but even so, Emily canceled a puppet show and left Gina with Leon and took the Volkswagen south.
She was nervous about making the four-hour trip alone, but as soon as she’d merged on the interstate she felt wonderful. It seemed that the air here was thinner and lighter. She was even pleased by all the traffic she encountered—so many people skimming along! No doubt they were out here day and night, endlessly circling the planet, and now at last she had joined them. She smiled at every driver she passed. She was fascinated by the private, cluttered worlds she glimpsed—maps and stuffed animals on window ledges; a passenger sleeping, open-mouthed; a pair of children combing out their dog.
She turned off the interstate and traveled smaller and smaller roads, winding through rich farm country and then poor country, passing unpainted shacks bristling with TV antennas, their yards full of trucks on blocks and the hulls of cars, then speeding through coppery woodlands laced with underbrush and discarded furniture. She reached Taney in the early afternoon. The town was still so small that several of the men hunkering before the Shell station were familiar to her—not even any older, it seemed; just painted there, dreamily holding their hand-rolled cigarettes. (Their names swam back to her: Shufords and Grindstaffs and Haithcocks. She’d had them stored in her memory all these years without knowing it.) Autumn leaves scuttled down Main Street. She turned up Erin Street and parked in front of the squat little house that she and her mother had shared with Aunt Mercer.
The yard was shadowed by great old trees. No real grass grew there—just patchy bits of plantain in the caked orange dirt, weeds trailing out of a concrete urn, and a leaf-littered boxwood hedge giving off its dusky, pungent smell. Where were Aunt Mercer’s flowerbeds? She would generally have something blooming, even this late in the year. Emily climbed the front-porch steps and paused, uncertain whether to knock or to walk on in. Then the door swung open and Claire said, “Emily, honey!”
She hadn’t changed. She was plump and kind-f
aced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. “Honey, don’t just stand there. Where’s your little family?”
“I left them home,” Emily said.
“Left them! Came all this way by yourself? Oh, and we were counting on seeing your sweet daughter …”
Emily couldn’t imagine Gina in this house. It wouldn’t work; the two wouldn’t meet in her mind. She followed Claire through the hall, with its smell of old newspapers, and into the parlor. The furniture was dark and ungainly. It so completely filled the room that Emily almost failed to notice the two people sitting on the puffy brown sofa—Claire’s husband, Claude, and Aunt Junie, Claire’s mother, the mountainous old woman who also lived here. Neither one was a blood relation, but Emily bent to kiss their cheeks. She’d last seen them when she came home after her mother’s death, and they’d been sitting on this very sofa. They might have remained here ever since—abandoned, sagging, like large cloth dolls. When Claude reached up to pat her shoulder, the rest of him stayed sunk in the cushions; his arm seemed disproportionately long and distant from his body. Aunt Junie said, “Oh, Emily, look at you, so grown up …”
Emily sat on the sofa between them. Claire settled in a rocker. “Did you eat?” she asked Emily. “You want to wash up? Have a Coke? Some buttermilk?”
“I’m fine,” Emily said. She felt sinfully fine, larger and stronger and less needy than all three of them put together. She folded her hands across her purse. There was a silence. “It’s good to be back,” she said.
“Wouldn’t Aunt Mercer be pleased?” asked Claire.
There was a little bustle of motion; they’d found their subject. “Oh, wouldn’t she just love to see you sitting here,” Aunt Junie said.
“I wish she could have known,” said Claire. “I wish you could have come before she passed.”
“But it was painless,” Claude said.
“Oh, yes. It’s the way she’d have wanted to go.”
“If she had to go, well, that’s the way.”
Claire said, “All those troubles with her joints, Emily; you never saw. Arthritis swolled her up so, she got extra knobs and knuckles. Times she had a job just fixing her meals, but you know how she was: she wouldn’t give in. Times she couldn’t button her buttons or dial on the telephone, and Mama with that elbow of hers … I would say, ‘Aunt Mercer, let me come over and stay a while,’ but she said, ‘No,’ said, ‘I can do it.’ She just had to do it her way. She always liked to feed that cat of hers herself, said it wouldn’t eat from anyone else, which was only what she liked to believe; and she was bound and determined to write her own letters. At Christmas—remember, Emily? How she always wrote you, longhand? And sent a little something for the baby. And Easter, why, that was her day to have us all over, and do every bit herself. Polished the silver, set the table … but she had to see to it some time ahead, in case the arthritis, you know … I stopped by on Good Friday and there was the cloth on the table and the very best china laid out. I said, ‘Aunt Mercer, what’s all this in aid of?’ ‘I just want to be sure it’s ready,’ she said, ‘for your mama can’t manage a thing with that elbow and I do like to get organized.’ See, she would never even mention her arthritis. Doctor had to tell us what was what; said, ‘She is in more pain than she lets on.’ She hated to put us out, never cared to lean on others. In some ways, it was best that she was taken when she was.”
“Oh, it was all for the best,” Aunt Junie said.
Claude said, “It was a mercy.”
“I should have come before,” Emily said. “I never knew. She never mentioned it in her letters.”
“Yes, well, that was how she was.”
“But she’d be proud that you came now,” Aunt Junie said.
“And you’ll want to go through her things, surely—so many of her nice things that I know she would want you to keep,” Claire said.
“I don’t have room in the car,” said Emily. But suddenly she felt she would like this whole house—the wallpaper patterned with wasp-waisted baskets of flowers, the carpet always rubbed the wrong way, the china high-heeled slipper filled with chalky china roses. She imagined moving in. She pictured resuming her life where she’d left off, drinking her morning cocoa from the celery-green glass mug she’d found in a cereal box when she was eight. And when Claire said, “But her jade bar pin, Emily, that wouldn’t need any space,” she instantly pictured the bar pin, streaked with a kind of wood grain and twined at one end with blackened gold leaves. She was amazed at how much was still lodged in her mind. Like the Shufords, the Grindstaffs, and the Haithcocks, Aunt Mercer’s house lived on in Emily, every warped shingle and small-paned window, whether she took it out to examine it or not. She would let the bar pin go to Aunt Junie, who wore such things, but in a sense she would continue owning it forever, and she might catch an accidental glimpse of it, barely noticed, some moment while waking or falling asleep fifty years from now.
“I don’t have room even for that,” she said.
Then she spread her hands and looked down at them—the parched white backs of them, the gold wedding ring as thin as wire.
At four o’clock they got to their feet and prepared to walk over to the Meetinghouse. Everyone seemed to have a great many coats and scarves, although it was a warm day. They helped each other, like handicapped people. Claire smoothed Claude’s collar for him and straightened his lapels. “Don’t you have a wrap, dear?”
Aunt Junie asked Emily. “Your … what is that … skirt and top; it’s so thin. Won’t you borrow a sweater? You don’t want to take a chill.” But Emily shook her head.
Walking up Erin Street, they did meet a few young people, wearing boot-cut jeans and those velvet blazers that were popular in Baltimore too. This town was not so isolated as Emily had imagined. But the Meetinghouse—the only Friends Meeting in Taney County-was as small and poor as ever, a gray frame cubicle huddled in the back yard of the Savior Baptist Church; and everyone approaching it was old. They mumbled and clung to each other’s arms, climbing the front steps. Emily hoped to see the friends she’d gone to First Day School with—never more than three or four of them in the best of times—but they must have moved away. There was no one under fifty. She took her seat on a straight-backed bench, between Aunt Junie and Claude. She looked around the little room and counted fourteen people. The fifteenth entered and closed the door behind him. A hush fell like the hush on a boat when the engine is cut off and the sails are raised.
In this quiet Emily had grown up—not a total silence but a ticking, breathing quiet, with the occasional sound of cloth rubbing cloth, little stirrings, throats cleared, people rustling coughdrop packets or fumbling through their purses. She expected nothing from it. (She had never been religious.) She wondered, for the hundredth time, what that dusty red glass was on the ledge above the east window. It was nearly overflowing with something that looked like wax. Maybe it was a candle. She always came to that conclusion. (But first she thought of something brewing—a culture, yogurt, dough, something concocting itself out of nothing.) She tried to name all the states in the Union. There were four beginning with A, two with C … but the M’s were hard; there were so many: Montana, Missouri, Mississippi …
An old man with cottony hair rose and stood leaning on his cane. “Mercer Dulaney,” he said, “once walked two and one-half miles in rheumatism weather to feed my dogs while I was off visiting my sister in Fairfax County. I reckon now I’ll take that cat of hers and tend it, if it don’t get on too bad with my dogs.”
He sat down, groped for a handkerchief, and wiped his lips. “Ah, ah,” he said. It made her think of Morgan Gower; he sometimes said that. She was surprised to remember her other life—its speed, its modernness, the great rush of noisy people she knew. She thought of Morgan hurtling down the street behind her, her daughter (daughter!) hailing a city bus; Leon tos
sing coins on the bureau before he undressed. She remembered the first time she ever saw Leon. He had walked in the door of the library reading room, wearing that corduroy jacket of his. He had stood there looking around him, hunting someone, and had not found whoever it was and turned to go; but in turning, he caught sight of Emily and paused and looked at her again, and then frowned and went on out. She had not actually been introduced to him for another week. But now it seemed to her that at his entrance—swinging through the library door, carrying a single book in his hand (his fingers fine-textured and brown, his shirtcuffs so perfectly white)—her life had suddenly been set in motion. Everything had started up, as if complicated wheels and gears had finally connected, and had raced along in a blur from then on. It was only now, in this slowed-down room, that she had a chance to examine what had happened. Why! Her mother had died! Her mother, and she’d never truly mourned her. She thought of the last time they’d spoken, on the long-distance phone in the dormitory lobby. (“It’s raining here,” her mother had said. “But I don’t want to waste our three minutes on the weather. Did you get that skirt I mailed you? But I don’t want to waste this time on clothes, my goodness …”) She thought about her dormitory room with its two narrow iron bedsteads and the stuffed white unicorn on her pillow. She had once collected unicorns; she’d loved them. What had happened to her unicorn collection? Her roommate must have got it, or Goodwill had come, or it had simply been discarded. And think what else was gone: her favorite books she’d brought with her to college, her diary, her locket with her only picture of her father in it—a young man, laughing. She ached for all of them. She felt they had just this minute been ripped away from her. She thought of Aunt Mercer with her long-chinned, sharp, witty face, her pale, etched mouth always fighting back a smile. It was such a loss; she was so lost without Aunt Mercer.