“When she and I were girls,” Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking her purse in Emily’s lap, “we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting … and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we’d known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we’d really do—grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?”
She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to waiting.
4
That evening they had supper at Claire’s—casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people’s last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of “The Brady Bunch.” Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o’clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily helped her next door to Aunt Mercer’s, where both of them planned to sleep.
“I suppose we’ll have to sell this place,” Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. “There isn’t much point in keeping up two houses now.”
“But where will you live, Aunt Junie?”
“Oh, I’d move in with Claire and Claude,” she said.
Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily’s father was still alive.
Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. “You ought to pick out what you want here,” Aunt Junie said. “Why, some of it’s antiques. Pick out what you’d like to take home.”
She leaned on Emily’s arm, and they made their way to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow—a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, “Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare.” A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn’t want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn’t explain it. She said, “Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money.”
“Take something small, at least,” Aunt Junie said. “Emily, honey, you’re our only young person. You and your little daughter: you’re all we’ve got to pass things on to.”
Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed. (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight, even if she wouldn’t say so?) She missed Gina’s watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-looking mouth—Aunt Mercer’s mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.
Meanwhile, Aunt Junie traveled around the room, holding her crippled arm with her good hand. “This china slipper, maybe. Or these little brass monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil …”
“Aunt Junie, really, we don’t lead that kind of life,” Emily told her.
“What kind of life? What kind of life must it take just to put a few brass monkeys on your coffee table?”
“We don’t have a coffee table,” Emily said, smiling.
“Take Mercer’s, then.”
“No. Please.”
“Or jewelry, a watch, a brooch. Pin her bar pin on your collar.”
“I don’t have a collar, either,” Emily said. “I only wear these leotards, and they’re made of something knit; they can’t be pinned.”
Aunt Junie turned and looked at her. She said, “Oh, Emily, your mother sent you off so nice. She read up in Mademoiselle and made you all those clothes for college. She was worried you’d be dressed wrong. No one else in your class went away to school, none of those Baptists, those Haithcocks and Biddixes. She wanted you to go off nice and show them all, come back educated, settle down, marry someone good to you like my Claire did; see my Claire? And she fixed you that sweet paisley dress with the little white collar and cuffs. Now, that you could pin a brooch on. She said you could wear it to Meeting. You said, ‘Mama, I do not intend to go to Meeting there and all I want is blue jeans. I’m getting out,’ you said, ‘I’m going to join, get to be part of some big group, not going to be different ever again.’ What a funny little thing you were! But of course she paid you no mind, and rightly so, as you can see; quite rightly so. Now, I don’t know what you call this: leotard? Is that it? Well, I’m sure it’s all very stylish in Baltimore, but Emily, honey, it can’t hold a candle to that paisley dress your mother made.”
“That paisley dress is gone,” Emily said. “It’s twelve years old. It’s cleaning windows now.”
Aunt Junie turned her face away. She looked stony and blind with hurt. She groped through the furniture-chair, desk, another chair—and reached the sofa and lowered herself into it.
“But of course I wore it,” Emily said, lying.
She pictured it still hanging in her dormitory closet, a ghost passed on to each new freshman class. (“This dress belonged to Miss Emily Cathcart, who vanished one Sunday in April and was never seen again. College authorities are still dragging Sophomore Pond. Her spirit is said to haunt the fountain in front of the library.”)
She sat down beside Aunt Junie. She touched her arm and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, what for?” Aunt Junie asked brightly.
“If you like, I’ll take the bar pin. Or something little, anything, or—I know what: the marionettes.”
“The—?”
“String puppets is what you called them. Didn’t you say you’d kept them?”
“Yes,” said Aunt Junie, without interest. “Someplace or other, I guess.”
“I’ll take one home with me.”
“Yes, I recollect now you said you give some kind of children’s parties,” Aunt Junie said. She adjusted her paralyzed arm beneath the shelf of her bosom. “It’s been a tiring day,” she said.
“You want me to help you to bed?”
“No, no, you run along. I can manage.”
Emily kissed her on the cheek. Aunt Junie didn’t seem to notice.
In the room that Emily and her mother had once shared—such an intertwined, unprivate life that even now she didn’t feel truly alone here—she untied her skirt and stepped out of her shoes. Her own younger face, formless, smiled from a silver frame on the bureau. She switched off the light, folded back the spread, and climbed into bed. The sheets were so cold they felt damp. She hugged herself and clenched her chattering teeth and watched the same old squares of moonlight on the floor. Aunt Junie, meanwhile, seemed to be moving around in some other part of the house. Drawers slid open, latches clicked. Emily thought she heard the rafters creak in the attic. Oh, this leaden, lumbering world of old people! She slid away into a patchwork kind of sleep. Her mother seemed to be rearranging the bedroom. “Let’s see, now, if the chair were here, the table here, if we were to put the bed beneath the window …” Emily sat up once to pull the spread back over her shoulders for warmth. An
owl was hooting in the trees. This time when she slept, it was like plummeting into someplace bottomless.
She woke and found the room filled with a pearly gray, pre-dawn light. She got up, staggering slightly, and reached for her skirt and tied it around her. She put on her shoes and went out to the hall, which was darker. From Aunt Junie’s room a snoring noise came. Oh, Lord, they would probably all sleep for hours yet. She felt her way to the living room to find her purse, where she’d stashed a comb and toothbrush. It was on the coffee table. Something knobby poked from it. She turned the lamp on, blinked, and lifted out an ancient female marionette in a calico dress.
The head and hands were plaster, crudely colored. She had a large, faded mouth and two dim circles of rouge. Her black thread hair was in braids. Her tangled strings were tied to a single-cross control bar, just like the one that Emily had invented. Or maybe (it began to seem) she had not invented it after all, but had remembered it from her childhood. Though she couldn’t recall ever having been shown this little creature. Maybe it was something that was passed in the dark through the generations—the very thought of giving puppet shows, even. And here she imagined she’d come so far, lived such a different existence! She saw her Red Riding Hood scene in a whole new light now, as something crippled. She held the marionette by its snarl of strings. The blue eyes stared at her flatly. The plaster hands—one finger chipped—were suspended in a gracious, stiff position.
Out in the kitchen a clock ticked with a muffled sound, as if buried. There was barely enough room to walk between chairs and occasional tables. Everything was so stuffed and smothering. She set the marionette on the sofa and picked up her purse and left the room. Fresh air, she thought, might clear her head. She opened the door and stepped out on the porch, where instantly the cold pierced all she wore. But still the stuffy feeling didn’t leave her. She descended the steps. She went out to the street and stood shivering and looking at the car—Leon’s car, compact and gleaming. After a moment she opened the door and slid inside and took a deep breath of its leathery smell. Then she found her keys in her purse. Then she switched the engine on, but not the headlights, and slipped away.
In Baltimore it was a crowded, clamorous morning in the middle of the week, with the sun flashing off a sea of metal and everyone honking and darting in and out of lanes. Emily turned down Crosswell Street and parked somewhere, anywhere, she didn’t know. She flew from the car and ran inside the building and up the stairs, and then couldn’t find the proper key and was jingling her way through a ring of them when Leon opened the door. He stood there looking down at her, holding a book in one hand, and she threw her arms around him and pressed her face to his chest. “Emily, love,” he said. “Emily, is something wrong?” She only shook her head, and hung on tight.
5
Almost daily she had letters from Morgan, whether or not he came in person. Dear Emily, Am enclosing this Sears ad, you really need a pipe wrench and Sears are better than any Cullen Hardware sells … For he had taken over the care of their apartment, moving in on the disrepair that lurked in all its corners; he clanked blithely among the mysteries beneath the kitchen sink. Dear Emily, Came across a hint last night that just might solve that trouble with your toaster. Simply cut a piece of heavy paper, say a match-book cover, 1″ x 1″ …
He was the Merediths’ own personal consumer advocate, composing disgusted notes to Radio Shack on his tinny, old-fashioned typewriter, storming into auto-repair shops—solving whatever little discontent Emily mentioned in passing. She began to rely on him. Sometimes she said, “Oh, I really shouldn’t ask you to do this—” but he would say, “Why not? Who would you rather ask instead? Ah, don’t hurt my feelings, Emily.”
Once she had a problem with her tape recorder, the portable recorder she’d bought to use in their shows. Morgan didn’t happen to be around, and while Emily fiddled with the buttons she caught herself wondering, irritably, where was he? How could he leave her alone like this, to cope without him when he’d led her to depend on him? She grabbed up the recorder and ran the several blocks to Cullen Hardware. She arrived breathless; she slapped the recorder on the counter between Morgan and a customer. “Listen,” she said, jabbing a button. In blew the trumpet for “The Brementown Musicians”—but blurred and bleary, with some kind of vibration in the speaker. The customer stepped back, looking startled. Morgan sat on his high wooden stool and nodded thoughtfully. “It’s driving me crazy!” Emily told him, switching it off. “And if you think it sounds bad now, you ought to hear it when the volume’s up, in the middle of a show. You can’t tell if it’s a trumpet or a foghorn.”
Morgan went to a revolving rack for a paintbrush, and he came back and took the recorder onto his lap and slowly, tenderly, brushed the plastic grooves that encased the speaker. Grains of something white flew out. “Sugar, perhaps. Or sand,” he said. “Hmm.” He pressed the button and listened again. The trumpet sound was clear and pure. He gave the machine back to Emily and returned to adding up the customer’s purchases.
Like a household elf, he left behind him miraculously mended electrical cords, smooth-gliding windows, dripless faucets, and toilet tanks hung with clever arrangements of coat-hanger wire to keep the water from running. “It must be wonderful,” Emily told Bonny, “to have him with you all the time, fixing things,” but Bonny just looked blank and said, “Who, Morgan?”
Well, Bonny had her mind on other matters. She was helping one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy. The baby was due in February but kept threatening to arrive now, in early November; the daughter had come home to lie flat on her back for the next three months. It was all Bonny could talk about. “When she sits up just a little, to straighten a pillow,” she said, “I have this picture of the baby falling, just tumbling out of her like a penny out of a piggy-bank, you know? I say, ‘Lizzie, honey, lie down this instant, please.’ It’s turning around my view of things. I used to think of pregnancy as getting something ready, growing something to finish it; now all I think of is holding something back that is going to come regardless. And Morgan! Well, you know Morgan. Always off somewhere, he really has no comprehension … At night he comes home and reads her stories from the operas. He’s taken up an interest in the opera, has he told you? Such a crazy man … ‘Don Giovanni encounters a statue and invites it home to supper,’ he reads. ‘Sounds like something you would do,’ I tell him. He reads on. I believe he thinks that Liz is still a child, in need of bedtime stories; or maybe he just likes an excuse to read them himself—but for day-to-day things! For bringing trays to her and emptying bedpans!”
Emily nodded gravely. She sympathized with Bonny: he must be exasperating to live with. But, after all, it wasn’t Emily who had to live with him.
She recalled how odd he’d seemed when they first knew him—his hats and costumes, his pedantic, elderly style of speech. Now he seemed … not ordinary, exactly, but understandable. She was beginning to want to believe his assumption that events don’t necessarily have a reason behind them. Last month she and Leon were sitting with him in Eunola’s Restaurant when Morgan glanced out the window and said, “How funny, there’s Lamont. I thought he was dead.” He didn’t act very surprised. “That happens more and more often,” he said cheerfully. “I often think I see, for instance, my mother’s father, Grandfather Brindle, walking down the street, and he’s been dead for forty years. I tell myself he might not really have died at all—just got tired of his old existence and left to start a new one without us. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen? Someplace there may be a whole little settlement—even a town, perhaps—full of people who supposedly died but really didn’t. Have you thought of that?”
Then Leon gave a tired hiss, the way he did when Emily said something silly. Well, why shouldn’t there be such a town? What was so impossible about it? Emily sat straighter, and looked guiltily into her lap. “The world is a peculiar place,” Morgan said. “Tottery old ladies, people you wouldn’t trust to navigate a grocery cart, are headi
ng two-ton cars in your direction at speeds of seventy miles per hour. Our lives depend on total strangers. So much lacks logic, or a proper sequence.”
“Jesus,” said Leon.
But Emily felt encouraged; everything looked brighter. (This was shortly after she’d come back from Taney. Morgan’s kind of spaciousness sounded wonderful to her.) She smiled at him. He smiled back. He was wearing a furry Russian hat, now that the weather had turned. It sat on his head like a bear cub. He leaned across the table to Leon and told him, “Often I fall into despair. You may find that funny. I seem to be one of those people whose gloominess is comical. But to me it’s very serious. I think, in ten thousand years, what will all this amount to? Our planet will have vanished by then. What’s the point? I think, and I board the wrong bus. But when I’m happy, it’s for no clearer reason. I imagine that I’m being very witty, I have everyone on my side, but probably that’s not the case at all.”
Leon let out his breath and watched the waitress refilling their cups.
“Oh, I’m annoying you,” Morgan said.
“No, you’re not,” Emily told him.
“Somehow, it appears I am. Leon? Am I annoying you?”
“Not at all,” Leon said grimly.
“I tend to think,” Morgan said, “that nothing real has ever happened to me, but when I look back I see that I’m wrong. My father died, I married, my wife and I raised seven human beings. My daughters had the usual number of accidents and tragedies; they grew up and married and gave birth, and some divorced. My sister has undergone two divorces, or terminations of marriage, at least, and my mother is aging and her memory isn’t what it ought to be … but somehow it’s as if this were all a story, just something that happened to somebody else. It’s as if I’m watching from outside, mildly curious, thinking, So this is what kind of life it is, eh? You would suppose it wasn’t really mine. You would suppose I’d planned on having other chances-second and third tries, the best two out of three. I can’t seem to take it all seriously.”