Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [116]
“What happened to the other driver?” Emily asked.
“What other driver?”
“The driver of the other car.”
“David was the driver of the other car.”
“You mean she collided with her husband?”
“Yes, and got this injured back, this sprained or twisted back; I’m telling you,” Bonny said.
“Oh, now I see.”
“Well, I wanted her to come home because I can nurse her better than David could. Heaven knows I’ve had the practice. And besides that, I’ve been attending these lectures on a whole different kind of nutrition, a diet that heals any sort of ailment. It works on physical problems, mental problems, depressions, infections, tumors … You may not remember this, but last winter, when Molly was mugged in Buffalo while she was taking her son to the emergency room …”
Salting the stew, tasting it, listening with half an ear, Emily considered the Gowers’ accidents: their wrecks, falls, and fires, all those events through which they slid so blithely. To Emily, who had no accidents whatsoever, their lives sounded catastrophic; but to Bonny, sheer custom must have leveled everything out. Emily tried to imagine reaching such a stage. She couldn’t begin to.
Even now that Morgan’s household had moved to hers, she thought—his mother and sister and dog, his hats and suits—she herself didn’t seem to have been transformed in any way at all.
3
Emily took Gina shopping. Gina was going to Camp Hopalong in Virginia for the month of August, at Leon’s parents’ expense. It was time she learned to live away from home, they said. Emily was uneasy about it. She didn’t like doing without Gina for so long, and also she was afraid that in Virginia, near Leon and his parents, Gina would somehow be stolen from her—turned against her. They would point out that Emily was immoral or deceitful or irresponsible, oh, any number of things, she just knew it; and Emily would not be there to explain herself. But she didn’t tell Gina that. Instead, she said, “You’re so young, you might get lonesome. Remember how Morgan had to bring you back from Randallstown? You couldn’t make it through a simple slumber party.”
“Oh, Mama. That was at Kitty Potts’s house and she had that group of girls that didn’t like me.”
“Still,” Emily said.
“Everybody goes to camp. I’m not a baby any more.”
Emily hoisted Joshua on her hip and walked Gina down Crosswell Street to Merger Street, to Poor John’s Basement. Holding Camp Hopalong’s checklist in her free hand, she informed the salesgirl that they needed six pairs of white shorts. Six pairs! It was lucky Leon’s parents were paying for the clothes as well. Gina took a stack of shorts into a curtained booth, while Emily waited outside. (Recently, Gina’d turned modest.) The salesgirl, awkward on her platform sandals as some frail, hoofed animal, hung in the background, clutching one elbow. Joshua started fussing and leaning out of Emily’s arms, but she couldn’t put him down because the floor was filthy—blackened boards permanently stamped with scraps of foil and gray disks of chewing gum. Joshua grew heavier and heavier. Emily called, “Gina? Honey, hurry, please. It’s nearly lunchtime.”
There was no answer. She knocked on the wall near the booth and then drew the curtain aside. Gina was standing before a full-length mirror, wearing a stained T-shirt and a pair of blinding white shorts with cardboard tags dangling from a belt loop. Tears rolled down her face. She seemed to be watching them in the mirror. “Honey!” Emily said. “What’s wrong?”
“I look like a freak,” Gina said.
“Oh, Gina.”
“I’m fat.”
“Fat! You’re skin and bones.”
“Look: great bobbles of fat. Obese! And my knees don’t match.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Emily said. She looked to the salesgirl for help. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
The salesgirl blew a perfect pink bubble.
“I wish I were dead,” Gina said.
“Honey, would you rather not go to camp?