Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [25]
This whole room belonged to the puppets: the hollow back bedroom, with peeling silvery pipes shooting to the ceiling and a yellow rain stain ballooning down one wall. The window was painted shut, its panes so sooty that the sun set up an opaque white film in the afternoons. The wooden floor put splinters in Gina’s knees and turned her overalls black. The china doorknob was hazy with cracks. The door hung crooked. Nights, when Emily worked late in the glow of one goose-necked lamp, the hall light that shone beneath the door was not a rod but a wedge, like a very long piece of pie.
She sat up late and repaired the witch, the all-purpose stepmother-witch that was used in so many different plays. No wonder she kept wearing out! One black button eye dangled precariously. Emily perched upon the stepladder that was the room’s only furniture and tied a knot in a long tail of thread.
The puppets most in use were kept in an Almadén chablis box in the corner. They poked their heads out of the cardboard compartments: two young girls (one blonde, one brunette), a prince, a green felt frog, a dwarf. The others stayed in muslin bags in the closet, with name tags attached to the drawstrings: Rip Van W. Fool. Horse. King. She liked to change them around from time to time, assign them roles they were not accustomed to. Rip Van Winkle, minus his removable beard, made a fine Third Son in any of those stories where the foolish, kind-hearted Third Son ends up with the princess and half the kingdom. He fitted right in. Only Emily knew he didn’t belong, and it gave a kind of edge to his performance, she felt. She ran him through his lines herself. (Leon played the older two sons.) She put an extra, salty twang in his voice. The real Third Son, meanwhile—more handsome, with less character—lay face-up backstage, grinning vacantly.
Emily had never actually planned to be a puppeteer, and even now both she and Leon thought of it as temporary work. She had entered college as a mathematics major, on full scholarship—the only girl her age in Taney, Virginia, who was not either getting married the day after graduation or taking a job at Taney Paper Products. Her father had been killed in an auto accident when Emily was a baby; then, early in Emily’s freshman year at college, her mother died of a heart ailment. She was going to have to manage on her own, therefore. She hoped to teach junior high. She liked the cool and systematic process that would turn a tangle of disarranged numbers into a single number at the end—the redistributing and simplifying of equations that was the basis of junior-high-school mathematics. But she hadn’t even finished the fall semester when she met Leon, who was a junior involved in acting. He couldn’t major in acting (it wasn’t offered), so he was majoring in English, and barely scraping by in all his subjects while he appeared in every play on campus. For the first time Emily understood