Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [34]
Emily passed the idea on because it sounded like something she could manage. She would not, at least, freeze up onstage in front of a few small children. Victor was immediately willing, but Leon looked doubtful. “Just the three of us?” he asked.
“We could change costumes a lot. And there are always people around here, if we’re really stuck for more characters.”
“We could use my mother for a witch,” Victor said. “Well, I don’t know,” Leon said. “I wouldn’t even call that acting, if you want to know the truth.”
“Oh, Leon.”
She dropped the subject for the next few days. She watched him weighing it in his mind. He came back from the Texaco station with his hands black, smearing black on the doorknobs and the switchplates. Even after he washed, black stayed in the creases of his skin and rimmed his fingernails. Sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for his tuna, he spread his hands on his knees and studied them, and then he turned them over and studied them again. Finally he said, “These children’s plays, I suppose they’d do for a stopgap.”
Emily said nothing.
He said, “It wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, just so we don’t get stuck in it.”
Now, all this time Emily and Victor had been laying their plans, they’d been so sure he would change his mind. They’d already ordered a phone for the kitchen. It arrived the day after Leon gave in. They placed an ad in the papers and they made a large yellow poster to hang in Crafts Unlimited. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, the poster read. Or … you name it. (“Just so it doesn’t take a cast of thousands,” Leon said.)
Then they sat back and waited. Nothing happened.
On the sixth day a woman phoned to ask if they gave puppet shows. “I don’t need a play; I need a puppet show,” she said. “My daughter’s just wild about puppets. She doesn’t like plays at all.”
“Well, I’m sorry—” Emily said.
“Last year I had Peter’s Puppets come and she loved them, and all they charged was thirty-two dollars, but now I hear they’ve moved to—”
“Thirty-two dollars?” Emily asked.
“Four dollars a child, for seven guests and Melissa. I felt that was reasonable; don’t you?”
“It’s more than reasonable,” Emily said. “For a puppet show we get five per child.”
“Goodness,” the woman said. “Well, I suppose we could uninvite the Macintosh children.”
In the two weeks before the party Emily borrowed Mrs. Apple’s sewing machine and put together a Beauty, two sisters, a father, and a Beast, who was really just a fake fur mitten with eyes. She chose “Beauty and the Beast” because it was her favorite fairytale. Victor said he liked it too. Leon didn’t seem to care. Plainly, as far as he was concerned, this was just another version of the Texaco job. He hardly noticed when Emily came prancing up to him with her hand transformed into Beauty.
She cut a stage from a cardboard box, and bought gauzy black cloth for the scrim. She and Victor clowned together, putting on doll-like voices to match the puppets’ round faces. They had the two sisters sing duets and waltz on the kitchen windowsill. Leon just looked grim. He had figured out that most of their fee had already been spent on materials. “This is not going to make us rich,” he said.
“But think of next time,” Emily said, “when we’ll already be equipped.”
“Oh, Emily, let’s not have a next time.”
On the day of the party—a rainy winter afternoon—they loaded everything into Victor’s mother’s car and drove north to Mrs. Tibbett’s stucco house in Homeland. Mrs. Tibbett led them through the living room to a large, cold clubroom, where Leon and Victor arranged the cardboard stage on a Ping-Pong table. Meanwhile Emily unpacked the puppets. Then she and Victor set the two sister puppets to whispering and snickering,