Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [36]
“Oh,” Emily said. It all came back to her now. She couldn’t think how she’d forgotten. “Well …” she said.
“But I guess that would take too many puppets.”
“No,” Emily said, “it’s just that we use a more authentic version.”
“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Tibbett said.
3
By spring they were putting on puppet shows once or twice a week, first for friends of Mrs. Tibbett’s and then for friends of those friends. (In Baltimore, apparently, word of mouth was what counted most.) They made enough money so they could start paying Mrs. Apple rent, and Leon quit his Texaco job. Emily went on working at Crafts Unlimited just because she enjoyed it, but she earned almost as much now from the extra puppets that she sold there. And gradually they began to be invited to school fairs and church fund-raisers. Emily had to sit up all one night, hastily sewing little Biblical costumes. A private school invited them to give a show on dental hygiene. “Dental hygiene?” Emily asked Leon. “What is there to say?” But Leon invented a character named Murky Mouth, a wicked little soul who stuffed on sweets, ran water over his toothbrush to deceive his mother, and played jump-rope with his dental floss. Eventually, of course, he came to a bad end, but the children loved him. Two more schools sent invitations the following week, and a fashionable pedodontist gave them fifty dollars to put on a Saturday-morning show for twenty backsliding patients and their mothers, who (Emily heard later) had to pay twenty-five dollars per couple to attend.
It was mostly Leon’s doing, their success. He still grumbled any time they had a show, but the fact was that from the start he knew exactly what was needed: dignified, eccentric little characters (no more squeaky voices) and plenty of audience participation. His heroes were always dropping things and wondering where they were, so that the children went wild trying to tell them; always overlooking the obvious and having to have it explained. Emily, on the other hand, cared more for the puppets themselves. She liked the designing and the sewing and the scrabbling for stray parts. She loved the moment when a puppet seemed to come to life—usually just after she’d sewed the eyes on. Once more, a puppet had his own distinct personality, she found. It couldn’t be altered or submerged, and it couldn’t be duplicated. If he was irreparably damaged—or stolen, which sometimes happened—she could only make a new one to fill his role; she couldn’t make the same one over again.
That was ridiculous, Leon said.
She imagined the world split in two: makers and doers. She was a maker and Leon was a doer. She sat home and put together puppets and Leon sprang onstage with them, all flair and action. It was only a matter of circumstance that she also had to be the voices for the heroines.
Victor was neither maker nor doer, or he was both, or somewhere in between, or … What was the matter with Victor? First he grew so quiet, and paused before answering anything she said, as if having to reel his mind in from more important matters. He moped around the apartment; he stared at Emily sadly while he stroked his wisp of a mustache. When Emily asked him what his trouble was, he told her he’d been born in the wrong year. “How can that be?” she asked him. She supposed he’d taken up some kind of astrology. “What difference does the year make?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it bother me?”
He nodded, swallowing.
That night at supper he put down his plate of baked beans and stood up and said, “There’s something I have to say.”
They still had no furniture, and he’d been eating on the windowsill. He stood in front of the window, framed by an orange sunset so they had to squint at him from their places on the floor. He laced his fingers together and bent them back so the knuckles cracked. “I have never been a sneaky person,” he said. “Leon, I’d like to announce that I’m in love with Emily.”
Leon said, “Huh?”
“I won’t beat around the bush: I think you’re