Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [38]
It wasn’t so easy to clown around with Leon.
4
She dressed Gina in a T-shirt, pink corduroy overalls, and a snowsuit. She buckled her little red shoes on her feet. Gina was impatient to get going. “Can we swing on the swings?” she asked.
“Not today, honey.”
“But I want to swing on the swings.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Why can’t we swing on the swings?”
She was almost two now. Terrible Two’s: they had minds all their own. But that could be said of Gina at any age. Somehow, this one small child kept both of her parents continually occupied and teetering on the edge of exhaustion. They must be doing something wrong. It didn’t look so hard for other people.
Emily put a coat on and tied a scarf over her hair. It was February, a damp, cold day. Even the apartment was cold. She poked her head into the kitchen to say goodbye to Leon. He was sitting at the chipped enamel table they’d bought from Goodwill, reading the Village Voice. “Leon?” she said. “I’m taking Gina for a walk.”
“You want me to come along?”
“Oh, no, I’ll be back soon.”
He nodded and returned to his paper. Emily led Gina out the door. They went down the creaking stairway, past the side entrance of Crafts Unlimited, through the glass door at the front of the building. She checked the Laundromat across the street. No one was there. She hoisted Gina into her arms and set off toward Beacon Avenue. Gina kept struggling to get down; she liked to go places under her own steam. (It took her all day.) By now she was so heavy that it was difficult to hold on to her. Emily went faster than she’d intended to, pulled forward by Gina’s tilted weight. Her slippers made a rustling, patting sound.
They arrived at the E-Z Cafeteria five minutes early, but Leon’s mother was already waiting, seated alertly at the foremost table with her hands crossed over her purse. When she saw Emily (when she saw Gina, really), she seemed to open like a flower. Her face lifted, her hands uncrossed themselves, and the feathers on her hat stirred. “Ah!” she cried. She rose and brushed her cheek against Emily’s. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she told Emily. “I didn’t know if you’d want to bring her out in this weather.”
“Oh, she’s out in any weather,” Emily said.
Mrs. Meredith settled Gina in the high chair she’d already wheeled up. “Was she cold?” she crooned. “Did her little face get frozen?” She unwrapped her like a package, and patted Gina’s thick, dark hair. “Oh, exactly like Leon’s hair,” she said. (She always did.) “Will you look at how she’s grown? Just in this one month she’s grown so that I never would have known her. Though of course I’d know her anywhere,” she said, contradicting herself. Gina gazed at her reflectively. She was always quieter in her grandmother’s presence.
The E-Z Cafeteria was not Mrs. Meredith’s style, but it was one place they could manage Gina. They could wheel her down the food line instead of waiting for their order to arrive, and they could leave without delay any time she got restless. It had taken them a while to figure this out. They’d started off at the Elmwood—Mrs. Meredith’s suggestion, a place near Towson, to which Emily had to travel by bus. It was the only Baltimore restaurant Mrs. Meredith knew of. And, to be fair, she’d had no idea she was inviting a baby to lunch as well.
What had happened was, when Emily got married she had naturally informed her Great-Aunt Mercer, back in Taney. Aunt Mercer had not been very pleased, but she’d made the best of it. On her thick, silver-rimmed stationery, which smelled as if she’d kept it in her basement for the last ten years, she wrote to ask Emily who this young Meredith might be. What’s his daddy’s name? Would I be likely to know any of his people?