Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [84]
There were any number of answers she could give, all true. She said, sometimes, that she thought their marriage had something badly wrong with it, something out of step, she couldn’t say just what. Maybe so, said Leon, but what did she want him to do about it? He did not believe, he said, that there was anything in the world that would make her really happy. Unless, perhaps, she could bring the whole solar system into line exactly her way, not a planet disobeying. What was it that she expected of him? he would ask. She was silent.
Or sometimes she said that she worried about Gina. It didn’t seem right for a nine-year-old to act so serious, she said. It broke her heart to see her so unswervingly alert to their moods, watching from a distance, smoothing over quarrels. But Leon said Gina was growing up, that was all. Naturally, he said. Let her be, he said.
Also, Emily said, their puppet shows never went well any more. Running through every play was some kind of dislocation—characters stepping on each other’s speeches, unsynchronized, ragged, or missing cues and gawking stupidly. Fairytales fell into fragments, every line a splinter. When Cinderella danced with the Prince, their cloth bodies clung together, but the hands inside them shrank away. Emily believed that the audience could guess this. She was certain of it. Leon said that was ridiculous. They were making more money than they ever had before; they had to turn down invitations. Things were going wonderfully, Leon said.
In her sleep, she dreamed she walked a revolving pavement like a merry-go-round, and she was still tired when she woke.
Often, when she had some work that could be done by hand, she’d spend her mornings down in Crafts Unlimited. She’d perch on a stool behind the counter and listen to Mrs. Apple while she sewed. Mrs. Apple knew hundreds of craftsmen, all their irregular, colorful lives, and she could talk on and on about them in her cheery way, stringing together people Emily had never heard of. Emily relaxed, expanded, watched well-dressed grandmothers buying her puppets. Once Mrs. Apple’s son Victor came to visit. He was living in D.C. now and had driven over unannounced. He’d gained a good deal of weight and shaved off his mustache. His wife, a pretty woman with flossy blond hair, carried their small son in her arms. “Well, well, well,” Victor said to Emily, and he hooked his thumbs into the tiny pockets of his vest. “I see you’re still making puppets.”
She felt she had to defend herself. “Yes,” she said, “but they’re much different now. They’re a whole different process.”
Getting off her stool, though, going to a table to show him a king with a gnarled face, she was conscious of how dreary she must seem to him—still in the same building, the same occupation, wearing the same kind of clothes. Her braids, she felt suddenly, might as well have solidified on her head. She wished she had not let Morgan Gower persuade her to go back to ballet slippers. She wished she had Gina here—all the change that anyone could ask for. Victor bounced slightly on the balls of his feet, examining the king. Melissa, Emily thought suddenly. Melissa Tibbett—that was the name of the birthday child at their very first show, when Victor had been the doll-voiced father wondering what to bring back from his travels. Melissa must be in her teens by now—sixteen years old, at least; long past puppets. Emily set the king back on the table and smoothed his velvet robe.
“How about Leon?” Victor asked. “Is he doing any acting?”
“Oh, well, not so very much. No, not so much at the moment,” she said.
He nodded. She hated the understanding way he looked into her eyes.
That afternoon she pulled a cardboard box from the closet and unpacked her marionettes. She’d been experimenting with marionettes for several years. She liked the challenge: they were harder to work. She had figured out her own arrangement of strings, suspended from a single cross of Popsicle sticks. There were two strings for the hands, two more for the knees, and one each for the