Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [90]
“But of course I wore it,” Emily said, lying.
She pictured it still hanging in her dormitory closet, a ghost passed on to each new freshman class. (“This dress belonged to Miss Emily Cathcart, who vanished one Sunday in April and was never seen again. College authorities are still dragging Sophomore Pond. Her spirit is said to haunt the fountain in front of the library.”)
She sat down beside Aunt Junie. She touched her arm and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, what for?” Aunt Junie asked brightly.
“If you like, I’ll take the bar pin. Or something little, anything, or—I know what: the marionettes.”
“The—?”
“String puppets is what you called them. Didn’t you say you’d kept them?”
“Yes,” said Aunt Junie, without interest. “Someplace or other, I guess.”
“I’ll take one home with me.”
“Yes, I recollect now you said you give some kind of children’s parties,” Aunt Junie said. She adjusted her paralyzed arm beneath the shelf of her bosom. “It’s been a tiring day,” she said.
“You want me to help you to bed?”
“No, no, you run along. I can manage.”
Emily kissed her on the cheek. Aunt Junie didn’t seem to notice.
In the room that Emily and her mother had once shared—such an intertwined, unprivate life that even now she didn’t feel truly alone here—she untied her skirt and stepped out of her shoes. Her own younger face, formless, smiled from a silver frame on the bureau. She switched off the light, folded back the spread, and climbed into bed. The sheets were so cold they felt damp. She hugged herself and clenched her chattering teeth and watched the same old squares of moonlight on the floor. Aunt Junie, meanwhile, seemed to be moving around in some other part of the house. Drawers slid open, latches clicked. Emily thought she heard the rafters creak in the attic. Oh, this leaden, lumbering world of old people! She slid away into a patchwork kind of sleep. Her mother seemed to be rearranging the bedroom. “Let’s see, now, if the chair were here, the table here, if we were to put the bed beneath the window …” Emily sat up once to pull the spread back over her shoulders for warmth. An owl was hooting in the trees. This time when she slept, it was like plummeting into someplace bottomless.
She woke and found the room filled with a pearly gray, pre-dawn light. She got up, staggering slightly, and reached for her skirt and tied it around her. She put on her shoes and went out to the hall, which was darker. From Aunt Junie’s room a snoring noise came. Oh, Lord, they would probably all sleep for hours yet. She felt her way to the living room to find her purse, where she’d stashed a comb and toothbrush. It was on the coffee table. Something knobby poked from it. She turned the lamp on, blinked, and lifted out an ancient female marionette in a calico dress.
The head and hands were plaster, crudely colored. She had a large, faded mouth and two dim circles of rouge. Her black thread hair was in braids. Her tangled strings were tied to a single-cross control bar, just like the one that Emily had invented. Or maybe (it began to seem) she had not invented it after all, but had remembered it from her childhood. Though she couldn’t recall ever having been shown this little creature. Maybe it was something that was passed in the dark through the generations—the very thought of giving puppet shows, even. And here she imagined she’d come so far, lived such a different existence! She saw her Red Riding Hood scene in a whole new light now, as something crippled. She held the marionette by its snarl of strings. The blue eyes stared at her flatly. The plaster hands—one finger chipped—were suspended in a gracious, stiff position.
Out in the kitchen a clock ticked with a muffled sound, as if buried. There was barely enough room to walk between chairs and occasional tables. Everything was so stuffed and smothering. She set the marionette on the sofa and picked up her purse and left the room. Fresh air, she thought, might clear her head. She opened the door and stepped out on the porch,