Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

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 then* 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 head and the lower back. (At fairs she'd seen double and triple crosses, like biplanes, and half a dozen additional strings, but none of it seemed essential.) She took a Red Riding Hood, her most successful effort, and went into the living room. Leon was on the couch, reading the afternoon paper. Gina was writing a book report. "Look," Emily said.

Leon glanced up. Then he said, "Oh, Emily, not those marionettes again."

"But look: see how easy?" She pranced Red Riding Hood across the floor, up the couch, into Gina's lap. Gina giggled. Then Red Riding Hood skipped away, swinging a small yellow basket that snapped cleverly over her arm. "What do you think?" Emily asked Leon.

"Very nice, but not for us," Leon said. "Emily, our old puppets can do that, and more besides. They can set the basket down and pick it up again. They don't have all those strings in the way."

"Oh, it's just like with my shadow puppets. You won't try anything new," she said. "I'm tired of the old ones."

"So?" he asked her. "You can't just switch the universe around, any time you're tired of it," She packed the marionettes in their box. She went for a walk, though she ought to be starting supper. At the corner of Crosswell and Hartley she paused for a traffic light and Morgan Gower came up beside her. He was wearing a tall black suit, a high-collared shirt, and a bowler hat so ancient it looked rusty. He bowed and tipped his hat. She laughed. A grin spread behind his beard, but he seemed to guess her mood and he didn't speak. In fact, when the light turned green he dropped back again, though she was conscious of his presence- keeping a measured distance behind, humming a little tune and watching over her.

In October, Emily's second cousin Claire called to say that her great-aunt had died in her sleep. She'd donated her remains to the cause of medical science, Claire said (just like Aunt Mercer; she would put it in just those words), but still there'd be a service at the Meetinghouse. Emily thought she ought to attend it. She hadn't seen Aunt Mercer in twelve years-not since before her marriage. They had only exchanged Christmas cards, with polite, fond notes beneath the signatures. Going now, of course, was pointless; but even so, Emily canceled a puppet show and left Gina with Leon and took the Volkswagen south.

She was nervous about making the four-hour trip alone, but as soon as she'd merged on the interstate she felt wonderful. It seemed that the air here was thinner and lighter. She was even pleased by all the traffic she encountered-so many people skimming along! No doubt they were out here day and night, endlessly circling the planet, and now at last she had joined them. She smiled at every driver she passed. She was fascinated by the private, cluttered worlds she glimpsed — maps and stuffed annuals on window ledges; a passenger sleeping, open-mouthed; a pair of children combing out their dog.

She turned off the interstate and traveled smaller and smaller roads, winding through rich farm country and then poor country, passing unpainted shacks bristling with TV antennas, their yards full of trucks on blocks and the hulls of cars, then speeding through coppery woodlands laced with underbrush and discarded furniture. She reached Taney in the early afternoon. The town was still so small that several of the men hunkering before the Shell station were familiar to her-not even any older, it seemed; just painted there, dreamily holding their hand-rolled cigarettes. (Their names swam back to her: Shufords and Grindstaffs and Haithcocks. She'd had them stored in her memory all these years without knowing it.) Autumn leaves scuttled down Main Street. She turned up Erin Street and parked in front of the squat little house that she and her mother had shared with Aunt Mercer.

The yard was shadowed by great old trees. No real grass grew there-just patchy bits of plantain in the caked orange dirt, weeds trailing out of a concrete urn, and a leaf-littered boxwood hedge giving off its dusky, pungent smell. Where were Aunt Mercer's flowerbeds? She would generally have something blooming, even this late in the year, Emily climbed the front-porch steps and paused, uncertain whether to knock or to walk on in. Then the door swung open and Claire said, "Emily, honey!" She hadn't changed. She was plump and kind-faced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. "Honey, don't just stand there. Where's your little family?"