Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"When she and I were girls," Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking. her purse in Emily's lap, "we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her "brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn't make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting… and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we'd known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we'd really do-grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?" She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to wailing.

That evening they had supper at Claire's-casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people's last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of "The Brady Bunch." Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o'clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily helped her next door to Aunt Mercer's, where both of them planned to sleep.

"I suppose we'll have to sell this place," Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. "There isn't much point in keeping up two houses now."

"But where will you live, Aunt Junie?"

"Oh, I'd move in with Claire and Claude," she said.

Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily's father was still alive.

Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. "You ought to pick out what you want here," Aunt Junie said. "Why, some of it's antiques. Pick out what you'd like to take home." She leaned on Emily's arm, and they made their way to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow-a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, "Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare." A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn't want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn't explain it. She said, "Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money."

"Take something small, at least," Aunt Junie said. "Emily, honey, you're our only young person. You and your little daughter: you're all we've got to pass things on to." Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed, (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight even if she wouldn't say so?) She missed Gina's watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-1ooking mouth-Aunt Mercers mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.

Meanwhile, Aunt Junie traveled around the room, holding her crippled arm with her good hand. "This china slipper, maybe. Or these little brass monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil…

"Aunt Junie, really, we don't lead that kind of life," Emily told her.

"What kind of life? What kind of life must it take just to put a few brass monkeys on your coffee table?"

"We don't have a coffee table," Emily said, smiling.

"Take Mercer's, then."

"No. Please."

"Or jewelry, a watch, a brooch. Pin her bar pin on your collar."

"I don't have a collar, either," Emily said. "I only wear these leotards, and they're made of something knit; they can't be pinned." Aunt Junie turned and looked at her. She said, "Oh, Emily, your mother sent you off so nice. She read up in Mademoiselle and made you all those clothes for college. She was worried you'd be dressed wrong. No one else in your class went away to school, none of those Baptists, those Haithcocks and Biddixes. She wanted you to go off nice and show them all, come back educated, settle down, marry someone good to you like my Claire did; see my Claire? And she fixed you that sweet paisley dress with the little white collar and cuffs. Now, that you could pin a brooch on. She said you could wear it to Meeting. You said, 'Mama, I do not intend to go to Meeting there and all I want is blue jeans. I'm getting out,' you said, Tm going to join, get to be part of some big group, not going to be different ever again.' What a funny little thing you were! But of course she paid you no mind, and rightly so, as you can see; quite rightly so. Now, I don't know what you call this: leotard? Is that it? Well, I'm sure it's all very stylish in Baltimore, but Emily, honey, it "can't hold a candle to that paisley dress your mother made."

"That paisley dress is gone," Emily said. "It's twelve years old. It's cleaning windows now." Aunt Junie turned her face away. She looked stony and blind with hurt. She groped through the furniture- chair, desk, another chair-and reached the sofa and lowered herself into it.

"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."

"Ill 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.