by Anne Tyler
“Bring me a casket of pearls, Father,” Emily piped in a tiny voice.
Leon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.
“What do you want me to bring you, Beauty?”
“Only a rose, Father. One perfect rose.”
She could see the outlines of the children through the scrim. They were listening, but they were fidgety underneath, she thought. It made her nervous. She felt things were on the verge of falling into pieces. During the father’s long scene alone in the palace, she saw Mrs. Tibbett’s fluttery silhouette enter and stand watching. What a shame; she’d come during the dull part. “Oh. A table has been laid for me, with lovely foods,” the father said. “And look: a fine gold bed with satin sheets. I wonder to whom this belongs.” Mrs. Tibbett shifted her weight to the other foot.
Then the Beast arrived. Emily expected him to roar, but instead he spoke in a deep, chortling growl that took her by surprise. “Who’s gobbled up all my food?” he asked plaintively. “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” (Oh, Lord, she hoped he hadn’t confused this with “Goldilocks.”) “My lovely bed, with the satin sheets to keep my hairdo smooth!” he groaned.
The children laughed.
An audience. She saw him realize. She saw the Beast raise his shaggy head and look toward the children. Their outlines were still now and their faces were craned forward. “Do you know who?” he asked them.
“Him!” they cried, pointing.
“What’s that you say?”
“The father! Him!”
The Beast turned slowly. “Oho!” he said, and the father puppet shrank back, as if blown by the Beast’s hot breath.
After the show the maid passed cake and punch around, but most of the children were too busy with the puppets to eat. Emily taught them how to work the Beast’s mouth, and she had Beauty sing “Happy Birthday” to Melissa. Mrs. Tibbett said, “Oh, this was so much better than last year’s ‘Punch and Judy.’ ”
“We never do ‘Punch and Judy,’ ” Leon said gravely. “It’s too grotesque. We stick to fairytales.”
“Just one thing puzzles me,” said Mrs. Tibbett.
“What’s that?”
“Well, the Beast. He never changed to a prince.”
“Prince?” Emily said.
“You had her living happily ever after with the Beast. But that’s not how it is; he changes; she says she loves him and he changes to a prince.”
“Oh,” Emily said. It all came back to her now. She couldn’t think how she’d forgotten. “Well …” she said.
“But I guess that would take too many puppets.”
“No,” Emily said, “it’s just that we use a more authentic version.”
“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Tibbett said.
3
By spring they were putting on puppet shows once or twice a week, first for friends of Mrs. Tibbett’s and then for friends of those friends. (In Baltimore, apparently, word of mouth was what counted most.) They made enough money so they could start paying Mrs. Apple rent, and Leon quit his Texaco job. Emily went on working at Crafts Unlimited just because she enjoyed it, but she earned almost as much now from the extra puppets that she sold there. And gradually they began to be invited to school fairs and church fund-raisers. Emily had to sit up all one night, hastily sewing little Biblical costumes. A private school invited them to give a show on dental hygiene. “Dental hygiene?” Emily asked Leon. “What is there to say?” But Leon invented a character named Murky Mouth, a wicked little soul who stuffed on sweets, ran water over his toothbrush to deceive his mother, and played jump-rope with his dental floss. Eventually, of course, he came to a bad end, but the children loved him. Two more schools sent invitations the following week, and a fashionable pedodontist gave them fifty dollars to put on a Saturday-morning show for twenty backsliding patients and their mothers, who (Emily heard later) had to pay twenty-five dollars per couple to attend.
It was mostly Leon’s doing, their success. He still grumbled any time they had a show, but the fact was that from the start he knew exactly what was needed: dignified, eccentric little characters (no more squeaky voices) and plenty of audience participation. His heroes were always dropping things and wondering where they were, so that the children went wild trying to tell them; always overlooking the obvious and having to have it explained. Emily, on the other hand, cared more for the puppets themselves. She liked the designing and the sewing and the scrabbling for stray parts. She loved the moment when a puppet seemed to come to life—usually just after she’d sewed the eyes on. Once more, a puppet had his own distinct personality, she found. It couldn’t be altered or submerged, and it couldn’t be duplicated. If he was irreparably damaged—or stolen, which sometimes happened—she could only make a new one to fill his role; she couldn’t make the same one over again.
That was ridiculous, Leon said.
She imagined the world split in two: makers and doers. She was a maker and Leon was a doer. She sat home and put together puppets and Leon sprang onstage with them, all flair and action. It was only a matter of circumstance that she also had to be the voices for the heroines.
Victor was neither maker nor doer, or he was both, or somewhere in between, or … What was the matter with Victor? First he grew so quiet, and paused before answering anything she said, as if having to reel his mind in from more important matters. He moped around the apartment; he stared at Emily sadly while he stroked his wisp of a mustache. When Emily asked him what his trouble was, he told her he’d been born in the wrong year. “How can that be?” she asked him. She supposed he’d taken up some kind of astrology. “What difference does the year make?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Why should it bother me?”
He nodded, swallowing.
That night at supper he put down his plate of baked beans and stood up and said, “There’s something I have to say.”
They still had no furniture, and he’d been eating on the windowsill. He stood in front of the window, framed by an orange sunset so they had to squint at him from their places on the floor. He laced his fingers together and bent them back so the knuckles cracked. “I have never been a sneaky person,” he said. “Leon, I’d like to announce that I’m in love with Emily.”
Leon said, “Huh?”
“I won’t beat around the bush: I think you’re wrong for her. You’re such a grouch. You’re always so angry and she’s so … un-angry. You think her puppets are nothing, a chore, something forced on you till you get to your real thing, acting. But if you’re an actor, why don’t you act? You think there’s no theatre groups in this city? I know why: you had a fight with that guy Bronson, Branson, what’s-his-name, when you went to try out. You’ve had a fight with everyone around. You can’t try out for the Chekhov play because Barry May’s in that and he’ll tell all the others what you’re like. But still you say you’re an actor and you’re so disadvantaged, so held back, wasting your talents here when there’s other things you could be doing. What other things?”
Leon had stopped chewing. Emily felt her chest tightening up. Victor was smaller than Leon, and so young and meek he would never hit back. She imagined him cowering against the window, shielding his head with his arms, but she didn’t know how to step in and stop this.
“I realize I’m not as old as Emily,” Victor said, “but I could take much better care of her. I would treat her better; I’d appreciate her; I’d sit admiring her all day long, if you want to know. We’d live a real life, not like this, with her ducked over her sewing machine and you off brooding in some corner, paying her no attention, holding some grudge that no one can guess at … Well, I’ll say it right out: I want to take Emily away with me.”
Leon turned and looked at Emily. She saw that he wasn’t angry at all. He was relaxed and amused, smiling a tolerant, kindly smile. “Well, Emily?” he said. “Do you want to go away with Victor?”
She felt suddenly flattened.
“Thank you, Victor,” she said, pressing her palms
together. “It’s nice of you, but I’m fine as I am, thank you.”
“Oh,” said Victor.
“I appreciate the thought.”
“Well,” Victor said, “I didn’t want to sneak around about it.”
Then he sat back down on the windowsill and picked up his plate of beans.
The next morning he was gone—Victor and his tangle of blankets and his canvas backpack and his cardboard carton of LP records. He hadn’t even said goodbye to Mrs. Apple. Well, it was a relief, in a way. How could they act natural after that? And she and Leon did need to be on their own. They were a married couple; it began to seem that they really were married. She was starting to think about a baby. Leon didn’t want one, but in time he would come around. They could use Victor’s room for a workshop now, and then for the baby later on. It was lucky Victor had left, in fact.
But she hated how his woodsy, brown boy-smell hung in the empty room for days after he had gone.
Several times in Emily’s life, similar things had happened. Men had seemed to affix themselves to her—but not to her personally, she thought. What they liked was their idea of her. She remembered a boy in her logic class who used to write her notes asking if she would take down her hair for him. Her hair: a bunch of dead cells that had nothing to do with her. “Think of it as longer, thinner fingernails,” she had written back coolly. She disliked being seen from outside that way—as someone with blond hair, someone with an old-fashioned face. Once, in New York, a man had started eating every day at the restaurant where she worked, and any time she so much as passed his table he would tell her about his ex-wife, who had also worn braids on top of her head. It was a continuing story: Emily would bring his rolls and he would say, “On our second date we went to the zoo.” She’d refill his coffee cup and he would say, “I’m pretty certain she loved me to begin with.” After a couple of weeks he went away, but Emily couldn’t forget the ex-wife. She was Emily’s other self; they would have understood each other, but she had slipped off and left Emily to take the blame. Now, with Victor, Emily wondered who he’d had in mind. Not Emily, she was sure—poking around in her linty old clothes, hunting up noses for her puppets. It must have been someone else who looked like Emily but had the capacity for a greater number of people in her life. Poor Victor! It was a pity, Emily thought. She was surprised at how much she missed him. She could not imagine loving anyone but Leon, but when she’d put a puppet together and longed for someone to try him out on, she thought of Victor and their squeaky-voiced duets. She remembered Beauty’s sisters clowning around at that first birthday party while Leon paced the floor.
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? He isn’t one of those Nashville Merediths, is he? And once she had her answers, of course she felt duty-bound to write his parents a get-acquainted note. Next Leon received a letter from his mother, sent direct to his New York address: Mr. Leon Meredith. No mention of Emily. He threw it away unopened. “Oh, Leon!” Emily said. It was true she wasn’t comfortable with his parents, but you couldn’t just discard your only relatives. Leon said, “I told you that was a mistake, writing your aunt. I said it would be.” And the letter stayed in the wastebasket.
They moved to Baltimore, but the letters followed, for all his mother had to do was ask Aunt Mercer for his new address. And Leon went on throwing the letters away. Maybe eventually he’d have opened one (this couldn’t last forever, could it?), but then the Merediths did something unforgivable. They gave his forwarding address to his draft board.
It wasn’t malicious, Emily was certain, but Leon thought it was. “That’s my parents for you,” he said. “They’d rather have me dead in the jungle than alive and happy without them.” He went on cursing them even after he failed the physical. One leg was found to be an inch and a half shorter than the other, the result of a broken thighbone in his childhood. No one had ever noticed it before. He returned with a painful limp and said, “I’m free, but I won’t forget what they tried to do to me.” And he continued throwing their letters away.
If Emily’s name had been on the envelopes too, she’d have opened them. She was pregnant by then and wishing for her mother. Aunt Mercer was no use—with her dim, steely handwriting: The crocuses are late this year and the rodents have been at my galanthus bulbs—and Mrs. Apple was sympathetic but had no recollection of childbirth. (“Per
haps I was put to sleep,” she said. “Do they give anesthesia for such things? I may have been asleep the whole nine months, in fact.”) Emily dreamed that Mrs. Meredith would suddenly arrive in person, miraculously plumper and more motherly, and she’d fold Emily into her lap and let her be a daughter again. But she never did.
Then, three months after Gina’s birth, there it was: Mrs. Leon Meredith. Emily marveled at how long it had taken. She smuggled the letter into the bathroom and locked the door behind her to read it. I know it must be you who’s keeping our boy from us. I saw from the start you were a cold little person. But he is our only child. Think how we must feel.
Emily was stunned. She couldn’t believe that anyone would be so unfair. Her eyes blurred and the sheets of bricks shimmered in the window.
Why are you saying these things? she wrote back. I have nothing to do with any of this and I don’t understand it. It’s between you and Leon.
His mother said, It seems you must have taken offense at something. Please, could we start over? Could we meet at the Elmwood this Wednesday at noon?
Emily didn’t want to meet her. She felt like ripping the letter to shreds. She looked at Gina, who lay crowing in her cardboard box, and she tried to imagine anything Gina could do—marrying, mismarrying, committing murder—that would sever her from Emily’s life as Leon had severed himself from his parents’. There was nothing. She just wouldn’t allow it. Gina was the whole point; even what Emily felt for Leon seemed pallid by comparison. She smoothed the letter on her lap and saw Mrs. Meredith’s tense, powdery face, with the eyebrows plucked as thin as two arched wires and the lids beneath them always a little puffed, as if she were on the edge of tears.
There were certain rules, Emily had been taught. She would have to go just this once.
Mrs. Meredith came by taxi, all the way from Richmond. Evidently, she didn’t drive, and had simply hired a cab for the day. The driver sat at the next table, spreading pâté on a cracker and reading Male magazine. Mrs. Meredith waited behind a foggy martini glass. Her back was very straight. Then Emily entered with Gina riding the way she liked to in those days-hanging over Emily’s forearm, with her bottom propped against Emily’s hip, frowning darkly at her own bare toes. “Oh!” Mrs. Meredith cried out, and one hand flew to her throat, knocking the martini glass into her lap.
