Cordially...
The room spins. Emma sits, tries to think clearly, tries to breathe, fails at both for a moment, then catches some air and places the letter down on the desk. She has a tour beginning within minutes, but suddenly she’s forgotten what to tell them, the words erased from her memory and replaced by all these new, awful words — uncertain, difficult, cease, inconvenience, unfortunate. She can’t even summon the strength to hope, to pretend that there has been a mistake. The letter looks and reads like truth. Everything ends today.
It’s her husband’s fault. She knows he’s behind this somehow, though it seems impossible. He’s punishing her for what she’s done, for what she’s become; punishing her again. He never wanted her here in the first place, and finally he’s gotten his way. The son of a bitch, she thinks, even though she would never say this aloud. No one in Millbridge would believe her capable of saying such a thing. The son of a bitch.
She can’t bear the thought of changing again. Emma loves being a docent. She even likes saying the word to herself — docent, docent, docent. The out-of-state developers who’ve been renovating the old marble mill brought that word with them from Boston, just as the Irish and the Polish and the Italians had carried their words here in earlier times.
Emma first saw the classified ad in the local paper three years ago: “Wanted: one full-time docent.” She had to look it up in the dictionary: “A knowledgeable guide, particularly one who conducts visitors through a museum and delivers a commentary on exhibitions.” Above all, she loves the notion of being a docent every time somebody in town asks, “What are you up to these days, Emma?”
“I’m a docent at the MillWorks Marble Museum,” she replies. Since she began working here, she has noticed how much more interesting and even enjoyable life is; the work has put a spring in her step and a lilt in her voice that just weren’t there before, ever. After all those years of saying “housewife” or “wife and mother,” it has felt awfully good to have a new answer to that annoying and demeaning question. But now she will lose her answer. Now she will be “Bill’s wife” again, and that is no pleasure at all.
How had she ever summoned the nerve to apply for this job in the first place? She’s still not sure. She considered a hundred sensible reasons not to apply, but in the end she couldn’t stop herself. Just getting out of the house, away from Bill, seemed like the best reason. Ever since his retirement twenty years ago, he’d haunted their house more than a real ghost ever would have. And for the past eight years he’d been confined to a wheelchair, so he was mad every time she went out the door for any reason, as if her two good legs were an insult or a rebellion or something.
Emma’s friends teased her at first about this docent business, and Bill, who thought she was crazy to want to do this, said it was just “a high-falutin’ way of saying tour guide, like calling a garbage collector a sanitation engineer.”
When she told him later what the salary would be — she should have kept that to herself — he said she should turn them down; said if they were going to give her a fancy French title they should at least pay her more than a supermarket cashier.
“We got enough money, ain’t we?” he asked her the day they actually offered her the job.
“It’s not about money,” she replied.
“Why do you want to work anyway?” he growled. “You’re seventy-five years old, goddamn it.”
“Seventy-three. I can do this job. I can still walk and talk.”
“What am I supposed to do?” He was practically spinning circles in his wheelchair, that old anger welling up just like it used to, but with no place to spend itself, least of all on her. Not anymore.
“What are you supposed to do about what?” she asked calmly.
This stumped him, but only for a second. “About lunch.” It was pathetic, but the best he could do under pressure. In fact, he relied on her for a lot more than lunch — she was his full-time nurse, and those wages were worse than what she’d be getting from the museum.
“Eat,” she snapped, surprising herself. His face betrayed a flutter of shock. He stormed away without another word, and that was how her career began, like busting a bottle of champagne against a ship. Jealous was what he was, just plain old jealous.
There was a time when she would have listened to him, let him bully her. Instead, she didn’t even fight with him about it, not really, or at least not in the old way, with shouting and tears and threats. She simply waited him out, did what she wanted to do, and let him stew about it. She took care of all his needs, came home on her lunch hour, and showed him she could handle both worlds, his and hers. She didn’t even talk to him about it after a while. She just let it happen. She’d learned how to be stubborn too.
What would he say now if she told him about the museum closing? He’d be happy about it, she’s sure.
Teach you a lesson, he’d say.
What lesson?
Not to hope.
“The original settlers in the Millbridge area were mostly English and came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hamp-shire,” Emma says. The words, when she needs them, come without effort, like a prayer. “The Irish arrived by the mid nineteenth century, built the railroads, and stayed on to work in the quarries and shops of the new marble industry.”
Even by the marble museum’s modest standards, this is a small group. A young family of four trails behind her, followed by an attentive couple about Emma’s age, mid seventies, dressed for sport in pale yellow sweatsuits and dazzling white sneakers. Emma realizes that her smart blue skirt and jacket and crisply starched white blouse probably seem old fashioned and schoolmarmish to all of them, but she doesn’t mind. It feels good to dress up. For too many years she mended her housedresses again and again because every nickel Bill earned at the mill went to keep their daughter out of rags and put food on the table.
“By the end of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred commercial varieties of marble were being quarried in Vermont,” she continues as she leads her party along a corridor. Red letters stenciled on the whitewashed walls of the corridor announce the next exhibit: The Story of Marble: From the Precambrian Period to Contemporary Times.
Emma has already shown them, from the vantage point of a custom-built, second-story balcony, the immense, abandoned interior of the mill building attached to the museum. It’s one of a dozen such ghost buildings that were once loud, crowded, and dusty. What her group saw, however, was a clean, spacious cement floor, a couple of long-silenced gang saws, several polishing machines, and a few A-frame pallets holding marble slabs.
After seeing the shop floor, the group watched a grainy, fifteen minute condensed history of the Millbridge Marble Company. Now, as they enter the history room, Emma continues her talk: “By 1908, the company had five thousand employees. Interpreters were sent to Ellis Island to recruit immigrants. In 1923, nearly fifty gang saws in one Millbridge mill operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. During a strike in the mid 1860s, the company brought in French-Canadian workers to replace the evicted Irish. In 1871, the company imported several dozen Swedes, but few of them remained. In 1886, a large number of Italians were brought over by the company, and in the early 1890s Polanders began arriving. In this room you will see how and why Vermont became their destination and their future.”