“What’s Polanders?” asks one of the children, a thin girl with straight blond hair. She looks up at Emma with bright, curious, blue eyes.
“Immigrants from Poland, sweetie,” her father says. “People came from all over the world to work in America. It was their dream.” He is gravely overweight. His wife is tiny and quiet.
Emma steps aside with practiced grace and gently waves her right arm through the air as an invitation. “I’ll give you some time to look around here before we continue on to the Marbles of the World Hall.”
The kids burst into the spacious room. Their parents follow, and all four scatter among the exhibits as if chronological order were just an old-fashioned notion. The older couple, by contrast, moves directly to the first numbered exhibit to study a cutaway of the earth’s surface during the Precambrian era. The man points and his wife nods. On the other side of the room, the little boy whispers to his mother, then tugs at her sleeve when she ignores him. Finally, she leans down to listen.
“Ask the docent,” she says.
He looks at Emma but doesn’t speak.
“Could you show him where the bathroom is, ma’am?” the mother asks.
“Of course,” Emma replies, smiling. The boy responds to her smile, as children often do.
She will miss the children. She will miss everything. She has spent three years talking about change as it relates to the earth and to marble and to the business of bringing stone to market. Now that she faces change herself, she realizes that knowing about it is not the same as feeling its effects.
Emma loves telling tourists about the marble industry in Millbridge. She feels like an actress in a play. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s this damn marble mill, where all of the men in her family and all of the men in Bill’s family spent their working lives. Her father worked a gang saw, with its long steel blades swinging back and forth, slicing, with the help of an abrasive slurry of sand and water, through the immense marble blocks. It took hours to work through a single block. A fine stone mist suffused the air around the workers. That was what they breathed all day. At night, when her father came home, gray mud covered him from head to toe, and he looked like a statue.
She wasn’t the least bit surprised when she discovered, during her first training session, that one of the blown-up, black-and-white photographs on the wall at the museum pictured her father, his hands on his hips, looking disgusted, that impatient scowl Emma remembers so well, as he watched his saw blades slice through stone in a pendulum swing as relentless as nature.
She’s not vain about her accumulated knowledge. She realizes that a lot of people her age in Millbridge could probably do this job. Marble flows through their veins too. Well, the men wouldn’t be good at it. They couldn’t control their foul mouths, and she can’t imagine them sticking to the script; the poor tourists would have to listen to one boring story about the good old days after another. She’s constantly amazed by the way the men, including her Bill, could hate the marble company for all those years and then, after it was taken away from them, talk about it like the place had been paradise itself. No, it was definitely best to keep the men away from the tourists.
The little boy drops a candy wrapper on the floor. Emma doesn’t want to scold. It’s not her style, and the museum discourages it, believing that scolding tourists is bad for business. Instead, she waits until the child moves along, and then scoops up his litter, crumpling it into a tight ball. She doesn’t like to see her museum, her second home, abused. She loves the place, loves the sheer glorious wasted space of it all. She loves the whitewashed walls and the tall banks of factory windows, through which sunlight pours because the panes are no longer coated with marble dust. Everything here is so bright and clean now.
Except when she is leading a tour group, Emma is often left on her own. The girls they hire to work in the gift shop never stay for long and seldom have much to say to her, so she wanders the halls even when she doesn’t have a group. Sometimes she finds a quiet place to sit and read.
Emma glances at her watch: eleven fifteen. They’re behind schedule. She needs to be home for lunch by noon. She’ll have to cut a few corners to get this group through before then. She scans the room, sees the father examining a scale-model reproduction of an early steam drill. This is the second time he’s been there, which is a good sign. He’s ready to move on.
“If you’ll follow me, we’ll continue our tour in the Marbles of the World Hall. There you will see for yourself the vast array of colors and textures this extraordinary stone comes in, depending upon where it has been quarried. If you would... Excuse me. Please come this way now.”
The children race toward her, stopping at the last possible second, their shoes squeaking on the polished wood. They laugh. She smiles. The older couple, who only managed to get halfway through the numbered displays, obediently moves toward her as well; the kids’ mother trails just behind. Only the husband hesitates. Clearly, Emma thinks, he is used to giving orders, not taking them.
“Wow!” cries the little boy as they approach the brilliant, sunlit expanse of the exhibition hall. He starts to run ahead.
“Careful, champ,” yells his father. “Wait for us.”
Emma picks up the thread of her talk again. “The marble slabs you are about to see range from Parian marble, a semitranslucent stone quarried in Greece and popular among sculptors for its whiteness, to Belgian Black, which smells like rotten eggs when it is cut.” As usual, the children snicker when she says this.
On her way home for lunch, Emma drives down Pine Street past the Catholic church. As the spire looms, she feels an urge to stop, go inside, and pray... for what? Can she pray for a museum? Can she pray for her own selfish needs? Her happiness? Maybe she should at least make a sign of the cross as she drives by. She doesn’t, though, and soon the church shrinks in her rearview mirror. Just before it disappears altogether, she whispers, “Please, God.” Too early to say, “Rest in peace.”
She stands on the porch of her house, their house, Bill’s house. Although it’s only a little after noon, dark autumn clouds have given to afternoon a darkness like twilight. She notices that there are lights on in every room. Bill hates the dark, but he hates high electric bills more.
Through the living room window Emma can see marble everywhere — coffee and end tables, lamps and ashtrays, all set against the pale blue tint of the furniture fabric, wall paint, carpeting, and curtains. On the fireplace mantel, family photos mix with bowling trophies and knickknacks. From this distance, they could be pictures of anybody; she can only recognize them because she already knows who they are.
She could lead one of her tour groups through this house, point out marble artifacts in almost every corner, take them out to the TV room where Bill, an authentic retired marble worker, slumps in his favorite chair, the television screen shifting from one program to the next with the reliability of a clock.
She thinks about the way young people talk about needing their space these days. When Bill first retired, the walls of their little house suddenly boxed her in. He was never a homebody when he worked. On his days off he fished and hunted, and many nights he’d go to the Legion or to the Bowlerama. In retirement, he went out less and less over the years, stopped visiting his old buddies, and eventually they died or stopped visiting too. He hasn’t done anything for a long time. He sits and waits for her. That’s his job.
Emma slips quietly inside. In the TV room she stands beside the chair where Bill’s heavy body sprawls, surrounded by objects that tell the simple story of his days — dirty coffee mugs lined up on his tray, along with an open, half empty bag of potato chips, an overflowing ashtray, a crumpled pack of Marlboros, and a breakfast plate that once held scrambled eggs and toast.