The television is on, but soundless. Three pretty young women sit on plush furniture in a coffee shop, laughing at a pair of young men who punch each other in the shoulder, then wince with pain and fall to the floor.
“The museum is going to close, Bill,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m so...” She touches his shoulder, gently at first, then with a sharp poke.
They don’t have conversations, only confrontations. Last month, for example, she cooked at the Senior Center and he got on her case about that. She’d just come home from a long day at the museum, and the minute she walked in the house, he yelled, “Supper ready?” as he came back to consciousness at the sound of the front door slamming shut. His voice was frail but still had that threatening edge she had always feared. It twisted something inside her every time.
Emma did not answer him; she headed for the stairs. She had a headache. Her legs were sore and tired. Her everything was sore and tired.
“Supper ready?” his gravelly voice echoed again through the house. “What’re we havin’?”
She hated shouting, but from the bottom of the stairs, she called back to him. “I told you this morning. It’s Thursday. I have to help cook at the Center tonight. If you’re interested, we’re having chicken and biscuits.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re welcome to join us. You know that. You love chicken and biscuits.” Slowly she climbed the stairs.
“It ain’t the food.” Bill hated the senior center, which he called a “dump full of geezers learnin’ to knit.” Actually, she knew he didn’t like people seeing him in the wheelchair, especially the part where she had to help him get in and out of their car.
Emma knew there was little point in arguing. She didn’t want to fight. She didn’t even want him to come with her, truth be told. She took a deep breath at the top of the stairs, trying to calm herself. She shut him out by concentrating on something she’d read that afternoon in a book she borrowed from the library. She’d already memorized it:
“Champlain Black marble comes from one of the oldest quarries in the United States. The rich black of this stone is contrasted by flecks of fossilized organisms. The quarry is an ancient sea bed, more than four hundred fifty million years old. This stone has been used in the construction of many well-known buildings, including Radio City Music Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge.” She felt confident enough to add it to her script.
Emma entered her bedroom and chose an outfit, something nice but practical, since she would be in the kitchen and not at a fancy ball. Bill yelled again, but she couldn’t make out a word he said, so she didn’t respond. She dressed quickly and touched up her face, wishing she had time to shower. She delayed leaving the bedroom, hoping that he’d lose interest and go back to his damned TV.
Even at eighty-one, frail and withdrawn and crippled, hardly more than a shadow of the man she’d known all her life, Bill could intimidate her. She knew this had more to do with the person he once was, not the one he’d become, but her reaction was instinctive, honed from years spent trying to predict his moods and deflect his anger.
When she’d married him, he was thirty and she twenty-two, still living with her parents. He was a man of the world. He’d been to France and Germany during the war, and had come back to work in the quarries, a good job in those days. Bill was tough, like most of the quarrymen, and always had a short fuse. When they were young, he scared her sometimes. Although he hardly ever laid a hand on her — she was lucky compared to some of her friends — the things he’d say sometimes froze her heart.
Ready at last, Emma left the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, she saw Bill waiting for her below, his wheelchair positioned to block her way, its bulky frame making up for his frailty.
“I said, what am I supposed to do about supper?” His eyes were cold, his tone seething with rage.
“There’s still some pork in the fridge,” Emma said, descending slowly. She stood on the last stair, waiting for him to move aside. He scowled. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his beard made him look even older and meaner. She wondered what she had ever seen in him, and almost laughed at the thought, so absurd under the circumstances.
For the first time that she could remember in a confrontation like this, he surrendered. Waving her off with disgust, he turned sharply and headed back toward the TV room, muttering some terribly unpleasant things about her, though none she hadn’t heard before. A moment later, the volume was so high that the sound of canned laughter filled the house.
The afternoon is slow at the museum, as if the tourists all received a letter this morning, too: “Your visits will no longer be required. Thank you for...”
Whether it’s the bad news or the lack of a sizable audience, Emma just can’t keep her mind on her work. “The process of sawing marble by means of a toothless strip of metal and the liberal use of sand was the invention of a Vermonter — Isaac Parker, of Middlebury,” she says, and knows the name is wrong the second it leaves her tongue.
“Was he an ancestor of yours?” asks a professorial type wearing a corduroy sport coat and blue jeans.
“Who?”
“Isaac Parker.” He jots the name down in a small notebook.
“Oh, no, did I say Parker? I meant Markham.”
Emma is suddenly disoriented in the one place where she had come to feel oriented.
When the tour is over, she goes outside and strolls through the marble chip — covered parking lot, just to breathe some fresh air and to clear her mind. It almost works. A few minutes later, she walks beneath the museum’s entrance arch — one immense marble block atop a pair of vertical blocks — and enters the building again. The place is nearly empty. She wanders through the quiet halls, fondly touching displays with her fingertips.
She enters her favorite room, the Marbles of the World Hall. As big as a gymnasium, it was originally the company’s showroom. Marble, limestone, and a few granite panels are showcased vertically and bathed in abundant natural light streaming through the banks of small-paned windows high on the walls.
Emma walks down one of the narrow aisles, moving from slab to slab as if each were a separate canvas in an art museum. She loves the names: Verde Antique, Regal White Danby, Westland Green Veined Cream, Pico Green, Westland Cippolino, Neshobe Gray Clouded, Champlain Black, Mariposa Danby, Striped Brocadillo, Verdoso, Olivo. She will miss them all.
In a soft voice, Emma recites: “Extraneous substances introduced in minute quantities during formation created the colors, veining, clouds, mottling, and shadings in marble. The activity and movement of the earth’s crust caused the wavelike or folded configuration of the veining. The limestone beds tilted up and folded, resulting in the characteristics of the marble. Veins appeared when cracks or sedimentary layers filled with minerals to become permanent characteristics as a result of metamorphism.”
Standing before a slab of Best Light Cloud, she moves in close, observes crystals fleck in the changing afternoon light. Then she steps back, as she imagines people do in front of paintings at an art gallery, and the crystals become veins of soft color. She can sense her own blood rushing along its delicate arteries, and feels a connection with the stone.
Two hours later, shortly before closing time, she stands in the same spot and recites her script again; this time a dozen people form a semicircle around her. They listen, some intently, some just politely, but all look surprised when she suddenly falls silent and stares at the slab with intense concentration. No one seems willing to move or to speak.