"You don't have to, you know."
"I want to."
"They can't force you."
"I want to," Gina said. "I want to get out of here! And never come back. I'm sick of everything always so messy, babies and diapers and those two old ladies taking up my bedroom. You just let them move right in on me. You acted glad to have them. Nobody else at St. Andrew's sleeps on a fold-out bed. And that dog that snores, and Morgan's stupid tools and things anyplace I want to sit. I'm fed up with him! Does he have to wear those hats all the time? Does he have to make such a show of himself?"
"Why, Gina!" Emily said.
But later, when they'd walked home, it was to Morgan that Gina acted friendliest. At lunch she kept giggling with him, and then flashing some kind of challenge at Emily with her flat, black, unreadable eyes.
"I'm much more free than I used to be," Bonny said. "I mean, he used to color my world so. You know how that is?" There was something wrong with the telephone. Other lines seemed to be spilling into it. Emily heard faint laughter and a burble of distant voices. "No," she said, worming a screwdriver out of Joshua's grasp. "No, not exactly."
"Oh, he was so tiring! Everything had to be larger than life, extravagant, grandiloquent. Take my brother, Billy. You've met Billy. He hasn't been lucky in marriage. He's had three wives. But three is not an impossible number. I mean, the way Morgan always spoke of him, you'd think Billy'd been married dozens of times, *Now, who is his wife at the moment?' he'd ask. 'Do I know her name?' And somehow we all fell in with it. Even Billy, it seemed, came to believe that he'd had this great, long train of wives. He made jokes about it, acted like a drop-in guest at his own weddings. There! See? I'm talking as if he had a wedding every week." Something was boiling over on the stove. At the kitchen table Brindle slouched in her long, white, dingy bathrobe, laying out her Tarot cards, and when she heard the hiss of steam she looked up, but she did nothing about it, Emily stepped over the dog, stretched to the end of her cord, and took the pan off the stove and set it in the sink. "Bonny, I'm cooking supper now," she said.
"He only feels he's real when he's in other people's eyes," Bonny told her, "Things have to be viewed. All alone in the bathroom, he's no one. That's why his family doesn't count. They tend not to see him; you know how families are. So he has to go out and find himself in someone else's line of vision. Oh, how wearing he was. I blame it on his mother. She expected so much of himespecially after his father died. "You can be anything,' she told him. He must have misunderstood. He thought she said, 'You can be everything.'"
"He's wonderful with Gina," Emily said.
"I feel sorry for you," Bonny said.
Trunks and dress forms, a rusty birdcage, barrels containing a gigantic cup-and-saucer collection muffled in straw, stacks of National Geographies, Brindle's catalogs, Louisa's autograph book, a samovar, a carton of records, a lady's bicycle, a wicker elephant. And this was only what lined the hall, which had once been as empty as a tunnel. In the living room: two sets of encyclopedias (one general, one medical), a spread-out jigsaw puzzle, Louisa's platform rocker with several yards of knitting coiled in the seat, and half a dozen runny watercolors of peaches, pears, and grapes-products of an art course Brindle had taken twenty years ago, back when she was married to her first husband. The husband himself (pink-faced, with a windowpane of white painted on his bald skull like the shine on an apple) hung in a curly gold frame above a bookcase full of manuals.
In Gina's room there was almost NO floor-just a field of bureaus and unmade beds. In Morgan's and Emily's room were more bureaus (two and a half for Morgan alone), the bed, the sewing machine, Gina's old, yellowed crib with the tattered eyelet canopy they'd brought up from the basement for Joshua, and puppets dangling from the picture rails, since there wasn't space in the closet. The closet held Morgan's clothing. There, also, no floor was evident-no air, even. Step inside and you'd be impacted in a solid, felty darkness, faintly smelling of mothballs.
Emily loved it all.
She began to understand why Morgan's daughters kept coming home when they had to convalesce from something. You could draw vitality from mere objects, evidently-from the seething souvenirs of dozens of lives raced through at full throttle. Morgan's mother and sister (both, in their ways, annoying, demanding, querulous women) troubled her not a bit, because they weren't hers. They were too foreign to be hers. Foreign: that was the word. All she touched, dusted, and edged around was part of a foreign country, mysterious and exotic. She drew in deep breaths, as if trying to taste the difference in the air. She was fascinated by her son, who did not seem really, truly her own, though she loved him immeasurably. At meals, she tended to keep silent and to watch everybody with a small, pleased smile. At night in bed, she never lost her surprise at finding herself alongside this bearded man, this completely other person. She felt drawn to him by something far outside herself-by strings that pulled her, by ropes. Waking in the dark, she rolled toward him with a kind of stunned sensation. She was conscious of their two surfaces meeting noticeably: oil and water.
But Morgan said they had to move to some place bigger-a place with more bathrooms, at least. He was sorry, he said, to be putting her through this. He knew she had never bargained on having his female relatives dumped at her door like stray cats. (Actually, they had climbed the stairs themselves, wearing gloves, but it was true that Bonny'd just dropped them off in front of the building,) He would like, he said, a house in the country-a large, bare farmhouse. However, there was the matter of money. Even keeping this apartment was difficult, nowadays. Mrs. Apple had raised the rent. She was not as friendly as she'd once been, Emily thought. And Morgan had lost his job. Emily felt that this was spitefulness on Bonny's part. Why should Morgan's private arrangements affect his work at Cullen Hardware? But Morgan said that was Uncle Ollie's doing, not Bonny's. In fact, he said, Uncle Ollie had seemed to leap at the opportunity-had rushed to the store as soon as he heard the news and flung Morgan's wardrobe onto the sidewalk, the selfsame wardrobe Bonny had flung there earlier. (People were so eager to get rid of his clothes, Morgan mourned.) It so happened that Morgan was out, at the time. He returned to find Uncle Ollie planted in front of the store, rising from a billow of hats. "Is it true what they tell me?"
"Yes."
"Then you're fired." If he had said, "No," Morgan claimed, Uncle Ollie would no doubt have been disappointed. He must have been waiting all along for such a chance.
Now Morgan had no steady employment, although a couple of times a week he clerked at the plumbing-supply store down the street. Emily tried to make more and more puppets, faster and faster, working late at night while Josh was asleep. Whenever Morgan saw her bent over her sewing machine, he apologized. He said, "You look like someone in an ad for unions." What he didn't understand was that Emily felt happier now than she'd ever felt before. She rattled inside this new life like… well, like Morgan in one of his hats, she supposed. But he went on apologizing. He couldn't believe she didn't mind.
When the time arrived for Leon to drive to Baltimore and pick up Gina, Emily cleaned the apartment so he wouldn't imagine she had let things go. But she didn't try to straighten the clutter, or get Brindle out of her bathrobe. And she didn't hide Morgan's collection of outdated Esso maps or his latest woodworking project — a formless bundle of two-by-fours leaning in a corner of the bathroom.
It was a Saturday he was coming. Saturday morning she got up early, not that she had any choice: Joshua woke her. She took him out to the kitchen and fed him, balancing his warm, damp weight in her lap. He waved his fists and pedaled with his feet as soon as he saw his cereal. His four lower teeth, as crisp as grains of rice, clicked against the spoon. He was a beautiful baby-dark and creamy-skinned, like Gina, but easier than she had been. Leon had never met him.