Morgan's Passing

Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler

Book: Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anne Tyler
Ads: Link
moved on to Haightsville, south of Philadelphia. They thought they had a connection there, but that fell through, and they ended up in a tavern called the Bridle Club that was decorated to look like a stable. Emily had the impression that most of the customers were married to other people waiting at home. It was a middle-aged crowd—squat men in business suits, women with sprayed and gilded hair and dresses that looked one size too small. These people, too, talked among themselves throughout the skits, but they did offer a few ideas. A man wanted a scene in which a teenager announced to her parents that she was quitting school to become an exotic dancer. A woman proposed that a couple have a quarrel about the wife’s attempts to introduce a few gourmet foods to her husband. Both of these suggestions, when they were made, caused a little ripple of amusement through the room, and the group turned them into fairly funny skits; but Emily kept imagining that they might be true. The man did have the seedy, desolate look of a failed father; the woman was so frantically gay that she could very well have just escaped from a stodgy husband. What the audience was doing was handing over its pain, Emily felt. Even the laughter seemed painful, issuing from these men with their red, bunchy faces and the women bearing up bravely beneath their towering burdens of hair. For the third skit, a man sitting with three other men proposed the following: a wife develops the notion that her husband, a purely social drinker who can take it or leave it and quit whenever he wants to, supposing he ever did want to, is in fact an alcoholic. “Pretend like this woman gets more and more out of line,” he said. “Pretend like she goes around watering the Jack Daniel’s, calling up the doctor and the AA people. When he asks for a drink, she brings him ginger ale with a spoonful of McCormick’s brandy extract stirred in. When he wantsto go out for a friendly night with his buddies, she says—”
    â€œPlease!” said Barry, holding up a hand. “Leave something for us!”
    Then everyone laughed, except Emily.
    They were appearing at the Bridle Club for three nights, but the second night Emily didn’t go. She walked around town instead, until almost ten o’clock, looking into the darkened windows of Kresge and Lynne’s Dress Shoppe and Knitter’s World. Periodically, carloads of teenagers shot by, hooting at her, but Emily ignored them. She felt so much older than they were, she was surprised she wasn’t invisible to them.
    In the drugstore, which was the only place still open, she bought a zippered cosmetic kit for traveling, completely fitted with plastic jars and bottles and a tiny tube of Pepsodent. She and Leon were almost penniless at this point. They were having to sleep apart—Emily and the two other women at the Y, the men in the van. The last thing they could afford was a $4.98 cosmetic kit. Emily rushed back to her room, feeling guilty and pleased. She started rearranging her belongings—carefully pouring hand lotion into one of the bottles, fitting her silver hairbrush into a vinyl loop. But she really didn’t wear much make-up; the zippered bag took more room than her few cosmetics had taken on their own. It was a mistake. She couldn’t even get her money back; she’d used the bottles. She began to feel sick. She went through her suitcase throwing things out—her white school blouses, her jeans, every bit of underwear. (If she wore only leotards, she wouldn’t need underwear.) When she was done, all that remained in her suitcase were two extra wrap skirts, two extra leotards, a nightgown, and the cosmetic bag. The small cardboard wastebasket next to her bed was overflowing with filmy, crumpled, shoddy non-essentials.
    Their third appearance at the Bridle Club was canceled in favor of the owner’s cousin’s girlfriend, a torch singer. “I

Similar Books

Sweet Charity

M McInerney

The Curve Ball

J. S. Scott

Cataract City

Craig Davidson

Out of the Blue

Sarah Ellis

Ghostwalker

Erik Scott de Bie