The light circled just her face. “No strings attached.” The audience groaned, and laughed at their reaction to the pun. For a brief second she seemed to stand there on her own, without the assistance of the puppeteers. “Are we still friends? Of course we are. Good-bye, my dears, adieu.” And then a quick blackout.
When the applause began, the lights went full. Deux Mains had Kay take a bow, but then she dropped the puppet, allowing her to hang limp as the other puppeteers emerged from behind the scrim. The reaction of the first night surprised her, and the acclaim continued through the whole week. Only the matinees proved more subdued, perhaps because of all the children brought by parents who thought puppets were for children or who failed altogether to read the warnings. No matter how enthusiastic, the clapping and cheers enthralled her. The puppets made their exit, spent but exhilarated, an atmosphere of fatigue and euphoria in equal measure.
After Quatre Mains and the others battened down their sets and props, the puppets rested until midnight. Replaying the performance in her mind, Kay was always surprised by the return to autonomous life, which was made even stranger by the presence of the inanimate ones, the lifeless Punch and Judy, the seven glove puppets who played the dwarfs to No?’s “Snow White and the Codependents,” and the seagull, nothing more than a children’s toy. Scattered among the dead were some of her old cronies from the Back Room. The Sisters whispered together in a corner. Mr. Firkin regaled Nix with a particular moment in the show when he “had them eating out of the palm of my hand.” Kay longed for the others who had been stowed away—the Devil and the Good Fairy, the Queen and even the Worm. And then there was the curious case of Marmee, who was always hounded by the Dog backstage. Usually she kept to herself, knitting one night and unraveling her work the next, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return. Nearly the entire week had passed before Kay had the courage to approach her and inquire directly.
“How is it that you are alive like us?”
Marmee lifted one eyebrow and leered at her.
Kay continued, “Do I know you? You look familiar.…”
“You mean to say you don’t recognize your old friend? Oh, the Quatre Mains would be so happy to know how readily and easily you’ve been fooled.” She laughed and hunched her shoulders and rocked on her heels. “Are you sure you can’t guess?”
“Something about you reminds me of the one we called the Hag.”
“That’s it!” Marmee touched the tip of a knitting needle to the side of her wooden nose. “First try, good for you. Isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t I marvelous? They took off my old head and gave me a new one. Freshened up the stuffing and patched me right well. I feel forty years younger.”
Kay wanted to reach out to touch her, see if she was real, but a tremor ran along her arm from fingers to shoulder. A bubble grew inside where her stomach used to be, and she felt dizzy enough to sit. “How could it be? You are still you? Not someone else, for you sure look different.”
“Looks aren’t everything, chick. There’s such a thing as essence. What’s inside you. I’ve been all kinds of puppets over the years. Once I played a bawdy in a honky-tonk show, and once I was a rod puppet on a well-known TV show for children. But things change. As long as you hold on to your essence, you have everything.”
“But you were taken away with the Judges. What about the Judges? What about their essence?”
Drawn in by their conversation, the other puppets eavesdropped, curious but quiet. Marmee looked about the circle and confronted the question.
“They were unmade. You’ll find what’s left of them in a box of spare parts. The stuffing back in Québec. Maybe it was the Original’s idea, or maybe it was a whim of the Quatre Mains. He saw no need for them any longer, so…” She clapped the dust from her hands and wiped them clean.
“You mean they are gone? For good?”
“For good, for ill, for what you will. But, yes, they are kaput. No more.”
The others seemed unfazed, accepting the finality of her pronouncement quite readily. Drifting away in twos and threes, they talked quietly among themselves. Nix cracked a joke that made Mr. Firkin laugh and then chide him with a warning of “too soon.” Puppets changing shape, disappearing altogether. Kay’s notions of order were disturbed, so she found a dark corner in which to hide and contemplate and take exception to just who ruled the world.
*