She said she wanted to show you her room. a beat. She doesn't say that about people. She barely says that about Aunt Dorothy. And Aunt Dorothy brings her candy. Margaret kept walking.
She kept her pace even, she said carefully. "That's a very kind thing to hear." "I thought so, too," Emily said. And then with the pure directness of a 10-year-old who had decided that the adult world's complicated systems for not saying things directly were inefficient. I think Papa thinks about you a lot.
He looks at the door on Sunday mornings now before we even leave the house. Like he's already thinking about where he's going. Margaret said, "Emily, I'm just telling you what I see." Emily said, "That's all." She shrugged with the casual authority of someone who had discharged an obligation and was at peace with it.
The results are going to be soon. We should go back. They went back. The announcement was made by Mr. Cvy, the hotel woman's husband, which was a detail Margaret had not previously known, and she filed it away on a raised platform near the main tent entrance with the kind of deliberate pacing that men used when they had an audience and a result. and they understood those two things combined into something worth drawing out. Third place went to a cobbler from the Morrison girl.
Technically accomplished, Mr. Cvy said with an excellent pastry layer. Second place went to the Garfield woman's lemon chess. A perennial standard, he said. Then he paused. He looked at his paper.
He said, "The first place ribbon in this year's open competition goes to a pie that every one of our three judges independently and without discussion wrote the same word about." Another pause. Stand 14. Margaret Dawson, sweet potato with molasses crust. The tent was quiet for exactly one second.
Then it wasn't. The sound was not unanimous. It was not the town of Willow Creek rising to celebrate one of its own. It was complicated and fractured and real in the way that public moments were always real. Some people clapping, some people exchanging looks, some people doing the small rapid calculations of social geography, figuring out where they stood.
Clara Hutchkins was standing near the far side of the tent and she was not clapping and her face was doing something complicated and controlled. Margaret walked to the platform. She was aware of her weight on every step. The way she was always aware of it in public, that double consciousness of being in her own body and watching herself be in her own body. And she made herself stop being aware of it and just walk the way she walked to her kitchen, the way she walked to her cart, the way she walked every day of her life in her own skin.