Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

Elizabeth went out the kitchen door and found the turkey squatting by a basement window. “Shoo!” she said, and clapped her hands. The turkey moved a few feet off before he stopped again. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!”

Mrs. Emerson appeared on the back porch, followed by Timothy. “Now, how on earth—” she said. “I thought I told you to kill that thing.”

“I was just getting set to,” Elizabeth said.

“Then what did I see in the kitchen? What is that creature on the counter?”

Timothy handed his pipe to his mother and came down the porch steps. “Drive him this way,” he told Elizabeth. “I’ll be here to grab him.”

“I would rather drive him off again.”

“Explain that, please,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I gave you a perfectly simple chore to do, one that Richard would have seen to in five minutes. The only thing in my life I ever won and you shoo him off like a common housefly. Then try to fool me with one from the butcher. That is what you did, isn’t it? That’s where you and Timothy came in from together, looking so smug?”

Because neither Elizabeth nor Timothy felt like answering, they concentrated on the turkey. They closed in on him tighter and tighter, although the last thing they wanted to do was catch him. The turkey did a little mumbling dance with himself, stiff-legged.

“I can’t trust anyone,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh, Mother. What’d you ask her to do it for, anyway? She’s too tender-hearted.”

“Too what? Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson set the pipe down, in the exact center of the top porch step, and folded her arms against the cold. “It isn’t the turkey I mind, it’s the deception,” she said. “The two of you going off like that, laughing at me behind my back. Conspiring. That naked, storebought-looking bird lying on my kitchen counter.”

Timothy had driven the turkey to a spot directly in front of Elizabeth, but Elizabeth made no move to catch him. She was watching Timothy, who was growing pinker and stonier but not answering back. He stood so close to her that she heard the angry little puff of his breath when his mother spoke to him.

“This was your idea, wasn’t it. Elizabeth never did such a thing before. I always felt I could rely on her. Now I don’t know, I just don’t know. It isn’t enough that you leave me all alone yourself, you have to drive everyone else off too. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what you’re hoping for?”

“Good God,” said Timothy, and then in one swift lunge he scooped up the turkey and carried it squawking and flapping to the toolshed. He took such long steps that Elizabeth had to run to keep up with him. It seemed that the whole upper half of his body had turned into beating, whirling, scattering feathers. When he reached the chopping block he jammed the turkey down on it and held it there. Then for a moment everything stopped. The turkey held still. His head lay limp on the block, his eyes seemed fixed on some inner thought.

“Timothy? Wait,” Mrs. Emerson called.

Timothy reached for the axe without looking at it, hefted it in his hand to get a better grip and chopped the turkey’s head off. It took one blow. The turkey’s wings began flapping, but with doomed, slow beats that carried the body nowhere. The beady eyes stared at a disc of blood. Mrs. Emerson cried, “Oh!”—a single, splintering sound. Elizabeth said nothing. She stood at Timothy’s side with her hands in her jacket pockets, staring out over the trees and pinning her mind on something far away from here.

Two weeks before Christmas there was a heavy snowfall. Timothy had a date with Elizabeth, and it took him nearly an hour to make the drive to his mother’s house. Downtown was difficult enough, but once he reached Roland Park his was the only car on the road, laying new black tracks which wavered slightly if he traveled at more than a creeping pace. He hunched over the steering wheel and squinted through a fan of cleared glass while handfuls of soft snow floated soundlessly around him. His gloves were lost, his heater was broken, and he had forgotten to have his snow tires put on. The only comfort was his radio — a news announcer telling him, over and over, that Baltimore was experiencing a heavy snowstorm and traffic conditions were hazardous. “Exercise extreme caution,” he said. His voice was friendly and concerned. Timothy carried out a token pumping of his brakes, relieved that someone else had noticed these dreamlike puffs of white.

He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.

The lights of the houses along the way were circled with bluish mist. Parked cars were being buried, quickly and stealthily. “If you don’t have to drive, stay home,” the announcer said. “Keep off the roads.” Timothy had no need to drive at all, and should have been safe in his own apartment, but he felt like seeing Elizabeth. He had started taking her out two and three times a week. They went to dinner or the movies, or sometimes they stayed home and played whooping, dashing games of chess, with Elizabeth making bizarre moves and sacrificing quantities of pieces whenever she grew bored. Timothy was more scientific about it. He knew all the famous matches by heart, and could solve any chess problem the newspapers offered him. But Elizabeth had a psychological trick of swooping into his territory from some unexpected corner of the board, stunning him with the swift arc of her long arm, so that even when the invasion was harmless he was taken off guard and made some unlikely move to counter hers. Their games ended in giggles. Everything they did ended in giggles. He kept trying to get on some more serious footing with her, but every time they saw each other they went sailing off into some new piece of silliness. He caught it from her; laughter came shimmering off her like sparkles of water. His mother watched them with a puzzled, anxious smile.

The house was lit in every window, casting long yellow squares across the white lawn. He climbed out of the car and braced himself for a trip through the snow without boots, but before he took his first step Elizabeth rounded the house carrying a snow shovel. Sparks of white glinted on her cap, which seemed to be one of those fighter-pilot helmets with ear-flaps that little boys often wear. “Halt!” she said, and raised her shovel like a rifle. Then she placed herself squarely in front of the steps, set the shovel down at a slant, and started running. A narrow black line followed her magically, pausing each time she was stopped short by the creases between sidewalk squares. The rasping sound brought Timothy’s mother to an upstairs window — a silhouette against yellow lamplight. He laughed and waved at her. Then the blade of the shovel arrived at his shoe-tips and Elizabeth faced him, laughing too and out of breath. “There,” she said, and turned to lead him up the black carpet she had laid for him.

They stamped their feet on the doormat. Elizabeth had on huge rubber boots with red-rimmed soles and flapping metal clasps; he had the feeling they were once his father’s. The cuffs of her jeans were stuffed into them, and her jacket collar was turned up so that her hair, streaming from the helmet, fell half inside and half out in honey-colored tangles. Other girls could waft through his mind in chiffon, or silk, or at least ruffled shirtwaists, but not Elizabeth. Elizabeth forever wore that thick, shabby jacket, and wore it badly — hands deep in her pockets, waist hiked up in back, shoulder seams reaching halfway to her elbows and the zippered front bellying out below her chest. He thought of the way she dressed as another joke played on him by the universe. If he was going to get so tied up with her, couldn’t she have at least one romantic quality? Couldn’t she smell like flowers, or be as light on her feet as a snowflake? But she smelled of wood shavings. When she stamped her boots, gleaming drops shot out to dampen his trousers all the way to the knees.