Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“He did, he did,” Timothy said. Jean, maybe. Or Betty. One of those plain names. She looked like half the girls he knew — feathered cap of hair, bright lipstick and blue eyeshadow, fine-boned figure that fit very tidily into a nurse’s uniform. The other half of the girls he knew were from Roland Park, and their hair was smoother and hung gleaming to one side and they wore their clothes with a sloping, casual elegance. But they all had one thing in common: they treated Timothy like a teddy bear. They couldn’t seem to take him seriously. Was it because of his round face, or the curling-up corners of his mouth? “Show how you play patty-cake,” the girl told Christopher. “Isn’t he adorable?” Her tone was the same for Timothy as for the baby; it wasn’t clear who she thought was adorable.

“I believe he’s throwing up,” Timothy said.

“That’s not throwing up, he’s just spitting a little milk. Tell him, Chrissy. Say, ‘Don’t you know anything about babies , fellow?’ ”

What he really wanted (and thought of whenever one of these girls showed off with a baby or a frying pan) was to get married and settle down, have two or three children. He had been planning on that all his life, even when he was in the girl-hating stage and when, much later, he had turned into a Hollywood-style bachelor with an apartment full of dim lights and soft music always waiting on the record player. Only he seemed to keep choosing the wrong girls. Even Elizabeth was wrong, and look at him: still tagging after her, still mulling her over all day and half the night until he grew weary at the thought of her. Elizabeth took him no more seriously than any of the others did. She could have, once, maybe at the beginning. He thought she had been swayed by public opinion. He imagined his family and a whole string of girls drawing her aside, one by one, to say, “You know that Timothy is a clown, of course. Always good for a laugh. Never really feels anything.” Now she was as gay and careless with him as if he were a brother. When he took her home after a date she gave him a companionable good-night kiss and slid out of his hands like water. When he said something important to her she ignored it, or dodged it, or laughed it off. Why did he keep on seeing her, anyway? She would make someone a terrible wife. She was too lackadaisical. There was something frustrating about her. Any plan involving Elizabeth was bound to fall to pieces in a stream of irrelevant side trips, senseless delays, wild goose chases. “Why don’t you get organized?” he had asked her once. “What for?” she said.

What did she care?

He finished off his wine and let Lisa Schmidt ladle him another mugful. She was passing around the room barefoot with the steaming kettle. Jean or Betty, whoever she was, untangled her beads from the baby’s fingers and said, “How’s your cute little gerbil, Timothy?”

“I got rid of him,” he said.

“Oh, why?”

“He was getting on my nerves.”

“Well, I wish you’d’ve told me. I thought he was adorable. Who’d you give him to?”

“I flushed him down the toilet.”

“Flushed — you didn’t.”

He nodded.

“You didn’t really.”

“Would I lie? Last I saw of him he was scrabbling with his little paws, trying to climb back out. Then whoosh! down he went.”

“If that’s really true,” the girl said, “and not something you just made up, I think you should be reported.”

“Probably hell on the plumbing,” said Timothy.

“You don’t deserve another animal as long as you live. I hope they blacklist you at all the pet shops.”

“Now I have ants,” he said.

“That’s all you’re worthy of.”

“They come in a glass tray, you can watch them dig tunnels. After a while it gets boring, though. And even ants are a trouble. They’re always asking for syrup, and every now and then a drop of water. You have no idea how silly it makes you look with the neighbors. ‘I’ll be out of town a few days, could you water my ants?’ ”

“That cute little roly-poly gerbil,” the girl said. “What’s the matter with you? You must like to think you’re funny. Well, you don’t hear me laughing.”

“Oh, don’t take it to heart,” Timothy said. “I gave him to one of the intern’s wives.”

She rested her chin on the baby’s head and stared across the room, slit-eyed.

“Honest I did. He’s much happier there. Got married and had a family.”

“I don’t know which to believe,” she said, “but I’d hate to see the inside of that head of yours. How could you even make up a thing like that? Scrabbling with his little hands?”

“I have a cruel streak,” Timothy said.

“Take another look. That’s no streak, it’s a yard wide.”

Then she rose to pass the baby on, as if she didn’t trust Timothy too close to him.

Elizabeth and three other people had progressed to the subject of jobs, all the odd summer jobs they had held down. Someone had worked in a funeral parlor. Someone had made hairbrushes. Elizabeth, whom he had imagined coming directly here from home, turned out to have wandered through various northern cities stuffing envelopes, proofreading textbooks, and substituting for mailmen. And been fired from every one. She had sent out a thousand empty envelopes by mistake, let horrendous errors slip by her in the textbooks, and on the mail route (her favorite job) given everybody the wrong letters, consistently. How was that possible, when he had seen her keep track of a dozen tiny wheels and screws while dismantling and reassembling the kitchen clock? He thought of her with her family, breaking more things than she fixed. None of it fitted with what he saw of her here.

He stretched out on the floor with another mug of wine and imagined a federal law ordering everybody to switch parents at a certain age. Then butter-fingered Elizabeth, her family’s cross, could come sustain his mother forever and mend all her possessions, and he could go south and live a happy thoughtless life assisting Reverend Abbott at Sunday vespers. There would be a gigantic migration of children across the country, all cutting the old tangled threads and picking up new ones when they found the right niche, free forever of other people’s notions about them. He stared up at the ceiling with a blank smile while words buzzed over his head. His damp, stockinged feet were poked under a radiator. Elizabeth was next to him, and when the ceiling started whirling he turned to watch her hands clasped around her mug. His eyes became fixed on them. He sank into the grainy texture of her skin, he thought he could taste on his tongue the sharp, scraped knuckles. Who else would have hands in such terrible shape? There must be some special meaning to them. On her left wrist was a deep, slow-healing cut, running diagonally across the radial artery. She had done that in his presence. He had seen the knife flash too far along the grain of a carving, watched blood spurt instantly across the kitchen table. “Find the pressure point. Here,” he had said, and wound a dishtowel around it and bundled her into his car. “Keep it tight. Push down harder.” He had sped her to old Dr. Felson’s office, frantically honking his horn. The dishtowel grew bright red. Elizabeth pressed beneath it with sawdust-covered fingers and watched the scenery through her side window. “What on earth?” she said once. She was looking at a man and woman struggling beside a bus stop, the man flailing his fists and the woman taking swipes at him with her pocketbook. Timothy slammed on his brakes, cursed, and speeded up again. He hadn’t known Elizabeth very well at the time. He had thought her unconcern was due to a misguided faith in medical students — people who could supposedly take charge of these things. Responsibility weighed on his head as if she had dumped it there. He was unable to tell her that for him, medicine was only so many words in a textbook; that humans were fragile, complicated networks encased in envelopes nearly as transparent as the diagrams made them out to be; that faced with blood, his stomach froze and his throat closed up and he wondered why his mother expected so much of him.