Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

An image of his mother’s house rose up, cupped in his own hands like the Allstate insurance ad.

Now Elizabeth was trying to convince some stranger that the length of a person’s forearm was always exactly the length of his foot. “It’s a scientific fact,” she said (more earnestly than she had said anything else this evening, especially to him), and the boy said, “That’s ridiculous.” But he tried it, anyway — took off a shoe and knelt on the floor with his arm flat alongside his foot. All over the room, other people were trying it too. The place was turning into a contortionists’ convention. Timothy felt like the lone human being in a jumble of machinery, intricate wheels and gears and sprockets, all churning busily. He closed his eyes and sank away, following green fluorescent threads that criss-crossed behind his lids.

Then Elizabeth was saying, “Timothy? Wake up, it’s time to go.” When he opened his eyes everyone was smiling down on him. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head, and let someone bundle him into his coat. The other guests were leaving too. The room had a ragged, broken look as they stood around in knots saying goodbye. Elizabeth led him over to Ian and Lisa, and then through the swamp of galoshes by the door. As she was pulling on her boots she said, “You want me to drive?”

“Why? Do you think I’m not able? I’m stone cold sober.”

And he was, as soon as he hit fresh air. He stood on the sidewalk a moment, tilting his face into the falling snow while other people stepped around him and clapped him on the back and wished him good night. A headache started up and ran like a crack from one temple to the other, waking him fully. “I have never in my life let a girl drive me home,” he said.

“Oh well, all right.”

The car was buried. Timothy dragged handfuls of snow off the front windshield while Elizabeth, who seemed unable to do the simplest thing in a routine way, drew vertical and horizontal lines across the rear window until it looked like a stretch of plaid. Then, “Zzzip!” she said, and swooped off all the white squares in between and was settled in her seat by the time he had opened his door. “I had a very good time,” she told him.

“Did you?”

He started the engine, and the wheels spun a moment before getting a grip. When he turned his head to back into the street he had a glimpse of Elizabeth peacefully chewing her chin-strap, unaware of the arrows of irritation he was sending her across the dark.

The snow was worse. Although the roads had been cleared, by now they were filling up again, and the soft flakes had grown smaller and faster. He inched along, screwing his face up with the effort of finding his way. When Elizabeth reached toward the radio button he said, “Do you mind?” She settled back in her seat. She jingled a boot-clasp with her fingernail and hummed a program of her own.

Once inside the city limits he thought he could relax, but in Roland Park the roads were deep with snow and rutted so that his car kept wavering. The engine made whining, straining noises like a sewing machine. “Freen, freen,” said Elizabeth, imitating it. Ordinarily he would have answered with a sound effect of his own. That was one thing they had in common: an ability to fry like bacon, whine like mosquitos, jingle like his mother’s bracelets, always fading into giggles while anyone around them looked baffled. It wasn’t the kind of talent other people could appreciate. (“What’s this?” Elizabeth had once asked, and then given a creak and said, “A tree growing. Ever put your ear to a treetrunk?” And the two of them had collapsed against each other, laughing not at the treetrunk but at Mrs. Emerson’s bewildered face.) But now Timothy only scowled at a gust of white that slammed against the windshield. “Who was that character you were talking to so long?” he asked.

“Bart Manning, his name was.”

“How come you know him?”

“He gave me a ride here. His mother’d just died; he worried all the way down because they put the wrong color eyes on her death certificate.”

She sometimes offered him these sudden jewels, tacked to the end of dull facts. He nearly smiled, but then he rubbed the windshield with his coat sleeve and said, “Are you breaking that date with Matthew tomorrow?”

“No,” she said.

Nothing tacked to the end of that .

“Well, in that case, Elizabeth—”

“Turn toward the skid,” she told him.

But he couldn’t. The car had started sliding in a slow, dreamy semicircle, and all he seemed able to do was hang on tight to the wheel. He had the sense of watching from far away, with only a passing interest, curious as to how this would all come out. When they stopped they were at right angles to the road. The nose of the car pointed into a bank. The headlights lit tall scrubby weeds growing from dimples in the snow.

“Looks like we get to walk off the wine,” Elizabeth said.

Walk? In this weather? It was easily a mile or more. He thought of the other possibilities — sit here hoping for a police car to pass, go wake one of those sleeping houses and phone his family or an all-night service station. But he was too tired suddenly to bother framing the words out loud. And while he was looking at the houses — all of them huge and silent beneath a glowing sky, drinking in snow and giving back not so much as a gleam of lamplight — he began to feel unreal. It seemed possible he would die here. With somebody foreign, not even related to him. It seemed possible he was already dead.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “did you ever get the feeling you had just died?”

“In a skid?”

“Did you ever think you might be making all this up — everyday life, the same as usual — and meanwhile your family had your body in a coffin and your funeral all arranged?”

Elizabeth seemed to need time to think that over. He watched her closely, as closely as his mother did when she was waiting for Elizabeth to solve all her problems. “Did you?” he asked.

“Oh, well, it must be the sign of a happy nature,” Elizabeth said.

“What? A what?”

“Must be, if you think heaven is just everyday life.”

“No, you don’t—”

“And anyway, it’s not such a bad idea,” she said. “I never did think much of those streets of gold and pearly gates. Wouldn’t you like to just go on like this forever? With something always about to happen and someone new always showing up? Oh, wouldn’t that make dying all right? I prefer reincarnation myself, more chance of surprise, but there’s not all that much difference.”

Then she turned up her jacket collar and climbed out of the car. After a moment Timothy followed. He was about to poke fun at her—“Is that what you think? Is that how well you understand? Are you the one my mother is leaning on to patch her life together?” But something about the way she walked ahead of him, with her shoulders hunched against the cold and her shiny stockinged legs plowing awkwardly through the drifts, made him keep still. He caught up with her and trudged alongside, protecting her with his silence. The tight, closed line of his mouth was a gift to her; his hand, guiding her onto the curb, cradled her shoulder as gently as if she were some sad little glass figurine that he could break in an instant.

But at the first streetlight she stopped, bent to take one boot off, and handed it to him. “It’s for you,” she told him. “Wear it and we’ll be even.” He put it on. When they set off again their footsteps had a drunken, slaphappy rhythm — a shoe squashing, a boot flopping, another shoe squashing. Their shadows tilted from side to side, limping and draggled but comical, so that when Elizabeth pointed them out Timothy had to smile. Then he started laughing, and she joined in, and they walked the rest of the way strung out across the sidewalk holding hands stiff-armed, like tottering black paperdolls on a field of white.