Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

She climbed the stairs with both hands to her hat, removing it as levelly as if it were full of water. “Now, about this weekend—” she said.

“I thought we’d been through all that.”

“Will you let me finish? Come with me while I put my things up.”

Mrs. Emerson crossed the hall and entered her bedroom, but Timothy stayed where he was. When Elizabeth reached the top of the stairs he opened his mouth, as if he were about to tell her something. Then his mother said, “Timothy?” He gave one helpless flap of his arms and followed his mother.

Elizabeth went into her own room. She was fitting together a rocking horse that had arrived unassembled, a present for Mrs. Emerson’s grandchild. He might be visiting in July. “Fix it up and put it in Mary’s room,” Mrs. Emerson had said. “I plan to be a grandmother well-stocked with toys, so that he looks forward to coming. In time maybe he can visit alone, they say it’s quite simple by air. You tag the child like luggage and tip the stewardess.” The rocking horse had been packed with the wrong number of everything — too many screws, too many springs, not enough nuts. Elizabeth had spread it on the floor of her room, and now she sat down on the rug to look at the diagram. Across the hall, behind a closed door, Mrs. Emerson murmured endlessly on. When the words were unintelligible she always sounded as if she were reading aloud. It was the positive way in which she put things, without breaks or fumbles. From time to time Timothy’s voice rode over hers, but it never slowed her down.

Elizabeth emptied out a mayonnaise jar full of stray nuts from the basement. She picked up one after another, trying to fit them to the extra screws. “Now, this for this one,” she said under her breath. “This for this. No.”

“I already told you—” Timothy said.

Mrs. Emerson went on murmuring.

“Don’t you ever take no for an answer?”

Elizabeth shoved the nuts aside and went back to the diagram. She already knew it by heart, but there was something steady and comforting about printed instructions. “First assemble all parts, leaving screws loose. Do not tighten screws until entire toy has been assembled.” The author’s voice was absolutely definite. Timothy’s was frazzled at the ends. What was she doing here, still in Baltimore? She should have left long ago. She awoke almost nightly to hear the tape-recorder voice—“Why don’t you write? It’s not that I care for my own sake, I just think you’d wonder if I were dead or alive”—and she lay in bed raging at Mrs. Emerson and her children too, all those imagined ears putting up with such a loss of dignity. She kept promising herself she would leave. But never see Matthew again? Never play chess with Timothy? Lose the one person who leaned on her and go back to being a bumbler? She set a deadline: at the first mistake, the first putty knife through a windowpane, she would move on. That shouldn’t take long. But her magic continued to hold. What she couldn’t solve the hardware man down on Wyndhurst could, and there was always The Complete Home Repairman in her bureau drawer. All she had to do was disappear for a moment and refer to it, like a doctor keeping his patient waiting while he thumbed through textbooks in some hidden room. At this rate she would stay here forever. And always knowing, to the end of her days, that she should be out in the world again.

“You mistake the kind of twins we are,” Timothy said. “Did you think we were Siamese?”

“Fit tab A into slot B, making sure that …”

“We’re not even identical. Not even close to identical. We were an accident of birth!”

Elizabeth sighed and dropped the diagram. She rose to circle her room, twice, and then she padded out the door and down the stairs. In the kitchen, where she had meant to stop for milk, the clutter seemed like an extension of the argument above. She went through without slowing and continued on down to the basement. There everything was dim and silent, flickering like a pool of water in the sunlight that sifted through dusty windows. Dark, battered doors closed off the old servants’ rooms, with transoms above them that reminded her of school corridors and church fellowship halls. In the central part were tangled metal cast-offs, bicycles, a workbench, hunks of monster household appliances. There was a cabinet door laid across the zinc laundry tubs, with two huge canning kettles on top of it. Elizabeth and Matthew were making wine together. They had split the cost of the ingredients and shared the work, but it was up to Elizabeth to stir up the dregs once a day. She took a long-handled spoon from a nail, rolled the cheesecloth off the first kettle and dipped the spoon deep inside. A yeasty, spicy smell rose up, with bubbles that churned and snapped in a film across the surface.

“Where will we get the grapes?” Matthew had asked, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, grape wine we can buy . Just look in this recipe book — tomato wine, dandelion wine. Let’s make something different. Is there such a thing as mushroom wine?” And she had laughed at his expression. He was slow, thorough, too serious; she provided the lightness for him. What answering glimmers she found in him she nourished along, and then he would surprise her by laughing too and losing that dark, baffled look on his face. He was the only Emerson she knew of who was short of money. She seized on that as a base for all the flights she took him on — painting, wine-making, installing a shower in his cracked old bathtub. Once they mixed up a week’s supply of something called sludge that they found in a cookbook for the poverty-stricken. With Timothy it would have ended in silliness; sludge might have been rolled into balls and flung all over the kitchen. Well, that was fun too, of course. But Matthew enjoyed it in his own way, following a plan systematically with that knotted gaze he turned on everything, giving his slow smile when it was done.

They had made a batch of orange wine and another of wheat. They had chopped oranges, lemons, and raisins endlessly, baked wheat on cookie sheets in the oven until a musty golden smell filled the kitchen, all while Mrs. Emerson was out at a meeting. (She might not take to having a brewery in her basement, and they had never bothered about a government permit. Matthew was all for sending off for one but Elizabeth was too impatient to begin.) They had lugged the kettles down the stairs and filled them with buckets of water and sacks of sugar. “It may turn out too sweet,” Matthew said gravely. “It may,” said Elizabeth. They never talked much. When he found out she was planning a visit home he said, “I’ll miss you,” and Elizabeth, instead of answering as she would to someone else (“Miss me, what for? I’m only going for the weekend”), said, “I’ll miss you too. Want to come with me?” “That would be better,” he said, “and you won’t have to ride with strangers.” He was forever protecting her, but not in that fretful way that wore on her nerves. He lent her his rain-hat, and scooped her hair out of the way when she shrugged herself into her jacket. On walks through the woods to his house he would let her go single-file, unhampered by hand-holding or the troublesome etiquette of briars held back for her and roots pointed out; but once inside, in a living room splintery with cold, he might come up behind her to stand motionless and silent, his arms folded around her and his chin resting on her head, warming the length of her back.

“Any time the basement door is open there’s the strangest smell coming up,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Have you noticed?” She thought it was a new kind of detergent Alvareen was putting in the washing machine. Elizabeth never told her anything different.