Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Here,” said Timothy. “Corned beef on rye. That all right? Cold beer.”

“Well, thanks,” said Elizabeth, sitting up. She took the plate and peered between the slices of bread. “Corned beef is what we had two weeks ago. Is this the selfsame can?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you get food-poisoning from canned corned beef?”

But Timothy, in a chair opposite her with his sandwich halfway to his mouth, stared into space.

“Timothy.”

“What.”

“Look, it’s not so bad. Find something else to do.”

“Like what, for instance,” he said.

“Well, I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not? Say something , can’t you? Give me a treatise on reincarnation, convince me I’m full of lives and can afford to throw one away. Convince my mother too, while you’re at it.”

“Well, it is a point,” Elizabeth said.

“Ha.” He took a swig from his beer can. “Women have it easy,” he said. “You can work or not, nobody minds. Men are expected to be responsible. There’s no room for variation.”

“Maybe you should make a big switch. Lumberjack? Fur-trapper? Deck-swabber?”

“I could answer one of those DRAW ME ads on the matchbooks,” Timothy said. He laughed.

“You could be a state hog inspector.”

But then he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his sandwich still untasted. “I can’t seem to picture a future any more,” he told her. “There’s nothing I hope for. No one I want to be. Yet I started out so promising, would you believe it? In grade school they thought I was a genius. No one but Andrew even knew what I was talking about. I invented weird gadgets, I played chess tournaments, I monitored Stravinsky on an oscilloscope that I rebuilt myself. Did you know that?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t even know what an oscilloscope is.”

“Why is everything you say so inconsequential? Can’t you understand when something serious is going on?”

But it was hard to take him seriously when he looked so much like the child he had been talking about. There was one of him in every classroom Elizabeth had ever sat in — chubby and too clever, pale and scowling, wearing an old man’s suit and cracking elderly jokes that made his classmates uneasy. She could picture him scuffing around the playground with his hands in his pockets while the others chose up softball teams; his name would come up by default, at the end, and he would play miserably and dodge the ball when it crossed the plate and then hit some pathetic, ticked-off foul and fling his bat in a panic and run toward first base anyway, hunched and desperate, until the hoots and curses called him back. “Oh, aren’t you glad you’re not still there?” she asked suddenly, for in spite of the traces of that child on his face he had at least grown into his suit and his friends had grown into his jokes. He had passed the age for softball and learned when not to sling long words around. But Timothy, off on some track of his own, merely blinked.

“Elizabeth,” he said. “Don’t go home this weekend. Let’s take a trip together.”

“Oh, well, no.”

“We could start off for anywhere! Drive without a plan. Stop when we felt like it.” He paused, having just then heard her answer. “What’s the matter with you? You love sudden trips. Are you worried what people might think?”

“I just—”

“I never thought you would be, somehow.” He looked down at his sandwich, and began tearing pieces out of it and dropping them on his plate. “We would have separate rooms, of course,” he said.

“No, you see—”

“If that’s what’s bothering you.”

“No.”

The sandwich had turned into a pile of shreds. “Maybe you think — we wouldn’t have to have separate rooms,” he said. “I just meant — I don’t know what you expect of me. What do you want, anyway? What am I supposed to be doing? Just tell me, can’t you? I don’t know why I should be making such a mess of saying this.”

“Oh well, that’s all right,” Elizabeth said helplessly. What she wanted to say was, “Of course I’ll come.” When would she learn not to plan ahead, when always at the last minute she felt tugged by something different? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really would like to.”

“Or take me home with you.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Why not? If you want I could stay in a hotel, I wouldn’t be bothering your family then. Would that be better?”

“You see, Matthew is coming,” Elizabeth said.

He stared at her.

“I invited him.”

“But why Matthew? Why does he always keep popping up like this?”

“I like him,” she said. And she decided she’d better go on with what she had planned to tell him earlier: “While we’re on Matthew, Timothy, I thought I should say something about—”

“You are going to turn into a very objectionable old lady, Elizabeth. You know that. The opinionated kind. ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ every other sentence — it’s fine now, but wait a while. See how it sits on people when you’ve lost your looks and you’re croaking it out.”

“That is something to think about,” said Elizabeth, glad to change the subject.

“Call up Matthew. Tell him I’m the one that needs to go.”

“Timothy, I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning and every single minute there’s been some Emerson dumping crisises on me.”

“Crises,” Timothy said into his beer can.

“Picking and bickering and arguing. Raking up all these disasters and piling them in front of me. Well, I’ve had my quota. I don’t want any more. I’m going to call your mother, and then I’m going off for an afternoon on my own and not coming back till supper.”

“Wait, Elizabeth—”

But she left. She went into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, and lifted the telephone from the table. Then she couldn’t remember Mrs. Emerson’s number. All this chaos was disrupting her mind. There were tatters of old arguments in the air around her, and she had a restless, hanging-back feeling as if there were something she had not done well. She listened to the dial tone droning in her ear and watched Timothy pace back and forth in the living room with his eyes averted, his face pink and rumpled-looking. Then Mrs. Emerson’s number flashed before her, and she leaned forward to dial.

The telephone rang four times. (Was Mrs. Emerson in some new frenzy, twirling through the house wringing her hands and far too upset to answer?) The fifth ring was cut off in the middle. “Hello!” Mrs. Emerson said.

“It’s Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth, where are you? There’s a man here delivering big sacks of something.”

“Oh, that’ll be the lime.”

“What will I do with it? Where will I tell him to put it? I thought you were around the house somewhere.”

“The lime goes in the toolshed,” Elizabeth said. “I’m at lunch. I may be late getting back, I’m spending the afternoon downtown.”

“Downtown? What — and I can’t find Timothy. One minute he was here and the — now, don’t take all afternoon, Elizabeth.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Bye.”

She hung up. Timothy was leaning against the doorframe, watching her. “Now call Matthew,” he said.

“I’m through with that subject.”

“That’s what you think.”

He took a step back and slammed the door between them, with a noise that shook the room. She heard the key in the lock. “Call him!” he shouted from the other side.

“Oh, for—”

She stood up and went to try the door. It was firmly locked. Timothy was standing so close behind it that she heard his breath, which came in short puffs. “Timothy,” she said. He didn’t answer. She gave the door a kick and then turned an oval knob at eye level that locked it from inside — a useless move, but the final-sounding click was a satisfaction. Then she flung herself on the bed again and lay back to stare at the ceiling.