Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

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An easygoing young girl becomes inextricably involved with the Emerson family when she takes a job as their handyman.

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He walked through the front room, where each board creaked separately beneath his feet. He went into the kitchen and took a roll of liverwurst from the yellowed refrigerator. Leaning against the sink, paring off slices with a rusty knife, he ate liverwurst until he stopped feeling hungry and then put it away again. That was his supper. There was a table, of course, and two chairs, and a whole set of dishes in the cupboard (his mother’s gift, brown earthenware), but he rarely used them. Most meals he ate standing at the stove, spooning large mouthfuls directly from the pot to save dishwashing. Once when Elizabeth came for supper he had started to do that — dipped a fork absentmindedly into the stew pot, before he caught himself — and all Elizabeth did was reach for the potato skillet and find herself another fork. Halfway through the meal they traded pans. If he narrowed his eyes he could see her still, slouched against a counter munching happily and cradling the skillet in a frayed old undershirt that he used for a pot-holder.

Then sometimes, when living alone depressed him, he set the table meticulously with knife, fork and spoon and a folded napkin, plate and salad plate, salt and pepper shakers. He served into serving dishes, and from them to his plate, as if he were two people performing two separate tasks. He settled himself in his chair and smoothed the napkin across his knees; then he sat motionless, forgetting the canned hash and olive-drab beans that steamed before him, stunned by the dismalness of this elaborate table set for one. What was he doing here, twenty-eight years old and all alone? Why was he living like an elderly widower in this house without children, set in his ways, pottering from stove to table to sink? The carefully positioned salad plate and the salt and pepper shakers, side by side in their handwoven basket, looked strained and pathetic. He went back to eating at the stove, with salt from a Morton’s box and pepper from an Ann Page pepper tin.

In the living room he picked up old Newsweeks and placed them in a wooden rack. He straightened a rug. He aligned the corners of the slipcover on the daybed. Then, since it was growing dark, he lit a table lamp and sat down with that morning’s paper. Words jerked before his vision in scattered clusters. He felt like a man in a waiting room before a dreaded appointment, reading sentences that skipped along heartlessly in spite of the sick feeling in his stomach. He raised his eyes and looked at the walls instead — tongue-and-groove, shiny green, with an oval photograph of someone long dead leaning over the fireplace. The fireplace itself was black and cold, in spite of the chill in the air. A brown oil burner fed its pipe into one side of the chimney, and clanked periodically as if its metal were still contracting after all the winter months it had tried to heat this room.

“Aren’t you freezing?” his mother had asked. And Elizabeth had said, “You want to go hunt firewood?” His father, rocking in that chair with a glass of warm bourbon, had said, “When I was a boy, rooms were always this cold. We were healthier, too.” His father had come visiting often, mumbling something about business carrying him in this direction. He had supplied the bourbon himself, and occasionally fresh vegetables or a slab of bacon — country things, which he had purchased in the city to bring out here. He liked to have the fire lit. He liked to rock in silence for hours. “Now, this is the way to live,” he said. “At heart, I’m a simple man,” but there had been nothing simple about him. Every quality he had was struggling with another its exact opposite. If he rocked so contentedly here, in the city he was a whirlwind. Always selling, pushing, buying, bargaining, sometimes bending the law. “Remember this,” he kept telling his children. “If you want to rise in the world, smile with your eyes. Not just your mouth. It gets them every time.” His children cringed. Momentarily, they hated him. (Yet every one of them, blond and dark both, had his pure blue eyes that curled like cashew nuts whenever they smiled.) He mourned for weeks when Mary refused to be a debutante, and he joined the country club on his own and played golf every Sunday although he hated it. “What do I go there for?” he asked. “What do I want with those snobs?” He was made up of layers you could peel off like onion skins, each of them equally present and real. The innermost layer (garage mechanic’s son, dreaming of a purple Cadillac) could pop up at any time: when he watched TV in his undershirt, when he said “like I said” and “between you and I,” when he brought home an old tire to whitewash and plant with geraniums. “Oh, Billy,” his wife said of the tire, “people just don’t — oh, how can I explain it?” He was hurt, which made him brisker and more businesslike, and he stayed late at the office for weeks at a time. Then he bought her a ruby ring too big to wear under gloves. Then he took all his sons hunting although none of them could shoot. “I like the natural life,” he told them. “I’m a simple man, at heart.”

Matthew’s father was clearer in this room than Timothy; his death seemed more recent, more easily mourned. He had gone unwillingly, after all — taken unawares, in his sleep, probably looking forward to tomorrow’s wheelings and dealings. But how could you mourn a suicide? Complications arose every time Matthew tried. On top of the oil burner was a sheaf of photographs he had been puzzling over the night before: Timothy in his mother’s yard, last summer when Matthew was trying out his new camera. He had not yet learned how to use it. The focus was blurred, and in every print Timothy’s laughing face had extra outlines around it, as if he had been moving, lunging toward the lens, as if laughter were some new form of attack. However Matthew tried to imagine him sober-faced, he couldn’t. He pulled up images in his mind, one by one: Timothy laughing with that girl he had brought to dinner once, his arm around her shoulders; Timothy laughing with his mother, with Melissa, with his father at his college graduation. Then a new picture slid in, clicking up from the back of his head: Timothy quarreling with Elizabeth. Only what was it about? Had she broken a date? Refused one? Shown up late for something? All he remembered was that it had happened on the sunporch, over the noise of a TV western. “If you persist,” Timothy said, “in seeing life as some kind of gimmicky guided tour where everyone signs up for a surprise destination—” and Elizabeth said, “What? Seeing what?” “Life,” said Timothy, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, life,” and smiled as fondly and happily as if he had mentioned her favorite acquaintance. Timothy stopped speaking, and his face took on a puzzled look. Wispy lines crossed his forehead. And Matthew, listening from across the room, had thought: It isn’t Timothy she loves, then. He hadn’t bothered wondering how he reached that conclusion. He sat before the television watching Marshall Dillon, holding his happiness close to his chest and forgetting, for once, all the qualities in Timothy that were hard to take (his carelessness with people, his sharp quick tongue, his succession of waifish girls hastily dressed and combing their hair when Matthew came visiting unannounced). He forgot them again now, and with them the picture of Timothy triumphantly cocking his pistol and laughing in his family’s face. All he saw was that puckered, defeated forehead. He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. He felt burdened by new sorrows that he regretted having invited.

. . .

That night he dreamed that Elizabeth had gone away. She was long gone, she had been gone for years, she left behind her a dark blue, funnel-shaped hollow that caused his chest to ache. Then his mother died. She lay on a table with her head slightly propped and he stood beside her reading a newspaper. All the headlines contained numerals. “783 SUNK; 19 SURVIVORS; 45 BURIED IN MINE DISASTER,” he read, but he understood that this was her will leaving everything to Elizabeth. It made sense; on the table his mother had changed into a frail, lavender-dressed old lady, the kind who would make eccentric wills in favor of pets and paid companions. He began searching for Elizabeth, combing through long grasses with his fingers and coming up with nothing. She never appeared. Her absence caused an echoing sound, like wind in the tops of very tall pines. “What shall I do about the money?” he asked the old lady on the table. “If you fail to find the beneficiary it must be buried with me,” she said. “You’ll never get it.” He let the money float into the coffin. He was crying, but it wasn’t because of what she had said; it was the wastefulness, the uselessness, the lost look of all that fragile green paper waiting forever for Elizabeth to come home.

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