Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

When he returned to the terminal, Andrew was waiting meekly beside the suitcase. He touched Matthew’s shoulder. “Let’s go home, Matthew,” he said, and his voice was as gentle as a child’s after a scolding. “I wouldn’t let it bother me,” he said. “She looked kind of strange, anyway. Nobody we would have much to do with.”

Elizabeth had a nightmare which she couldn’t remember. She awoke and sat up, her heart thudding, while vague, malevolent spirits swooped over her head. But the room was warm and sunlit, and a breeze was ruffling the dotted swiss curtains. She lay down and went to sleep again. She dreamed she was mending a quantity of buttons — the finish to every nightmare she had had this month, as boring and comforting as hot milk. She was riffling through a cascade of chipped and broken buttons in a cardboard box. Plastic, glass, leather, gold, mother-of-pearl. She fitted together two halves of a tiny white button that belonged on a shirt collar. She rewove an intricate leather knot from a blazer. She glued a silver shank to a coat button, and a pearl disc back into its round metal frame; she found the missing piece of a pink plastic heart from a baby’s cardigan. Her hands moved surely and deftly, replacing the gagging horror of the nightmare with a quiet calm. More buttons appeared, in cigar boxes and coffee cans and Band-Aid tins. Sometimes she grew discouraged. Why mend things so fragile? Why couldn’t they let her throw them out and buy new ones? But there was some joy in doing her job so well. She worked on, plowing through a torrent of colored discs. She awoke feeling as exhausted as if she had been laboring all night long.

Her mother was out in the kitchen, running the Mix-master. “I hope you know what time it is,” she told Elizabeth.

“Eleven-fifteen,” Elizabeth said. She got herself a glass of orange juice and sat down on a stool.

“You never used to get up so late. Do you feel all right?”

Mrs. Abbott was pouring evaporated milk into the beater bowl. Her face from a distance was young and thin and bright, but up close you could see a network of lines like the creases in crumpled, smoothed-out tissue paper. She wore a gingham dress and canvas slip-ons, and she moved with a quick, definite energy that made Elizabeth feel all the more lumpish. In two swift motions she had scraped down the sides of the beater bowl, slapping the scraper sharply against the bowl’s rim. “Maybe you’re coming down with something,” she said.

“I feel all right.”

“You look a mite yellowish.”

“I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t. Her head ached, her throat was dry, her eyelids stung. Her joints seemed in need of oiling. She wondered if she were falling apart, like the machine Mrs. Emerson had talked about. Maybe, at twenty-three, she had passed her peak and started the long slope downhill. “Twenty-three,” Timothy said out of nowhere, “is a woman’s sexual prime, and you are going to be very very sorry you didn’t take advantage of it.” His voice brushed past her right ear. She flicked it away. Ghosts in the daytime were easily dealt with.

Her mother broke eggs into the beater bowl, and then dumped in an unmeasured amount of salt. Two or three times a year she spent a morning in the kitchen brewing up this mixture — chicken and rice in a pale cream sauce, a dozen portions at once, laid away in the freezer until some church member should sicken or die. The pans were aluminum foil, disposable, to save the bereaved the effort of washing and returning them. How thoughtful can you get? And what would old Mr. Bailey say, or that sickly Daphne Knight, if they knew that even now their funeral baked meats were lying in wait for them in the freezer? She watched her mother disjoint a row of stewed chickens on the counter, tossing the slippery gray skin to the collie who fidgeted at her feet. “This is what you were doing the last time I was here,” Elizabeth said. “They must have been dying off like flies.”

“Oh, they have,” said her mother. “I made another batch while you were gone.” She sounded cheerful and matter-of-fact. On the surface she was the perfect minister’s wife, tilting her head serenely beneath his pulpit on Sundays and offering the proper sympathy in the proper soft, hesitant voice; but underneath she was all bustle and practicality, and if she could have deep-frozen her sympathy ahead of time too she probably would have. She yanked a thighbone from a hen and tossed it toward the garbage bin, but Elizabeth reached out to catch it and offer it to the dog. “Oh no , Elizabeth,” her mother said, and grabbed it back without altering the rhythm of her work. “No bones for you , Hilary,” she told the dog. “They’ll give you splinters.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” Elizabeth said.

“Do you want to pay the vet’s bills?”

“Nope, she’s not worth it.”

Elizabeth scowled at Hilary, who was beautiful but stupid. She had a white mane and a long sharp nose. Because she was untrustworthy around henhouses she was kept in the house like any city dog, and pent-up energy made her nervous and high-strung. She prowled restlessly around the linoleum with her toenails clicking. “I don’t like you,” Elizabeth told her. Hilary moaned and then zeroed in on a place to lie down.

“Your father’s having trouble over tomorrow’s sermon,” her mother said. “He’s working on it now, but when he’s through he wants to have a talk with you.”

“What about?”

“That’s for him to say.”

“Slothfulness,” said Elizabeth. “Aimlessness. Slobbishness.”

“Oh, Elizabeth.”

“Well, that is it, isn’t it?”

“If you know what it is,” her mother said, “why don’t you do something about it?”

Elizabeth stood up. “I believe I’ll walk the dog,” she said.

“Go ahead. The leash is on the doorknob.”

She stalked through the house, with Hilary leaping and panting and whimpering behind her. There was nothing about this place that made her feel comfortable. Until a few years ago they had lived in an old Victorian frame parsonage, but then the church ladies (always in a flutter over how to make life easier for Reverend Abbott) had arranged to have a brick ranch-house built. It was nearer the church, which was no advantage because the church sat in the middle of a tobacco field out on R.F.D. 1. The outline of the house was bland and shallow. Even the sounds there were shallow — wallboard thudding flimsily, carpets purring, water hissing into a low-slung modern tub. Mr. Abbott, who was subject to drafts, loved it. Mrs. Abbott hated it, although only Elizabeth guessed that. Mrs. Abbott was very much like Elizabeth; she liked wood and stone, she had enjoyed outwitting the bucking hot water heater and the back screen door that was forever sticking shut in the old house. Moving around her new streamlined kitchen, she sometimes stopped to throw a baffled look at the stove that timed its own meals. Then Elizabeth would say, “We could always move back again.”

“Move back? What would the congregation think? Besides, they’re tearing it down.”

Elizabeth clipped the leash to Hilary’s collar and stepped out the front door. Blazing heat poured down on her. It was only the beginning of June, but in this treeless yard it felt like August. She crossed the flat spread of grass and descended the clay bank to the highway. Just to her right sat the church, raw brick that matched the house, topped by a white steeple. Gravestones and parking space lay in back of it. The Sunday school bus sat beneath a pecan tree at one side. FAITH BAPTIST CHURCH, its sign read. “THE DIFFERENCE IS WORTH THE DISTANCE.” She never could get that phrase straight in her head. At night sometimes it came to her: The difference is worth the distance, the distance is worth the difference. Which was it? Either would do. She stopped to let the dog squat by the mailbox, and then moved on up the road.