Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

Neat white farmhouses speckled the fields, as far as the eye could see. Each had its protective circling of henhouses and pigsties, barns and tobacco barns, toolsheds and whitewashed fences. Occasionally a little dot of a man would come into view, driving a mule or carrying a feedsack. Nobody seemed to notice Elizabeth. She imagined that the neighbors thought of her as a black sheep — the minister’s ne’er-do-well daughter who lay in bed till eleven and then had no better occupation than walking the dog.

There in that green field, where nothing useful grew, a circus tent rose up every August and a traveling revivalist came. He stood behind a portable pulpit, sweating from all his flailing and shouting beneath the bug-filmed extension lamps. His message was death, and the hell to follow — all for people who failed to give in to God in this only, only life. Elizabeth’s father sat to one side of him in a folding wooden chair. “Wouldn’t you be jealous?” Elizabeth had asked him years ago. “Having someone else to come and save your own people?” “That’s a very peculiar notion you have there,” her father said. “As long as they arrive at the right destination, does it matter what road they come by?” She hadn’t taken his words at face value; she never did. She had watched, in her white puff-sleeved dress on a front row seat, and come to her own conclusion: the revivalist picked sinners like plums, and her father stood by with a bushel basket and smiled as they fell in with a thud. His smile was tender and knowing. Ordinary Baptist housewives, stricken for the moment with tears and fits of trembling, flocked to the front with their children while the choir sang, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and her father smiled down at them, mentally entering their names on a list that would last forever. What if they changed their minds in the morning? Maybe some did; for next year they were at the front once more as if they felt the need of being saved all over again. A girlfriend of Elizabeth’s had been saved three times before she was fourteen. Each time she cried, and vowed to love her mother more and stop telling lies. She gave Elizabeth her bangle bracelets and her bubble-bath, her movie magazines and her adjustable birthstone rings from Dick Tracy candyboxes and all other vain possessions. “Oh, how could you just sit there?” she said. “With that preacher’s voice so thundery and your father so quiet and shining? This has changed my whole life,” she said. Although it never did, for long. But Elizabeth was always stunned by those brief glimpses of Sue Ellen in her altered state, with her face flushed and intense and the centers of her eyes darker. And then at breakfast the next morning there would be her father and the revivalist calmly buttering buckwheat muffins, never giving a thought to what they had caused.

Hilary was begging to run, yelping and shaking with excitement. “Oh, all right,” Elizabeth told her. They took off across a field. Elizabeth’s moccasins sank deep into plowed orange earth. The collie in motion rippled like water, her tail a billowing plume, her white forepaws landing daintily together. But Elizabeth only felt heavy and out of breath, and an ache between her shoulderblades was spreading down her spine. “Stop, now,” she said. She drew the leash inward and Hilary slowed, still panting, and chose her way between clods of earth. From behind she was bulky-hipped and dignified. The long hair on her hindlegs looked like ruffled petticoats. That should have made Elizabeth smile; why did she want to cry? She studied the petticoats, and the stilt-like legs beneath them — old-lady legs. Mrs. Emerson’s legs. She saw Mrs. Emerson gingerly descending the veranda steps, slightly sideways, with her skirt swirling around her thin, elegant shins. Sun lit her hair and the discs on her bracelet. She was looking down, concentrating on the precise placement of her pointy-toed alligator shoes. Was it worry that puckered the inner corners of her eyebrows?

Pieces of Emersons were lodged within Elizabeth like shrapnel. Faces kept poking to the surface — Timothy, Mrs. Emerson, Margaret cheerfully sharing her sawdusty room. And Matthew. Always Matthew, with his dim eyes behind his glasses asking why she had been so curt with him when she left. Why had she? She wanted to do it all over again, take more time explaining to him even if it meant catching a later bus. Take the time to tell Mrs. Emerson goodbye, and to put away her tools properly. No one else would. But most of all, what she wanted was to change all those days with Timothy. “Whatever it was that happened,” Matthew had told her, “you can’t blame yourself for it.” Well, why not? Who else could she blame? She had done everything wrong with him from the very beginning, laughed off all he said to her right up to the moment when the gun went off, misread every word; and what she hadn’t misread she had pretended to. She thought of that snowy night when he worried that he had died, and she had acted as if she didn’t understand. If she couldn’t help him out, couldn’t she at least have admitted she couldn’t?

“Don’t mull it over,” Matthew had said. But he was under the impression that they were talking about a straightforward suicide. And he didn’t have the picture of death from a bullet wound to struggle against every night of his life.

She tapped Hilary with a loop of leash. “Let’s go,” she said. Then she set off toward the ranch-house, with Hilary trotting beside her casting helpful, anxious glances. Red dust had worked into the stitches of Elizabeth’s moccasins. A hot wind stiffened her face. Everywhere she looked seemed parched and bleak and glaring, but at least she was back where she was supposed to be.

When she got home Polly was in the kitchen with her baby, the smallest, fattest baby Elizabeth had ever known. Creases ringed her wrists like rubber bands; she not only had a double chin but double thighs, double knees, double ankles as well. Polly jostled her in her lap absentmindedly, speaking over her wispy head. “Look at you,” she said. “I wish I could just go tearing off with the dog any time I wanted.”

“Why don’t you?” Elizabeth said. “Leave Julie with Mother.”

“Oh, no,” said Polly. She sighed. She was smaller than Elizabeth, with a heart-shaped face and a tousle of yellow curls like a frilled nightcap. “You’re the one with the cute little sister,” people used to tell Elizabeth. In high school Polly had been Queen of May Day. She had kept to the style of the fifties ever since — spitcurls framing her forehead, her lipstick a pure bright pink. Her flower-sprigged shirtdress was immaculate, except where the baby had just spit down the front. “Hand me a Kleenex, will you?” she asked Elizabeth. “What did I take all that Good Grooming for, if this was what I’d come to?”

“If you wore a bibbed apron —” her mother said. “That’s what I always did.” She was laying sheets of foil across the casseroles, which lined one counter from end to end. Without looking around she said, “Polly brought the mail in with her. What’d you do with that letter, Polly?”

“Here it is.”

From the look Polly gave her as she handed her the envelope, Elizabeth guessed that they had been discussing it before she came in. She made a point of ripping it open in front of them, not even bothering to sit down. It was written in Matthew’s looped, rounded hand. Dear Elizabeth, Why don’t you ever answer my letters? Did your suitcase arrive safely? Why do you —She folded the sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. “What’s for lunch?” she asked her mother.

“One of these casseroles.”

“Funeral food?”

Polly settled her baby into a new position and studied Elizabeth’s face. “You certainly have been getting a lot of mail these days,” she said.