Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Mmm.”

“All from Baltimore. You used to be the world’s worst letter-writer. Have you changed? Or is someone an optimist.”

“Oh, you know, these are just people I met,” Elizabeth said vaguely.

“People? They look like mostly one handwriting.”

“Now, Polly, leave her alone,” her mother said. “Elizabeth, honey, I wish you’d take these down to the freezer for me.”

She stacked foil pans into Elizabeth’s outstretched arms. They were still warm, almost hot. Elizabeth rested her chin on the uppermost pan and started for the basement. Behind her, a deep meaningful silence linked her mother and Polly.

Most of the basement was a recreation room, which smelled of asphalt tile. A phonograph sat in one corner. When she was still in secretarial school Polly used to bring her friends here, and they had danced and drunk Cokes and eaten endless bags of Fritos. Then Carl had proposed to her on that vinyl loveseat in front of the TV. Elizabeth remembered the night it happened — Polly making the announcement, smiling up at Carl as she spoke. She was still the younger sister then; it wasn’t until she was married that she somehow bypassed Elizabeth and began exchanging those knowing glances with her mother over Elizabeth’s head. She had hugged Elizabeth tightly and suggested they have a double wedding. A what? Elizabeth thought she had lost her mind. By then Elizabeth was in her junior year of college, living at home, and she had brought no boys back with her except the laundromat burglar once and you couldn’t count poor sweet Dommie. She had never used this recreation room. It affected her the way New Year’s Eve parties did: you were supposed to have fun there, you were pressured into it, and the obligation weighed her spirits down.

She crossed to the dark cubicle behind the record player, partitioned off by cinderblocks, containing only a furnace and a freezer. On the floor by the freezer a batch of orange wine was brewing up in a canning kettle. “What’s that stuff you have down there?” her mother had asked the day before. “It’s a new kind of preserves,” Elizabeth said. “Preserves? What on earth kind of preserves …” Elizabeth had cut all the oranges and lemons herself, regretting it before she was halfway done; every whiff of lemon reminded her of when she and Matthew had done this job together. She had a mind like a tape recorder, an audial version of a photographic memory, and each chop of knife blade against breadboard brought her bits of things that Matthew had said. “ ‘Two cups raisins, minced’— how , when they stick together so?” “Did you ever make pomander balls?” “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic. I’ll bring a chicken, you bring the wine in some nice, round jug with a cork plugged in.…” Now the wine was probably rotting away on the sink, and she would never know how it came out. That was why she was brewing more now — that and sheer devilment. She liked the idea of strong spirits bubbling in Reverend Abbott’s basement. She had sent off this time for the special government permit, just so she would know that the parsonage was a licensed brewery even if no one else ever did.

When she had stashed the casseroles away she bent to lift the cheesecloth from the canning kettle. Warm spicy smells rose up. Bubbles stung her nose. Matthew lifted his head and gave her a long, slow, puzzled look from behind his glasses.

It was late afternoon before her father was finished with his sermon. He pushed away the papers on his desk when she came in. “Every week, the sermon gets harder,” he told her. “Now I wonder why that should be. I always reach a point where I think I’m beaten, I can’t go on, I have finally found a sermon that can’t be written.” He smiled and rubbed his eyes with a long angular hand. His face was made of straight lines; his skin was stretched over fine, narrow bones and his fair hair conformed exactly to his skull. When he opened his eyes they were like blue glass globes, but tired veins were traced across the whites. “I need a vacation,” he said. “I believe it’s showing in my sermons.”

“Take one.”

“Well, but there’s always someone needing me, you know.”

“They’ll manage,” Elizabeth said.

“Have a seat, will you? Just clear those things off the chair.”

She handed him what she collected — mimeographed pages and a stack of manila folders — and sat down in the captain’s chair opposite his desk. He spent some time aligning the corners of the mimeographed pages. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Well now, Liz, it seems to me we were going to have a little talk.”

“That’s what Mom said.”

“Your mother, yes. Now last week you said, if I’m right—” He slumped in his seat and stared at a letter opener. It always took him some time to get started. In these preliminary stages, before he grew sure of himself, Elizabeth kept feeling she had to help him out. “I said I would look for a job,” she reminded him.

“Yes. A job.”

“And that—”

“And that you were reapplying to Sandhill. I remember. My point is, do you?” He straightened his back suddenly, and stared at her so directly that his eyes seemed to grow square. “Are you planning to go on like this forever?” he asked. “The last thing I want to do is pressure you, Liz, but I never saw anyone live the way you do. Week after week you rise late and lie around the house all day, your appearance is disorderly and your habits are slovenly, you go nowhere, you see no friends, you stay up till all hours watching television so you can rise late the next day — and your mother says you are no help at all.”

“Did Mom say that?”

“She has enough to do as it is.”

“How can she say that? I help out. I did the dishes the last four nights running. Why didn’t she come to me about it?”

“It’s not only the dishes,” said her father. “It’s your general presence. You’re disrupting an entire household. Now I suggested, if you remember, that you find something to keep you busy until fall term. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want to remain idle all that time,’ I told you. Well, it seems I was mistaken. You do want to. Your mother says you’ve taken no steps whatever toward finding a job. You haven’t even left the house, except to walk Hilary. What kind of life do you call that?”

“I can’t think of any job I’d be good at,” Elizabeth said. She drew a pack of Camels from her shirt pocket, causing her father to wince. “It’s not as if I could type, or take shorthand, or do anything specific,” she said, tamping a cigarette on the edge of his desk.

“You know what smoke will do to my asthma,” her father said. “Liz, honey. I know all about young people. It’s part of my job. But you’re twenty-three years old . We’ve been waiting twenty-three years for you to straighten out a little. Isn’t it time you shaped up? Don’t you think you’re past the stage for teenage rebellion? It’s just not becoming. Why, I would expect you to be married and starting a family by now. Whatever happened to young Dommie?”

“He’s engaged,” Elizabeth said. She slid the cigarette back into its pack and studied a double photograph frame on the desk — Polly at eleven, dimpling and looking upward through long lashes; Elizabeth at twelve, an awkward age, with her face sullen and self-conscious and her organdy dress too tight under the arms. “I bet you were a tomboy,” Timothy once said, but she never had been. She had dreamed of being rescued from fire or water by some young man; she had experimented with lipsticks from the five-and-dime until she realized she would never look anything but garish in make-up. She grimaced, and without thinking took the Camel out again and struck a kitchen match on the arm of her chair. Her father buried his face in his hands.