Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

Elizabeth’s hands were square and brown, badly cared for, the nails chopped-looking and the knuckles scraped. But their competence, as they located the screw and fitted it into the chair, was comforting to watch. Mrs. Emerson blinked to clear her blurred eyes. “Emmeline was another one,” she said. “The maid. Now I’m having to make do with a girl from State Employment, a shiftless sort that chews tobacco. Half the time I can’t even count on her to come. And the house! I’m ashamed to look at it too closely. Oh, it seems I’ve just been left all alone suddenly. No one stayed with me.” She laughed. “I must be hard to get along with,” she said.

Elizabeth had pulled a red pocketknife from her dungarees. She opened out a screwdriver blade and began tightening the screw. “My,” said Mrs. Emerson, making an effort to lighten her voice. “Is that the kind with all the different blades? Corkscrew? Can opener?”

Elizabeth nodded. “It’s Swiss,” she said.

“Oh, a Swiss Army knife!” Mrs. Emerson blew her nose once more and then folded the handkerchief and blotted her eyes. “Matthew wanted one of those for Christmas once,” she said. “My oldest son. He asked for one.”

“They come in handy,” said Elizabeth.

“I’m sure they do.”

But she had given him, instead, a violin and a record player and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Remembering that made her start crying all over again. “I’m sorry about this,” she said, although Elizabeth still had not looked up at her. “It must be bereavement. The aftermath of bereavement. I just lost my husband three months ago. At first, you know, things are very busy and there are always people calling. It’s only later you notice what’s happened. After the people have left again.”

She watched the pocketknife being folded, the chair being set in the garage. “Goodness, that didn’t take long,” she said.

Elizabeth returned, dusting off her hands. “I’m sorry about your husband,” she told Mrs. Emerson.

“Oh, well. Thank you.”

Mrs. Emerson rose from the steps. All her joints ached, and her knees felt tight and stiff where they had been scraped. They started together up the hill. “My friends say it’s often this way,” she told Elizabeth. “The delayed reaction, I mean. But I never expected it now , three months after. I thought I had felt bad enough at the time. Sometimes this terrible idea comes to my mind. I think, if he was going to die, then couldn’t he have done it earlier? Before I was all used up and worn out? I could have started some sort of new life, back then. I would have had some hope. Well, that’s a stupid thing to say.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

It was this girl’s silence that made Mrs. Emerson rattle on so. Mrs. Emerson had a compulsion to fill all silences. In an hour she would be wincing over what she had spilled out to a stranger, but now, flushed with the feeling of finally having someone stay still and listen, she said, “And I can’t go for comfort to my children. They’re not that kind, not at all. Oh, I always try to look on the bright side, especially when I’m talking to people. That makes me tend to exaggerate a little. But I never fool myself: I know I’d have to attend my own funeral before I see them lined up on this veranda again talking the way they used to. They are always moving away from me; I feel like the center of an asterisk. They work at moving away. If I waited for my sons to come carry this furniture it would rot first, they never come. They find me difficult.” She climbed the front steps and turned to flash a very bright smile at Elizabeth, who was looking at her blankly. “Those auto rides,” she said, “with all of us crammed inside. ‘There go the Emersons,’ people would say, and never guess for an instant that behind the glass it was all bickering, arguing, scenes, constant crisis—”

“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said comfortably, “I reckon most families work that way.”

Mrs. Emerson paused; her thoughts snagged for a second. Then she said, “They live on crisis. It’s the only time they’re happy. No, they’re never happy. They lead such complicated lives I can’t keep up with them any more. All I’ve seen of my grandchild is one minute little black-and-white photo of a bunch of total strangers, one of them holding the baby. A lady I’d never seen before. Elderly. The last time we were all together was by necessity, for the funeral — and they left the baby with his other grandmother. Two of my boys live right in this area, but do I see them? Well, Matthew, when he can get away. Timothy never. The only one just dying to come is Andrew, and him I’m supposed to discourage because he’s a little bit unbalanced. He’s not supposed to leave his psychiatrist. He’s not supposed to come home and expose himself to upset. It’s unhealthy of him to want to.”

“It sounds,” Elizabeth said unexpectedly, “as if he’s in somebody’s clutches.”

For a moment Mrs. Emerson, who had already opened her mouth to begin a new sentence, had trouble following her. She looked up, startled, at Elizabeth’s earnest, scowling face. Then she laughed. “Oh, my,” she said, and reached for her handkerchief. “Oh, my, well …”

Elizabeth straightened up from the railing she had been leaning against. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll just take this last load of furniture down.”

“Oh, will this be the last?” Mrs. Emerson said. She had suddenly stopped laughing.

“There’s only these two.”

“Wait, don’t hurry. Wouldn’t you like to rest a minute? Have some milk and cookies? You said you hadn’t made an appointment. You could finish up any time.”

“I just did have breakfast,” Elizabeth said.

“Please. Just a glass of milk?”

“Well, all right.”

Mrs. Emerson led her into the house, through the ticking hallway toward the kitchen at the rear. “My, it’s so dark in here,” she said, although she was used to the darkness herself. As she passed various pieces of furniture — the grandfather clock, a ladderback chair, the chintz-covered armchair in the kitchen, all of them scuffed and worn down around the edges from a lifetime with children — she reached out to give them little pats, as if protecting them from a stranger’s eyes. But Elizabeth didn’t even glance at them. She seemed totally unobservant. She pulled an enameled stepstool toward the table and sat down on it, doubling her knees so as to set her feet on the top step. “I just don’t want to hit the O’Donnells at lunch,” she said.

“No, no, you have plenty of time,” said Mrs. Emerson.

She poured out a tall glass of milk. Elizabeth said, “Aren’t you having any?”

“Oh. I suppose so.”

Ordinarily she never touched milk. She only kept it for cooking. When she settled herself at the table and took the first sip she had the sudden sense of being back in her mother’s house, where she used to have milk and cookies to ease all minor tragedies. The taste of milk after tears, washing away the gluey feeling in the back of her throat, was the same then as now; she stared dreamily at a kitchen cabinet, keeping the taste in her memory a long time before taking another sip. Then she set the glass down and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people that gives notice all the time.”

“Notice?”

“Firing people.”

“Why should I think that?” Elizabeth said.

“Well, all this talk about Richard. And then Emmeline. But those two have been with me half a lifetime; it’s only lately that all this unpleasantness came up. They took advantage, knowing the state I was in. Oh, I don’t blame them entirely, I know I haven’t been myself. But how could they expect me to be? Ordinarily I’m a marvelous employer, people can’t do enough for me. You can tell by their name that family will have too many children.”