Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“I’ll never get up for the wedding tomorrow. Are there going to be many guests?”

“No. I don’t know. Just whoever they invited.”

“Why was I invited?” Margaret said — something she never would have asked sober. But Elizabeth didn’t seem to mind. She straightened up from a pile of books, thought a while, and then said, “I don’t know,” and went back to work again. Margaret decided it was better than a lot of answers she could have been given.

Twice some people stopped by — a married couple with a gift, two boys with a bottle of champagne. The couple stayed only a minute and kissed Elizabeth when they left. The boys sat down for a beer. Margaret couldn’t remember seeing them go.

And meanwhile Elizabeth worked steadily on, clearing the room. Her clothes were the last thing she packed. She threw them into a steamer trunk and slammed the lid. “Done,” she said.

“How are you getting all this to Ellington?” Margaret asked.

“Dommie will move it in a truck, later on.”

“Dommie? Oh. You haven’t said anything about him,” Margaret said. “What’s he like? What’s he do?”

“He’s a pharmacist. He’s taking over his father’s drugstore.”

“Well, that’ll be nice.”

“How’s your family?” Elizabeth asked suddenly.

“They’re fine.”

“Everything going all right? Everyone the same as usual?”

“Oh, yes.”

Margaret’s mind was still on Dommie, trying to picture him. It wasn’t until several minutes later that Elizabeth’s questions sunk in. Had she wanted to hear about Matthew? There was no way of knowing. By then Elizabeth was making up the daybed, moving around with sheets and army blankets while Margaret watched dimly and sipped the last can of beer. “On the way down here,” Margaret said finally, “we passed so close to Matthew’s house I was tempted to stop in and see him.”

Elizabeth folded the daybed cover, slowly and silently.

“He never married, you know,” Margaret told her.

But all Elizabeth said was, “Didn’t he?” Then she put a pillowcase on a pillow and laid it at the head of the daybed. “Well, here’s where you sleep.”

“How about you?” Margaret said.

“I have a sleeping bag.”

She brought it out from the closet and unrolled it — a red one, so new that a label still dangled from the zipper-pull. “We’re supposed to go camping on our honeymoon,” she said.

“But you can’t just sleep on the floor. Why don’t we change places? You need to rest up for tomorrow.”

“I don’t mind the floor, it’s the ground that’s going to bother me,” Elizabeth said. “Old roots and stobs and crackling leaves.”

“Why are you going, then?”

“Dommie likes nature.”

“Doesn’t the bride have some say?”

“I did. I chose camping,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t know Dommie. He’s so sweet . He makes you want to give him things.”

“Well, still—”

“You want first go at the bathroom?”

“Oh. All right.”

She had thought she would fall into a stupor the minute she was in bed, but she didn’t. She lay on her back in the dark, watching the windowpane pattern that slanted across the ceiling. Music and faint voices drifted over from the main house. A screen door slammed; crickets chirped. On the floor Elizabeth breathed evenly, asleep or at least very relaxed, as if tomorrow were any ordinary day. Her white pajamas showed up blurred and gray — the same pajamas, probably, that she had worn back in Baltimore. There they had slept in Margaret’s old twin beds, with fragments of Margaret’s childhood lining the bookshelves and stuffed in the closet. And she had lain awake, just as now. She had been going over and over Timothy’s death — not yet wondering why he died, or picturing how, but just trying to realize that she would never again set eyes on him. Tonight he seemed faded and distant. The sadness that washed over her wasn’t because she missed him but because she didn’t miss him; he was so long ago, so forgotten, a tiny bright figure waving pathetically a long way off while his family moved on without him. They were caught up in things he had never imagined. He had never met Brady, or Mary’s daughters, or Peter’s strange girlfriend. And he wouldn’t know what to make of it if he could see her here, in a garage in North Carolina the night before Elizabeth’s wedding.

She flowed from Timothy to Jimmy Joe, to what would happen if he should see her here. Anywhere she went, after all, it was possible to run into him. Anywhere but Baltimore — he must surely have moved on. Maybe to New York, to materialize beside her at a counter in Bloomingdale’s. Maybe to that beach in California. Maybe to Raleigh. He would come sauntering down the street with his windbreaker collar turned up, soundlessly whistling. His eyes would flick over her, veer away, and then return. “Oh,” he would say, and she would stop beside him, poised to rush on to somewhere important as soon as she had said hello. “How are you?” she would ask him, smiling a social smile. “Oh, how could you just let me go, as if five weeks of me were all you wanted?”

She saw his mouth starting to frame an answer. His lips were slightly chapped, his shoulders were thin and high, and his hands were knotted in his windbreaker pockets. This time when the tears came she thought of them as a continuation, interrupted on some days by dry-eyed periods. She rolled to a sitting position, disguising her sniffs as long deep breaths, and reached for her purse at the foot of the bed. Beneath the window, Elizabeth stirred.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

She must have been awake all along; her voice was firm and clear.

Margaret said, “No, I think it’s an allergy.” She fumbled for a Kleenex. Then she said, “I seem to keep having these crying spells.” “Anything I can get you?” “No, thank you.”

“Well, if you should think of something.”

“I’m really very happy,” Margaret said. “I’m not just saying that. I felt so happy. Everything was going so well. Now all of a sudden I’ve started thinking about my first husband, someone I don’t even love any more.”

“Oh, well, he’ll go away again,” Elizabeth said.

Margaret stopped in the middle of refolding a Kleenex and looked over at her. All she saw was a dim gray blur.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Nobody does. I keep remembering things I’d forgotten. I keep thinking about the last time I saw him, when my mother walked in and just took me away and he never said a word.”

“Took you away? How did she do that?”

“Just — oh, and he allowed it. I’ve never been so mistaken about anyone in my life. She packed me off to an aunt in Chicago. But do you think he even lifted a finger?”

“How did she find you?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’d written her a note once we got settled, telling her not to worry.”

“But took you away! She’s so little.”

Through her tears, Margaret laughed. “No, not by force,” she said. “She didn’t drag me out by the hair or anything.”

“How, then?”

“Oh, well—” Margaret stared past Elizabeth and out the window, where the sky was a deep, blotting-paper blue. Her tears had stopped. She zipped her purse and set it at the foot of the bed. “I feel much better now,” she said. “I hope I didn’t keep you from sleeping.”

Elizabeth said nothing. Margaret lay down and watched the ceiling. It tilted a little from all the beer she had drunk. She was conscious of an alert, unsettled silence — Elizabeth still wakeful, still not saying, “That’s all right,” or, “This could happen to anyone,” or some other soothing remark to round off the conversation. “You must think our family is pretty crazy,” Margaret said after a while.