Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“More or less.”

It wasn’t the answer she had expected. “They aren’t really,” she said, too loudly. Then she sighed and said, “Oh well, I guess they could wear on your nerves quite a bit.”

Elizabeth stayed quiet.

“Dragging you into all our troubles that way. It must—”

“Ha,” said Elizabeth.

“What?”

“They didn’t drag me in , they wanted me for an audience.” She clipped off the ends of her words, as if she were angry. “I finally saw that,” she said. “I was hired to watch. I couldn’t have helped if I’d tried. I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Oh no, I think Mother just liked having you around,” Margaret said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“But I don’t see what you’re saying.”

“They were always asking me to do something,” Elizabeth said. “Step in. Take some action, pour out some feeling. And when I didn’t, they got mad. Then once, one time, I did do something. And what a mess. It was like I’d blundered onto the stage in the middle of a play. What a mess it made!”

“I think you must be talking about Timothy,” Margaret said.

Elizabeth only rolled over and plumped her pillow up.

“But you didn’t do anything,” Margaret said. “Nobody thinks you’re to blame.”

“Talk to your mother about that.”

“Why? Because she never kept in touch? Well, you have to see that —she just doesn’t want to be reminded. If there’s anyone she blames it’s herself.”

“Not that I ever heard,” Elizabeth said.

“She blames herself for telling Timothy that you were taking Matthew home with you.”

“Well, she — what?” Elizabeth sat up. “When did she tell him that?”

“Before he left the house, I guess,” Margaret said. “That morning. She says she should have let you do it, however you were planning to.”

“Before he left with me? Before we went to his place?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“He knew all along, then,” Elizabeth said. “All the while he was asking to come with me. He planned it that way. He was trying to make me feel bad.”

“Maybe so,” said Margaret. “Anyway, I don’t know how—”

“If I never see another Emerson in all my life,” Elizabeth said, “I’ll die happy.”

Which should have hurt Margaret’s feelings, but it didn’t. She was feeling too sleepy. Sleep took her by surprise, dropping the bottom out of her mind, and suddenly she was blinking and floating, losing track of what they were talking about, spinning off into blurry unrelated thoughts. She was barely conscious of the sound of a match striking. She heard Elizabeth inhaling on a cigarette and crumpling cellophane — wakeful, daytime sounds, but they only made her sink further away. She slept deeply, feeling trustful and protected, as if Elizabeth sitting alert on the floor were a sentry who would keep watch for her through the night.

The wedding was held in a red brick church in the middle of nowhere. Elizabeth directed Margaret there, along glaring highways. She wore her jeans, and her hair was not combed; it blew out like a haystack in the wind. She was going to change at her parents’ house, she said. In the back seat were her suitcase and her sleeping bag. A linen suit hung from a hook by the window. “Oh, you’re not wearing a long dress,” Margaret said. “No,” said Elizabeth. All her answers this morning were brief and vague. Her mind must be on the wedding. She watched the road with narrow gray eyes that looked nearly white in the sunlight. Her face was calm and expressionless, and her hands, curled around her pocketbook, remained perfectly still.

“Here’s where my family lives,” she said finally, and Margaret pulled over to the side of the road. The driveway was choked with cars, each one crinkling the air with heat waves. A woman stood on the cement stoop of the ranch-house, and as soon as the car doors opened she called, “Happy wedding day, honey!” and started down the steps. Margaret hung back, although it was she who carried the white suit. She hated to be the only stranger in someone’s family gathering. “I’ll just go straight to the church,” she told Elizabeth.

“Come in, if you want to.”

“No, I’ll just—”

She pushed the suit on top of Elizabeth’s sleeping bag and turned toward the church, barely taking time to wave at the woman. It must have been Elizabeth’s mother. She was saying, “You haven’t got much time, honey. Oh! Won’t your friend stay? Mrs. Howard’s already at the organ, you can hear her if you’ll listen. Your flowers are in the icebox but don’t you dare get them out till the very last thing, you know how they’ll — where are your shoes , Elizabeth? Are you planning to get married in moccasins?” If Elizabeth said anything, Margaret didn’t hear her.

She walked along the highway to the church, which had only one car in front of it and a Sunday school bus to the side. Although she felt awkward going in so early, it was too hot to stand out in the sun. She climbed the steps and entered through the arched door. Inside, she smelled lemon oil and hymn books. The light was so dim that she stood in the back of the nave for a moment, blinking and widening her eyes, listening to the organ music that wound its way down from the choir loft. The pews were empty, their backs long polished slashes. In front of the altar was a spray of white flowers. The windows were rose-colored and stippled with asterisks. Margaret crossed to the nearest one and opened the lower pane. Then she sat down in the pew beneath it, but still no breeze came to cool her. She picked up a cardboard fan stapled to a popsicle stick and stirred the warm air before her face.

At Elizabeth’s house, now, they would all be gathered around and fussing over her, straightening her veil and brushing her suit. Margaret imagined her standing like a totem pole, dead center, allowing herself to be decorated. But she couldn’t picture her coming down this aisle. She turned in her seat, looking toward the doorway, and saw the ushers just stepping inside with carnations in their buttonholes. They looked back at her, all out of the same perplexed brown eyes. Was she on the correct side of the church? Which was the bride’s side? She couldn’t remember. She stayed where she was, to the right of the altar, and whisked her fan more rapidly.

People began filing in — old ladies, a few awkward men, women who took command of the church the moment they stepped inside. They clutched the ushers’ arms and beamed at them, whispering as they walked (“How’s your mama? How’s that pretty little sister?”), while the ushers stayed remote and self-conscious, and the women’s husbands, a few steps behind, carried their hats like breakable objects. The organ grew more sure of itself. A fat lady slid into Margaret’s pew, trailing long wisps of Arpege. “I finally did make the Greyhound,” she said.

“Oh, good,” said Margaret.

The fat lady frilled out the ruffles at her elbows, touched both earlobes, and pivoted each foot to peer down at her stocking seams. Margaret turned and looked out the window. If she ducked her head, she got a horizontal slice of grass, ranch-house, and the lower halves of several pastel dresses and two black suits heading toward the church. In the center was Elizabeth’s white skirt, drawing nearer — a sight that startled and scared her, as if she herself were involved in this wedding and nervous about its going well.

The fat lady had started talking, apparently to Margaret. “You knew Hannah couldn’t make it,” she said. “She’s having such a lot of trouble with Everett. But Nellie will be here. ‘Oh,’ she told me, ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Been waiting a long time to see that boy get married.’ Well, you know. It came as quite a surprise. I had always thought he would marry Alice Gail Pruitt. I expected to see Liz Abbott die an old maid, to tell you the truth.”