Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

Dear Mary , she wrote on cream notepaper. How nice to hear about the vacation. It will do you a world of good. You don’t mention a babysitter, and maybe you’ve already found one, but I did want to let you know that just in case you haven’t—

She stopped to read over what she had written. Although she had chosen her words carefully, her handwriting was deliberately a little more slapdash than usual. Let it look casual, spur-of-the-moment. But when she took up her pen again, she paused and read the letter a second time. She was thinking of her grandchildren. Four of them, three girls and a boy, and she would like to know where people got the idea that girls were quieter. Oh, they ran her ragged. Climbing too high, jumping too far, running too fast. Talking in their high-pitched voices with excited gulps for air. Always hiding her things and giving shrieks of laughter when she missed them. Was she even sure she wanted to do this?

Grandchildren were not all they were cracked up to be. She held onto that thought a minute, enjoying it, before she flicked it away again. Grandchildren were wonderful. What else did she have to live for? Her committee work was fading out; her friends were turning into droning old ladies or even, some of them, dying. Mornings, when she came downstairs in a fresh crisp dress and looked all around her at the high ceilings dripping cobwebs, she sometimes wondered why she had bothered to get up. The house seemed thinner-walled, like an old and brittle shell, and she was a little dried-up scrap of seaweed rattling around in its vastness. But then she would remember her children, who descended and spread out from her like a fan, and their children spreading out further; and she felt grand and deep and bountiful, a creamy feeling that she held to tightly all through her empty mornings. She felt it now. She rose and made her way to the hall again, for no other purpose than to fill all the other rooms with her richness while it lasted.

Down the stairs, which was harder on her legs than coming up but not so bad for her chest. Through the lower hall, touching pieces of furniture meaninglessly as she passed them. And into the kitchen, where she put a piece of bread in the toaster because it was possible that she had skipped lunch. While she waited for the toast she gathered dirty dishes and set them into the sink. Alvareen had not been by for a week. It looked as if she had finally quit, and all over a little spat that had no importance whatsoever. She had claimed she ought to be paid for her sick-days. “Seeing as you always save up what work I missed, every rag and tag,” she said, “and I got to do it then when I get back, you ought to at least pay me for it.” “That’s rubbish, that’s ridiculous,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I don’t have to stand for any smart talk, Alvareen, I can always find some clean hard-working girl to bring in from the country.” “Suit yourself,” said Alvareen. What Mrs. Emerson couldn’t bring herself to tell her was that it wasn’t just work she paid Alvareen for, it was her presence in the house, something to drive the echoes away. But try letting her know that: she would puff up immediately, maybe ask for a raise. Mrs. Emerson would not even give her the satisfaction of a telephone call. If she quit, she quit. There were no more clean hard-working girls in the country (where had they got to, anyway?) but good riddance, even so. She’d make do without.

The toaster clicked. Mrs. Emerson took the last clean plate from a cabinet and went over to the table, but then she saw that the toast had not come up. It was caught down inside by one bent corner. Mrs. Emerson poked it with a finger, and nothing happened. She circled the table thoughtfully. “Never put a fork in a toaster,” people were always saying. It might have been the only advice she had ever been given; it came in a chorus, from somewhere above her head. Lately she had been noticing how many opportunities there were for painful deaths. Anything was possible: gas heaters exploding, teenaged drivers running her down, flying roof slates beheading her in a windstorm, and cancer — oh, cancer most of all. Several nights she had awakened with the certain, heart-stopping knowledge that when she died it would be in some horrible way. She had pushed it off, but the knowledge sank in and became accepted. In the daytime she often found herself surveying her actions from some distant point in the future. This was me, before It happened, she would say, going about my business blissfully unaware, never dreaming how it would end. The thought gave a new tone to everything she did. Measuring out tea leaves or folding back her bedspread was tinged with a lurking horror, like the sunlit village scenes in vampire movies. And where there was actually some danger — getting this toast out, for instance — she became nearly helpless. She spent minutes just staring at the toaster, plotting courses of action. A wooden spoon, maybe — something non-conductive. But how did she know it was non-conductive? She had only the scientists’ word for it. Finally a channel seemed to break through in her brain, and she clicked her tongue at herself and bent to unplug the toaster. Even then, she didn’t put her fingers in. She turned the toaster upside down and shook it, scattering crumbs all across the kitchen table.

When she had buttered the toast, she took it with her into the hallway. There she picked up the telephone and dialed Mary’s number. Lines whirred and snapped into action halfway across the continent. The phone rang several times at the other end, and then Mary said, “Hello?”

“Oh, Mary,” said Mrs. Emerson, as if she had forgotten whom she was calling. “How are you, dear?”

“Oh, fine,” said Mary, and waited.

“How wonderful about the vacation,” said her mother.

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“And no children along.”

“No.”

“You’ll be leaving them behind.”

“Well, I don’t see what’s so wrong about that,” Mary said. “You and Daddy went off sometimes. It’s not as if—”

“No, no, it’s a fine idea,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I think it’s just fine.”

“Well, then.”

“Now that you mention it though,” Mrs. Emerson said, “do you have someone to stay with the children?”

“Oh, yes, that’s all taken care of.” “No problem there, then.”

“Oh, no.”

“I see. Of course, if it’s settled,” Mrs. Emerson said. “But you know I’m willing to help out with them if I’m needed.”

“Thank you, Mother. I think we can manage.”

“Oh. All right.”

“We’ll leave them with Morris’s mother, and that way there’ll be less—”

“Morris’s mother!” Mrs. Emerson said. She put her other hand to the receiver. “But she gets to see them all the time!”

“All the more reason,” said Mary. “They’re more used to her. We have to think of the children’s side of this.”

“But I am,” Mrs. Emerson said. She picked up a ballpoint pen and bent over the telephone pad, although there was nothing she wanted to write down. Her voice was soft and feathery. No one hearing it would have guessed how tightly she held the pen. “It’s for the children that I want to come, after all,” she said.

“Yes, but with Pammie in this nightmare-stage, one more trauma is all she—”

Mrs. Emerson drew a straight slash across the pad and straightened up. “You have just said a word which I utterly despise,” she said.

“Now, Mother—”

“I loathe it. I detest it. Traumas . How much harm can it do them to see their grandmother once in a while? How long has it been , after all? I so seldom—”

“It’s been seven weeks,” said Mary. “In the past year you’ve paid us four visits, and all but one lasted nearly a month.”