Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

“Um—”

“The O’Donnells. Babies and toddlers and little ones in diapers, I’m just sure of it. I believe I know them. Don’t I?”

“I thought—”

“They’ll run you off your feet over there.”

Elizabeth finished her milk and set her empty glass down. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I think you must be offering me a job,” she said.

“A job,” said Mrs. Emerson. She sat straighter and placed her palms together. “That is something to consider.”

“Are you asking if I’d like to work for you?”

“Well, would you?” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Sure. I’d make a better handyman than babysitter, any day.”

“Handyman!” said Mrs. Emerson. “No, I meant housework. Taking over for Emmeline.”

“Why not handyman? It’s what you need most. You already have a maid, you said.”

“But gardening . Painting. Climbing ladders.”

“I can do that.”

“Well, I never heard of such a thing.”

“Why? What’s so strange about it?” Elizabeth said. She had a habit of rarely bothering to look at people, Mrs. Emerson noticed. She concentrated on objects — pulling threads from a seam of her dungarees or untangling the toaster cord or examining the loose knob on the peppermill, so that when she did look up there was something startling, almost a flash, in the gray of her eyes. “You wouldn’t have to pay me much,” she said, looking straight at Mrs. Emerson. “If you let me live in I could get by on next to nothing.”

“It’s true, it scares me just to think of looking for another colored man,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Nowadays you can’t tell what to expect.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”

“But carrying firewood! Digging compost!”

Elizabeth waited, looking perfectly comfortable, picking leaves off the soles of her moccasins.

“I do get nervous at night,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Not that I am frightened or anything. But having someone down the hall, just another human being in case of—”

She fell silent and raised a hand to her forehead. This world expected too many decisions of her. The girl’s good points were obvious (calmness and silence, and the neat twist of her hands mending the chair) but there were bad points, too (no vivacity , that was it, and this tendency to drift into whatever offered itself). She sighed. “Oh well,” she said. “It can’t hurt to try you out, I suppose.”

“Done,” said Elizabeth, and reached a hand across the table. Mrs. Emerson was slow to realize that she was supposed to shake it.

“Now, I was paying Richard fifty a week,” she said. “But he wasn’t living in. Is forty all right?”

“Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth, cheerfully. “Anything.” How would she earn her way through college, talking like that? Then she stood and took her glass to the sink. She said, “I guess I’ll get the last of those chairs taken care of.”

“Fine,” said Mrs. Emerson. She stayed where she was. That was her privilege, now that she was paying. She listened to the front door slamming, the chair legs scraping across the veranda. Then she heard Elizabeth crashing through the woods. She thought of living in the same house with her — such a lanky, awkward, flat-chested girl — and she raised her eyes to the ceiling and asked her husband what she had let herself in for.

“It’s simple,” said Elizabeth. “That stump is the chopping block. There’s the axe. And there sits the turkey, wondering when you’ll start. What else could you want?”

“If it’s all that simple why ask me to do it?” the boy said. He was standing beside her in the toolshed doorway, looking at the turkey in its crate. The turkey paced three steps to one side, three steps to the other, stopping occasionally to peer at them through the slats.

“Look at him, he wants to get it over with,” Elizabeth said.

“Couldn’t we call in a butcher?”

The boy was a college senior named Benny Simms — pleasant-faced, beanpole-thin, with a crewcut. He lived two houses down, although his mother was beginning to question that. “He lives at your place,” she told Mrs. Emerson on the phone. “Every weekend home he’s out visiting your handyman. Handywoman. What kind of girl is she anyway? Who are her people? Do you know anything about her?” Elizabeth had heard of this call, and other mothers’ calls just like it, from Mrs. Emerson, who reported it in a voice that tried to sound amused but came out irritated. “This is one problem I never had with Richard,” she said. “I find there are drawbacks that I hadn’t foreseen when I hired you.” She was still trying to switch Elizabeth over to housekeeping, which was probably why she sounded irritated. She tapped her fingernails on a tabletop. “I don’t know, people surprise me more all the time. ‘Above all else, be feminine,’ I used to tell my daughters, and here you are in those eternal blue jeans, but every time I look out the window some new boy is helping you rake leaves.”

“Oh, well, the leaves are nearly gone by now,” Elizabeth said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I’ll be indoors more. They won’t be stopping by so much.”

“It’s more likely they’ll just start invading my kitchen,” Mrs. Emerson said.

Benny Simms picked up the axe that was leaning against the toolshed. He ran a finger down the blade and whistled. “I just did sharpen it,” Elizabeth told him. “I guess you did.”

“Did you know the Emersons have a whetstone wheel? The old-fashioned kind, that works with a foot pedal. I found it in the basement.”

“Nothing about the Emersons would surprise me at all,” Benny said.

“I like things like that. Things without machinery to them. Machinery is something I don’t understand too well.”

“I would’ve thought you’d know all about it,” Benny said.

“No. Yard work now, or carpentry, or plumbing — things that you can see reason to right on the surface …”

“Then why can’t you kill the turkey?” asked Benny.

“Well.”

He handed her the axe. Elizabeth turned it over several times, studying the glint of the blade very carefully but moving no closer to the turkey. She was wearing what Mrs. Emerson called her uniform — moccasins, dungarees, and a white shirt, and a bulky black jacket with a rib-knit waist now that the weather had turned cool. A wind from the east was whipping her hair around her face. She kept brushing it back impatiently without lifting her eyes from the axe. “I’m not too certain about that bevel,” she said. “It looks a little bluish. I hope I didn’t go and ruin the tempering.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Benny. “What’d you take this job for, if you can’t kill turkeys?”

“Well, how was I to know? Would you expect that to be a part of my job? First I heard of it, in she walked yesterday carrying the crate by the handle. Passed it over to me without even slowing down, walked on through the house peeling off her gloves. Said, ‘Here you are, Elizabeth, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving dinner.’ Tomorrow! I didn’t know what to say. I suspect,” she said, setting down the axe, “that she planned it all on purpose, to turn me to housekeeping.”

“Most people get their turkeys from the supermarket,” Benny said.

“Not her.”

“All plucked and wrapped in plastic.”

“Not Mrs. Emerson. She won it at a church bazaar.”

“Oh, is that what you win? I’ve heard of prize turkeys before but I thought they’d have their feathers off.”