Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“There, now. See?” said Mrs. Emerson. “You don’t make sense. First you say the children aren’t used to me and then you say I’m around all the time.”

She smiled brightly at her wavery yellowed reflection in the antique mirror. Her hair clung to her forehead, which was damp. Although she wasn’t hot, a flush of some sort was rising from her collarbones. She undid the top button of her blouse.

“It’s not my fault I’m not making sense,” Mary said. Her voice was younger and higher; she sounded as if she were back at that terrible time in her teens, when all she seemed to do was cry and throw tantrums and pick out her mother’s niggling faults. “Mother, can’t you stand on your own feet any more? You’re out here all the time, and every visit you make I have the feeling you might not go home again. You get so settled . You seem so permanent . You act as if you’re taking over my household.”

“Why, Mary,” Mrs. Emerson said. She laid her fingers to her throat, which was tightening and cutting off her breathing. “Where could you get such a thought? Don’t you see how careful I am to be a good guest? I help out with the chores, I give you and Morris a little time alone when he comes home in the evenings—”

“You circle around whatever room we’re in, clearing your throat. You throw out all our food and buy new stuff from the health store. You make a point of learning the mailman’s name and the milkman’s schedule and the garbage days, as if you were moving in. You send my clothes to the laundry to save me ironing when ironing is something I enjoy, you buy curtains I can’t live with and hang them in the dining room, you string Geritol bottles and constipation remedies all across my kitchen table—”

“Well, if I’d only—”

“Then you go off to Margaret’s and spoil little Susan rotten. She told me so.”

“Oh, this is unfair!” said Mrs. Emerson. “How was I to know, if no one tells me?”

“Why should we have to tell you?”

“Well, now that I’ve heard,” said Mrs. Emerson, getting a tighter grip on her voice, “you’ll have no further cause for complaint. I certainly won’t be troubling you again.”

“I might have known you’d take it that way,” said Mary.

“Well, what am I supposed to say? Anything I do is wrong. I shouldn’t visit, I shouldn’t not visit. What, then, Mary? Why are my children so un — un—?”

Her tongue stopped working. It jerked and died. Her throat made an involuntary clicking sound that horrified her. She dropped the receiver, letting it swing over the edge of the table. “Mother?” Mary’s voice said, tinnily. Long cold fingers of fear were closing around Mrs. Emerson’s chest. She buckled her shaking knees and slid to the floor. Then, like a very poor actor performing an artificial death, she felt her way to a prone position and lay staring up at the underside of the table. “Mother, what is it?” Mary said. The swinging receiver was nauseating to watch. Mrs. Emerson closed her eyes and felt herself draining away.

When she looked up at the table again it seemed darker, clustered with spinning black specks. Was she going blind? She tried to work her arms, but only one responded. It moved to touch the other, which felt dead and cold and disgusting. She was dying in pieces, then. How fortunate that she had got the children grown before this happened. They were grown, weren’t they? Weren’t they? There seemed to be one baby left over. But when she tried to picture him she realized that she had never seen him; he was that poor little soul born dead, between Melissa and Peter. Well, but it was logical that she should have thought of him; she was going to heaven to meet him, after all. So some people said. Only he had managed alone so long, and the ones left here needed her so much more. How could she bear to look down and see her poor, unsatisfied children struggling on without her? And don’t tell her she wouldn’t see them. If heaven was where people stopped being concerned with such things then no woman would be happy there.

The undersurface of the table was rough and unfinished, a cheat. From above, it had always been so beautifully polished. In one corner a carpenter’s pencil had scrawled the number 83, and she spent a long time considering its significance. Her mind kept floating away from the problem, like a white balloon. She kept reaching out and grabbing it back by the string. Then she saw a small gray brain, a convoluted bulb growing on the inner side of one table leg. Shock caused new chills to grip her chest, before she realized that she was looking at a chewed piece of gum. Chewing gum. She saw cheerful rows of green and pink and yellow packets strung across the candy counter at the Tuxedo Pharmacy. She saw her children snapping gum as they came in for supper, a nasty habit. Chewing open-mouthed, on only one side, their faces peaceful and dreamy. Laying little gray wads on the rims of their plates before they unfolded their napkins. How often had she told them not to do that? The wads cooled and hardened; Margaret, her sloppiest child, would pry hers off the plate and pop it back in her mouth when she had finished eating. Was it Margaret who had stuck chewing gum to her mother’s walnut table?

The children swam up from the darkness at the edges of the hallway. Not I, not I, they all said. They were happy and glowing, as if they had just come in from outdoors. Matthew and Timothy and Andrew, their voices newly changed, their hands newly squared and hardened so that she kept having an impulse to reach out and touch them. Teenaged boys are so difficult to live with, a friend whispered. Yes, difficult, Mrs. Emerson said politely, and she smiled and nodded, rubbing the back of her head against the floor, but inwardly she disagreed. She was layered around with teenaged boys, all huge and gangling, making her feel small and frivolous and well-protected. In the middle of their circle she spun, laughing. She was going to stay at this moment in time forever.

It was some trouble with Mary that caused her to be lying here. She remembered now.

She was arguing with her husband, something about the baby. Matthew. This is the wrong one, she said. In the hospital he was fairer. How could I have such a dark-headed baby? She had made him drive her back to the hospital, she had carried the baby in naked, the way he had arrived, rolled in a blue receiving blanket. Would she ever forget how the nurses had laughed? They had called in doctors, orderlies, cleaning ladies, to share the joke with them. In their center she stood looking at the unwrapped baby and saw that he was hers after all — those level, considering eyes, wondering how much to expect from her. She had started crying. “Why honey,” her husband said. “This isn’t like you.” And it wasn’t. She had never been like herself again. All the rush of life in this house, that had carried her along protesting and making pushing-off gestures with both hands. All the mountains out of molehills, the molehills out of mountains. “The trifles I’ve seen swelled and magnified!” she said, possibly out loud. “The horrors I’ve seen taken for granted!”

She opened her eyes, although she had thought they were open already. There was something she had to do. Feed someone? Take care of someone? Was one of the children sick? No, only herself. She had to call for help. She framed the word “Mama” and discarded it — too strange a mouthful, it must be inappropriate. Her husband? She worried over his name, which was almost certainly Billy. But would she have married a Billy? Oh, after all the hesitation and excitement, the plans, the doubts, the final earth-shaking decision of whom to marry — and now look. She couldn’t remember which man she had ended up with. It was all the same in the end.