Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“I’ve been trying to do things during the weekends. I mow the grass, rake leaves. But it’s a full-time job, I never quite catch up.” He looked down at his plate, where an egg lay nearly untouched. “Before she got sick I’d just finished cleaning out the basement,” he said “Shoveling it out. All that junk. Remember our wine?”

“Yes.”

“I found it in the basement six months after you left. White scum on the top and the worst smell you can imagine.”

“I wondered what you’d done with it,” Elizabeth said.

A younger, shinier Matthew flashed through her mind. “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic,” he had said. “I’ll bring a chicken, you bring a …” As if that picnic had actually come about, she seemed to remember the sunlight on a riverbank and the flattened grass they sat on and the feel of Matthew’s shirt, rough and warm behind her as she leaned back to drink from a stoneware jug.

“What would it have tasted like, I wonder,” Matthew said.

She knew she should never have come back here.

The first time she realized that Andrew was home was at supper. They ate in the dining room — Elizabeth, the two sisters, Matthew, and Susan. Elizabeth kept hearing clinking sounds coming from the kitchen, separated by long intervals of silence. “What’s that?” she asked, and Mary said, “Oh, Andrew.”

“Andrew? I didn’t even know he was here.”

“He’s going back on Sunday.”

Nobody pretended to find it odd that he should be eating in the kitchen.

That night, from the army cot that had been set up for her on the sunporch, she heard Andrew cruising the house in the dark. He slammed the refrigerator door, creaked across floorboards, scraped back a dining room chair. He carried some kind of radio with him that poured out music from the fifties — late-night, slow-dance, crooning songs swelling and fading as he passed through rooms, like a bell on a cat’s collar. In the morning when she went upstairs his door was tightly shut, sealed-looking. When she returned from the library with a stack of historical romances for Mrs. Emerson she found florists’ roses by the bed — nothing any of the others would have thought of buying — and the smell of an unfamiliar aftershave in the air. He ate his lunch in the kitchen. That weighty, surreptitious clinking cast a gloom over the dining room, but no one mentioned it. “We seem to be missing the butter,” Elizabeth said, and Mary rose at once, letting a fork clatter to her plate, as if she feared that Elizabeth would go out to the kitchen herself. “Sit still, I’ll get it,” she said. But Elizabeth hadn’t even thought of going. She avoided Andrew as much as he did her. Otherwise, even in a house so large, they would have had to bump into each other sometime . She kept an ear tuned for the sound of his approach, and circled rooms where he might be. Why should she bother him, she asked herself, if he didn’t want her around? But she knew there was more to it than that: she didn’t want him around, either. He had passed judgment on her. Once or twice, during the afternoon, she caught glimpses of him as he crossed the living room — a flash of his faded blue shirt, a color she associated with institutions — and she averted her face and hunched lower in her chair beside Mrs. Emerson. She should have gone right out to him, of course. “Look here,” she should have said. “Here I am. Elizabeth. You know I’m in the house with you. I feel so silly pretending I’m not. Why are you doing this? Or why not just go back to New York, if you can’t bear to see me?” But she already knew why. He had summed her up. He was afraid to leave his family in her hands. He alone, of all the Emersons, knew that she was the kind of person who went through life causing clatter and spills and permanent damage.

A man from an orthopedic supply house delivered an aluminum walker. It sat by Mrs. Emerson’s bed most of Friday afternoon, but she made no move to use it. “Try, just try it,” Mary said. Mrs. Emerson only sent it slit-eyed glances full of distrust. She felt strongly enough about it to frame a very complicated sentence about walkers reminding her of fat old ladies in side-laced shoes, which made Elizabeth laugh. “You’re right, come to think of it,” she said. Mary frowned at her. When they were alone she said, “Elizabeth, I hope you’ll encourage Mother a little. The doctor says she’ll be back to normal in no time if she’ll just take things step by step.” “Oh, she’ll be all right,” Elizabeth said. And she was. With no one watching, with Elizabeth’s back deliberately turned, Mrs. Emerson looked at the walker more closely and finally reached out to test its weight with one hand. Within a few hours, she had allowed herself to be lifted to a standing position. She clomped around the sunporch, leaning heavily on the walker and puffing. Elizabeth read a magazine. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.

“You should probably get some rest,” Elizabeth said. She had figured out by now how to carry on their conversations. As soon as she got the gist of a sentence she interrupted, which sounded rude but spared Mrs. Emerson the humiliation of long delays or having words supplied for her. It seemed to work. Mrs. Emerson released the walker, and Elizabeth closed her magazine, helped Mrs. Emerson back to bed, and took her slippers off. “Before supper we’ll try it again,” she said.

“But I—”

“Yes, but the more you practice the sooner you’ll be free of the walker.”

Mrs. Emerson closed her mouth and nodded.

Matthew and his mother and Elizabeth went over Mrs. Emerson’s checkbook together. Mrs. Emerson wanted Elizabeth to pay bills and keep her records; she had had Elizabeth’s signature cleared at the bank. “But why?” Elizabeth asked her. “You can write that much. Why me?” She felt herself sinking into some kind of trap, the trap she had been afraid of when she first said no to coming back. “I’ll only be here six weeks, remember,” she said.

“Oh well,” said Matthew, “I suppose it’s tiring for her, dealing with all this.”

But Elizabeth was still watching Mrs. Emerson. “Six weeks is all the leave I have,” she said. “That’s understood. Margaret told me so.”

Mrs. Emerson merely aligned a stack of envelopes. She moved her lips, forming no words, pretending it was the stroke that kept her from speaking.

Matthew smoothed open the pages of the budget book and explained how it was kept — a page for every month, an entry for every expense, however small. Matches, stamps, cleaning fluid. Her children thought of the book as a joke. Matthew showed Elizabeth the first page, started two years ago: “This book, 69¢; envelope for this book, 2¢.” He pointed it out silently, smiling. Elizabeth barely glanced at it. “Why couldn’t you do this?” she asked him. “You’re here all the time.”

“But I won’t be after Sunday.” “Why? Where are you going?”

“Well, I have to get back to work. I can only stop by in the evenings.”

She looked up and found him watching her. His glasses had slipped down his nose again. His shoulder just brushed hers. He smelled like bread baking, and always had, but until now she had forgotten that. Caught off guard, she smiled back at him. Then Mrs. Emerson cleared her throat, and Elizabeth moved over to sit on the foot of the bed.

All Friday evening she worked on the bills, staying close by Mrs. Emerson in case questions arose. “Who is this Mr. Robbins? Why the two dollars? Where is this bill they say you’ve overlooked?” She decided that budget books were more revealing than diaries. Mrs. Emerson, who had been born rich, worried more about money than Elizabeth ever had. Her business correspondence was full of suspicion and penny-counting, quibbling over labor hours, threatening to take her business elsewhere, reminding everyone of contracts and estimates and guarantees. Her bills were from discount stores and cut-rate drug companies, some of them clear across the country, and to their trifling amounts interest rates and penalties had been tacked on month after month while Mrs. Emerson hesitated over paying them. Her checks were from an inconvenient bank at the other end of town — lower service charges, Matthew said. Yet Elizabeth found a seventy-dollar receipt from a health food store, and a sixty-dollar bill for a bathrobe. She whistled. Mrs. Emerson said, “What, what—”