Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Sorry,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I dreamed that your voice was a little gold wire. I was chasing a butterfly with my fourth-grade science class. My fingers would just brush the butterfly; then the wire pulled it away again. There was gold in the butterfly, too. Threads of it, across the wings.”

She pulled her feet off the cold slate floor and tucked them under her. “You may be scared of the dark,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not? What would be so strange about that? Look at all the dark corners there are, and the moonlight makes them look darker. I used to think that skinny ladies in bathrobes were waiting in corners to get me. I don’t know why. My father had a lady like that in his church — sick for years, about to die, always wore a pink chenille bathrobe. Whenever my mother said ‘they’—meaning other people, just anyone — that’s who I pictured. ‘They’ve put a stop sign on Burdette Road,’ she’d say, and I would picture a whole flock of ladies in pink bathrobes, all ghostly and sure of themselves, hammering down a stop sign in the dead of night. Funny thing to be scared of. They weren’t only in corners, they were in the backs of closets, and under beds, and in the slanty space below the stairs. Now I’m grown up and don’t think of them so much, but if something is worrying me, dark corners can still make me wonder what’s in them. Possibilities, maybe. All the bad things that can happen to people. Or if I’m worried enough , ladies in pink bathrobes all over again.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. But she didn’t seem to be dropping off to sleep yet.

“When you’re independent again it won’t be so bad,” Elizabeth told her. “It’s feeling helpless that scares you.”

“But I won’t—”

Elizabeth waited.

“I won’t be—”

“Of course you will. Wait and see. By the time I leave you’ll be running this house again.”

“Gillespie.”

Elizabeth stiffened.

“Can’t you—”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I have a job now. One I like.”

“You never used to—”

“Now I do, though,” Elizabeth said. “I stay with things more. I don’t go flitting off wherever I’m asked nowadays.”

But she hadn’t guessed the words correctly. “Never used to like, like children,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh. Well, not as a group, no. I still don’t. But these I like.”

She passed a hand across her eyes, which felt dry and hot. She was going to be exhausted by morning. “Are you sleepy?” she asked.

“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I have talked. What more is there to say?” She wound a loose thread around her index finger. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll tell you how I happened to start working at the school. I was leaning out the window of this crafts shop where I used to sell things, watching a parade go by. There were people crammed on both sidewalks, mothers with babies and little children, fathers with children on their shoulders. And suddenly I was so surprised by them. Isn’t it amazing how hard people work to raise their children? Human beings are born so helpless, and stay helpless so long. For every grownup you see, you know there must have been at least one person who had the patience to lug them around, and feed them, and walk them nights and keep them out of danger for years and years, without a break. Teaching them how to fit into civilization and how to talk back and forth with other people, taking them to zoos and parades and educational events, telling them all those nursery rhymes and word-of-mouth fairy tales. Isn’t that surprising? People you wouldn’t trust your purse with five minutes, maybe, but still they put in years and years of time tending their children along and they don’t even make a fuss about it. Even if it’s a criminal they turn out, or some other kind of failure — still, he managed to get grown, didn’t he? Isn’t that something?”

Mrs. Emerson didn’t answer.

“Well, there I was hanging out the window,” Elizabeth said, “thinking all this over. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing up here, anyway? Up in this shop where I’m bored stiff? And never moving on into something else, for fear of some harm I might cause? You’d think I was some kind of special case,’ I thought, ‘but I’m not! I’m like all the people I’m sitting here gawking at, and I might just as well stumble on out and join them!’ So right that day I quit my job, and started casting about for new work. And found it — teaching crafts in a reform school. Well, you might not think the girls there would be all that great, but I like them. Wasn’t that something? Just from one little old parade?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. Then she was silent.

“Mrs. Emerson?”

But all Elizabeth heard was her soft, steady breathing. She slid off the bed and found her way back to the cot. She stretched out and pulled the cool sheets over her, but then she couldn’t sleep. She stayed wide awake and thoughtful. She was awake when Andrew’s shadow crossed a moonbeam, heading all alone to the gazebo. When she propped herself on an elbow to look at him, he had stopped close beside the sunporch. A thin silvery line traced the top of his head and slid down the slope of his shoulders, stopping at the white shirt whose collar was pressed open in a flat, old-fashioned style. Although he was looking toward the windows, he couldn’t see her. His face was a blank oval, pale and accusing. After a moment he turned and wandered off behind the tangled rosebushes.

“Look,” Matthew said. “From here you would think the house was on fire.”

Elizabeth followed the line of his arm. They were in the gazebo, balanced precariously on a rotten railing, and from where they sat they could look up and see the house reflecting the sunset from every window. Not as if it were on fire, Elizabeth thought, so much as empty . The windows were glaring orange rectangles, giving no sign of the life behind them. The scene had a flat, painted look. “I wonder why she keeps the place,” Matthew said.

“Maybe for her children to come home to.”

“We never come all at once anymore.”

He picked up her hand and turned it over. Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. At this time of day, in this stillness, it seemed as if she had never been away; his hardened palm was as familiar as if she had last held it minutes ago. She rested lightly against his side, which felt warm on her bare arm. Matthew was in a suit. He was dressed to take Andrew to the bus station and the girls to the airport. Elizabeth wore only jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. When she shivered he said, “Do you want my jacket?”

“No, thanks. It’s time for you to be going.”

But Matthew didn’t move. “My father bought this house when they were married,” he said. “Before they even had children. They moved in with nothing more than Grandmother Carter’s parlor furniture, in all this space. He said they were going to live here till they died. He expected to have a long life, I guess. They were going to celebrate their golden anniversary here, all white-haired and settled with the third floor closed off except when children and grandchildren came to spend their summer vacations.”

“Vacations in Baltimore?”

“If you were to marry me,” Matthew said, “we could stay in this house, if you liked.”

Which surprised her no more than his hand had. Why should it? Life seemed to be a constant collision and recollision of bodies on the move in the universe; everything recurred. She would keep running into Emersons until the day she died; and she and Matthew would keep falling in love and out again. If it snowed, wouldn’t Timothy be waiting for her to shovel him a path? Wouldn’t he emerge from those bushes if she took it in her head to walk another turkey?