Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

“When I picture our golden anniversary,” Matthew said, “I think of us in a supermarket. One of those cozy old couples you see telling each other what food they like. ‘Here’s some nice plums, Mother,’ I’d say, and you’d say, ‘Now, Pa, you know what plums do to your digestion. Remember back in ’82,’ you’d say, ‘I fixed stewed plums for supper and you never got a wink of sleep. Remember?’ ” He made his voice old and crotchety, but Elizabeth didn’t laugh.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I picture us with your family tangled up in everything you do, and me brought in to watch. Your mother living with us, and long distance phone calls from sisters divorcing and brothers having breakdowns, and quarrels among the lot of you every evening over the supper table. And me on the outside, wondering what next. Putting on the Band-Aids. Someone to impress.”

“Is that how you see yourself?” Matthew asked. “On the outside?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then what are you doing here now?”

“Putting on the Band-Aids,” Elizabeth said.

“But who asked you to do it? Mother. She didn’t want anyone else. She thinks of you as family. They all do.”

“Mighty strange family,” Elizabeth said. “She didn’t write for four years, I never once got one of those little letters of hers all rehearsed on the dictaphone. What do you say to that? I used to think of them as family too, I always did want a little more sinful family than the one I’ve got. But then I caused all that trouble with Timothy, and your mother didn’t write and we all went our separate ways. Now I’m back for six weeks. Period.”

“You and I don’t see things the same,” Matthew said. “Do you think you’re just standing off aloof from us?”

“Well, I’m surely not collecting guns,” Elizabeth said, “or eloping, or having spells of insanity or shouting quarrels.”

“We’re having a shouting quarrel right now,” said Matthew.

“Matthew, will you go? Your sisters are going to miss their planes.”

“There’s plenty of time.” But even as he spoke, the back door slammed and Mary called, “Matthew? Are you coming?”

“Go on, Matthew,” Elizabeth said.

“In a minute. We haven’t—”

“Matthew!” Mary called.

“Oh, all right,” he said. He slid off the rail and stood there a minute, scratching his head. “Tomorrow I go back to work,” he told Elizabeth.

“All right.”

“I can only come here in the evenings. Will you be here?”

“Where else?” Elizabeth said.

She watched his loose-boned figure shambling up the hill toward Mary, with his awkward suit that looked too short and his hair shaggy and ruffled. Then Margaret came out of the house, carrying Susan, and Mary started speaking. Whatever it was she said — scolding Matthew, or asking where Andrew was, or worrying about plane schedules — Elizabeth couldn’t catch, but she heard her thin, sharp voice and Susan’s irritable fussing. The scraps of their quarrel and the fluttering of Mary’s skirt in the breeze made them seem remote, like little figures under glass. They stood with their backs to Elizabeth. In a minute Andrew would come out and they would leave, confident that Elizabeth would keep things going somehow while they were away. Elizabeth slid off the railing and wandered through the grass, feeling cold and tired. She ought to say goodbye. Instead she moved in a wide slow circle around the gazebo, picking up twigs and fallen branches out of habit although she had nowhere to put them.

One long branch refused to be lifted, and when she tugged at it, it broke off in her hands. It was weighted at the other end by a pair of shoes, slim and elegant but scuffed across the toes; above them, a gray suit, and a faded blue shirt pressed open at the collar.

She straightened, holding the branches close to her chest, and looked squarely into Andrew’s long, sad face. “Well,” she said.

Andrew said nothing. He held a little steel pistol whose eye was pointed at her heart.

Now, why should that make her want to laugh? The blue of the steel was lethal-looking, and she was holding the branches so tightly that her muscles were trembling. And above all, she had been through this before; she knew now that it was something to take seriously. Laughter tended to set explosions off. “Why is everything you say so inconsequential?” Timothy had asked, but now the most inconsequential remark of all came into her head, and she said it in spite of herself.

“Where did you get that gun, I wonder,” she said.

Andrew winced, as if he knew what a mistake she had made.

“Plucked it off a tree? Found it in your mother’s sewing box?”

“It was left with me by a friend,” said Andrew. “He went to Europe.”

“Funny friend,” Elizabeth said.

“Things always come to you somehow, if you want them badly enough.”

She had never heard his voice before, except above the noise of the bus station. It was light and frail, breakable-sounding. There was a pulse ticking in his forehead. The hand that held the pistol was shaking, which gave her some hope that his aim might be poor. “Andrew,” she said, “give me the gun now.”

“I can’t. I didn’t want to do this. I warned you and warned you, I wrote you letters. Nothing stops you. I know what you were up to in the gazebo.”

“Really? What was I up to?” Elizabeth asked.

“You’d better take this seriously. I mean it.”

“I am. I know you do,” said Elizabeth. And she did. It was beginning to seem possible that this was the way she would die — in a numb, unreal situation in the orange half-light of a Sunday evening. How could she have guessed, when she woke up this morning and brushed her teeth and chose what shirt to wear? She didn’t even know what date it was. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.

“June seventh,” said Andrew.

She thought it over. June seventh had never had any significance before. She pushed her mind back to Timothy, who had died one day in April because of mistakes that she had made and had rehashed again and again since then, but she had never been sure what she should have done instead. Started crying? Run away? Said she would take him south with her after all?

She made up her mind. She said, “Well, I can see how you feel. Shall I leave Baltimore and not come back?”

Then she spun away from him to start toward the house. She had completed the turn already (she saw Matthew with a suitcase, his back to her, his sisters straggling behind him) and she was just wondering what to do with these dead branches when the gun went off.

The sound had nothing to do with her. It was as distant as the diminished figure of Matthew, who pivoted in mid-step without a pause and dropped the suitcase and started running toward her. The others were a motionless, horror-struck audience; then they came running too. But the first to reach her was Andrew himself. He knocked away the branches she held and picked up her arm. Blood was soaking through the cuff of her sleeve. She felt a hot stab like a bee-sting, exactly where her smallpox vaccination would be.

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Andrew said. “Did I hurt you?”

When Matthew reached her she was laughing. He thought she was having hysterics.

. . .

They took her to old Dr. Felson, who wouldn’t make trouble. He had a dusty, cluttered office opening off his wife’s kitchen. It smelled of leather and rubbing alcohol. And Dr. Felson, as he hunted for gauze, talked like someone out of a western. “A graze,” he said. “A flesh wound. Would you happen to be sitting on my scissors? I’ve seen you here before, I believe.”

“You sewed up a cut for me,” Elizabeth said. “A knife wound on my wrist.”