Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

“Nope. You do it all yourself.”

“Do you know how to pluck them?”

“Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth. “The feathers and the innards, that’s no problem.”

Benny was brushing his crewcut on end, over and over. “Innards. Jeepers,” he said, “I’d forgotten them. You’ll have to fish out all those half-made eggs.”

“I tend to doubt that,” Elizabeth said. She smiled suddenly and shut the toolshed door, dropping the wooden crossbar into place. “Oh, well, I don’t know why I asked you anyway. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“I’m awful sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

They started up the hill toward the front yard — Elizabeth ahead, with her hands deep in her jacket pockets, Benny still brushing up his crewcut as he walked. “What I stopped by for,” he said, “was to ask if you wanted to come with me this afternoon.”

“I’d love to.”

“I’m going — don’t you want to know where you’d be coming with me to?”

“Where am I coming with you to?”

“I’m going out to the country for my mother. Picking up some pumpkins for pumpkin pie.”

“Oh, good,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe I’ll get Mrs. Emerson a pumpkin too. Big as a footstool. Drop it in her lap and say, ‘Here you go, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving.’ ” She laughed, but Benny didn’t.

“I don’t know why you stay with that woman,” he said. “Couldn’t you find someone else to work for?”

“Oh, I like her.”

“What for? The whole family’s crazy, everyone knows that.”

Elizabeth had stopped to empty bits of leaves from one moccasin. She shook it out, standing one-legged in the grass. “Other people have said so too,” she said, “but I don’t know yet if they’re right. So far I’ve only seen Mrs. Emerson and Matthew.”

“Matthew. Well, he’s okay but Andrew is stark raving mad. Wait till you see him.”

Elizabeth bent to put her moccasin back on, and they continued toward the street. Squirrels were racing all around them, skimming over the grass and up the skeletons of the trees. “Lately we’ve got squirrels in the attic,” Elizabeth said. “No telling how they got there, or what I do to get rid of them.”

“When I was little Mrs. Emerson used to scare me to death,” said Benny. “Also Andrew, and Timothy a little too but that might have been just because he was Andrew’s twin. I wouldn’t even come in for cookies, not even if Mrs. Emerson called me herself with her sweetie-sweet voice. I’d heard stories about them since I was old enough to listen. That Andrew is violent . And do you know that Mrs. E. went to pieces once because she thought her first baby got mixed up in the hospital?”

“I hear a lot of people have that thought,” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe so, but they don’t go to pieces. And they don’t try and give the babies back to the hospital.”

Elizabeth laughed.

“I wonder if my mother would care to hire you,” Benny said.

“It’s not too likely. Besides, I believe I’d like to stay and meet these people.”

“When would you do that? Some don’t come home from one year to the next.”

“Well, one’s coming today, as a matter of fact,” Elizabeth said. “The one here in Baltimore. Timothy. That’s what we’re killing the turkey for.”

“I could ask my mother if she needs any carpentry done.”

“Never mind,” said Elizabeth. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Go on, now. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“All right. I hope you manage that turkey somehow.”

“I will.”

She climbed the steps to the veranda, unzipping her jacket as she went. Inside, the house was almost dark, filled with ticking clocks, smelling of burned coffee. The furniture was scarred and badly cared for. “Mrs. Emerson,” Elizabeth had once said, “would you like me to feed the furniture?” Mrs. Emerson had laughed her tinkling little laugh. “Feed it?” she had said. “Feed it what?” “Well, oil it, I mean. It’s drying out, it’s falling to pieces.” But Mrs. Emerson had said not to bother. She had no feeling for wood, that was why — the material that Elizabeth loved best. The hardwood floors were worn dull, black in some places where water had settled in, the grain raised and rough. In a house so solid, built with such care (six fireplaces, slate in the sunporch, a butler’s pantry as big as a dining room, and elegant open inserts like spool-bed headboards above every doorway), Mrs. Emerson’s tumble of possessions lay like a film of tattered leaves over good topsoil, their decay proceeding as steadily as Mrs. Emerson’s life. Strange improvements had been tacked on — a linoleum-topped counter, crumbling now at the edges, running the length of the oak-lined breakfast room, dingy metal cabinets next to the stone fireplace in the kitchen. In the basement there were five separate servants’ rooms, furnished with peeling metal bedsteads and rolled-up, rust-stained mattresses; on the second floor most of the doors were kept shut, darkening the hall; on the third floor there was an echo, the wallpaper was streaked brown beneath the shuttered windows, the floor outside the bathroom bore a black ring where someone had long ago left a glass of water to evaporate, unnoticed. The two attics off the third-floor rooms were crammed with playpens, cribs and potty-chairs, bales of mouse-eaten letters, textbooks no school would think of using any more. There was a leak beside one chimney which only Elizabeth seemed concerned about. (Periodically she was to empty the dishpan beneath it; that was all.) Mrs. Emerson, meanwhile, set antique crystal vases over the scars on the dining room buffet and laid more and more Persian carpets over the worn spots on the floors. The carpets glowed richly, like jewels, calling forth little sparkles of admiration from the ladies who came to tea. Elizabeth hated Persian carpets. She wanted to banish all their complicated designs to the basement and sand the floors down to bare grain — something she knew better than to suggest to Mrs. Emerson.

She climbed the stairs, creaking each step in turn, trailing her hand along the banister. In the hall she stopped a moment to listen to Mrs. Emerson, who was in her bedroom talking to the maid. “Now, Alvareen, if Mr. Timothy gets here by lunchtime I don’t want you serving any bread. He’s gained fifteen pounds since he started medical school. Heart disease runs in the family. Give him Ry-Krisp, and if he asks for bread say we don’t have any. Can you understand that? Meanwhile, I want to see a little cleaning done. I don’t know how things have been allowed to slide so. The baseboards are just furry. Do you know what Emmeline used to do? She ran along the baseboard crevices with a Q-tip, down on her hands and knees. Now that’s cleaning.”

“Yes’m,” said Alvareen.

“Are you out there, Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth crossed the hallway to the bedroom. Mrs. Emerson was sitting at her little spinet desk, wearing a dyed-to-match sweater and skirt and a string of pearls, holding a gold fountain pen poised over a sheet of cream stationery. She looked like an advertisement. So did everything else in the room — the twin beds canopied with ruffles, the lace lampshades, the two flowered armchairs that turned out to be shabby only if you came up close to them. It was hard to imagine that Mr. Emerson had lived here too. He had died of a heart attack, people said, in one of the twin beds — almost the only Emerson to do things without a fuss. Now the beds were neatly made and there were little satin cushions arranged at the heads. The only thing out of place was Alvareen, a black hulk of a woman in a gray uniform, standing beside Mrs. Emerson with her hands under her apron. “Mrs. Emerson, I’ll be going now,” she said.