Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Came with young Timothy, didn’t you?” He straightened up from a desk drawer and scowled at Matthew, who was holding tight to Elizabeth’s bleeding arm. “Don’t go getting germs on that,” he said. “Well, Lord. Who was it cut your wrist now? I forget.”

“I cut my wrist,” Elizabeth said.

“You Emersons could support me single-handed.”

“I’m not an—”

“Mind if your blouse is torn?”

“No.”

He slit her sleeve and put something on her arm that burned. Elizabeth hardly noticed. She felt silly and lightheaded, and the pain in her arm was getting mixed up with the stab of light that cut through her brain: Now we are even, no Emersons will look at me ever again as if I owe them something; now I know nothing I can do will change a bullet in its course. “This’ll throb a little tonight,” the doctor said, but Elizabeth only smiled at him. Anyone would have thought Matthew was the one in pain. He held her wrist too tightly, and his face was white. “Don’t worry,” Elizabeth told him. “It looks a lot worse than it feels.”

“Of course it does,” said Dr. Felson. He was wrapping her arm in gauze, which felt warm and tight. “But how about next time? You may not be so lucky.”

“Next time!” Elizabeth said.

“What does Andrew have to say about this? I’ve looked the other way quite a few times in my life, but that boy’s beginning to bother me.”

“Oh, well, he’s apologized,” Elizabeth said.

Dr. Felson snorted and stood up. “If it gets to hurting, take aspirin,” he told her.

“Okay.”

She let Matthew lead her out again, across the wooden porch and into the street. He guided her steps as if she were an old lady. “I’m all right . Really I am,” she said, but he only tightened his arm around her shoulders. His car was waiting beside the curb, packed with people who had missed their travel connections all on account of her. Mary in the front seat, Margaret and Susan and Andrew in the back — peering out of the dusk, their faces pale and anxious, waiting to hear the outcome. “What’s he say?” said Andrew. “Is she all right? Will you be all right?” He loomed out through the window to take a better look, and at the sight of him bubbles of laughter started rising up again in her chest. “Of course I will,” she said, and laughed out loud, and opened the door to pile in among a tangle of other Emersons.

While Peter drove P.J. slept, curled in the front seat with her head in his lap. Long skeins of tow hair strung across his knees, twined around the steering wheel and got caught between his fingers. He kept shaking his hands loose, as if he had dipped them in syrup. Then the hot wind blew up new strands. “P.J.?” he said. “Look, P.J., can’t you stretch out in the back?” P.J. slept on, smiling faintly, while blocks of sunlight crossed her face like dreams.

They were driving back to New Jersey after a week with P.J.’s parents — an old tobacco farmer and his wife who lived on a rutted clay road in Georgia. The visit had not been a success. The gulf between Peter and the Grindstaffs had widened and deepened until P.J., the go-between, could cause a panic if she so much as left the room for a glass of water. She had ricocheted from one side to the other all week, determinedly cheerful and oblivious. Now her head was a weight on his right knee every time he braked; she was limp and exhausted, refilling her supplies of love and gaiety while she slept.

Just past Washington, he pulled into a service station and woke her up. “Would you like a Coke?” he asked her. P.J. lived on Cokes. And she was a great believer in breaking up trips — for sandwiches, restrooms, Stuckey’s pecan logs, white elephant sales, caged bears and boa constrictors — but now she only looked at him dimly. “A what?” she said.

“A Coke.”

“Oh. Well, I guess so.”

She yawned and reached for the door handle. While the attendant scraped bugs off the windshield Peter watched her cross the concrete apron — a thin, tanned, rubber-boned girl with red plastic rings like chicken-bands dangling from her ears. She swung her purse by its strap and tugged at her shorts, which were brief enough to show where her tan left off. The attendant stopped work for a moment to watch her go.

From the glove compartment Peter took stacks of maps — Georgia, New England, even eastern Canada, and finally Baltimore. He had promised P.J. they would stop over to see his family. It was three years since he had last been there. When he opened the map to check the best route the half-forgotten names of streets — St. Paul and North Charles, criss-crossed now with grimy folds that were beginning to tear — gave him the sudden, depressing feeling that he was a teenager again. He remembered hitchhiking on North Charles, sweating in the damp heavy heat, fully aware that his mother would go to pieces if she ever saw him doing this. He pictured Baltimore in an eternal summer, its trademark the white china cats, looking fearfully over their shoulders, which poor people riveted to their shutters and porch roofs. And then his mother’s house — closed, dim rooms. Gleaming tabletops. What was the point of going back?

P.J. came in sight, picking her way across the cement on narrow bare feet. When she caught the attendant watching she grinned and raised her Coke bottle in a toast. Then she leaned in the window and said, “Come on, Petey, get out and stretch your legs.”

“I’m comfortable here.”

“Out back they have garden statues, and birdbaths and flowerpots. Want to take a look?”

“I’d rather get going,” Peter said.

She climbed into the car, wincing when the backs of her thighs hit the hot vinyl. Down her cheek were the stripes of Peter’s corduroy slacks. Her eyes were still sleepy and rumpled-looking. “They have the cutest little plaster gnomes,” she said. “On spikes. You just stick them into the grass. I bet Mama would love one of those.”

“I bet she would,” said Peter.

She looked at him sideways, and then took a sip of her Coke. “Shall I get her one?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“As a sort of making-up present?”

Peter handed a credit card to the attendant. “You don’t have to make up,” he said.

“I was thinking of sending it in your name.”

“Well, don’t.”

She drank off the last of the Coke, wiped the rim of the bottle, and set off toward the case of empties beside the vending machine. The minute she was gone Peter felt sorry. “P.J.!” he called.

She turned, still cheerful. He slid out of his seat and ran to catch up with her. “Of course we can buy one,” he said. “Put my name all over it, if you like.”

“Oh, good,” P.J. said. “I’ll do the wrapping and mailing and all, you won’t have to lift a finger, Petey.”

She led him around the back of the filling station. toward a field of plaster flamingos and sundials and birdbaths. The gnomes stood in a huddle, their paint already flaking, grinning at a cluster of little black boys who held out hitching-rings. The saleslady wore a straw hat and a huge flowered smock that blazed in the sunlight. “Aren’t they darling?” P.J. said. “Or would she rather have an eentsy wheelbarrow to plant her flowers in. Which do you think?”

“You know her best,” Peter said.

“Or then these deer. They’re nice.” She wandered through the field, unable to make up her mind, patting the heads of little painted animals and returning the smile of any statue that smiled at her. Her bare feet stepped delicately between the grass blades, as if she had no weight at all. “How much do you reckon it would cost to mail a sundial?” she asked. The saleslady said, “Oh, no, honey, you don’t want to mail them, it’d take a fortune.” Peter hated people who called their customers “honey.” But P.J. only shifted her smile to the saleslady’s face, and the two of them stood beaming at each other like very dear friends. Oh, it would take a lot to make P.J. start frowning. He thought of all this last week, all the times her parents must have whispered, “Paula Jean, what’s the matter with that boy?” all the children who, coming upon him unexpectedly, lost their bounce and seemed to sag under the weight of his gloom. Yet P.J. had continued smiling. She had led him by the hand through the barnyard, hoping that he would make friends with the animals. She had introduced a hundred topics of conversation that Peter and her family might seize on. “Petey’s just got out of the Army, Daddy, you and him ought to compare experiences. Petey, don’t you want to see Mama’s herb garden?” Peter had tried, but nothing came to his mind to say. He floated in a weariness that made him want to escape to some hotel and sleep for days. “Petey, darling,” P.J. said, “don’t you like them?” I do,” he said truthfully, “but I just can’t—” “Talk about the crops. Daddy likes that. Talk about baseball, or what’s on the television.” So then, back among the others, Peter said, “How’re the crops, Mr. Grindstaff?” “Just fine,” said Mr. Grindstaff, and Peter said, “Oh, good,” and subsided, unable to think of what came next.