Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“He’s just back from Vietnam,” P.J. would tell people. Everyone murmured, as if that explained things. But Peter had been gloomy long before the Army. War only added a touch of fear and the sense of being out of place, neither of which seemed to leave him when he came back. He was still afraid. He still felt out of place. He had a job now, teaching chemistry in a second-rate girls’ school, where the pupils whispered and giggled and knit argyle socks while he lectured. “All of you,” he would tell them, “missed the second equation on the last hour quiz. Now I would like to go over that with you.” The girls looked up at him, still moving their lips to count stitches, and Peter fell silent. Why would he like to go over it? What difference did it make? How had he come to be here?

P.J. settled on a gnome with a pointed red cap, cradled it in her arms all the way to the car and rolled it in a picnic blanket in the trunk. “I just know she’s going to love it,” she said. And then, when they had pulled out into traffic again, “I know things will work out all right. Won’t they? Everything will be just fine now.”

“Of course,” said Peter, but he had no idea what she was talking about. This trip? The two of them? He and her family? If he found out he might have to disagree. He kept quiet, and smiled steadily at the stream of oncoming cars while P.J. slid down and set both feet against the dashboard. Her hair blew out behind her, knotting itself and slipping out of the knots. She seemed to glint and shimmer. When Peter first met her, in the school cafeteria, she had stood out among the pasty dull students like a flash of silver. She had worn a white uniform and collected dirty dishes off the tables with pointed, darting hands. He took her for a student with a part-time job. When she turned out to be a real waitress he was relieved, since it was against school rules to date students. Then later, after they had begun to grow serious, he had some doubts. A waitress? What would his family say? He pushed the thought away, ashamed that it had come up. He started seeing her daily; he fit himself into her motionless, shadowless life: lying oiled and passive on a beach towel for hours at a stretch, watching television straight through till sign-off, sitting all afternoon in dusky taverns dreamily peeling the labels off beer bottles. She gave him the feeling that she could never be used up. Whenever he looked her way she smiled at him.

The rush hour was beginning. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and the flashes of sunlight off chrome stung his eyes. “Where are we now?” P.J. asked.

“Close to — just past Washington.”

“Close to Baltimore.”

“Well, yes.”

“How much longer to your mother’s?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Peter said.

“Oh, Petey, don’t say we can’t go. After all this time that I’ve been counting on it?”

“If we drove straight through, we could be home by bedtime,” Peter said. “Besides, she might not even be there.”

“Didn’t you tell her we were coming?”

“I meant to drop a postcard, but then I forgot.”

“You’re ashamed to show me to her.”

“No, Lord,” he said. “I’ve kept away long before you were around.”

“That’s just not natural, Petey. Not and you living so close.”

“But I wasn’t always close, I was in the Army.”

“When Barney Winters went overseas, down home,” P.J. said, “they let him have some time with his folks after basic training. Then when he came back he spent a month there, just filling up on that good home cooking he said. Fat? In that one month he must have gained thirty pounds. You never would’ve known him.”

“I went to New York after basic training,” Peter said.

“Gunther Jones, too, he visited home before he left. And would have after, I reckon, if he hadn’t gone and got killed.”

“Well, we all do our own thing,” Peter said. “I went and saw a lot of art galleries.”

“Before, you mean. I don’t know how much you enjoyed it but afterward I know , you told me yourself. Up until the new semester opened you didn’t do a thing but lay around a old rented room reading the beginnings of books. Call that a rest? Call that a recuperation? When you could have been home all that time eating your mother’s good home cooking?”

“I can cook better than my mother does,” Peter said.

“Petey, do you have some reason not to want to go there?”

“None at all,” said Peter. Which was true, but he should have made something up — some feud or family quarrel that would have satisfied her. As it was, she thought he was putting her off. She considered the subject still open for discussion. “Barney Winters’ mother met him when he landed,” she said. “Bringing a whole chess pie that he ate right there by the plane.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Peter.

“Myself, I’m a family-type person. Just made that way, I don’t know why. We always were close-knit. Now I want to meet your family too, but if you think I wouldn’t match up to them—”

“No, P.J. We’ll go, if you’re so set on it. But just for one night, is that understood? No hanging around. No getting caught up in anything.”

“Whatever you like, Petey,” P.J. said.

By the time they reached Baltimore, Peter had a long ache of tiredness running down his spine. He drove irritably, one hand always ready at the horn. Row houses slipped past him in endless chains, with clusters of women slumped on all the stoops, fans turning lazily behind lace curtains, parlor windows full of madonnas and globe lamps and plastic flowers alternating with windows boarded up and CONDEMNED signs on the doors. Children were drinking grape Nehis. Men scuttled out from package stores with brown paper bags clutched to their chests. “Are you still sure you want to stop in Baltimore?” Peter asked.

P.J. didn’t bother answering. She was neatening the edges of her lipstick with the tip of a little finger. “Should I put my hair up?” she said.

“You look okay.”

“My wig is right handy.”

“No, P.J.”

P.J. dumped her pocketbook on the seat and riffled through ticket stubs and loose change and wadded-up hair ribbons until she found the little plastic case containing her eyelashes. They were cut in a style called “Innocence”—spiky black lashes widely spaced, so that when she had put them on she looked as if she had just finished crying over some brief, childish tragedy. She blinked and turned to him. “How’s that?” she asked.

“Very nice.”

“Is it far to go?”

“Another fifteen minutes or so.”

“Well, is there something I should know first. I mean, subjects not to bring up? People not to mention? You never tell me things, Petey. I want to do this right, now.”

“Oh, just be yourself,” Peter said. Which were her exact words on the way to Georgia, but she missed that. If he were to list forbidden subjects it would take him all night.

Once out of the downtown areas they drove faster, through streets that grew steadily greener and cooler. Then they entered Roland Park, and Peter suddenly felt eager to be home. He forgot all the misgivings he had had. There was the old locked water tower, which he had once tried to break into. There was the Women’s Club where his mother went for luncheons, always in a hat and gloves. And now the wooded road that led to the house, dark and cool and dappled with sunshine. He hid his eagerness from P.J. as carefully as if she might mock him for it, although he knew she wouldn’t. “We’re almost there,” he told her, keeping his face blank. P.J. nodded and sat up straighter and wet her lips.

In this neighborhood, people stayed out of sight more. All he saw was one lone maid with a shopping bag, heading toward the bus stop. And his mother’s house, when he drew up in front of it, was closed and silent. The curtains hung still, the veranda chairs were empty. A water sprinkler spun dreamily in the right side yard.