Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Well,” said Peter. He let his hands drop from the wheel. P.J. said nothing. She was looking at the house, taking in the rows of gleaming windows and the wide expanse of grass, the multitude of chimneys rising from the slate roof.

“You never told me it was a big house,” she said finally.

“Shall we go in?”

P.J. began gathering up her possessions. She had a purse, sandals, a scarf, a sack of licorice shoestrings which had already lined her lips with black although Peter didn’t tell her so. When she had climbed out of the car she tugged at her shorts and slid into her sandals — leather soles with yards of straps which would have twined all the way to her knees if she had tied them. She shuffled up the front walk, curling her toes to keep the sandals on. She looked like a seal on dry land. Peter stayed where he was, watching her. He didn’t even open his door until she turned to look for him. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

“Sure.”

He had expected his mother to burst out of the house the moment he cut the engine, ending a three-year vigil at the front window.

It wasn’t until he was halfway up the walk that he became aware of the noise. A clattering sound, like millions of enormous metal zippers stickily opening and shutting. It rose from every bush. It was so steady and monotonous that it could pass unnoticed, like a clock’s ticking. “What is it?” he asked, and P.J. only looked at him blankly. “That noise,” he said.

“Crickets? Locusts?”

A buzzing black lump zoomed into his face, and then veered and swooped away. He ducked, seconds after it had gone.

“Seventeen-year locusts,” he said.

“Never heard of them,” said P.J.

“Cicadas, in point of actual fact.”

The words were Timothy’s, dredged up from a long-ago summer, and so was the tone — dry and scientific, so unlike Peter that even P.J. noticed and looked surprised. The last time the locusts had been here, Peter was twelve. He remembered the fact of their presence, and Timothy’s lecture on them, but not what they were really like —not these viciously buzzing objects which, he saw now, swung through the air on invisible strings and hung like glittering fruit from all the bushes. P.J. had one on her shoulder; it rattled menacingly when he brushed it away. When he stepped on the sidewalk, he crunched countless pupa shells which lay curled and hollow, small beige shrimps with all their legs folded tightly inward.

They crossed the shiny gray floorboards of the veranda. P.J. knocked at the door. “Knock, knock!” she called out gaily. She always did that, but today Peter found it irritating. “There is a doorbell,” he said, and reached around her to press it. P.J. looked up at him, her eyes like round, rayed suns in her Innocence eyelashes.

It was a child who opened the door for them. A squat little blond boy with a solemn face, wearing miniature Levis.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi there,” said Peter, too heartily. “I’m your Uncle Peter. Remember me?”

“No.”

“So there, Peter Emerson,” P.J. said. She laughed and bent down to the little boy’s level. “I’m P.J. What’s your name?”

He studied her. Peter cleared his throat. “This is George, I believe,” he said. “Matthew’s boy. Is your grandma home, George?”

“Yup.”

“Could we see her?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” George said.

He turned back in the direction he had come from. The cuffs of his Levis dragged on the floor. “Well,” said Peter “Shall we go in?”

They followed George across the hallway — Peter leading P.J. as if she were another child, clutching her by the arm while she looked all around her. They went through the butler’s pantry, windowless and stale, and then into the sudden brightness of the kitchen.

His mother was standing just as he had imagined her — wearing soft colors, her hair a clear gold, surrounded by her family. The only thing wrong was that she and all the others had their backs turned. They were facing squarely away from him, watching something out the rear door. “It’s the screens, they will have to be mended in the morning,” his mother said. “Look at those holes! Anything could get through them.”

“Hello, Mother.”

She turned, but even when she looked directly at him she seemed distracted. “What?” she said. “What— Peter!”

Everyone turned. Their faces were momentarily surprised and unguarded.

“Peter, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, just passing through. Mother, this is P.J. P.J., this is my brother Andrew, my brother Matthew’s wife Gillespie — where’s Matthew?”

“He’s still at work,” his mother said. “Are you staying long? Why didn’t you tell us? Have you eaten supper?”

“We were heading back from Georgia—” Peter said. His mother stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her cheek felt withered and too soft, but she still wore the same light, powdery perfume, and she held her back as beautifully straight as ever. Her speech was slower now than her children’s — as slow as Gillespie’s southern drawl, and hesitating over consonants. “Georgia?” she said. “What would you go to Georgia for?”

“You look older,” said Andrew. He looked older himself, but happy. His hair was thinning, and below his concave chest a paunch had started. Someone’s apron was tied around his middle. “If I’d known you were coming—” he said, and then P.J. stuck her hand out to him. He looked at it a moment before accepting it.

“I’m very glad to meet you all,” said P.J.

Andrew frowned. He was nervous with strangers — something Peter had forgotten to warn her about. But before the silence grew noticeable, his sister-in-law stepped in. “We’re glad to meet you,” she said. “Good to see you again,” she told Peter, and she shifted the diapered baby who rode her hip and held out her hand. Peter took it with relief; her cool, hard palm seemed to steady him.

“We were just on this trip, you see,” he told her. “Passing through Baltimore. Thought we’d stop in. I wasn’t sure you’d — are we interrupting something?”

“Oh, of course not!” his mother said gaily.

“But with everyone at the back door there, I didn’t know—”

“It was a locust. Gillespie was shooing it out of the house for us. Oh, these locusts, Peter, you can’t imagine. We keep the house just sealed , and still they get in. Will this screen be seen to, now?”

“I’ll mend it in the morning,” Gillespie said.

“Mother is scared of locusts,” Andrew said.

“You’re none too fond of them yourself, Andrew dear,” his mother told him.

“Well, no.”

And meanwhile P.J. stood smiling hopefully, with her belongings still clutched to her chest, looking from one face to another and settling finally on the baby, who was playing with a long strand of hair that had straggled from Gillespie’s bun. “Oh, isn’t it darling,” she said. “What’s its name?”

“She isn’t an it, she’s a she,” Andrew said stiffly.

“Well, how could anyone tell?” Gillespie asked him. “All she’s got on is a diaper.”

“Her face is a girl’s face. No one should mistake it.”

“Oh, hush, Andrew, I never heard of such a thing.”

Peter waited for Andrew to get insulted, to collapse in a kitchen chair or turn on his heel and leave, but he didn’t. He had changed — a fact that Peter forgot all over again each time he left home. He was the only person in this house who had changed. His mother remained a gilded pink and white and Gillespie continued shuffling around in dungarees, her face a little broader and more settled-looking but her fingers still nicked by whittling knives and her manner with babies still as offhand as if she were carrying a load of firewood. But Andrew had mellowed; he had calmed and softened. (“Andrew is in such a state,” Mrs. Emerson had written last winter. “You know how he gets when Gillespie’s expecting, I believe he’d go through the labor pains for her if only he could.” Only Peter seemed to remember the day after Timothy’s funeral, when Andrew had paced the living room saying, “Where is that girl? Where? I’ll get her for this.”) Now instead of taking offense Andrew smiled, first at Gillespie and then at the baby, whose cheek he lightly touched. “Her name is Jenny,” he told P.J.