Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“I don’t believe you.”

“You know how seldom I write them. I just hadn’t got around to—”

“You wouldn’t have told them. You’d have let them give us separate rooms, never said a word. Or asked to share a room, that’s more like you. Let them think we were living in sin. That’s your idea of a joke. And me just going on not realizing, thinking you had told them. Oh, I feel like such a fool! Here I was trying so hard, asking for baby pictures — they must have thought I was the pushiest girlfriend you ever had. I wondered why they kept mixing my name up. Did you even tell them I existed?”

“I might have. I forget,” Peter said.

“You didn’t, did you?”

He put his hands in his pockets and circled the room. It had the musty, dead feeling of a guest room — furniture bare and polished but thinly filmed with dust, bedspread perfectly smooth, all traces of Melissa gone except for perfume stains on the vanity table. When he reached the window he pulled it open and leaned out into the twilight. “Hot in here,” he said.

“You never even told them you were dating me,” P.J. said. “You kept us so separate you never even told me about them , not hardly enough to count. Not even their names, just sets of words — the Nervous Case, the Sister that Elopes, the Handyman’s Husband. Like you’d met them only once or twice, and had to think up labels to keep them straight. And if you’ll pardon me for saying so I get the feeling they do you the same way. Which will you be, now? The Georgia Cracker’s Husband? And not a word about we wish you a happy life together, or we hope you’ll be like one of us—”

Peter watched her lips, which were puffy from crying. The paint was flaking off her ear-bangles. All he seemed able to think of was her grammatical mistakes, which chalked themselves up in his mind like a grocery list.

“Why, there I was with a wedding ring on!” P.J. said. “Did they think to notice? No. They were too busy chasing bugs around. That crazy old lady locking herself away from the bugs.”

“Well, wait, P.J.,” Peter said. “This is my family you’re talking about.”

“What do I care?”

“This afternoon you were going to be their long-lost sister.”

“Me? Not now, boy. Not for a million dollars. That little closed-up family of yours is closed around nothing , thin air, all huddled up together scared to go out. Depending on someone that is like the old-maid failure poor relation you find some places, mending their screens and cooking their supper and fixing their chimneys and making peace — oh, she ended up worse off than them . I wouldn’t move into this family for anything you paid me. You can just go on down to them and leave me be.”

“P.J.—”

“Will you go?”

He made a grab for her — a mistake. He felt a cool smoothness slipping through his fingers and then she was gone, flashing white through the doorway and clattering down the stairs with her sandals flapping. The front door slammed. “Peter?” his mother called. “Is that you? Was that him?” The door spring twanged and hummed, and then fell silent.

Peter didn’t go after her. He had been through this too many times — not the quarrels, she had never quarreled before, but the running away whenever his moods grew too much for her. She would stay gone for two or three hours before she wandered in, cheerful again. “What do you do when you’re gone?” he had once asked her, and she had laughed and looked down at her hands. “Oh, walk around,” she said. “Sit on park benches. Check the time every now and then to see if I’ve been away long enough to worry you.” She should never have told him. Now he could afford to stay home and wait for her. Before, he had run after her in a panic at the thought of being left with no company but his own forever more.

He descended the stairs slowly, and found his family still sitting in the living room. There was no sign of supper yet, not even any silver on the dining room table, but they didn’t seem concerned. In the kitchen, Gillespie whistled a tune; they waited, confident that food would arrive somehow, sometime.

“Where’s P.J.?” Matthew asked him.

“She’s taking a walk.”

“I didn’t warm to her,” said Andrew.

“You don’t warm to anyone.”

“When I was married,” Mrs. Emerson said, “my family disapproved very strongly. They said, ‘Oh, certainly he’s nice enough, and we have no doubt he can support you. But don’t you want more than that? Pamela, he’s not your type,’ they said. ‘He doesn’t have, he has a different—’ Well, I didn’t listen. I will say this, though: I told them to their faces. I never snuck around. We had a perfectly beautiful church wedding with all my family in attendance, acting very civilized. Then later I thought, Well, now I know what they meant. I know what my parents meant. They had my best interests at heart, after all. But I only thought that later.”

Andrew looked up from the asterisk he was drawing in a tea-ring. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you telling us that you and Dad didn’t get along?”

“Oh, we got along,” said his mother. “But there was so much — we were so far apart. Never understood each other. And I thought you children would take after my side. Even Billy wanted that. Why, it was he who named you — Matthew Carter Emerson, Peter Carter Emerson, every last one of you had my maiden name in the middle. ‘It gives them something to be proud of,’ Billy said. ‘The whole world knows who the Carters are.’ Oh, I had such expectations of you all! How did things turn out so differently? You’re pure Emerson. You’re all like Billy’s brothers, separate and silent and with failure just built into you, and now looking back I can’t even pinpoint the time when you shifted sides. Why did it work out this way?”

As if she were discussing some abstract problem, something that had nothing to do with them, her three sons sat looking detached and interested. Then Matthew said, “Oh, I don’t know. I kind of liked Dad’s brothers.”

“You would,” said his mother. “You most of all.”

“They were sort of rednecks, Matthew,” Andrew said.

“Well, wait a minute—”

Before it became an argument, Peter escaped. He went out to the kitchen, where he found George playing with a locust on the floor and Gillespie nursing the baby, sitting peacefully with her blouse unbuttoned like a broad golden madonna. The roast was cooling on the counter, but she didn’t seem in any hurry. “Where’s P.J.?” she asked.

“Gone out.”

“Well, I wish you’d go get her. Supper will be on as soon as I’m through here.”

“Maybe we could start without her,” Peter said. A picture of never finding P.J. at all flashed through his head. He might jump in his car now and leave alone, light-hearted and full of a pure, free joy. Then hours later P.J. would come straggling in, with grass stains on the back of her shorts. “Where’s Petey?” “He’s gone.” “Well,” she would say, trying to remain dignified, acting as if this were all according to plan—“I believe I’ll be getting along too now. I just loved meeting you all.” He imagined her out on the street thumbing rides, with her purse hitched over her shoulder and her bare legs flashing like knife blades in the darkness. Yet how could he be sure that, halfway to New Jersey, he wouldn’t start feeling lonely and remorseful? Then too, he could stay here. This house could expand like an accordion, with its children safe and happy inside and Gillespie to take care of them. Why not?

Gillespie hoisted the baby on her shoulder and went to the refrigerator for a carton of milk. She poured a saucer full and set it out on the back porch. “Kitty kitty?” she called. Then she returned and checked the biscuits in the oven, and after that she placed the baby on the other breast. Jenny screwed her face sideways, searching for the nipple. Gillespie hummed beneath her breath — a juggler of supplies, obtaining and distributing all her family needed. But when she caught Peter watching her, she said, “I’d wish you’d go find P.J., Peter.”