Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

“Yes, yes, go on. Elizabeth, have you taken care of that turkey?”

“Not yet,” Elizabeth said.

“Why not? I can’t imagine what’s holding you up.”

“I was just going to fetch an old shirt,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t want to get all bloody.”

“Oh. Now, I’m not interested in the details, I just want him seen to. At one o’clock tomorrow I want to find him stuffed, trussed, and ready to carve. Is that clear?”

“Who’s going to cook him?” Elizabeth asked. “Not me.”

“Alvareen, but I’m having to pay her double for the holiday. No one else will do it.”

She smoothed the lines between her eyebrows, looking tired and put-upon, but Elizabeth didn’t offer to change her mind about cooking. One piece of housework, she figured, would turn her magically into a maid — and just when Mrs. Emerson was getting used to her as a handyman. At teas, catching sight of Elizabeth as she climbed the stairs or passed a doorway, Mrs. Emerson would cry, “Wait! Girls, I want you to see Elizabeth. My handyman, can you imagine?” And the ladies would round their mouths and act surprised, although surely the news was all over Roland Park by now. “Oh, Pamela, I swear,” one of them said, “you always find some different way of doing things.” Mrs. Emerson beamed, setting her cup soundlessly in its little fluted saucer.

“I’ve brought you in some firewood,” Elizabeth said, “and later I’ll drive out for the stuffing mix. Would you like a big old pumpkin?”

“Excuse me?”

“A pumpkin. I’m going out to the country with Benny this afternoon.”

“Now, what would Alvareen know to do with a pumpkin? She can barely warm up a brown-and-serve pie. I don’t remember giving you the afternoon off.”

“I did a full day’s work in the morning,” Elizabeth said. “Carried in the firewood, caulked three window frames, mended the back porch railing, and sharpened all your tools. Also I oiled the whetstone.”

“What whetstone is that?”

“The one in the basement.”

“Oh, I never knew we had one. Well, Richard worked five full days a week. Morning and afternoon.”

“Richard wasn’t on hand round the clock whenever you called for him,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, never mind that, can’t you just stay? Timothy’s coming home.”

“I won’t take long.”

Mrs. Emerson rose and went to her dresser, where she began going through a little inlaid box full of bobby pins. She dug out bobby pins and put them back in and dug out more, as if some were better than others. Then she began shifting hairbrushes and perfume bottles around. “I don’t know what I depend on you for,” she told Elizabeth. “You’re never here when I need you.”

Elizabeth said nothing.

“And the country, all these trips to the country and anywhere else that comes to mind. Washington. Annapolis. Lexington Market. The zoo. Any place you’re asked. It’s ridiculous, can’t you just stay put a while? Timothy said he might be here by lunch. I was counting on your standing by to help me.”

“Help you do what?” Elizabeth asked.

“Well, maybe we’ll need more firewood.”

“I just got through telling you, I brought some in. MacGregor delivered a truckload this morning.”

“What if we burn more than you’d planned on? Some problem will turn up. What if we need a repair job all of a sudden?”

“If you do, I’ll see to it later,” Elizabeth said. “And Timothy will be here.”

“To be truthful, Elizabeth, it’s nice to have things thinned out a little when just one of my children is here. Somebody to lighten the conversation. Couldn’t you stay?”

“I promised Benny,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, go then. Go. I don’t care.”

When Elizabeth left, Mrs. Emerson had started opening all her bureau drawers and slamming them shut again.

Elizabeth’s room was across the hall from Mrs. Emerson’s. The air in it smelled heavily of cigarettes — the Camels Elizabeth chain-smoked whenever she was idle — and there was a clutter of paperback detective stories and orange peels and overflowing ashtrays on the dresser. In the lower drawers were odds and ends belonging to Margaret, who had lived in this room until she left home. Her Nancy Drew mysteries were still in the bookcase, and her storybook dolls lined one wall shelf. The other children’s rooms were stripped clean; Margaret’s was different because she had left in a hurry. Eloped, at sixteen. Now she was twenty-five, divorced or annulled or something and drawing ads for a clothing company in Chicago. “And moody, so terribly moody,” Mrs. Emerson said. “The few times she’s been back I’ve wondered if she’d go into a depression right before my eyes.” Mrs. Emerson had a way of summing up each child in a single word, putting a finger squarely on his flaw. Margaret was moody, Andrew unbalanced, Melissa high-strung. But coming from her, the flaws sounded like virtues. In Mrs. Emerson’s eyes anything to do with nerves was a sign of intelligence. Other people’s children were steady and happy and ordinary; Mrs. Emerson’s were not. They were special. On the bookshelf in the study Margaret’s pale, pudgy face scowled out from a filigree frame, her lipstick a little blurred, her lank hair a little mussed, as if being special were some storm that had buffeted her. In this pink lacy room she must have seemed as out of place as Elizabeth, who sat on the satin bedspread in her dungarees and scattered wood chips across the flowered carpet whenever she was whittling.

Wood chips marked the doorway to the room, and trailed across the hall and down the top few stairsteps. “You must think you’re Hansel and Gretel,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Everywhere you go you drop a few shavings.” She had seen Elizabeth’s carvings — angular, barely recognizable figures, sanded to a glow — and not known what to make of them, but apparently they had settled her mind. Before then she kept asking, “What are you going to do, in the end? What will you make of your life?” She liked to see plans neatly made, routes clearly marked, beelines to success. It bothered her that Elizabeth had just bought a multi-purpose electric drill that would sand, saw, wirebrush, sink screws, stir paint— anything —which she kept in the basement for her woodworking. “How much did that thing cost? It must have taken every cent I’ve yet paid you,” Mrs. Emerson said. “At this rate you’ll never get to college, and I have the feeling you don’t much care.” “No, not all that much,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. Mrs. Emerson kept nagging at her. That was when Elizabeth showed her the woodcarvings. She dragged them out of her knapsack, along with a set of Exacta knives and a sheaf of sandpaper. “Here you go, I’m planning to set up a shop and make carvings all my life,” she said. “Are you just saying that?” Mrs. Emerson asked. “Or do you mean it. It’s a mighty strange choice of occupations, and I never knew you to plan so far ahead. Are you just trying to quiet me?” But she had turned the carvings over in her hands, looking at least partly satisfied, and after that she didn’t nag so much.

Elizabeth pulled the knapsack out of her closet and dug down to the bottom of it, coming up finally with a man’s ragged shirt that was rolled into a cylinder. She shook it out and put it on over her jacket. Down the front of the shirt were streaks of paint in several different colors, but no blood. She had never even killed a chicken before. Not even a squirrel or a rabbit, and that at least would have been killing at long distance.

Across the hallway Mrs. Emerson was talking into her dictaphone. “This is going in Melissa’s letter. Melissa, are you sure you don’t need that brown coat with the belted back that’s hanging in the cedar closet? Something else, now. What was it I wanted to say?” There was a click as the dictaphone was shut off, another click to turn it on again. “Yes. Mary. Now, the last thing I want is to offend that husband of yours. I’m not any ordinary mother-in-law. But would you be able to use my old fur coat that I got four years ago? I never wear it, I was just going through my winter things this morning and stumbled across it. Young men can’t generally afford fur coats so I thought — but if you feel he’d be offended, just say so. I’m not any ordinary …”