Anne Tyler - The Tin Can Tree

'She'll be here any minute. Come on, now. It's a special favour to your mother.

'I bet she'll never notice,' Simon said, but he pulled a bureau drawer open. Joan closed the door and went on to her aunt's room.

Mrs Pike was sitting up against two pillows, fat and soft in a grey nylon nightgown. She had her hands folded across her stomach and was looking vaguely at the two points her feet made underneath the bedspread. 'Good morning,' Joan said, and Mrs Pike raised her eyes silently and peered at her as if she were trying to pierce her way through mist. But she never answered. After a minute her eyes passed on to something else, dismissing Joan like the wrong answer to a question she had asked. Joan came to stand at the foot of the bed.

'Aunt Lou,' she said, 'would you like to get up?'

Her aunt shook her head.

'Mrs Hammond's coming. Do you want her to find you in bed?'

'No,' said Mrs Pike, but she didn't do anything about it. She settled lower into the pillows, with her eyes worrying at the wallpaper now, and in so much dim clutter she appeared to be sinking, overcome by the objects around her. Under Joan's feet were cast-off clothes, everywhere, everything her aunt had been persuaded to put on in the last few days. She had stepped out of them and left them there, returning wearily to her grey nightgown. Mr Pike, on the other hand, had made some effort at neatness. He had laid his clothes awkwardly on the back of the platform rocker, where they rose in a layered mountain that seemed huge and overwhelming in the half-dark. On the bureau were hairbrushes and bobby pins and old coffee cups with dark rings inside them. The sight of it all made Joan feel caved in and despairing, and she went over to raise the window shade but the light only picked up more clutter. 'Aunt Lou,' she said, 'We just have to get organized here.'

'What?'

'We have to start cleaning things up.'

Her aunt nodded, without seeming to pay attention, but then she surprised Joan by moving over to the edge of the bed and standing up. She stood in that old woman's way she had just acquired – searching out the floor with anxious feet, rising slowly and heavily. For a minute she stood there, and then she shook her nightgown out and faltered toward the bureau. 'I'm going to clean up,' she told Joan.

That's it.'

But all Mrs Pike did, once she reached the bureau, was to stare into the mirror. She put both hands on the bureau top and leaned forward, frowning into her own eyes. The alarm clock in front of her ticked loudly, and she reached out without looking to set it farther away. 'Some people stop all the clocks when someone dies,' she said.

'What're you going to wear, Aunt Lou?'

'If Connie Hammond's coming, why, she'll have to turn around and go off again.'

'What dress are you going to wear?' Joan asked, and the sharpness of her voice made Mrs Pike sigh and stand up straight again.

'Any one will do,' she said. She pulled out a small plastic box from a half-open drawer and began putting bobby pins into it. One by one she scraped them off the top of the dresser, working like a blind woman with careful fingers while she kept her eyes on the mirror. Joan watched, not moving. Each bobby pin made a little clinking sound against the bottom of the plastic box, and each time the sound came Mrs Pike winced into the mirror. 'My grand- mother stopped all the clocks,' she said. 'She would also announce the death to each fruit tree, so that they wouldn't shrivel up. But we don't have no fruit trees.' Her fingers slid slowly across the bureau top, and when she found that all the bobby pins were picked up she closed the box and set it down again. Then she went back to bed. She tucked her feet down under the covers and drew the top sheet with great care over her chest.

'No, wait,' Joan said.

'I did what I could, Joan.'

Joan went over to the closet and pulled out the first thing she touched, a navy blue dress with white polka dots. 'Is this all right?' she asked.

'No.'

'This, then.' And she lifted a brown dress from its hanger and laid it on the bed without waiting for an answer. 'It's the prettiest one you've got,' she said.

Outside, a car screeched to a halt and sent up a spray of gravel that Joan could hear from where she stood. She looked out and saw Mrs Hammond's Pontiac swerving backwards into the yard with one sharp turn of the wheel, while Mrs Hammond herself remained rigidly facing forward. The car came to rest right beside James's pickup, within an inch of running over Simon's bicycle. Then Mrs Hammond shot out, clutching bits of cloth and tissue paper to her chest and leaving the car door open behind her. All she needed was an ambulance siren. Joan leaned out the window and called, 'Mrs Hammond?' and Mrs Hammond looked up, with her face startled and worried-looking.

'Just walk on in and come upstairs,' Joan told her. 'Aunt Lou's in bed still.'

'Oh. All right.'

She bent her head over her armload of cloth and started running again, and Joan could hear her quick sharp heels along the porch and then inside, across the parlour floor and up the stairs. 'Oh, law,' she was saying to no one. She sounded out of breath.

But Mrs Pike didn't say a word to all this. She just lay back against the pillows and folded her arms across her stomach again, her face expressionless. When Mrs Hammond burst into the room and said, 'Why, Lou!' as if Mrs Pike had somehow taken her by surprise, Mrs Pike only nodded gently and watched the wallpaper. 'Lou?' said Mrs Hammond.

'She was just now getting up,' Joan told her.

'Well, I'll help. That's what I came for.' She set her load down on the dresser and peered into the mirror a second, pushing back a wisp of hair, and then she came over to sit on the edge of the bed. Every move she made was definite; now that she was here, the room seemed to lose its swampiness. Her face was carefully made up to cover the little lines around her mouth, and she was packed into a nice summery sheath that Mrs Pike had made two years ago. The sight of so much neatness made Mrs Pike sit up straighter and pull her stomach in, even though her face stayed blank.

'I was talking about stopping all the clocks,' she told Mrs Hammond.

'Oh, no.'

'I've about decided to do it.'

'Oh, no. I don't think that's necessary.'

But Mrs Pike said, 'Yes. I don't know why I didn't think of it before.'

'It depends on the type,' Mrs Hammond said. 'Ormolu, for instance, or mahogany – that you would stop. But those are the only kind. Isn't that so, Joan?'

Joan hadn't heard that before, but she said, 'Well, yes,' and Mrs Hammond beamed at her and rocked gently on the bed.

'Only if it's ornamental,' she told Mrs Pike.

'Oh. I didn't know that.'

'You wouldn't stop a Baby Ben or anything.'

'No.'

'Do you want to get up?'

'Connie, I just can't,' Mrs Pike said. 'I just don't have it in me. You're going to have to go off again.'

'Oh, now.' Mrs Hammond shook her head and then began examining the room, as if anything Mrs Pike said was to be expected and she was just planning a wait till it was over. 'This place could use a bit of cleaning,' she said. 'Also, if I was you I'd add some patches of colour to it. You know? I put an orange candlestick in Mr Hammond's brown den and it just changed the whole atmosphere. He don't like it, but you'd be amazed at the difference it makes.'

'I don't care about any of that,' Mrs Pike said distinctly.

'Now, Lou.'

'I just want to sleep a while.'

'After you make up my lilac dress, I'll let you sleep all you like,' said Mrs Hammond. 'I need it for a party.'

She stood up and went over to the bureau, where she pulled open the top left drawer as if she knew by instinct where Mrs Pike kept her underwear. From a stack on the right she took a nylon slip and held it up to the mirror. 'Oh, my, how pretty!' she said, and tossed it in the direction of the bed. Mrs Pike caught it in her lap and stared at it.