The Clock Winder (26 page)

“It’s different from being a handyman,” Margaret said.

“Yes.”

“Did you like
that
job?”

“Oh, yes.”

But she didn’t say anything more about it. She hadn’t even asked how Margaret’s family was, and Margaret didn’t want to bring them up on her own.

The whole of that evening, as it turned out, was centered on packing. Elizabeth packed the strangest things. Five cardboard boxes were filled with broken odds and ends—cabinet knobs, empty spools, lengths of wire, wooden finials. “What are they
for?”
Margaret asked, and Elizabeth said, “I may want to make something out of them.” She dumped a handful of clock parts into a suitcase, and folded yards and yards of burlap down on top of them. Margaret watched in a beery haze. She was never able to remember much of her visit later—only in patches, out of chronological order. She remembered Elizabeth striding through a jumble of paint cans, munching on a hamburger. And her own trips from couch to refrigerator, and back to the couch with another beer. She sat in a slumped position, like something washed up on a beach and left to dry out and recover. Her shoes were abandoned on the rug; her dress became sprinkled with breadcrumbs and sawdust and bits of potato chips. “Oh, I feel so
relaxed,”
she said once, and Elizabeth stopped work to laugh at her. “You look it,” she said.

“I’ll never get up for the wedding tomorrow. Are there going to be many guests?”

“No. I don’t know. Just whoever they invited.”

“Why was I invited?” Margaret said—something she never would have asked sober. But Elizabeth didn’t seem to mind. She straightened up from a pile of books, thought a while, and then said, “I don’t know,” and went back to work again. Margaret decided it was better than a lot of answers she could have been given.

Twice some people stopped by—a married couple with a gift, two boys with a bottle of champagne. The couple stayed only a minute and kissed Elizabeth when they left. The boys sat down for a beer. Margaret couldn’t remember seeing them go.

And meanwhile Elizabeth worked steadily on, clearing the room. Her clothes were the last thing she packed. She threw them into a steamer trunk and slammed the lid. “Done,” she said.

“How are you getting all this to Ellington?” Margaret asked.

“Dommie will move it in a truck, later on.”

“Dommie? Oh. You haven’t said anything about him,” Margaret said. “What’s he like? What’s he do?”

“He’s a pharmacist. He’s taking over his father’s drugstore.”

“Well, that’ll be nice.”

“How’s your family?” Elizabeth asked suddenly.

“They’re fine.”

“Everything going all right? Everyone the same as usual?”

“Oh, yes.”

Margaret’s mind was still on Dommie, trying to picture him. It wasn’t until several minutes later that Elizabeth’s questions sunk in. Had she wanted to hear about Matthew? There was no way of knowing. By then Elizabeth was making up the daybed, moving around with sheets and army blankets while Margaret watched dimly and sipped the last can of beer. “On the way down here,” Margaret said finally, “we passed so close to Matthew’s house I was tempted to stop in and see him.”

Elizabeth folded the daybed cover, slowly and silently.

“He never married, you know,” Margaret told her.

But all Elizabeth said was, “Didn’t he?” Then she put a pillowcase on a pillow and laid it at the head of the daybed. “Well, here’s where you sleep.”

“How about you?” Margaret said.

“I have a sleeping bag.”

She brought it out from the closet and unrolled it—a red one, so new that a label still dangled from the zipper-pull. “We’re supposed to go camping on our honeymoon,” she said.

“But you can’t just sleep on the floor. Why don’t we change places? You need to rest up for tomorrow.”

“I don’t mind the floor, it’s the
ground
that’s going to bother me,” Elizabeth said. “Old roots and stobs and crackling leaves.”

“Why are you going, then?”

“Dommie likes nature.”

“Doesn’t the bride have some say?”

“I did. I chose camping,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t know Dommie. He’s so
sweet
. He makes you want to give him things.”

“Well, still—”

“You want first go at the bathroom?”

“Oh. All right.”

She had thought she would fall into a stupor the minute she was in bed, but she didn’t. She lay on her back in the dark, watching the windowpane pattern that slanted across the ceiling. Music and faint voices drifted over from the main house. A screen door slammed; crickets chirped. On the floor Elizabeth breathed evenly, asleep or at least very relaxed, as if tomorrow were any ordinary day. Her white pajamas showed up blurred and gray—the same pajamas, probably, that she had worn back in Baltimore. There they had slept in Margaret’s old twin beds, with fragments of Margaret’s childhood
lining the bookshelves and stuffed in the closet. And she had lain awake, just as now. She had been going over and over Timothy’s death—not yet wondering
why
he died, or picturing how, but just trying to realize that she would never again set eyes on him. Tonight he seemed faded and distant. The sadness that washed over her wasn’t because she missed him but because she
didn’t
miss him; he was so long ago, so forgotten, a tiny bright figure waving pathetically a long way off while his family moved on without him. They were caught up in things he had never imagined. He had never met Brady, or Mary’s daughters, or Peter’s strange girlfriend. And he wouldn’t know what to make of it if he could see her here, in a garage in North Carolina the night before Elizabeth’s wedding.

She flowed from Timothy to Jimmy Joe, to what would happen if
he
should see her here. Anywhere she went, after all, it was possible to run into him. Anywhere but Baltimore—he must surely have moved on. Maybe to New York, to materialize beside her at a counter in Bloomingdale’s. Maybe to that beach in California. Maybe to Raleigh. He would come sauntering down the street with his windbreaker collar turned up, soundlessly whistling. His eyes would flick over her, veer away, and then return. “Oh,” he would say, and she would stop beside him, poised to rush on to somewhere important as soon as she had said hello. “How are you?” she would ask him, smiling a social smile. “Oh,
how
could you just let me go, as if five weeks of me were all you wanted?”

She saw his mouth starting to frame an answer. His lips were slightly chapped, his shoulders were thin and high, and his hands were knotted in his windbreaker pockets. This time when the tears came she thought of them as a continuation, interrupted on some days by dry-eyed periods. She rolled to a sitting position, disguising her sniffs as long deep breaths, and
reached for her purse at the foot of the bed. Beneath the window, Elizabeth stirred.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

She must have been awake all along; her voice was firm and clear.

Margaret said, “No, I think it’s an allergy.” She fumbled for a Kleenex. Then she said, “I seem to keep having these crying spells.” “Anything I can get you?” “No, thank you.”

“Well, if you should think of something.”

“I’m really very happy,” Margaret said. “I’m not just saying that. I
felt
so happy. Everything was going so well. Now all of a sudden I’ve started thinking about my first husband, someone I don’t even love any more.”

“Oh, well, he’ll go away again,” Elizabeth said.

Margaret stopped in the middle of refolding a Kleenex and looked over at her. All she saw was a dim gray blur.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Nobody does. I keep remembering things I’d forgotten. I keep thinking about the last time I saw him, when my mother walked in and just took me away and he never said a word.”

“Took you
away?
How did she do that?”

“Just—oh, and he
allowed
it. I’ve never been so mistaken about anyone in my life. She packed me off to an aunt in Chicago. But do you think he even lifted a finger?”

“How did she find you?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’d written her a note once we got settled, telling her not to worry.”

“But took you away! She’s so little.”

Through her tears, Margaret laughed. “No, not by force,” she said. “She didn’t drag me out by the hair or anything.”

“How, then?”

“Oh, well—” Margaret stared past Elizabeth and out the window, where the sky was a deep, blotting-paper blue. Her tears had stopped. She zipped her purse and set it at the foot of the bed. “I feel much better now,” she said. “I hope I didn’t keep you from sleeping.”

Elizabeth said nothing. Margaret lay down and watched the ceiling. It tilted a little from all the beer she had drunk. She was conscious of an alert, unsettled silence—Elizabeth still wakeful, still not saying, “That’s all right,” or, “This could happen to anyone,” or some other soothing remark to round off the conversation. “You must think our family is pretty crazy,” Margaret said after a while.

“More or less.”

It wasn’t the answer she had expected. “They aren’t
really,”
she said, too loudly. Then she sighed and said, “Oh well, I guess they
could
wear on your nerves quite a bit.”

Elizabeth stayed quiet.

“Dragging you into all our troubles that way. It must—”

“Ha,” said Elizabeth.

“What?”

“They didn’t drag me
in
, they wanted me for an audience.” She clipped off the ends of her words, as if she were angry. “I finally saw that,” she said. “I was hired to watch. I couldn’t have helped if I’d tried. I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Oh no, I think Mother just liked having you around,” Margaret said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“But I don’t
see
what you’re saying.”

“They were always asking me to do something,” Elizabeth said. “Step in. Take some action, pour out some feeling. And when I didn’t, they got mad. Then once, one time, I did do something. And what a mess. It was like I’d blundered onto the stage in the middle of a play. What a
mess
it made!”

“I think you must be talking about Timothy,” Margaret said.

Elizabeth only rolled over and plumped her pillow up.

“But
you
didn’t do anything,” Margaret said. “Nobody thinks you’re to blame.”

“Talk to your mother about that.”

“Why? Because she never kept in touch? Well, you have to see
that
—she just doesn’t want to be reminded. If there’s anyone she blames it’s herself.”

“Not that I ever heard,” Elizabeth said.

“She blames herself for telling Timothy that you were taking Matthew home with you.”

“Well, she—what?” Elizabeth sat up. “When did she tell him that?”

“Before he left the house, I guess,” Margaret said. “That morning. She says she should have let
you
do it, however you were planning to.”

“Before he left with
me?
Before we went to his place?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“He knew all along, then,” Elizabeth said. “All the while he was asking to come with me. He
planned
it that way. He was trying to make me feel bad.”

“Maybe so,” said Margaret. “Anyway, I don’t know how—”

“If I never see another Emerson in all my life,” Elizabeth said, “I’ll die happy.”

Which should have hurt Margaret’s feelings, but it didn’t. She was feeling too sleepy. Sleep took her by surprise, dropping the bottom out of her mind, and suddenly she was blinking and floating, losing track of what they were talking about, spinning off into blurry unrelated thoughts. She was barely conscious of the sound of a match striking. She heard Elizabeth
inhaling on a cigarette and crumpling cellophane—wakeful, daytime sounds, but they only made her sink further away. She slept deeply, feeling trustful and protected, as if Elizabeth sitting alert on the floor were a sentry who would keep watch for her through the night.

The wedding was held in a red brick church in the middle of nowhere. Elizabeth directed Margaret there, along glaring highways. She wore her jeans, and her hair was not combed; it blew out like a haystack in the wind. She was going to change at her parents’ house, she said. In the back seat were her suitcase and her sleeping bag. A linen suit hung from a hook by the window. “Oh, you’re not wearing a long dress,” Margaret said. “No,” said Elizabeth. All her answers this morning were brief and vague. Her mind must be on the wedding. She watched the road with narrow gray eyes that looked nearly white in the sunlight. Her face was calm and expressionless, and her hands, curled around her pocketbook, remained perfectly still.

“Here’s where my family lives,” she said finally, and Margaret pulled over to the side of the road. The driveway was choked with cars, each one crinkling the air with heat waves. A woman stood on the cement stoop of the ranch-house, and as soon as the car doors opened she called, “Happy wedding day, honey!” and started down the steps. Margaret hung back, although it was she who carried the white suit. She hated to be the only stranger in someone’s family gathering. “I’ll just go straight to the church,” she told Elizabeth.

“Come in, if you want to.”

“No, I’ll just—”

She pushed the suit on top of Elizabeth’s sleeping bag
and turned toward the church, barely taking time to wave at the woman. It must have been Elizabeth’s mother. She was saying, “You haven’t got much time, honey. Oh! Won’t your friend stay? Mrs. Howard’s already at the organ, you can hear her if you’ll listen. Your flowers are in the icebox but don’t you dare get them out till the very last thing, you know how they’ll—where are your
shoes
, Elizabeth? Are you planning to get married in moccasins?” If Elizabeth said anything, Margaret didn’t hear her.

She walked along the highway to the church, which had only one car in front of it and a Sunday school bus to the side. Although she felt awkward going in so early, it was too hot to stand out in the sun. She climbed the steps and entered through the arched door. Inside, she smelled lemon oil and hymn books. The light was so dim that she stood in the back of the nave for a moment, blinking and widening her eyes, listening to the organ music that wound its way down from the choir loft. The pews were empty, their backs long polished slashes. In front of the altar was a spray of white flowers. The windows were rose-colored and stippled with asterisks. Margaret crossed to the nearest one and opened the lower pane. Then she sat down in the pew beneath it, but still no breeze came to cool her. She picked up a cardboard fan stapled to a popsicle stick and stirred the warm air before her face.