The Clock Winder (33 page)

“Your spending is all cock-eyed,” Elizabeth told her.

“I worry—”

“I would, too. What kind of bathrobe costs sixty dollars?
Health
food! You can live in perfect health on forty-nine cents a day, did you know that? For breakfast you have an envelope of plain gelatin in a glass of Tang, that’s protein and vitamin C, only you have to drink it fast before the gelatin sets. For lunch—”

“But stone-ground—”

“Fiddle,” said Elizabeth. “And forty-watt lightbulbs, so you’ll ruin your eyes and need to buy new glasses. I’ll have to change all the bulbs in this house, now. And five cents postage to save four cents on aspirin.”

“I worry—”

“But what
for?
You never used to.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Emerson said clearly. Then she
slumped against the pillow and started plucking at her sheet. Worry radiated from her in zig-zags that Elizabeth could almost see. Crotchety lines were digging in across her forehead—just what Mr. Emerson had set up all these trust funds to keep her from, never dreaming that they would be no comfort. “Oh, well,” said Elizabeth, sighing. She tapped Mrs. Emerson’s hand lightly and then went back to the bills. She wrote out neat columns of numbers, as if by her careful printing alone she could salvage all Mrs. Emerson’s hours of fretting and hand-twisting and helplessness.

By Saturday morning, Mrs. Emerson had grown more adept with the walker. She had turned it into an extension of herself, like her little gold pen or her tortoise-shell reading glasses—lifting it delicately, with her fingertips, setting it down almost soundlessly. “Now we can go out,” Elizabeth told her. She flung open the double doors off the sunporch and then went ahead, without looking back at Mrs. Emerson. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Aren’t you planting any annuals this year?”

Mrs. Emerson moved out into the yard. Elizabeth heard the barely perceptible clink of screws against aluminum, but still she didn’t look around. She walked on ahead, sauntering in an aimless way so that it wouldn’t seem she was deliberately slowing down. “We
could
pick up some marigolds,” she called back.

“I fool so—so—”

Unseen, Mrs. Emerson’s struggle for words seemed more difficult. Elizabeth winced and held herself rigid, staring at a flowerbed.

“Gillespie. I fool so—”

“Take your time,” Elizabeth told her. “I’m not in any hurry.”

“I fool so
clumsy,”
Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh, well. That’ll pass.”

She ambled toward a trellis, poking stray weeds with the toe of her moccasin. “Plantain is taking your yard over,” she said. “Something’s wrong with your grass. Don’t you ever feed it anymore?”

She turned and found Mrs. Emerson smiling at her, with the pale yellow sunlight softening her face.

While Mrs. Emerson napped, Elizabeth wound all the clocks. She nailed up a kitchen spice rack that was dangling crazily by one corner. She dragged the aluminum ladder out from under the veranda and stood on it to clean the gutters, until Matthew found her there. “I thought I told you not to do that,” he said. He held onto the ladder, steadying it, while she took swipes at damp black leaves that had rotted into solid clumps. “This isn’t your job any more,” he said. “And it isn’t safe. Will you let me take over, now?” The force he put into his words traveled through his hands and shook the rungs, so that she felt she was standing on something alive. When she descended with an armload of twigs it was he who moved the ladder to a new position and climbed it, and Elizabeth who held it steady. “You were supposed to be mowing the grass,” she called up to him.

“Never mind, I’ll get to it later.”

They were at the back of the house, above the steepest part of the lawn, and when she looked down the hill and then up at Matthew he seemed dizzyingly high. How old was this ladder, anyway? Did it have to shake so? What was that flimsy twanging sound? She leaned forward until she was braced full length along its slant, with her arms woven through
the rungs and her head hanging down to study her feet. When Matthew shifted his weight, a tremor ran through the metal like a pulse.

For supper that night, Mrs. Emerson came into the dining room. They lit candles to celebrate. She sat in her old chair at the head of the table, her back beautifully straight, her right hand folded in her lap while she managed her fork with her left. If she was surprised to see Andrew’s place empty, she didn’t show it. When Matthew offered her more meat she said, “No. Ask—ask—” and waved her hand toward the kitchen. Mary went out and there were low murmurs; then she came back in. “No, thank you,” she told Matthew. She threw a quick, embarrassed look at Elizabeth, who hardly noticed. Now that she had spent the afternoon repairing things, Elizabeth was thinking like a handyman again. She was making a mental note of the knobs on the corner cupboard, both of which had come off. They were sure to be in the silver candy bowl on the top shelf. How many times had she fished them out of that bowl and fitted them back on? She knew exactly how they would feel in her hand, the chipped, rounded edges pressing into her thumb and the way the left one always went on crooked unless she was very careful. She seemed to have memorized this house without knowing it. Between the main course and dessert she slipped out of her chair and stood on tiptoe to feel in the candy bowl, and sure enough, there they were. A little dirtier, a little more chipped. She squatted by the lower door and screwed the first one on. “Elizabeth?” Mary said. “Would you care for coffee?” Elizabeth turned and said, “Oh. No, thanks.” Mary’s face was puzzled and courteous. “If you have things to do,” she said, “maybe you want to be excused.” But Matthew was smiling at Elizabeth
as if she’d done exactly what he’d always known she would.

In the night Mrs. Emerson kept calling for things. She wanted food brought in, or errands run, or the sound of someone’s voice in the dark. “Gillespie. Gillespie,” she said. Elizabeth, on her cot, slept on, incorporating Mrs. Emerson’s voice into her dreams. “Gillespie.” Then she opened her eyes, and struggled up among a tangle of sheets.

“What,” she said.

“Water.”

She lifted the pitcher on the nightstand, found it empty, and padded off to the kitchen. While she was waiting for the water to run cold she nearly went to sleep on her feet. The name Gillespie rang in her ears—the new person Mrs. Emerson was changing her into, someone effective and managerial who was summoned by her last name, like a WAC. Now Mary had started calling her Gillespie too. It was contagious. She jerked awake, filled the pitcher, and brought it to the sunporch. “Here,” she said, and dropped into bed again.

“Gillespie.”

“What.”

“A blanket.”

The third call was for pills. “Pills?” Elizabeth said blurrily. “Sleeping pills? You’ve had them.”

“I can’t—”

“The doctor said no more than two. Remember?”

“But I can’t—”

Elizabeth sighed and climbed out of her cot. “How about warm milk,” she said.

“No.”

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

“No.”

“What
, then.”

“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.

Elizabeth sat down on the foot of the bed, and for a minute she only frowned at the moonlit squares on the floor. Soft night air, as warm as bath water, drifted in the open windows. Her pajamas smelled of Ivory soap and clean sheets, a dreamy, comforting smell. But Mrs. Emerson said, “Talk,” and sat straighter, waiting.

“When you called, I was asleep,” Elizabeth said.

“Sorry,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I dreamed that your voice was a little gold wire. I was chasing a butterfly with my fourth-grade science class. My fingers would just brush the butterfly; then the wire pulled it away again. There was gold in the butterfly, too. Threads of it, across the wings.”

She pulled her feet off the cold slate floor and tucked them under her. “You may be scared of the dark,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not? What would be so strange about that? Look at all the dark corners there are, and the moonlight makes them look darker. I used to think that skinny ladies in bathrobes were waiting in corners to get me. I don’t know why. My father had a lady like that in his church—sick for years, about to die, always wore a pink chenille bathrobe. Whenever my mother said ‘they’—meaning other people, just anyone—that’s who I pictured. ‘They’ve put a stop sign on Burdette Road,’ she’d say, and I would picture a whole flock of ladies in pink bathrobes, all ghostly and sure of themselves, hammering down a stop sign in the dead of night. Funny thing to be scared of. They weren’t only in corners, they were in the backs of closets, and under beds, and in the slanty space below the stairs. Now I’m grown up and don’t think of them so much, but if something is worrying me, dark corners can still make me wonder what’s in them. Possibilities, maybe. All the
bad things that can happen to people. Or if I’m worried
enough
, ladies in pink bathrobes all over again.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. But she didn’t seem to be dropping off to sleep yet.

“When you’re independent again it won’t be so bad,” Elizabeth told her. “It’s feeling helpless that scares you.”

“But I won’t—”

Elizabeth waited.

“I won’t
be—”

“Of course you will. Wait and see. By the time I leave you’ll be running this house again.”

“Gillespie.”

Elizabeth stiffened.

“Can’t you—”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I have a job now. One I like.”

“You never
used to—”

“Now I do, though,” Elizabeth said. “I stay with things more. I don’t go flitting off wherever I’m asked nowadays.”

But she hadn’t guessed the words correctly. “Never used to like, like
children,”
Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh. Well, not as a group, no. I still don’t. But these I like.”

She passed a hand across her eyes, which felt dry and hot. She was going to be exhausted by morning. “Are you sleepy?” she asked.

“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“I
have
talked. What more is there to say?” She wound a loose thread around her index finger. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll tell you how I happened to start working at the school. I was leaning out the window of this crafts shop where I used to sell things, watching a parade go by. There were people crammed on both sidewalks, mothers with babies and little children, fathers with children on their shoulders. And
suddenly I was so
surprised
by them. Isn’t it amazing how hard people work to raise their children? Human beings are born so helpless, and stay helpless so long. For every grownup you see, you know there must have been at least one person who had the patience to lug them around, and feed them, and walk them nights and keep them out of danger for years and years, without a break. Teaching them how to fit into civilization and how to talk back and forth with other people, taking them to zoos and parades and educational events, telling them all those nursery rhymes and word-of-mouth fairy tales. Isn’t that surprising? People you wouldn’t trust your purse with five minutes, maybe, but still they put in years and years of time tending their children along and they don’t even make a fuss about it. Even if it’s a criminal they turn out, or some other kind of failure—still, he managed to get grown, didn’t he? Isn’t that something?”

Mrs. Emerson didn’t answer.

“Well, there I was hanging out the window,” Elizabeth said, “thinking all this over. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing up here, anyway? Up in this shop where I’m bored stiff? And never moving on into something else, for fear of some harm I might cause? You’d think I was some kind of special case,’ I thought, ‘but I’m not! I’m like all the people I’m sitting here gawking at, and I might just as well stumble on out and join them!’ So right that day I quit my job, and started casting about for new work. And found it—teaching crafts in a reform school. Well,
you
might not think the girls there would be all that great, but I like them. Wasn’t that something? Just from one little old parade?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. Then she was silent.

“Mrs. Emerson?”

But all Elizabeth heard was her soft, steady breathing. She slid off the bed and found her way back to the cot. She
stretched out and pulled the cool sheets over her, but then she couldn’t sleep. She stayed wide awake and thoughtful. She was awake when Andrew’s shadow crossed a moonbeam, heading all alone to the gazebo. When she propped herself on an elbow to look at him, he had stopped close beside the sunporch. A thin silvery line traced the top of his head and slid down the slope of his shoulders, stopping at the white shirt whose collar was pressed open in a flat, old-fashioned style. Although he was looking toward the windows, he couldn’t see her. His face was a blank oval, pale and accusing. After a moment he turned and wandered off behind the tangled rosebushes.

“Look,” Matthew said. “From here you would think the house was on fire.”

Elizabeth followed the line of his arm. They were in the gazebo, balanced precariously on a rotten railing, and from where they sat they could look up and see the house reflecting the sunset from every window. Not as if it were on fire, Elizabeth thought, so much as
empty
. The windows were glaring orange rectangles, giving no sign of the life behind them. The scene had a flat, painted look. “I wonder why she keeps the place,” Matthew said.

“Maybe for her children to come home to.”

“We never come all at once anymore.”

He picked up her hand and turned it over. Elizabeth wasn’t surprised. At this time of day, in this stillness, it seemed as if she had never been away; his hardened palm was as familiar as if she had last held it minutes ago. She rested lightly against his side, which felt warm on her bare arm. Matthew was in a suit. He was dressed to take Andrew to the bus station and the girls to the airport. Elizabeth wore only jeans and a
short-sleeved shirt. When she shivered he said, “Do you want my jacket?”

“No, thanks. It’s time for you to be going.”

But Matthew didn’t move. “My father bought this house when they were married,” he said. “Before they even had children. They moved in with nothing more than Grandmother Carter’s parlor furniture, in all this space. He said they were going to live here till they died. He expected to have a long life, I guess. They were going to celebrate their golden anniversary here, all white-haired and settled with the third floor closed off except when children and grandchildren came to spend their summer vacations.”