The Clock Winder (28 page)

“Sounds funny to
me,”
Melissa said. She frowned, briefly interested. Then she said, “Well, anyway, this patchwork skirt woman. She’s a
nut
. I’m sorry I ever came down. Do you know what she said to me? I said, ‘Look, you’re getting twenty dollars for these things. I’ll give you twenty-five apiece,’ I said, ‘if you’ll supply me with a dozen now and all you can make from now on.’ ‘Twenty-five?’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t know, there’s something fishy about that.’ You’d think I was trying to sell
her
something. ‘Look,’ I told her …”

Margaret gazed through a traffic light. She was thinking
of Jimmy Joe, who might be sauntering down the sidewalk just a block from here. His collar would be turned up, he would be whistling beneath his breath. When he saw her, he would stop and wait. She reached out and touched his wrist, which was frail and bony. “Jimmy Joe,” she said, “I’m sorry I left you the way I did.” He smiled down at her and nodded, and then he walked on. If he ever came back it would be dimly, for only a second, in the company of others whose parts in her life were finished.

“ ‘How do I know I’ll
feel
like making all those skirts?’ she asked me.
Feel
like it! What next? ‘Oh, I believe I’ll just go my own little way,’ she said. Teeny old scrawny woman living all alone, you’d think she’d be jumping at the chance. In her front yard she’d set a bathtub on end and turned it into an icon.”

Margaret laughed.

“Why do you keep laughing?” Melissa said. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth? No. She wasn’t laughing at all.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Melissa said. “She’s all in the mind anyway. Margaret, what am I going to do? I was counting on patchwork skirts. What can I do instead?”

Margaret didn’t answer. She was out on the highway now, concentrating on driving, trying to get home before nightfall.

10

1965

Mary’s letter said, “Good news, Morris and I are going off for a week in July. Just the two of us, no children. Finally we’ll be able to finish a conversation, I told him.…”

Mrs. Emerson read it several times, trying to figure out what was expected of her. Was this a hint? Was Mary hoping her mother would babysit? No, probably not. The last time she visited Mary she had overstayed her welcome. Only four and a half days, and she had overstayed. She had replaced a scummy plastic juice pitcher with a nice glass one—nothing special, just something she picked up in downtown Dayton—and Mary had thrown a fit. “What is my juice pitcher doing in the garbage?” she had said. “What is this new thing doing here? Who
asked
you? What right did you have?” Mrs. Emerson had packed and left, and held off writing for three weeks. Then just a bread-and-butter note, brief, formal, apologizing for waiting so long but life had been so
cram-packed
lately, she said. And now what?

She wandered through the house carrying the letter, pressing her fingers to her lips while she thought things over.
If she didn’t offer to babysit she would be missing a chance to see her grandchildren. If she did offer, she might be turned down. The insult pricked her already; imagine how much worst if it actually happened! But if she didn’t offer …

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Lately her legs had grown stiff. She moved like an old lady, which she had promised herself she would never do, and although her shoes were still frail and spiky she had lately been eying the thick, black walking shoes in store windows. If she wore sheer stockings with them, after all, if she bought the kind of shoe with a fringed flap so that people thought she had merely changed into a tweedy type.… Her hand rested heavily on the banister, and when she reached the top she had to pause to catch her breath before she went into her bedroom.

Dear Mary
, she wrote on cream notepaper.
How nice to hear about the vacation. It will do you a world of good. You don’t mention a babysitter, and maybe you’ve already found one, but I did want to let you know that just in case you haven’t—

She stopped to read over what she had written. Although she had chosen her words carefully, her handwriting was deliberately a little more slapdash than usual. Let it look casual, spur-of-the-moment. But when she took up her pen again, she paused and read the letter a second time. She was thinking of her grandchildren. Four of them, three girls and a boy, and she would like to know where people got the idea that girls were quieter. Oh, they ran her ragged. Climbing too high, jumping too far, running too fast. Talking in their high-pitched voices with excited gulps for air. Always hiding her things and giving shrieks of laughter when she missed them. Was she even sure she
wanted
to do this?

Grandchildren were not all they were cracked up to be. She held onto that thought a minute, enjoying it, before she
flicked it away again. Grandchildren were wonderful. What
else
did she have to live for? Her committee work was fading out; her friends were turning into droning old ladies or even, some of them, dying. Mornings, when she came downstairs in a fresh crisp dress and looked all around her at the high ceilings dripping cobwebs, she sometimes wondered why she had bothered to get up. The house seemed thinner-walled, like an old and brittle shell, and she was a little dried-up scrap of seaweed rattling around in its vastness. But then she would remember her children, who descended and spread out from her like a fan, and
their
children spreading out further; and she felt grand and deep and bountiful, a creamy feeling that she held to tightly all through her empty mornings. She felt it now. She rose and made her way to the hall again, for no other purpose than to fill all the other rooms with her richness while it lasted.

Down the stairs, which was harder on her legs than coming up but not so bad for her chest. Through the lower hall, touching pieces of furniture meaninglessly as she passed them. And into the kitchen, where she put a piece of bread in the toaster because it was possible that she had skipped lunch. While she waited for the toast she gathered dirty dishes and set them into the sink. Alvareen had not been by for a week. It looked as if she had finally quit, and all over a little spat that had no importance whatsoever. She had claimed she ought to be paid for her sick-days. “Seeing as you always save up what work I missed, every rag and tag,” she said, “and I got to do it then when I get back, you ought to at least pay me for it.” “That’s rubbish, that’s ridiculous,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I don’t have to stand for any smart talk, Alvareen, I can always find some clean hard-working girl to bring in from the country.” “Suit yourself,” said Alvareen. What Mrs. Emerson couldn’t bring herself to tell her was that it wasn’t just work
she paid Alvareen for, it was her presence in the house, something to drive the echoes away. But try letting her know that: she would puff up immediately, maybe ask for a raise. Mrs. Emerson would not even give her the satisfaction of a telephone call. If she quit, she quit. There
were
no more clean hard-working girls in the country (where had they got to, anyway?) but good riddance, even so. She’d make do without.

The toaster clicked. Mrs. Emerson took the last clean plate from a cabinet and went over to the table, but then she saw that the toast had not come up. It was caught down inside by one bent corner. Mrs. Emerson poked it with a finger, and nothing happened. She circled the table thoughtfully. “Never put a fork in a toaster,” people were always saying. It might have been the only advice she had ever been given; it came in a chorus, from somewhere above her head. Lately she had been noticing how many opportunities there were for painful deaths. Anything was possible: gas heaters exploding, teenaged drivers running her down, flying roof slates beheading her in a windstorm, and cancer—oh, cancer most of all. Several nights she had awakened with the certain, heart-stopping knowledge that when she died it would be in some horrible way. She had pushed it off, but the knowledge sank in and became accepted. In the daytime she often found herself surveying her actions from some distant point in the future. This was me, before It happened, she would say, going about my business blissfully unaware, never dreaming how it would end. The thought gave a new tone to everything she did. Measuring out tea leaves or folding back her bedspread was tinged with a lurking horror, like the sunlit village scenes in vampire movies. And where there was actually some danger—getting this toast out, for instance—she became nearly helpless. She spent minutes just staring at the toaster, plotting courses of action. A wooden spoon, maybe—something non-conductive. But how did she
know
it was non-conductive? She had only the scientists’ word for it. Finally a channel seemed to break through in her brain, and she clicked her tongue at herself and bent to unplug the toaster. Even then, she didn’t put her fingers in. She turned the toaster upside down and shook it, scattering crumbs all across the kitchen table.

When she had buttered the toast, she took it with her into the hallway. There she picked up the telephone and dialed Mary’s number. Lines whirred and snapped into action halfway across the continent. The phone rang several times at the other end, and then Mary said, “Hello?”

“Oh, Mary,” said Mrs. Emerson, as if she had forgotten whom she was calling. “How are you, dear?”

“Oh, fine,” said Mary, and waited.

“How wonderful about the vacation,” said her mother.

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“And no children along.”

“No.”

“You’ll be leaving them behind.”

“Well, I don’t see what’s so wrong about
that,”
Mary said. “You and
Daddy
went off sometimes. It’s not as if—”

“No, no, it’s a fine idea,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I think it’s just fine.”

“Well, then.”

“Now that you mention it though,” Mrs. Emerson said, “do you have someone to stay with the children?”

“Oh, yes, that’s all taken care of.” “No problem there, then.”

“Oh, no.”

“I see. Of course, if it’s
settled,”
Mrs. Emerson said. “But you know I’m willing to help out with them if I’m needed.”

“Thank you, Mother. I think we can manage.”

“Oh. All right.”

“We’ll leave them with Morris’s mother, and that way there’ll be less—”

“Morris’s mother!” Mrs. Emerson said. She put her other hand to the receiver. “But
she
gets to see them all the time!”

“All the more reason,” said Mary. “They’re more used to her. We have to think of the children’s side of this.”

“But I am,” Mrs. Emerson said. She picked up a ballpoint pen and bent over the telephone pad, although there was nothing she wanted to write down. Her voice was soft and feathery. No one hearing it would have guessed how tightly she held the pen. “It’s for the children that I want to come, after all,” she said.

“Yes, but with Pammie in this nightmare-stage, one more trauma is all she—”

Mrs. Emerson drew a straight slash across the pad and straightened up. “You have just said a word which I utterly despise,” she said.

“Now, Mother—”

“I loathe it. I detest it.
Traumas
. How much harm can it do them to see their grandmother once in a while? How long has it
been
, after all? I so seldom—”

“It’s been seven weeks,” said Mary. “In the past year you’ve paid us four visits, and all but one lasted nearly a month.”

“There, now. See?” said Mrs. Emerson. “You don’t make sense. First you say the children aren’t used to me and then you say I’m around all the time.”

She smiled brightly at her wavery yellowed reflection in the antique mirror. Her hair clung to her forehead, which was damp. Although she wasn’t hot, a flush of some sort was rising from her collarbones. She undid the top button of her blouse.

“It’s not
my
fault I’m not making sense,” Mary said. Her voice was younger and higher; she sounded as if she were back
at that terrible time in her teens, when all she seemed to do was cry and throw tantrums and pick out her mother’s niggling faults. “Mother, can’t you stand on your own
feet
any more? You’re out here all the time, and every visit you make I have the feeling you might not go home again. You get so
settled
. You seem so
permanent
. You act as if you’re taking over my household.”