The Clock Winder (3 page)

Elizabeth nodded. “It’s Swiss,” she said.

“Oh, a Swiss Army knife!” Mrs. Emerson blew her nose once more and then folded the handkerchief and blotted her eyes. “Matthew wanted one of those for Christmas once,” she said. “My oldest son. He asked for one.”

“They come in handy,” said Elizabeth.

“I’m sure they do.”

But she had given him, instead, a violin and a record player and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Remembering that made her start crying all over again. “I’m sorry about this,” she said, although Elizabeth still had not looked up at her. “It must be bereavement. The aftermath of bereavement. I just lost my husband three months ago. At first, you know, things are very busy and there are always people calling. It’s only later you notice what’s happened. After the people have left again.”

She watched the pocketknife being folded, the chair being set in the garage. “Goodness,
that
didn’t take long,” she said.

Elizabeth returned, dusting off her hands. “I’m sorry about your husband,” she told Mrs. Emerson.

“Oh, well. Thank you.”

Mrs. Emerson rose from the steps. All her joints ached, and her knees felt tight and stiff where they had been scraped. They started together up the hill. “My friends say it’s often this way,” she told Elizabeth. “The delayed reaction, I mean. But I never expected it
now
, three months after. I thought I had felt bad enough at the time. Sometimes this terrible idea comes to my mind. I think, if he was going to die, then couldn’t he have done it earlier? Before I was all used up and
worn out? I could have started some sort of new life, back then. I would have had some hope. Well,
that’s
a stupid thing to say.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

It was this girl’s silence that made Mrs. Emerson rattle on so. Mrs. Emerson had a compulsion to fill all silences. In an hour she would be wincing over what she had spilled out to a stranger, but now, flushed with the feeling of finally having someone stay still and listen, she said, “And I
can’t
go for comfort to my children. They’re not that kind, not at all. Oh, I always try to look on the bright side, especially when I’m talking to people. That makes me tend to exaggerate a little. But I never fool
myself:
I know I’d have to attend my own funeral before I see them lined up on this veranda again talking the way they used to. They are always moving away from me; I feel like the center of an asterisk. They
work
at moving away. If I waited for my sons to come carry this furniture it would rot first, they never come. They find me difficult.” She climbed the front steps and turned to flash a very bright smile at Elizabeth, who was looking at her blankly. “Those auto rides,” she said, “with all of us crammed inside. ‘There go the Emersons,’ people would say, and never guess for an instant that behind the glass it was all bickering, arguing, scenes, constant crisis—”

“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said comfortably, “I reckon
most
families work that way.”

Mrs. Emerson paused; her thoughts snagged for a second. Then she said, “They
live
on crisis. It’s the only time they’re happy. No, they’re never happy. They lead such complicated lives I can’t keep up with them any more. All I’ve seen of my grandchild is one minute little black-and-white photo of a bunch of total strangers, one of them holding the baby. A lady I’d never seen before. Elderly. The last time we were all
together was by necessity, for the funeral—and they left the baby with his other grandmother. Two of my boys live right in this area, but do I see them? Well, Matthew, when he can get away. Timothy never. The only one just dying to come is Andrew, and him I’m supposed to discourage because he’s a little bit unbalanced. He’s not supposed to leave his psychiatrist. He’s not supposed to come home and expose himself to upset. It’s unhealthy of him to want to.”

“It sounds,” Elizabeth said unexpectedly, “as if he’s in somebody’s
clutches.”

For a moment Mrs. Emerson, who had already opened her mouth to begin a new sentence, had trouble following her. She looked up, startled, at Elizabeth’s earnest, scowling face. Then she laughed. “Oh, my,” she said, and reached for her handkerchief. “Oh, my, well …”

Elizabeth straightened up from the railing she had been leaning against. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll just take this last load of furniture down.”

“Oh, will this be the last?” Mrs. Emerson said. She had suddenly stopped laughing.

“There’s only these two.”

“Wait, don’t hurry. Wouldn’t you like to rest a minute? Have some milk and cookies? You said you hadn’t made an appointment. You could finish up any time.”

“I just did have breakfast,” Elizabeth said.

“Please. Just a glass of milk?”

“Well, all right.”

Mrs. Emerson led her into the house, through the ticking hallway toward the kitchen at the rear. “My, it’s so
dark
in here,” she said, although she was used to the darkness herself. As she passed various pieces of furniture—the grandfather clock, a ladderback chair, the chintz-covered armchair in the kitchen, all of them scuffed and worn down around the edges
from a lifetime with children—she reached out to give them little pats, as if protecting them from a stranger’s eyes. But Elizabeth didn’t even glance at them. She seemed totally unobservant. She pulled an enameled stepstool toward the table and sat down on it, doubling her knees so as to set her feet on the top step. “I just don’t want to hit the O’Donnells at lunch,” she said.

“No, no, you have plenty of time,” said Mrs. Emerson.

She poured out a tall glass of milk. Elizabeth said, “Aren’t you having any?”

“Oh. I suppose so.”

Ordinarily she never touched milk. She only kept it for cooking. When she settled herself at the table and took the first sip she had the sudden sense of being back in her mother’s house, where she used to have milk and cookies to ease all minor tragedies. The taste of milk after tears, washing away the gluey feeling in the back of her throat, was the same then as now; she stared dreamily at a kitchen cabinet, keeping the taste in her memory a long time before taking another sip. Then she set the glass down and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people that gives notice all the time.”

“Notice?”

“Firing people.”

“Why should I think that?” Elizabeth said.

“Well, all this talk about Richard. And then Emmeline. But those two have been with me half a lifetime; it’s only lately that all this unpleasantness came up. They took advantage, knowing the state I was in. Oh, I don’t blame them entirely, I know I haven’t been myself. But how could they expect me to be? Ordinarily I’m a marvelous employer, people can’t do enough for me. You can tell by their name that family will have too many children.”

“Um—”

“The O’Donnells. Babies and toddlers and little ones in diapers, I’m just sure of it. I believe I know them. Don’t I?”

“I thought—”

“They’ll run you off your feet over there.”

Elizabeth finished her milk and set her empty glass down. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I think you must be offering me a job,” she said.

“A job,” said Mrs. Emerson. She sat straighter and placed her palms together. “That is something to consider.”

“Are you asking if I’d like to work for you?”

“Well, would you?” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Sure. I’d make a better handyman than babysitter, any day.”

“Handyman!” said Mrs. Emerson. “No, I meant housework. Taking over for Emmeline.”

“Why not handyman? It’s what you need most. You already have a maid, you said.”

“But
gardening
. Painting. Climbing ladders.”

“I can do that.”

“Well, I never heard of such a thing.”

“Why? What’s so strange about it?” Elizabeth said. She had a habit of rarely bothering to look at people, Mrs. Emerson noticed. She concentrated on objects—pulling threads from a seam of her dungarees or untangling the toaster cord or examining the loose knob on the peppermill, so that when she did look up there was something startling, almost a flash, in the gray of her eyes. “You wouldn’t have to pay me much,” she said, looking straight at Mrs. Emerson. “If you let me live in I could get by on next to nothing.”

“It’s true, it scares me just to think of looking for another colored man,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Nowadays you can’t tell
what
to expect.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”

“But carrying firewood! Digging compost!”

Elizabeth waited, looking perfectly comfortable, picking leaves off the soles of her moccasins.

“I do get nervous at night,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Not that I am
frightened
or anything. But having someone down the hall, just another human being in case of—”

She fell silent and raised a hand to her forehead. This world expected too many decisions of her. The girl’s good points were obvious (calmness and silence, and the neat twist of her hands mending the chair) but there were bad points, too (no
vivacity
, that was it, and this tendency to drift into whatever offered itself). She sighed. “Oh well,” she said. “It can’t hurt to try you out, I suppose.”

“Done,” said Elizabeth, and reached a hand across the table. Mrs. Emerson was slow to realize that she was supposed to shake it.

“Now, I was paying Richard fifty a week,” she said. “But he wasn’t living in. Is forty all right?”

“Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth, cheerfully. “Anything.” How would she earn her way through college, talking like that? Then she stood and took her glass to the sink. She said, “I guess I’ll get the last of those chairs taken care of.”

“Fine,” said Mrs. Emerson. She stayed where she was. That was her privilege, now that she was paying. She listened to the front door slamming, the chair legs scraping across the veranda. Then she heard Elizabeth crashing through the woods. She thought of living in the same house with her—such a lanky, awkward, flat-chested girl—and she raised her eyes to the ceiling and asked her husband what she had let herself in for.

2

“It’s simple,” said Elizabeth. “That stump is the chopping block. There’s the axe. And there sits the turkey, wondering when you’ll start. What else could you want?”

“If it’s all that simple why ask
me
to do it?” the boy said. He was standing beside her in the toolshed doorway, looking at the turkey in its crate. The turkey paced three steps to one side, three steps to the other, stopping occasionally to peer at them through the slats.

“Look at him, he wants to get it over with,” Elizabeth said.

“Couldn’t we call in a butcher?”

The boy was a college senior named Benny Simms—pleasant-faced, beanpole-thin, with a crewcut. He lived two houses down, although his mother was beginning to question that. “He lives at
your
place,” she told Mrs. Emerson on the phone. “Every weekend home he’s out visiting your handyman. Handywoman. What kind of girl is she anyway? Who are her people? Do you know anything
about
her?” Elizabeth had heard of this call, and other mothers’ calls just like it,
from Mrs. Emerson, who reported it in a voice that tried to sound amused but came out irritated. “This is one problem I never had with Richard,” she said. “I find there are drawbacks that I hadn’t foreseen when I hired you.” She was still trying to switch Elizabeth over to housekeeping, which was probably why she sounded irritated. She tapped her fingernails on a tabletop. “I don’t know, people surprise me more all the time. ‘Above all else, be
feminine,’
I used to tell my daughters, and here you are in those eternal blue jeans, but every time I look out the window some new boy is helping you rake leaves.”

“Oh, well, the leaves are nearly gone by now,” Elizabeth said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I’ll be indoors more. They won’t be stopping by so much.”

“It’s more likely they’ll just start invading my kitchen,” Mrs. Emerson said.

Benny Simms picked up the axe that was leaning against the toolshed. He ran a finger down the blade and whistled. “I just did sharpen it,” Elizabeth told him. “I guess you
did.”