The Clock Winder

  At the end of July, Brady’s patience was beginning to show the strain. He suggested a minister, a doctor, a visit home. Margaret refused them all. “What do you want?” he said, and she said, “Nothing.” What she wanted was a trip on her own, but at the same time she wanted to stay close to Brady. She shifted from one decision to the other, sometimes within minutes, without ever mentioning what was going through her mind. Then a chance for a trip rose all by itself: a wedding invitation. She met him at the door with it one evening when he came home from work. “Guess what,” she said. “Elizabeth Abbott is getting married.”

  “Is that someone I’m supposed to know?”

  “No, maybe not. She’s just a friend of the family. I thought I might hop down,” she said, speaking rapidly, slurring over what she was telling him. “It’s just in North Carolina, I wouldn’t be gone long.”

  “Are you saying you’re going alone?”

  “Well, I thought, you know—”

  “Maybe you should,” he said. “Do you good to get away a while.”

  She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried, now that he had let her leave so easily.

  The wedding was the second week in August. It was to be held in a Baptist church in Ellington. On the invitation, Elizabeth appeared as Elizabeth Priscilla—a middle name so unsuitable that Margaret had trouble making the connection. The groom’s name was Dominick Benjamin Whitehill. Margaret had never heard of him, but then there was no reason why she should have. Elizabeth’s letters weren’t that informative. She wrote only two or three times a year—always briefly, in direct answer to letters from Margaret. Mainly she just asked how Margaret was and said that she was fine. She gave no more details than a fifth-grader might. She was working in a shop, her last letter had said. But what kind of shop, what was she doing there? She was living in Raleigh. She was getting along okay. And then, out of the blue, this invitation, with one handwritten sentence scrawled on the bottom margin: “Come if you want to—E.” As if she placed no real faith in all that copperplate engraving cordially inviting Margaret to attend.

  Margaret couldn’t locate Ellington on any Esso map. She called Elizabeth at her Raleigh address to find out how to get there, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, you’re coming, are you?” Her voice was lower than Margaret had remembered it. And her face she could barely picture any more. After all, they didn’t really know each other. Uncertainty made Margaret clench the receiver more tightly. “If you still want me—” she said.

  “Well, sure.”

  “But I can’t find Ellington.”

  “Just look for—no. Wait. This thing is taking place in the morning. If you’re coming from New York, you’d better get to Raleigh the night before. I can put you up at my apartment.”

  “Won’t I be in the way?”

  “No, you’ll solve the car problem. I can ride over with you in the morning.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” Margaret said.

  That was on Wednesday, her day for lunch with Andrew and Melissa. She avoided mentioning Elizabeth in front of Andrew, but when she and Melissa were leaving together she said, “You’ll never guess who’s getting married.”

  “Everyone but me already is married,” Melissa said.

  “Elizabeth Abbott. Remember her?”

  “No.”

  “Elizabeth. Mother’s Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, her,” Melissa said. She stopped in the middle of the block to peer into her compact. “Not to anyone in the family, I trust,” she said.

  “No, someone named Whitehill.”

  “Well, more power to her.” She snapped her compact shut and continued walking.

  “I thought I might go to the wedding,” Margaret said. “It’s down in North Carolina.”

  “Are you driving? You could give me a ride to Raleigh, if you’re going near there.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to see a woman in Raleigh who makes patchwork evening skirts. It’s for the boutique.”

  “Oh, that,” Margaret said. The boutique was a vague, half-hearted plan that Melissa had first mentioned last April, on her twenty-sixth birthday. She had short bursts of enthusiasm, where she spilled swatches and drawings from her purse and talked about leather and velvet and Marimekko, but then her modeling engagements picked up again and she would forget all about it. This must be one of her slack periods. It was always a bad sign when she looked in her compact too often. “This woman in Raleigh,” she said, “sells her skirts for twenty dollars. We could get fifty, easily, if we could only pin her down. She hasn’t got a phone and she doesn’t answer letters. Just give me a lift there, will you?”

  “I was thinking of going alone,” Margaret said.

  “Well, go alone, I’m not crashing the wedding. Just take me as far as Raleigh.” She hailed a taxi, which coasted to a stop at the curb. “When was it?” she asked.

  “Saturday after next,” said Margaret, giving up. “I’m going down that Friday.”

  “Well, give me a ring beforehand, then.” And she slid into the cab, pulling her long, netted legs in last, and slammed the door. Margaret continued down the sidewalk with her handbag hugged to her chest. She was rearranging her vision of the trip to include Melissa. She pictured driving down hot southern highways with all the windows rolled up for the sake of Melissa’s hairdo. Passing up Howard Johnson’s (her favorite restaurant, with its peppermint ice cream) because Melissa would not be caught dead in such a place. Suffering through a hundred of those sharp, conclusive clicks Melissa’s florentined compact made when she shut it. Then she thought, I’ll just call her up and tell her I’m going alone, I don’t want anyone with me. But she kept putting the call off from day to day, until it was too late.

  Which was lucky, as it turned out. Because as soon as they had set off, on a bright Friday morning, with Brady still solitary and desolate in the rear-view mirror, Margaret started crying. She drove on until the car was out of his sight, and then she parked by the curb. “You drive,” she told Melissa. “I can’t.”

  “Margaret, what in the world?”

  “Drive, will you?”

  Melissa muttered something and got out of the car. When she was back in, behind the wheel, she said, “There’s something you’re not telling me. Have you had a fight with Brady? Is that why you’re going off like this?”

  “No, of course not,” Margaret said. She blew her nose, but went on crying. Melissa, without a glance behind her, nosed the car into traffic again. Horns honked, brakes squealed. She fluttered a hand out the window. “You’re getting a divorce,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  But Margaret only buried her face in a Kleenex. She cried until they were well into New Jersey; she cried her way through half the Kleenex box, building a pile of soggy tissues on the seat beside her. She topped all the records she had set in the last two months. “Margaret, would you mind?” Melissa said. “Is this what you have planned for our whole trip?” Margaret turned further toward the window. She should have gone by train. This car was Brady’s, and everything about it—the smudged radio dial, the leathery smell, the masculine-looking tangle of stray coins and matchbooks and tobacco flecks in the dashboard tray—made her wonder how she could have thought of leaving him. If she were alone, she would have turned the car around. (But then, when he opened the door and saw her, wouldn’t that patient look cross his face again? He would shepherd her into the room, saying, “There, now,” and making her wish she had just headed on south and never come back.)

  In the middle of the New Jersey oilfields, she blew her nose a final time and blotted her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she told Melissa. Melissa pushed the gas pedal and sailed past a Porsche. “Think nothing of it,” she said.

  “I just keep having these crying spells.”

  “Oh well,” said Melissa, “so do we all.”

  Margaret, glancing sideways at her face, believed her. Melissa’s mouth was a downward curve, dissatisfie
d-looking. Even behind her enormous sunglasses, fine lines showed at the corners of her eyes. “Everyone,” Melissa said, “should have one day a month for nothing but crying. We’d all be a lot better off. Crime would stop, wars would stop, generals would lay down their arms—”

  “But not unreasonable crying,” Margaret said.

  Melissa only shrugged and passed another car.

  In Pennsylvania they changed seats. Margaret drove, and Melissa filed her fingernails and polished her sunglasses and yawned at the huge, tidy farms that slid past them. “I could never live in the country,” she said. “God, it’s hot. I wish your car was air-conditioned.”

  “Roll down the windows,” Margaret told her.

  “Never. We’re going to the sticks, there won’t be a decent beauty parlor in the state.”

  Margaret didn’t press her. She wasn’t feeling the heat at all. She felt sealed in, immune. She was watching Jimmy Joe teach her how to drive, and he was laughing at her tense, forward-huddled posture behind the wheel until she lost her temper and they had their first and only argument. Jimmy Joe’s left hand corrected her steering. A frayed gray Band-Aid looped his thumb.

  They bypassed Baltimore. The countryside around it—more farms, pastureland, clumps of trees—reminded her of Matthew’s place, and her mourning was extended to include him as well. He was the most loving of all her brothers. She might even have been able to tell him what was bothering her, except that it would just upset him. “Why can’t we stop off at Matthew’s?” she asked Melissa. “It isn’t that far.”

  “He would be at work.”

  “Do you suppose he knows about Elizabeth?”

  Melissa didn’t answer.

  “Do you?”

  “Oh, I don’t think they were all that serious anyway,” Melissa said.

  “Well, maybe not.”

  “Even so, I hope he hasn’t heard. Weddings do funny things to people.”

  “I’ve hardly ever been to one,” Margaret said.

  “Well, I have. Dozens. Always a bridesmaid, never a—especially when the minister says to show cause why they shouldn’t get married. You know. ‘Speak now, or forever hold your peace’ and sometimes the silence is so long, I start worrying I’ll jump up and say something silly just to fill it.”

  In the back of her mind, Margaret’s second wedding was moved into a church and it was Jimmy Joe’s voice that broke the silence. “I can, I can show cause,” he would say. “I still love her.” “You should have thought of that twelve years ago,” Margaret would tell him, and she would turn her back and take a closer hold on Brady’s arm, shutting Jimmy Joe away forever.

  In the afternoon they stopped at a restaurant Melissa approved of and ordered a late lunch. They sat across the table from each other, looking drained and frazzled, their ears humming in the sudden quiet. Melissa kept her sunglasses on. The tip of her nose poked out from beneath them, cool and white. “For someone you barely know,” she said, “you’re certainly going to a lot of trouble. A wedding? In this heat? Or was it just to get away a while.”

  “Both, I guess,” Margaret said. “But I would like to see Elizabeth. I try to keep up a correspondence with her, not that she makes it all that easy.”

  “Andrew goes into a mental state if he even hears her name. He says it was her fault what happened with Timothy.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Margaret said.

  “I’m just saying what he told me.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “Why take it so personally? You only saw her the once.”

  “Whatever else she may have done,” Margaret said, “she kept Mother company that whole awful year after Daddy died. Which was more than we did, any of us. I knew I should have, but I just couldn’t. You should be thanking your stars she was around.”

  “Well, it’s not as if there was nothing in it for her,” Melissa said.

  “Oh, stop,” said Margaret.

  After that, they ate in silence.

  They entered North Carolina late in the afternoon. They seemed to have come during a dry spell; the red soil was baked, the pines were harsh and scrubby, the unpainted barns had a parched look. “KEEP NORTH CAROLINA GREEN,” Melissa read off. “Get it green, first.” She pulled out her compact and a zippered bag full of bottles and tubes. It took her half an hour to remove all her make-up and put on fresh—an intricate task which she performed without speaking. Margaret drove in a daze of exhaustion. She barely winced when Melissa snapped her compact shut.

  In Raleigh, they found a hotel for Melissa and unloaded her suitcase. “Now, don’t forget,” said Melissa, standing on the curb. “The minute that wedding is over, I want to get out of here. Don’t hang around all day. I plan on seeing this woman tonight; after that I’ll just be twiddling my thumbs.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t go to any receptions or anything.”

  “All right,” Margaret said, and she slammed the door shut and zoomed off.

  Elizabeth lived in a green, wooded area that reminded Margaret of Roland Park, on the top floor of someone’s garage. When Margaret climbed out of her car, twilight had just fallen and the lights in the garage windows were clicking on. She stood in the driveway, smoothing her rumpled dress, and then she pulled her suitcase from the trunk and headed for the wooden staircase that ran up the outside of the building. She felt large and pale and awkward, top-heavy on the rickety steps. As she climbed she wiped her damp forehead and ran her fingers through her hair, and when she reached the top she paused a moment to catch her breath. Through the screen door she could see a bright, cluttered room, pine-paneled, sparsely furnished. Elizabeth was just crossing toward her. “Come on in,” she said. “I heard you on the steps. Need a hand?”

  She opened the door and reached out to take the suitcase. In two and a half years she had hardly changed at all. She wore jeans and a white shirt and moccasins; she might have been just about to go out and prune Mrs. Emerson’s poplar tree. Only her hair was short—hacked off raggedly, at ear level, making her look like a bushier version of Christopher Robin. A little sprig of a cowlick stood up on the back of her head, as precise as the stem on a beret. “I’m making you some supper,” she told Margaret.

  “Oh, don’t do that.”

  “Why not? I have to eat myself.”

  She slid the suitcase onto the daybed, which was already heaped with unironed clothes and a dozen blocks of wood. It must have been the wood that gave the place its workshop smell. Sawdust and shavings sprinkled the grass rug, and a stack of sandpaper sat on the table. In one corner was a large, mysterious object that turned out later to be a potter’s wheel. “Sorry about the mess,” Elizabeth said. “I have to pack tonight.”

  “Tonight? Don’t you have to rehearse?”

  “It’s not going to be that complicated a wedding.” Elizabeth picked up a head of lettuce and took it over to the sink. “At least, I hope it isn’t,” she said. “This whole thing is getting out of my control. Well, they know how it goes, I’ll let them handle it. Want a beer?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Margaret.

  Elizabeth got her one from the refrigerator and then hooked a chair with the toe of her moccasin and pulled it out from the table. “Sit and rest,” she said. “I hope you like hamburgers.”

  “I do. It’s nice of you to put me up like this. I know how busy you must be.”

  “Me?” she laughed. “No, I can use the lift to Ellington.”

  “Is that where you’ll live? Ellington?”

  “Mmhmm.” She was cutting the lettuce into a wooden bowl. Margaret watched her and took sips from her beer, which instantly started to numb her. If she had any sense, she would stop drinking right now. Instead she kept on, dreamily fixing her eyes on Elizabeth’s quick hands. Elizabeth poured dressing over the salad, slapped out some meat patties, dumped a can of beans into a saucepan. “I’m trying to use up most of the food,” she said. “Then I’ll give what’s left to a guy I work with.”

  “
Where do you work?” Margaret asked.

  “In this handicrafts shop, over a tavern. I wait on customers and stuff. And they stock some of my carvings.”

  “Do many people buy them?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. She looked toward the blocks on the daybed. “They keep coming in and picking them up, they say, ‘Oh, I like this type of thing, do you have any more?’ Then I show them more. They like that type, too, but they don’t often buy them.” She laughed. “I’m glad I’m quitting. I never did like waiting on customers.”

  “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.