The Clock Winder

  “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.”

&nbs
p; 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.

  At Elizabeth’s house, now, they would all be gathered around and fussing over her, straightening her veil and brushing her suit. Margaret imagined her standing like a totem pole, dead center, allowing herself to be decorated. But she couldn’t picture her coming down this aisle. She turned in her seat, looking toward the doorway, and saw the ushers just stepping inside with carnations in their buttonholes. They looked back at her, all out of the same perplexed brown eyes. Was she on the correct side of the church? Which was the bride’s side? She couldn’t remember. She stayed where she was, to the right of the altar, and whisked her fan more rapidly.

  People began filing in—old ladies, a few awkward men, women who took command of the church the moment they stepped inside. They clutched the ushers’ arms and beamed at them, whispering as they walked (“How’s your mama? How’s that pretty little sister?”), while the ushers stayed remote and self-conscious, and the women’s husbands, a few steps behind, carried their hats like breakable objects. The organ grew more sure of itself. A fat lady slid into Margaret’s pew, trailing long wisps of Arpege. “I finally did make the Greyhound,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” said Margaret.

  The fat lady frilled out the ruffles at her elbows, touched both earlobes, and pivoted each foot to peer down at her stocking seams. Margaret turned and looked out the window. If she ducked her head, she got a horizontal slice of grass, ranch-house, and the lower halves of several pastel dresses and two black suits heading toward the church. In the center was Elizabeth’s white skirt, drawing nearer—a sight that startled and scared her, as if she herself were involved in this wedding and nervous about its going well.

  The fat lady had started talking, apparently to Margaret. “You knew Hannah couldn’t make it,” she said. “She’s having such a lot of trouble with Everett. But Nellie will be here. ‘Oh,’ she told me, ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Been waiting a long time to see that boy get married.’ Well, you know. It came as quite a surprise. I had always thought he would marry Alice Gail Pruitt. I expected to see Liz Abbott die an old maid, to tell you the truth.”

  “Why is that?” Margaret asked.

  “Well, she’s been mighty difficult. Wouldn’t you say?” She kept looking around the church while she spoke, as if she had lost something. “Didn’t they do a nice job with the flowers, now. A few more wouldn’t hurt, but—we had thought she’d lost Dommie forever, but then he broke off with Alice Gail and came right back here where his heart had been all along. Talk about patient! That boy has the patience of a saint. I just hope Liz knows how lucky she is. And her parents! They’ve been angels to her. I said to Harry, I said,
speaking for myself I just don’t know how John and Julia do it. ‘If it were me, Julia,’ I told her once—”

  As if on cue, Mrs. Abbott started up the aisle on the arm of an usher. She was an older, heavier Elizabeth, but her speech was a continuation of the fat lady’s. Margaret could hear her clearly as she passed. “That child’s hair!” she told the usher. “Oh, I begged her to leave it long. ‘Just till after the wedding,’ I told her, ‘that’s all I ask.’ But wouldn’t you know …” She passed on by, a whispering blue shadow wearing white roses and absently patting the usher’s hand. He kept his eyes on his shoes.

  Then the organ paused, and a door at the front creaked open and the minister came out. If she hadn’t known ahead of time, Margaret would never have guessed that he was Elizabeth’s father. He was tall and handsome and frightening, dressed in black with a small black book between his clasped hands. He was followed by two young men. When they had arranged themselves at the front, so that Margaret could tell which was the groom, she sat forward to take a closer look. She had noticed how Elizabeth described him. “Sweet,” she had said—not a word that Margaret would have expected from her. But now she saw that nothing else would have been accurate. Dommie Whitehill’s face was the kind that would stay young and trusting till the day he died; his eyes were wide and dark, his chin was round, his face was pale and scrubbed and hopeful. His short brown hair was neatly flattened with water. If he had any last-minute doubts, none showed in the clear, shining gaze he directed toward the back of the church.