The Clock Winder

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.”

“Why, Mary,” Mrs. Emerson said. She laid her fingers to her throat, which was tightening and cutting off her breathing. “Where could you get such a thought? Don’t you see how careful I am to be a good guest? I help out with the chores, I give you and Morris a little time alone when he comes home in the evenings—”

“You circle around whatever room we’re in, clearing your throat. You throw out all our food and buy new stuff from the health store. You make a point of learning the mailman’s name and the milkman’s schedule and the garbage days, as if you were moving in. You send my clothes to the laundry to save me ironing when ironing is something I enjoy, you buy curtains I can’t live with and hang them in the dining room, you string Geritol bottles and constipation remedies all across my kitchen table—”

“Well, if I’d only—”

“Then you go off to Margaret’s and spoil little Susan rotten. She told me so.”

“Oh, this is unfair!” said Mrs. Emerson. “How was I to know, if no one tells me?”

“Why should we have to tell you?”

“Well, now that I’ve heard,” said Mrs. Emerson, getting a tighter grip on her voice, “you’ll have no further cause for complaint. I certainly won’t be troubling you again.”

“I might have known you’d take it that way,” said Mary.

“Well, what am I supposed to say? Anything I do is wrong. I shouldn’t visit, I shouldn’t not visit. What, then, Mary? Why are my children so un — un—?”

Her tongue stopped working. It jerked and died. Her throat made an involuntary clicking sound that horrified her. She dropped the receiver, letting it swing over the edge of the table. “Mother?” Mary’s voice said, tinnily. Long cold fingers of fear were closing around Mrs. Emerson’s chest. She buckled her shaking knees and slid to the floor. Then, like a very poor actor performing an artificial death, she felt her way to a prone position and lay staring up at the underside of the table. “Mother, what is it?” Mary said. The swinging receiver was nauseating to watch. Mrs. Emerson closed her eyes and felt herself draining away.

When she looked up at the table again it seemed darker, clustered with spinning black specks. Was she going blind? She tried to work her arms, but only one responded. It moved to touch the other, which felt dead and cold and disgusting. She was dying in pieces, then. How fortunate that she had got the children grown before this happened. They were grown, weren’t they? Weren’t they? There seemed to be one baby left over. But when she tried to picture him she realized that she had never seen him; he was that poor little soul born dead, between Melissa and Peter. Well, but it was logical that she should have thought of him; she was going to heaven to meet him, after all. So some people said. Only he had managed alone so long, and the ones left here needed her so much more. How could she bear to look down and see her poor, unsatisfied children struggling on without her? And don’t tell her she wouldn’t see them. If heaven was where people stopped being concerned with such things then no woman would be happy there.

The undersurface of the table was rough and unfinished, a cheat. From above, it had always been so beautifully polished. In one corner a carpenter’s pencil had scrawled the number 83, and she spent a long time considering its significance. Her mind kept floating away from the problem, like a white balloon. She kept reaching out and grabbing it back by the string. Then she saw a small gray brain, a convoluted bulb growing on the inner side of one table leg. Shock caused new chills to grip her chest, before she realized that she was looking at a chewed piece of gum. Chewing gum. She saw cheerful rows of green and pink and yellow packets strung across the candy counter at the Tuxedo Pharmacy. She saw her children snapping gum as they came in for supper, a nasty habit. Chewing open-mouthed, on only one side, their faces peaceful and dreamy. Laying little gray wads on the rims of their plates before they unfolded their napkins. How often had she told them not to do that? The wads cooled and hardened; Margaret, her sloppiest child, would pry hers off the plate and pop it back in her mouth when she had finished eating. Was it Margaret who had stuck chewing gum to her mother’s walnut table?

The children swam up from the darkness at the edges of the hallway. Not I, not I, they all said. They were happy and glowing, as if they had just come in from outdoors. Matthew and Timothy and Andrew, their voices newly changed, their hands newly squared and hardened so that she kept having an impulse to reach out and touch them. Teenaged boys are so difficult to live with, a friend whispered. Yes, difficult, Mrs. Emerson said politely, and she smiled and nodded, rubbing the back of her head against the floor, but inwardly she disagreed. She was layered around with teenaged boys, all huge and gangling, making her feel small and frivolous and well-protected. In the middle of their circle she spun, laughing. She was going to stay at this moment in time forever.

It was some trouble with Mary that caused her to be lying here. She remembered now.

She was arguing with her husband, something about the baby. Matthew. This is the wrong one, she said. In the hospital he was fairer. How could I have such a dark-headed baby? She had made him drive her back to the hospital, she had carried the baby in naked, the way he had arrived, rolled in a blue receiving blanket. Would she ever forget how the nurses had laughed? They had called in doctors, orderlies, cleaning ladies, to share the joke with them. In their center she stood looking at the unwrapped baby and saw that he was hers after all — those level, considering eyes, wondering how much to expect from her. She had started crying. “Why honey,” her husband said. “This isn’t like you.” And it wasn’t. She had never been like herself again. All the rush of life in this house, that had carried her along protesting and making pushing-off gestures with both hands. All the mountains out of molehills, the molehills out of mountains. “The trifles I’ve seen swelled and magnified!” she said, possibly out loud. “The horrors I’ve seen taken for granted!”

She opened her eyes, although she had thought they were open already. There was something she had to do. Feed someone? Take care of someone? Was one of the children sick? No, only herself. She had to call for help. She framed the word “Mama” and discarded it — too strange a mouthful, it must be inappropriate. Her husband? She worried over his name, which was almost certainly Billy. But would she have married a Billy? Oh, after all the hesitation and excitement, the plans, the doubts, the final earth-shaking decision of whom to marry — and now look. She couldn’t remember which man she had ended up with. It was all the same in the end.

She circled Billy, looked at him and then away again, finally made up her mind to speak. “But!” she said aloud. Her tongue was playing tricks on her. She tried again, making such an effort that her forehead tightened. “But!” she called, and saw Billy dead in his bed, his profile barely denting the pillow. Without taking time to mourn she went on to Richard. Would he help? But Richard was tinkling in the rosebushes. Men! His broad, sloping back reminded her of some sorrow. There was no one left. When she awoke in the night, the bed beside hers glowed white and leaped to her eyes at first glance as if it had something to tell her. So there! it said. She rocked her head from side to side.

Now, that clicking sound. Was it her throat again? Her heart? Her brain? No, only the telephone company, reminding her to hang up. She nearly laughed. Then she grew serious and gathered her thoughts together. It was necessary to call a doctor. She was quite clear about it now. She tensed her neck muscles and raised her head. Far away her feet pointed upward, side by side, ludicrous-looking, the feet of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. Her good arm moved to support her. She was just fine; she could do anything. She sank back again and stared up at the table. Beneath it, wooden braces ran diagonally at each corner. They were held in place by screws, which were sunk in round holes so that the heads were flush with the wood. Wasn’t it wonderful how the holes were so round? How the slant of the braces fit so well to the table angles? There was a word for that; she had heard it once.

“Mitering,” Elizabeth said.

Elizabeth, she said silently but briskly, I’m going to want a new backing for that picture at the head of the stairs. Mend the glass in the bookcase. Coil the hose, please. I can’t go getting sued if it trips someone. Do you know how to restring a venetian blind?

Elizabeth’s voice came in on a muffled jumble of sound, like a loudspeaker in a railroad station. She spoke in fragments. “The what?” she said. “What would he do that for?” “Oh, well—” She laughed. “If I have time, maybe,” she said.

We are falling to pieces around here, Mrs. Emerson told her.

Elizabeth laughed. “So are most people,” she said.

Elizabeth, we are—

“All right, all right.”

Mrs. Emerson prepared to sleep, with everything taken care of. Then some irritating thought began drilling her left temple. She had forgotten: she’d stopped liking that girl a long time ago. Shiftless. Untrustworthy. The world was made up of people forever happy, wastefully happy, laughing at something too far away for Mrs. Emerson to see even when she stood on tiptoe. She craned her neck. She clutched at Andrew’s elbow for support. What do you want from me? she asked him.

“Let us in,” he said.

He left. She was all alone. She was back before the children, before her husband, back to the single, narrow-boned girl that had been looking out of her aging body all these years.

“Let us in,” a man said. He rattled the front doorknob. “Mrs. Emerson? Are you there? Can you hear us? Let us in!”

She meant to answer, but forgot. Voices brushed against each other on her front porch. They were wonderful men, just wonderful. They were here for her. Love and trust washed over her in a flood, and she closed her eyes and smiled.

They broke the window of the front door. Now, why would they do such a thing? Large pieces of glass clanged on the floor while she screwed up her face, trying to figure it out. Then she found the answer. She was pleased with the rapid way her mind was working. She turned her head to watch a blue-sleeved arm reach in and unsnap the lock. The door opened and two policemen entered, dressed in full uniform just for her. “Mrs. Emerson?” one said.

“Ham,” she said, and then she went to sleep, finally in the care of someone competent.