The Clock Winder

13. 1970

While Peter drove P.J. slept, curled in the front seat with her head in his lap. Long skeins of tow hair strung across his knees, twined around the steering wheel and got caught between his fingers. He kept shaking his hands loose, as if he had dipped them in syrup. Then the hot wind blew up new strands. “P.J.?” he said. “Look, P.J., can’t you stretch out in the back?” P.J. slept on, smiling faintly, while blocks of sunlight crossed her face like dreams.

They were driving back to New Jersey after a week with P.J.’s parents — an old tobacco farmer and his wife who lived on a rutted clay road in Georgia. The visit had not been a success. The gulf between Peter and the Grindstaffs had widened and deepened until P.J., the go-between, could cause a panic if she so much as left the room for a glass of water. She had ricocheted from one side to the other all week, determinedly cheerful and oblivious. Now her head was a weight on his right knee every time he braked; she was limp and exhausted, refilling her supplies of love and gaiety while she slept.

Just past Washington, he pulled into a service station and woke her up. “Would you like a Coke?” he asked her. P.J. lived on Cokes. And she was a great believer in breaking up trips — for sandwiches, restrooms, Stuckey’s pecan logs, white elephant sales, caged bears and boa constrictors — but now she only looked at him dimly. “A what?” she said.

“A Coke.”

“Oh. Well, I guess so.”

She yawned and reached for the door handle. While the attendant scraped bugs off the windshield Peter watched her cross the concrete apron — a thin, tanned, rubber-boned girl with red plastic rings like chicken-bands dangling from her ears. She swung her purse by its strap and tugged at her shorts, which were brief enough to show where her tan left off. The attendant stopped work for a moment to watch her go.

From the glove compartment Peter took stacks of maps — Georgia, New England, even eastern Canada, and finally Baltimore. He had promised P.J. they would stop over to see his family. It was three years since he had last been there. When he opened the map to check the best route the half-forgotten names of streets — St. Paul and North Charles, criss-crossed now with grimy folds that were beginning to tear — gave him the sudden, depressing feeling that he was a teenager again. He remembered hitchhiking on North Charles, sweating in the damp heavy heat, fully aware that his mother would go to pieces if she ever saw him doing this. He pictured Baltimore in an eternal summer, its trademark the white china cats, looking fearfully over their shoulders, which poor people riveted to their shutters and porch roofs. And then his mother’s house — closed, dim rooms. Gleaming tabletops. What was the point of going back?

P.J. came in sight, picking her way across the cement on narrow bare feet. When she caught the attendant watching she grinned and raised her Coke bottle in a toast. Then she leaned in the window and said, “Come on, Petey, get out and stretch your legs.”

“I’m comfortable here.”

“Out back they have garden statues, and birdbaths and flowerpots. Want to take a look?”

“I’d rather get going,” Peter said.

She climbed into the car, wincing when the backs of her thighs hit the hot vinyl. Down her cheek were the stripes of Peter’s corduroy slacks. Her eyes were still sleepy and rumpled-looking. “They have the cutest little plaster gnomes,” she said. “On spikes. You just stick them into the grass. I bet Mama would love one of those.”

“I bet she would,” said Peter.

She looked at him sideways, and then took a sip of her Coke. “Shall I get her one?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“As a sort of making-up present?”

Peter handed a credit card to the attendant. “You don’t have to make up,” he said.

“I was thinking of sending it in your name.”

“Well, don’t.”

She drank off the last of the Coke, wiped the rim of the bottle, and set off toward the case of empties beside the vending machine. The minute she was gone Peter felt sorry. “P.J.!” he called.

She turned, still cheerful. He slid out of his seat and ran to catch up with her. “Of course we can buy one,” he said. “Put my name all over it, if you like.”

“Oh, good,” P.J. said. “I’ll do the wrapping and mailing and all, you won’t have to lift a finger, Petey.”

She led him around the back of the filling station. toward a field of plaster flamingos and sundials and birdbaths. The gnomes stood in a huddle, their paint already flaking, grinning at a cluster of little black boys who held out hitching-rings. The saleslady wore a straw hat and a huge flowered smock that blazed in the sunlight. “Aren’t they darling?” P.J. said. “Or would she rather have an eentsy wheelbarrow to plant her flowers in. Which do you think?”

“You know her best,” Peter said.

“Or then these deer. They’re nice.” She wandered through the field, unable to make up her mind, patting the heads of little painted animals and returning the smile of any statue that smiled at her. Her bare feet stepped delicately between the grass blades, as if she had no weight at all. “How much do you reckon it would cost to mail a sundial?” she asked. The saleslady said, “Oh, no, honey, you don’t want to mail them, it’d take a fortune.” Peter hated people who called their customers “honey.” But P.J. only shifted her smile to the saleslady’s face, and the two of them stood beaming at each other like very dear friends. Oh, it would take a lot to make P.J. start frowning. He thought of all this last week, all the times her parents must have whispered, “Paula Jean, what’s the matter with that boy?” all the children who, coming upon him unexpectedly, lost their bounce and seemed to sag under the weight of his gloom. Yet P.J. had continued smiling. She had led him by the hand through the barnyard, hoping that he would make friends with the animals. She had introduced a hundred topics of conversation that Peter and her family might seize on. “Petey’s just got out of the Army, Daddy, you and him ought to compare experiences. Petey, don’t you want to see Mama’s herb garden?” Peter had tried, but nothing came to his mind to say. He floated in a weariness that made him want to escape to some hotel and sleep for days. “Petey, darling,” P.J. said, “don’t you like them?” I do,” he said truthfully, “but I just can’t—” “Talk about the crops. Daddy likes that. Talk about baseball, or what’s on the television.” So then, back among the others, Peter said, “How’re the crops, Mr. Grindstaff?” “Just fine,” said Mr. Grindstaff, and Peter said, “Oh, good,” and subsided, unable to think of what came next.

“He’s just back from Vietnam,” P.J. would tell people. Everyone murmured, as if that explained things. But Peter had been gloomy long before the Army. War only added a touch of fear and the sense of being out of place, neither of which seemed to leave him when he came back. He was still afraid. He still felt out of place. He had a job now, teaching chemistry in a second-rate girls’ school, where the pupils whispered and giggled and knit argyle socks while he lectured. “All of you,” he would tell them, “missed the second equation on the last hour quiz. Now I would like to go over that with you.” The girls looked up at him, still moving their lips to count stitches, and Peter fell silent. Why would he like to go over it? What difference did it make? How had he come to be here?

P.J. settled on a gnome with a pointed red cap, cradled it in her arms all the way to the car and rolled it in a picnic blanket in the trunk. “I just know she’s going to love it,” she said. And then, when they had pulled out into traffic again, “I know things will work out all right. Won’t they? Everything will be just fine now.”

“Of course,” said Peter, but he had no idea what she was talking about. This trip? The two of them? He and her family? If he found out he might have to disagree. He kept quiet, and smiled steadily at the stream of oncoming cars while P.J. slid down and set both feet against the dashboard. Her hair blew out behind her, knotting itself and slipping out of the knots. She seemed to glint and shimmer. When Peter first met her, in the school cafeteria, she had stood out among the pasty dull students like a flash of silver. She had worn a white uniform and collected dirty dishes off the tables with pointed, darting hands. He took her for a student with a part-time job. When she turned out to be a real waitress he was relieved, since it was against school rules to date students. Then later, after they had begun to grow serious, he had some doubts. A waitress? What would his family say? He pushed the thought away, ashamed that it had come up. He started seeing her daily; he fit himself into her motionless, shadowless life: lying oiled and passive on a beach towel for hours at a stretch, watching television straight through till sign-off, sitting all afternoon in dusky taverns dreamily peeling the labels off beer bottles. She gave him the feeling that she could never be used up. Whenever he looked her way she smiled at him.

The rush hour was beginning. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and the flashes of sunlight off chrome stung his eyes. “Where are we now?” P.J. asked.

“Close to — just past Washington.”

“Close to Baltimore.”

“Well, yes.”

“How much longer to your mother’s?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Peter said.

“Oh, Petey, don’t say we can’t go. After all this time that I’ve been counting on it?”

“If we drove straight through, we could be home by bedtime,” Peter said. “Besides, she might not even be there.”

“Didn’t you tell her we were coming?”

“I meant to drop a postcard, but then I forgot.”

“You’re ashamed to show me to her.”

“No, Lord,” he said. “I’ve kept away long before you were around.”

“That’s just not natural, Petey. Not and you living so close.”

“But I wasn’t always close, I was in the Army.”

“When Barney Winters went overseas, down home,” P.J. said, “they let him have some time with his folks after basic training. Then when he came back he spent a month there, just filling up on that good home cooking he said. Fat? In that one month he must have gained thirty pounds. You never would’ve known him.”

“I went to New York after basic training,” Peter said.

“Gunther Jones, too, he visited home before he left. And would have after, I reckon, if he hadn’t gone and got killed.”

“Well, we all do our own thing,” Peter said. “I went and saw a lot of art galleries.”

“Before, you mean. I don’t know how much you enjoyed it but afterward I know, you told me yourself. Up until the new semester opened you didn’t do a thing but lay around a old rented room reading the beginnings of books. Call that a rest? Call that a recuperation? When you could have been home all that time eating your mother’s good home cooking?”

“I can cook better than my mother does,” Peter said.

“Petey, do you have some reason not to want to go there?”

“None at all,” said Peter. Which was true, but he should have made something up — some feud or family quarrel that would have satisfied her. As it was, she thought he was putting her off. She considered the subject still open for discussion. “Barney Winters’ mother met him when he landed,” she said. “Bringing a whole chess pie that he ate right there by the plane.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Peter.

“Myself, I’m a family-type person. Just made that way, I don’t know why. We always were close-knit. Now I want to meet your family too, but if you think I wouldn’t match up to them—”

“No, P.J. We’ll go, if you’re so set on it. But just for one night, is that understood? No hanging around. No getting caught up in anything.”

“Whatever you like, Petey,” P.J. said.

By the time they reached Baltimore, Peter had a long ache of tiredness running down his spine. He drove irritably, one hand always ready at the horn. Row houses slipped past him in endless chains, with clusters of women slumped on all the stoops, fans turning lazily behind lace curtains, parlor windows full of madonnas and globe lamps and plastic flowers alternating with windows boarded up and CONDEMNED signs on the doors. Children were drinking grape Nehis. Men scuttled out from package stores with brown paper bags clutched to their chests. “Are you still sure you want to stop in Baltimore?” Peter asked.

P.J. didn’t bother answering. She was neatening the edges of her lipstick with the tip of a little finger. “Should I put my hair up?” she said.

“You look okay.”

“My wig is right handy.”

“No, P.J.”

P.J. dumped her pocketbook on the seat and riffled through ticket stubs and loose change and wadded-up hair ribbons until she found the little plastic case containing her eyelashes. They were cut in a style called “Innocence”—spiky black lashes widely spaced, so that when she had put them on she looked as if she had just finished crying over some brief, childish tragedy. She blinked and turned to him. “How’s that?” she asked.

“Very nice.”

“Is it far to go?”

“Another fifteen minutes or so.”

“Well, is there something I should know first. I mean, subjects not to bring up? People not to mention? You never tell me things, Petey. I want to do this right, now.”

“Oh, just be yourself,” Peter said. Which were her exact words on the way to Georgia, but she missed that. If he were to list forbidden subjects it would take him all night.

Once out of the downtown areas they drove faster, through streets that grew steadily greener and cooler. Then they entered Roland Park, and Peter suddenly felt eager to be home. He forgot all the misgivings he had had. There was the old locked water tower, which he had once tried to break into. There was the Women’s Club where his mother went for luncheons, always in a hat and gloves. And now the wooded road that led to the house, dark and cool and dappled with sunshine. He hid his eagerness from P.J. as carefully as if she might mock him for it, although he knew she wouldn’t. “We’re almost there,” he told her, keeping his face blank. P.J. nodded and sat up straighter and wet her lips.

In this neighborhood, people stayed out of sight more. All he saw was one lone maid with a shopping bag, heading toward the bus stop. And his mother’s house, when he drew up in front of it, was closed and silent. The curtains hung still, the veranda chairs were empty. A water sprinkler spun dreamily in the right side yard.

“Well,” said Peter. He let his hands drop from the wheel. P.J. said nothing. She was looking at the house, taking in the rows of gleaming windows and the wide expanse of grass, the multitude of chimneys rising from the slate roof.

“You never told me it was a big house,” she said finally.

“Shall we go in?”

P.J. began gathering up her possessions. She had a purse, sandals, a scarf, a sack of licorice shoestrings which had already lined her lips with black although Peter didn’t tell her so. When she had climbed out of the car she tugged at her shorts and slid into her sandals — leather soles with yards of straps which would have twined all the way to her knees if she had tied them. She shuffled up the front walk, curling her toes to keep the sandals on. She looked like a seal on dry land. Peter stayed where he was, watching her. He didn’t even open his door until she turned to look for him. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

“Sure.”

He had expected his mother to burst out of the house the moment he cut the engine, ending a three-year vigil at the front window.

It wasn’t until he was halfway up the walk that he became aware of the noise. A clattering sound, like millions of enormous metal zippers stickily opening and shutting. It rose from every bush. It was so steady and monotonous that it could pass unnoticed, like a clock’s ticking. “What is it?” he asked, and P.J. only looked at him blankly. “That noise,” he said.

“Crickets? Locusts?”

A buzzing black lump zoomed into his face, and then veered and swooped away. He ducked, seconds after it had gone.

“Seventeen-year locusts,” he said.

“Never heard of them,” said P.J.

“Cicadas, in point of actual fact.”

The words were Timothy’s, dredged up from a long-ago summer, and so was the tone — dry and scientific, so unlike Peter that even P.J. noticed and looked surprised. The last time the locusts had been here, Peter was twelve. He remembered the fact of their presence, and Timothy’s lecture on them, but not what they were really like—not these viciously buzzing objects which, he saw now, swung through the air on invisible strings and hung like glittering fruit from all the bushes. P.J. had one on her shoulder; it rattled menacingly when he brushed it away. When he stepped on the sidewalk, he crunched countless pupa shells which lay curled and hollow, small beige shrimps with all their legs folded tightly inward.

They crossed the shiny gray floorboards of the veranda. P.J. knocked at the door. “Knock, knock!” she called out gaily. She always did that, but today Peter found it irritating. “There is a doorbell,” he said, and reached around her to press it. P.J. looked up at him, her eyes like round, rayed suns in her Innocence eyelashes.

It was a child who opened the door for them. A squat little blond boy with a solemn face, wearing miniature Levis.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi there,” said Peter, too heartily. “I’m your Uncle Peter. Remember me?”

“No.”

“So there, Peter Emerson,” P.J. said. She laughed and bent down to the little boy’s level. “I’m P.J. What’s your name?”

He studied her. Peter cleared his throat. “This is George, I believe,” he said. “Matthew’s boy. Is your grandma home, George?”

“Yup.”

“Could we see her?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” George said.

He turned back in the direction he had come from. The cuffs of his Levis dragged on the floor. “Well,” said Peter “Shall we go in?”

They followed George across the hallway — Peter leading P.J. as if she were another child, clutching her by the arm while she looked all around her. They went through the butler’s pantry, windowless and stale, and then into the sudden brightness of the kitchen.

His mother was standing just as he had imagined her — wearing soft colors, her hair a clear gold, surrounded by her family. The only thing wrong was that she and all the others had their backs turned. They were facing squarely away from him, watching something out the rear door. “It’s the screens, they will have to be mended in the morning,” his mother said. “Look at those holes! Anything could get through them.”

“Hello, Mother.”

She turned, but even when she looked directly at him she seemed distracted. “What?” she said. “What—Peter!”

Everyone turned. Their faces were momentarily surprised and unguarded.

“Peter, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, just passing through. Mother, this is P.J. P.J., this is my brother Andrew, my brother Matthew’s wife Gillespie — where’s Matthew?”

“He’s still at work,” his mother said. “Are you staying long? Why didn’t you tell us? Have you eaten supper?”

“We were heading back from Georgia—” Peter said. His mother stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her cheek felt withered and too soft, but she still wore the same light, powdery perfume, and she held her back as beautifully straight as ever. Her speech was slower now than her children’s — as slow as Gillespie’s southern drawl, and hesitating over consonants. “Georgia?” she said. “What would you go to Georgia for?”

“You look older,” said Andrew. He looked older himself, but happy. His hair was thinning, and below his concave chest a paunch had started. Someone’s apron was tied around his middle. “If I’d known you were coming—” he said, and then P.J. stuck her hand out to him. He looked at it a moment before accepting it.

“I’m very glad to meet you all,” said P.J.

Andrew frowned. He was nervous with strangers — something Peter had forgotten to warn her about. But before the silence grew noticeable, his sister-in-law stepped in. “We’re glad to meet you,” she said. “Good to see you again,” she told Peter, and she shifted the diapered baby who rode her hip and held out her hand. Peter took it with relief; her cool, hard palm seemed to steady him.

“We were just on this trip, you see,” he told her. “Passing through Baltimore. Thought we’d stop in. I wasn’t sure you’d — are we interrupting something?”

“Oh, of course not!” his mother said gaily.

“But with everyone at the back door there, I didn’t know—”

“It was a locust. Gillespie was shooing it out of the house for us. Oh, these locusts, Peter, you can’t imagine. We keep the house just sealed, and still they get in. Will this screen be seen to, now?”

“I’ll mend it in the morning,” Gillespie said.

“Mother is scared of locusts,” Andrew said.

“You’re none too fond of them yourself, Andrew dear,” his mother told him.

“Well, no.”

And meanwhile P.J. stood smiling hopefully, with her belongings still clutched to her chest, looking from one face to another and settling finally on the baby, who was playing with a long strand of hair that had straggled from Gillespie’s bun. “Oh, isn’t it darling,” she said. “What’s its name?”

“She isn’t an it, she’s a she,” Andrew said stiffly.

“Well, how could anyone tell?” Gillespie asked him. “All she’s got on is a diaper.”

“Her face is a girl’s face. No one should mistake it.”

“Oh, hush, Andrew, I never heard of such a thing.”

Peter waited for Andrew to get insulted, to collapse in a kitchen chair or turn on his heel and leave, but he didn’t. He had changed — a fact that Peter forgot all over again each time he left home. He was the only person in this house who had changed. His mother remained a gilded pink and white and Gillespie continued shuffling around in dungarees, her face a little broader and more settled-looking but her fingers still nicked by whittling knives and her manner with babies still as offhand as if she were carrying a load of firewood. But Andrew had mellowed; he had calmed and softened. (“Andrew is in such a state,” Mrs. Emerson had written last winter. “You know how he gets when Gillespie’s expecting, I believe he’d go through the labor pains for her if only he could.” Only Peter seemed to remember the day after Timothy’s funeral, when Andrew had paced the living room saying, “Where is that girl? Where? I’ll get her for this.”) Now instead of taking offense Andrew smiled, first at Gillespie and then at the baby, whose cheek he lightly touched. “Her name is Jenny,” he told P.J.

“Oh,” said P.J. She looked bewildered, but after a moment she smiled too.

“Now then,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Shall we go into the living room where it’s cool?”

She led the way, calming her skirt with her hands as if it were a long and stately gown. If the kitchen had become Gillespie’s, with its wood chips across the table and its scatter of tools beside the breadbox, the living room was still Mrs. Emerson’s. The same vases marched across the mantel; the same dusty gray smell rose from the upholstery. The red tin locomotive under the coffee-table could have been Peter’s own, back in the days when he was a child here anxiously studying the grownups’ faces.

His mother settled in her wing chair, across from Andrew, and Gillespie sat in the high-backed rocker with both children nestled against her. Peter chose the couch, beside P.J. He felt she needed some support. She was nervously twisting her purse strap, and the licorice bag rustled on her knees like something alive. “I just love old houses,” she said.

“How long can you stay?” his mother asked Peter. “And don’t say you’re just passing through. I want you to plan on a nice long visit this time.”

“I have a lot of work to get back to,” Peter said.

“In the summer? What kind of work would you do in the summer?”

But then, remembering her social duties, her face became all upward lines and she turned to P.J. “I hope you’re not tired from the trip, J.C.,” she said.

“P.J.,” said P.J. “No ma’am, I’m not a bit tired. I’m just so happy to finally meet you all. I feel like I know you already, Petey’s told me so much about you.”

A lie. Peter had told her next to nothing. And he hadn’t even mentioned her to his family, but Mrs. Emerson continued wearing her bright hostess look and leaning forward in that hovering posture she always assumed to show an open mind. “Where are you from, dear?” she asked.

“Well, New Jersey now. Before it was Georgia.”

“Isn’t that nice?”

P.J. shifted in her seat, deftly smoothing the backs of her thighs as if she wore a dress. “You look just like I thought you would,” she said — oh, always trying to get down to the personal, but she was no match for Mrs. Emerson.

“I suppose this heat is no trouble to you at all then,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Ma’am?”

“Coming from Georgia.”

“Oh. No ma’am.”

“Peter darling,” Mrs. Emerson said, “I want you to tell me everything. What have you been up to, now?”

“Well, I—”

“Where are my cigarettes?” She slid her fingers between the arm of the chair and the cushion. Peter, who hadn’t been going to tell her anything anyway, felt irritated at being cut off. He kept a pointed silence, with his arms folded tightly across his chest. He thought his mother was like a hunter who set traps and coaxed and baited until the animal was safely caught, and then she forgot she had wanted him and went off to some new project. “Nothing is where it should be in this house,” she said. “Gillespie, I think we could do with some iced tea to drink.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Gillespie handed the baby to Andrew and went to the kitchen, with George tailing her. P.J. sat back and smiled around the room. The only sound to be heard was the clatter of locusts. Finally P.J. said, “Mrs. Emerson, have you got a family album?”

“Album?”

“I’d like to see pictures of Peter when he was a baby.”

“Oh, there are hundreds,” Mrs. Emerson said. She had filled more albums than any coffee-table could hold — rows upon rows of snapshots precisely dated — but she didn’t offer to bring them out. “Somewhere around,” she said vaguely, and she turned to stare out a window. What connection did this girl have with Emersons?

What connection did Peter have? He sat plucking the knees of his slacks, as empty of things to say as he had been in Georgia, as hopeful of acceptance as P.J. From the kitchen came the smells of supper cooking, roast beef and baked potatoes. There was nothing like cooking smells to make you feel out of place in someone else’s house. While he was on the open highway life here had been going on in a pattern he could only guess at — meat basted, knife sharpened, bustling hunts for misplaced spoons, systems and rituals and habits they never had to think about. Mrs. Emerson lit her cigarette and reached without looking for an ashtray, which was exactly where she had known it would be. A silvery strand of baby-spit spun down onto Andrew’s hand, and out of nowhere Andrew produced a folded diaper and neatly wiped Jenny’s chin. P.J. was telling Mrs. Emerson how she just loved this section of Baltimore. (She just loved everything. What was the matter with her?) At her first pause, Andrew turned to Peter. “How’s the job going?” he asked. Mrs. Emerson said, “Do you like New Jersey?” To counterbalance P.J., he was blunter than he should have been. “I hate it,” he said.

“Oh, Peter.”

“If there was another job open anywhere, I’d take it in a flash.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

He peered at his mother. She was perfectly serious. Jobs nowadays were scarce and money scarcer, and no one was interested in chemists any more, but what did she know about that? It was possible that she wasn’t even aware there was a war on. Since he first left home there had been upheavals of every kind — assassinations, riots, not once referred to in letters from his mother. Oh well, once: “Mrs. Bittern was just here collecting food for riot victims. I gave her a can of pitted black olives.…” “I had hoped you might teach in some university,” she told him now. “Well, times are hard,” was all he said. She frowned at him, distantly, secure in her sealed weightless bubble floating through time. While he was in Vietnam, she had kept writing to ask if he had visited any tourist sights. And could he bring home some sort of native craft to solve her Christmas problems?

“Petey’s school is just a real nice place,” P.J. said. “He couldn’t hope for a better job.”

“That’s all you know,” Andrew said.

“What?”

“Peter made straight A’s all through school. Are you qualified to say he should stay in some mediocrity in New Jersey?”

“Oh! Well!”

She looked at Peter to defend her, but he didn’t. He was irritated by the soft, hurt look on her face. It was his mother who stepped in. “Now, Andrew,” she said. “You mustn’t mind Andrew, J.C. He’s hard on outsiders. The second time he met Gillespie, he shot her.” She laughed, and so did Andrew — a contented, easy sound. Peter heard her without surprise, although he had never been told about any shooting, but P.J. gave a little gasp and drew closer to him. “With a gun?” she said.

“Oh, Mother, now—” said Andrew.

But he was saved by a noise from the fireplace — a rattle as steady and senseless as some wind-up toy. Mrs. Emerson screamed. Her cigarette flew out of her hand and landed on the rug, and when Peter leaped up to stamp it out he collided with P.J., who reached the spot before he did but then tripped over one of her long twisted sandal straps. “Gillespie!” Mrs. Emerson screamed. “Gillespie, a locust!”

Then out came Gillespie, skating along levelly with a brim-full pitcher. She poured a dollop of tea on the cigarette and set the pitcher down on the coffee-table. “Where?” she said.

“In the fireplace!” said Mrs. Emerson, already scuttling toward the dining room. “Oh, I told you you should stuff that chimney up! Anything, I said, could get down inside it and the flue handle came off in Matthew’s hands two years ago—” Andrew followed her out of the room, shielding the baby, and Peter rose but had nowhere to go. He didn’t feel up to helping out. He could imagine how cold and heavy a locust must be, slithering down the back of his neck, and he was relieved to see that Gillespie seemed to have the situation in control. She crouched before the fireplace with a rolled-up magazine. George stood by with the poker, scratching the front of his grimy T-shirt and looking bored. “Here, buddy,” Gillespie told the locust. She poked at the ashes. “Come on, come on.” The whirring grew louder. The magazine rattled as if a fan blade had hit it and then up swooped the locust, evading Gillespie, zooming toward the ceiling with an angry buzz. Mrs. Emerson screamed again. She ducked behind Andrew, clutching him by the sides. “Will I survive this summer?” she asked.

Andrew said, “There, Jenny, there, Jenny,” although Jenny was happily gnawing his shirt collar without a care in the world.

“I will never get used to these creatures, never,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I haven’t stepped out of the house since they arrived. Gillespie? Why are you just standing there?”

“I’m waiting for him to come down,” Gillespie said.

“Down? Where is he? Oh, on my damask curtains, I’m sure of it.” She stepped back and sank into one of the dining room chairs. From the table behind her she took a bottle of vitamin C, uncapped it and gulped two pills, like a man downing a glass of whiskey. Her hands were shaking. “They’re everywhere,” she said. “Chattering all day, bombing into people, and at night it’s no better. They’re silent then but it’s a planning silence, they hang from all the leaves plotting how to get me in the morning.”

“It’s the oak trees,” Gillespie said. “They favor oaks.”

Her voice was calm and unemphatic, reducing monsters to mere scientific fact. But then the locust whirred up from the curtains and lit on the lampshade, and when George swung at it with the poker all he did was knock the lamp over. “Damn,” said Gillespie.

“We’re like in jail,” Andrew said. “Matthew and Gillespie and George are the trusties, they get to go out for mail and food. Mother and I stay inside.”

“I spend a summer in the house every seventeen years,” said Mrs. Emerson. She thought that over a minute. Then she said, “The next time they come, I’ll be dead.”

“Oh, Mrs. Emerson!” P.J. said.

But Mrs. Emerson only looked at her as if she wondered where P.J. had come from. She said, “Peter, do you remember when they were here before? You were, oh, twelve, I suppose. You were hopeless. You made a necklace out of the shells and wore it everywhere. You had bottles in your closet packed full of locusts. Black with them.”

“I did?” Peter said.

“You kept one on a string and took it for walks down Cold Spring Lane.”

He still couldn’t picture it. Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct recollection of Melissa’s running away from home with a peanut butter sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.

There was another whir. George leaped straight up in the air, as if he were catching a fly ball, and came to earth with his hands cupped tightly around a rattling black shape. “Ha!” he said.

“Now, when I open the door,” Gillespie told him, “throw him outside. Far out, Georgie. Don’t let him fly back in or Grandma will have a fit.”

They all went to the hallway — even Mrs. Emerson, hanging back a little. Gillespie opened the door and stood ready with the magazine. When George tossed the locust up it seemed to hang in mid-air a minute, and then Gillespie reached out and batted it on its way so violently that she lost her balance. It was Matthew who caught her. He was just crossing the porch with a folded newspaper.

“Not another one,” he said, setting her on her feet.

“She says we’ll have to stop up the chimney. Look who’s come for a visit.”

Matthew looked over Gillespie’s head and said, “Peter! I wondered whose car that was.”

“I was just driving through,” Peter said.

“He brought a girlfriend, and we’re going to get him to stay a good long time.”

Peter said, “Oh, well, I don’t—”

“Come on, we’ve got plenty of room,” Matthew said. “Well! Looks like the Army’s changed you a little.”

But Matthew hadn’t changed. He was still black-haired and stooped and skinny, still continually readjusting his glasses on the bridge of his long narrow nose. Gillespie, sheltered under his arm, smiled up at him and said, “You look tired.”

“I am. Old Smodgett was drunk again.”

He kissed his mother, who had come to the doorway but not an inch beyond it. He clapped Andrew on the shoulder and ran a finger down the curve of the baby’s cheek. P.J. stood waiting, next in line. “Oh,” said Gillespie, “this is P.J. P.J. — what’s your last name, anyway?”

“What?” said P.J. “Emerson.”

“Oh, isn’t that funny.”

“What’s funny about it?”

Peter cleared his throat.

“It’s customary to have your husband’s last name,” P.J. said.

“Husband?” said Mrs. Emerson.

P.J. spun around and stared at Peter.

“Guess I forgot to mention it,” Peter said.

“Mention what?” asked Mrs. Emerson. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, P.J. and I got married last month.”

He had startled everyone, but P.J. most of all. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “Didn’t you tell them?”

Then his mother’s voice rose over hers to say, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t. Could this be happening to me again?”

“I thought they knew,” P.J. said.

“Peter, I assumed she was a friend. Someone you had picked up along the way somehow. Is it just a joke? Are you making this up just to tease me?”

“Well, why? What would be funny about it?” P.J. said. She looked ready to run, but there was nowhere she knew of to run to. Mrs. Emerson ignored her.

“Is she pregnant?” she asked.

“Well!” said P.J.

“Now, Mother,” Matthew said, “I believe the best thing might be to sit down and—”

But it was Gillespie who rescued P.J. “Well, that’s one problem solved,” she said cheerfully. “I didn’t have two extra beds made up anyway. Do you want to see your room, P.J.?”

“Yes, please,” said P.J. Her voice was thin and muffled. She followed Gillespie up the stairs without a backward glance at Peter.

“I never expected this of you, Peter,” his mother said.

“Now, let’s sit down,” Matthew told her. “What’s that on the coffee-table? Iced tea? We can all have a—”

“I have five married children now. Five. And six weddings between them. Do you know how many I was invited to? One, just one. Mary’s. Not Melissa’s, not Matthew’s, not Margaret’s two. Just secrets! Scandals! Elopements! I can’t understand it. Don’t girls dream of big church weddings any more?”

“Sit down, Mother,” Matthew said. “Do you want lemon?”

They grouped themselves around her on the edges of chairs, all uneasily aware of the footsteps over their heads. Matthew poured tea and passed out the glasses. Each time he crossed the rug he had to step over his mother’s soggy cigarette, afloat in a puddle of tea, but he didn’t seem to find it odd. “Well, now,” he said, and he settled himself on the couch and began chafing his bony wrists. “What have you been up to, Peter?”

“We were just discussing that,” said his mother.

“I meant—”

“I believe I’m going to be sick,” Andrew said.

“Oh, Andrew. Pass me the baby.”

But he only clutched her tighter, and Jenny squirmed in his arms and screwed her face up. She started crying, beginning with a little protesting sound and working toward a wail. Gillespie entered the room, scooped her up, and passed on through. “Supper will be ready in a minute,” she called back.

“None for me,” Andrew said.

She didn’t answer him.

Peter rose and went upstairs, with the feeling that everyone’s eyes were on his back. He found P.J. in Melissa’s old room. She was in front of a skirted vanity table. Tears were running down her cheeks in straight, fine lines.

“P.J., I was going to tell them,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You know how seldom I write them. I just hadn’t got around to—”

“You wouldn’t have told them. You’d have let them give us separate rooms, never said a word. Or asked to share a room, that’s more like you. Let them think we were living in sin. That’s your idea of a joke. And me just going on not realizing, thinking you had told them. Oh, I feel like such a fool! Here I was trying so hard, asking for baby pictures — they must have thought I was the pushiest girlfriend you ever had. I wondered why they kept mixing my name up. Did you even tell them I existed?”

“I might have. I forget,” Peter said.

“You didn’t, did you?”

He put his hands in his pockets and circled the room. It had the musty, dead feeling of a guest room — furniture bare and polished but thinly filmed with dust, bedspread perfectly smooth, all traces of Melissa gone except for perfume stains on the vanity table. When he reached the window he pulled it open and leaned out into the twilight. “Hot in here,” he said.

“You never even told them you were dating me,” P.J. said. “You kept us so separate you never even told me about them, not hardly enough to count. Not even their names, just sets of words — the Nervous Case, the Sister that Elopes, the Handyman’s Husband. Like you’d met them only once or twice, and had to think up labels to keep them straight. And if you’ll pardon me for saying so I get the feeling they do you the same way. Which will you be, now? The Georgia Cracker’s Husband? And not a word about we wish you a happy life together, or we hope you’ll be like one of us—”

Peter watched her lips, which were puffy from crying. The paint was flaking off her ear-bangles. All he seemed able to think of was her grammatical mistakes, which chalked themselves up in his mind like a grocery list.

“Why, there I was with a wedding ring on!” P.J. said. “Did they think to notice? No. They were too busy chasing bugs around. That crazy old lady locking herself away from the bugs.”

“Well, wait, P.J.,” Peter said. “This is my family you’re talking about.”

“What do I care?”

“This afternoon you were going to be their long-lost sister.”

“Me? Not now, boy. Not for a million dollars. That little closed-up family of yours is closed around nothing, thin air, all huddled up together scared to go out. Depending on someone that is like the old-maid failure poor relation you find some places, mending their screens and cooking their supper and fixing their chimneys and making peace — oh, she ended up worse off than them. I wouldn’t move into this family for anything you paid me. You can just go on down to them and leave me be.”

“P.J.—”

“Will you go?”

He made a grab for her — a mistake. He felt a cool smoothness slipping through his fingers and then she was gone, flashing white through the doorway and clattering down the stairs with her sandals flapping. The front door slammed. “Peter?” his mother called. “Is that you? Was that him?” The door spring twanged and hummed, and then fell silent.

Peter didn’t go after her. He had been through this too many times — not the quarrels, she had never quarreled before, but the running away whenever his moods grew too much for her. She would stay gone for two or three hours before she wandered in, cheerful again. “What do you do when you’re gone?” he had once asked her, and she had laughed and looked down at her hands. “Oh, walk around,” she said. “Sit on park benches. Check the time every now and then to see if I’ve been away long enough to worry you.” She should never have told him. Now he could afford to stay home and wait for her. Before, he had run after her in a panic at the thought of being left with no company but his own forever more.

He descended the stairs slowly, and found his family still sitting in the living room. There was no sign of supper yet, not even any silver on the dining room table, but they didn’t seem concerned. In the kitchen, Gillespie whistled a tune; they waited, confident that food would arrive somehow, sometime.

“Where’s P.J.?” Matthew asked him.

“She’s taking a walk.”

“I didn’t warm to her,” said Andrew.

“You don’t warm to anyone.”

“When I was married,” Mrs. Emerson said, “my family disapproved very strongly. They said, ‘Oh, certainly he’s nice enough, and we have no doubt he can support you. But don’t you want more than that? Pamela, he’s not your type,’ they said. ‘He doesn’t have, he has a different—’ Well, I didn’t listen. I will say this, though: I told them to their faces. I never snuck around. We had a perfectly beautiful church wedding with all my family in attendance, acting very civilized. Then later I thought, Well, now I know what they meant. I know what my parents meant. They had my best interests at heart, after all. But I only thought that later.”

Andrew looked up from the asterisk he was drawing in a tea-ring. “What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you telling us that you and Dad didn’t get along?”

“Oh, we got along,” said his mother. “But there was so much — we were so far apart. Never understood each other. And I thought you children would take after my side. Even Billy wanted that. Why, it was he who named you — Matthew Carter Emerson, Peter Carter Emerson, every last one of you had my maiden name in the middle. ‘It gives them something to be proud of,’ Billy said. ‘The whole world knows who the Carters are.’ Oh, I had such expectations of you all! How did things turn out so differently? You’re pure Emerson. You’re all like Billy’s brothers, separate and silent and with failure just built into you, and now looking back I can’t even pinpoint the time when you shifted sides. Why did it work out this way?”

As if she were discussing some abstract problem, something that had nothing to do with them, her three sons sat looking detached and interested. Then Matthew said, “Oh, I don’t know. I kind of liked Dad’s brothers.”

“You would,” said his mother. “You most of all.”

“They were sort of rednecks, Matthew,” Andrew said.

“Well, wait a minute—”

Before it became an argument, Peter escaped. He went out to the kitchen, where he found George playing with a locust on the floor and Gillespie nursing the baby, sitting peacefully with her blouse unbuttoned like a broad golden madonna. The roast was cooling on the counter, but she didn’t seem in any hurry. “Where’s P.J.?” she asked.

“Gone out.”

“Well, I wish you’d go get her. Supper will be on as soon as I’m through here.”

“Maybe we could start without her,” Peter said. A picture of never finding P.J. at all flashed through his head. He might jump in his car now and leave alone, light-hearted and full of a pure, free joy. Then hours later P.J. would come straggling in, with grass stains on the back of her shorts. “Where’s Petey?” “He’s gone.” “Well,” she would say, trying to remain dignified, acting as if this were all according to plan—“I believe I’ll be getting along too now. I just loved meeting you all.” He imagined her out on the street thumbing rides, with her purse hitched over her shoulder and her bare legs flashing like knife blades in the darkness. Yet how could he be sure that, halfway to New Jersey, he wouldn’t start feeling lonely and remorseful? Then too, he could stay here. This house could expand like an accordion, with its children safe and happy inside and Gillespie to take care of them. Why not?

Gillespie hoisted the baby on her shoulder and went to the refrigerator for a carton of milk. She poured a saucer full and set it out on the back porch. “Kitty kitty?” she called. Then she returned and checked the biscuits in the oven, and after that she placed the baby on the other breast. Jenny screwed her face sideways, searching for the nipple. Gillespie hummed beneath her breath — a juggler of supplies, obtaining and distributing all her family needed. But when she caught Peter watching her, she said, “I’d wish you’d go find P.J., Peter.”

“I’d rather not,” he said.

“Emersons,” said Gillespie, but without much force. She brushed back a wisp of Jenny’s hair. In this position, with her eyes lowered, with her mouth curved for the baby, she looked younger than he had expected. He had pictured her as some kind of family retainer, ageless, faceless, present for as long as he could remember, although in fact she hadn’t arrived till he was in college and she was only a few years older than he was. Now she stuck out a moccasin to stop the locust’s progress across the floor, and when she grinned at George she looked like another child. “You better not let that in where Grandma is,” she told him.

“I’m going to teach him how to fly,” George said.

“Don’t you think he already knows?”

But George was wandering out of the kitchen now, toward the front door. Peter frowned after him.

“They think I’ve made a mistake,” he told Gillespie.

Gillespie stayed quiet. The baby, intent on nursing, rolled her eyes up to study him.

“Maybe they’re right,” he said. “You shouldn’t hope for anything from someone that much different from your family.”

“You should if your family doesn’t have it,” said Gillespie.

Then she rose, with the baby clinging like a barnacle, and went to check the oven again.

Peter stood still a moment, watching her, but she seemed to have nothing more to say to him. Finally he went out of the kitchen, down the hallway, avoiding the rest of the family. He passed so close that he could hear his mother in the living room. “Why are my children always leaving?” she asked. Peter stopped, afraid for an instant that it was him she was speaking to. “Why are they always coming back?” Andrew asked her. “Scratching their heads and saying, ‘What was it you wanted me to do?’ ” Mrs. Emerson murmured something Peter couldn’t understand. Then a newspaper crackled, drowning out their voices, and under the cover of its noise he went out the front door and eased it shut behind him.

The dry, bitter smell of locusts hung in the dark, but they were silent now. The only locust to be seen was the one on the porch which George flung out, caught, and flung once again, never causing more than a buzzing sound and a dazed whirring of wings. “Bye, fellow,” Peter said. He rumpled George’s hair.

“Bye,” said George, without surprise. He caught the locust again and looked at Peter absently, as if, every day of his life, he saw people arriving and leaving and getting sidetracked from their travels.

Peter went out to his car, looked up and down the dark street, and then got in and started the engine. He rolled slowly and almost soundlessly, peering at everything his headlights touched. After a few hundred feet he stopped and leaned over to open the door. “Want a ride?” he asked.

“Might as well,” said P.J.

She climbed in. When she slid over next to him her skin felt cooler than the night air, but the hand she laid on his knee was warm and she warmed the length of his side. By the time they had reached the main road again, she was asleep with her head in his lap.