The Clock Winder

4. 1961

“No fats, no butter,” Mrs. Emerson said. “That I could stand for, I’ve always been a picky eater. I cut the fat off my meat as a matter of course. But no eggs, he said! Stop eating eggs! What will I do for breakfast?”

Elizabeth glanced in the rear-view mirror and watched Mrs. Emerson straighten her hat, which was circled with spring flowers. They were returning from a heart specialist that old Dr. Felson had recommended. Ordinarily Mrs. Emerson drove herself, but today she must have been nervous over the appointment. She had risen at five-thirty, and collected her gloves and hat two hours early. Then at the last moment she had looked at the cloudless April sky and said, “Will it rain, do you think? You’d better drive me, Elizabeth.” So Elizabeth had put on the chauffeur’s cap, once black but now gray with mildew, which she had found on a rafter in the garage the month before. “Oh, must you?” Mrs. Emerson always said when she saw it. Elizabeth thought it was a wonderful cap. Whenever she wore it she made Mrs. Emerson sit in back. If there had been a lap-robe she would have tucked it in; if it hadn’t looked silly with jeans she would have liked a gold buttoned jacket and driving gloves. Only Mrs. Emerson would never have entered into the spirit of it. “Sometimes,” she said now, “I feel you are making fun of me, Elizabeth. Did you have to stand at attention when I came back to the car? Did you have to click your heels when you shut my door?”

“I thought that was what I was supposed to do,” Elizabeth said.

“All you’re supposed to do is be a help, and it would have helped much more if you’d come in with me as I asked. Taken off that silly hat and come been a comfort in the waiting room.”

“I tend to develop symptoms in waiting rooms,” Elizabeth said. She drove lazily, one arm resting on the hot metal frame of the open window. Her hair whipped around her neck in the breeze, and sometimes she had to reach up and steady her cap. “Isn’t it funny? If I go into a waiting room sick all my symptoms disappear. If I’m well it works the other way.”

“Thank goodness there were no real chauffeurs around,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I would have found you all playing poker, I’m sure. Discussing carburetors.” But she watched the scenery as she spoke, as if her mind were only half on what she was saying. During these last eight months, her life and Elizabeth’s had come to fit together as neatly as puzzle pieces. Even the tone of their voices was habit now — Mrs. Emerson’s scolding, Elizabeth’s flip and unperturbed. Outsiders wondered how they stood each other. But Mrs. Emerson, as she talked, kept dexterously erect in spite of Elizabeth’s peculiar driving, and Elizabeth went on smiling into the sunlight even when Mrs. Emerson’s voice grew creaky with complaints. “How will I manage breakfast now?” Mrs. Emerson asked.

“He say no eggs at all?”

“No more than two a week. A precautionary measure, he said. He kept comparing me to clocks and machines and worn-out cars, and the worst of it was that it all made sense. You keep hearing about the body being a machine, but have you ever given it any real thought? Here I am, just at the stage where if I were a car I’d be traded in. Repairs growing more expensive than my value. Things all breaking down at once, first that bursitis last winter and now my chest grabbing, only it’s worse than with a machine. All my parts are sealed in, airtight. No replacements are possible.”

“That’s true,” said Elizabeth.

She tried picturing Mrs Emerson as a machine. Sprung springs and stray bolts would be rattling around inside her. Her heart was a coiled metal band, about to pop loose with a twang. Why not? Everything else in that house had come apart. From the day that Elizabeth first climbed those porch steps, a born fumbler and crasher and dropper of precious objects, she had possessed miraculous repairing powers; and Mrs. Emerson (who had maybe never broken a thing in her life, for all Elizabeth knew) had obligingly presented her with a faster and faster stream of disasters in need of her attention. First shutters and faucets and doorknobs; now human beings. A wrist dangled suddenly over her shoulder. “See, how knobby?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Nobody ever told me to expect varicose bones.”

Elizabeth touched the wrist and returned it, unchanged.

“Could it be all those pregnancies?” said Mrs. Emerson, sitting back. “Eight of them, Elizabeth. One born dead. People are always asking if I’m Catholic, but the truth is I’m Episcopal and merely had a little trouble giving up the habit of a baby in the house. Could that harm my health?”

Elizabeth drove slowly, changing lanes in long arcs when the mood hit her. Buttery sunlight warmed her lap. The radio played something that reminded her of picnics.

“It doesn’t seem just that I should be getting old,” Mrs. Emerson said.

She removed her gloves and took a cigarette from a gold case — something she rarely did. Elizabeth, hearing the snap as she shut it, looked in the rear-view mirror. “Oh, don’t frown at me,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“I wasn’t.”

“I thought you were. The doctor told me not to smoke.”

“It’s all right with me if you smoke.”

“I plan to stop, of course, but not till I get over this nervous feeling.” She flicked a gold lighter which sputtered and sparked and finally rose up in a four-inch flame that blackened half the cigarette. She took a puff, not inhaling, and held it at an awkward angle with her elbow tight against her side. “What a beautiful day!” she said, just noticing. “It’s nice to be driven places.” And then, after a pause, she cleared her throat and said, “I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, Elizabeth, but I appreciate having you here.”

She had stepped far enough out of the pattern so that Elizabeth had to look at her again in the mirror. “That’s all right,” she said finally.

“No, I mean it. If I talked to my children this way they would get upset. Tell them I’m getting old, they’d feel forced to convince me I wasn’t.”

“Oh, well, getting old is one of the things I’m looking forward to,” Elizabeth said. “I’d like the insomnia.”

“The what?”

“The early-morning insomnia. I could have a lot more fun if I didn’t sleep so much.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Emerson. She took half a puff from her cigarette. “Now, a little worry wouldn’t hurt the other children at all, but don’t mention this new doctor to Andrew. He’s subject to anxiety as it is. Sometimes he calls long distance asking if I’m sure I’m all right, wondering about things so specific you know they must have come to him in a dream, either waking or sleeping: have I had any falls recently? am I careful around blades? Well, nowadays we all know what that means, but even so, I don’t want you giving him any grounds for concern.”

“I don’t even know Andrew,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes, but this weekend he’s coming for a visit.”

“No problem, then. I won’t be here.”

“Oh, but you have to be here!” Mrs. Emerson said.

“I’m going home.”

“What? Home?” Mrs. Emerson fumbled her cigarette, dropped it, and caught it in mid-air. “Not for good,” she said.

“No, I just promised my mother I’d visit.”

“Well, that’s impossible,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I mean it. Impossible. I won’t let you go.”

“I’ve put it off for months now. I can’t do it again.”

“You’ll have to.”

“I can’t,” said Elizabeth, and she crammed her cap down tight on her head and began driving with both hands.

“You never asked me about this. I never heard a word.”

“My weekends are my own,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, listen to you. You’re as set in your ways as an old maid,” said Mrs. Emerson. She ground out her cigarette and then braced herself as they zoomed away from a traffic light. “I should have known better than to rely on you. You or anyone. I should have let Billy buy me a lingerie shop on Roland Avenue, sat there all day the way my friends are doing, drinking gin and writing up the losses for income tax. Much too busy to see my children. Then they’d come home every week; just watch. They only take flight if you show any signs of caring.”

Elizabeth coasted past little Japanese trees that flowered pink and white on the grassy divide. She kept time in her head to faint music from the radio.

“This is all taking place because I mentioned something about appreciating you,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I am cursed with honesty. And where does it get me?”

“What would you want me for anyway?” Elizabeth asked. “I’ve kept even with all my work.”

“No, you don’t understand. I need a — Andrew and I manage better when there’s a buffer, so to speak. Somebody neutral. His brothers are no help at all. Matthew is always in a daze anyway, and Timothy just flies off somewhere. These two weeks he’s having a run of tests, isn’t that typical? I believe he arranged it that way, so that I’d be left alone with — oh, nothing that I say is what I mean. I love Andrew, sometimes I think I might love him best of all. And he’s so much better now. He’s not nearly so — he doesn’t have that — nothing’s really wrong with him, you know.”

Elizabeth peered into her side mirror.

“Why don’t you say something?”

“Just trying to change lanes,” Elizabeth said, and she leaned out the window. “How come this mirror is at such a funny angle?”

“I can’t put the visit off,” said Mrs. Emerson, “because he likes to come when things are in bloom. He’s already missed most of it. I wonder why Timothy can’t study at home? Talk to him, Elizabeth. Make him change his mind.”

“I’m against things like that,” Elizabeth said. “What if I changed his mind and he stayed home and got run over by a truck? What if the house burned down?”

“What?” Mrs. Emerson passed a hand across her forehead. “I’m not in the mood for an outline of your philosophy, Elizabeth. I’m worried. Oh, wouldn’t you think my children could be a little happier?” She waited, as if she really expected an answer. Then she said, “I suppose you’re going home with someone from a bulletin board.”

“Well, no.”

“You’re taking the train?”

“I’m going with Matthew,” Elizabeth said.

“Matthew?”

“That’s right.”

“Matthew Emerson?”

Elizabeth laughed.

“Well, I don’t know all the Matthews you might know,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I don’t understand. What would Matthew be going to North Carolina for?”

“To take me home.”

“You mean he’s going especially for you?”

“I invited him.”

“Oh. You’re taking him to meet your family.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, and flicked her turn signal.

“Does that have any significance?”

“No.”

“This is so confusing,” Mrs. Emerson said.

Which made Elizabeth laugh again. The spring air gave her a light-headed feeling, and she was enjoying the drive and the thought of taking a trip with Matthew. She didn’t care where the trip was to. But Mrs. Emerson, who misinterpreted the laugh, sat straighter in her seat.

“I am his mother,” she said.

“Well, yes.”

“I believe I have some right to know these things.”

Elizabeth braked at a stop sign.

“That would explain Timothy’s strange mood,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“He doesn’t know about it yet.”

“Well, what are you doing? Are you playing off one brother against another? Lately you’ve seen so much of Matthew, but you still go out with Timothy. Why is that?”

“Timothy invites me,” Elizabeth said.

“If you tell me again that you accept all invitations, I’m going to scream.”

“All right.”

“I didn’t want to mention this, Elizabeth, because it’s certainly none of my business, but lately I’ve worried that people might think there’s something easy about you. You can never be too careful of your reputation. Out at all hours, dressed any way, with any poor soul who happens along — and I can’t help noticing how Timothy always seems to have his hand at the back of your neck whenever he’s with you. That gives me such a queasy feeling. There’s something so — and now Matthew! Taking Matthew home to your parents! Are you thinking of marrying him?”

“He never asked,” Elizabeth said.

“Don’t tell me you accept all invitations to marry, too.”

“No,” said Elizabeth. She wasn’t laughing any more. She drove with her hands low on the wheel, white at the knuckles.

“Then why are you taking him home?”

Elizabeth turned sharply into the garage, flinging Mrs. Emerson sideways.

“Elizabeth?”

“I said it had no significance,” Elizabeth said.

Then she cut the motor and slammed out of the car. She didn’t open the door for Mrs. Emerson. She snatched her cap off her head and threw it in a high arc, landing it accidentally on the same rafter where she had found it. Was that how it got there in the first place? She stopped and stared up at the rafter, amused. Behind her Mrs. Emerson’s door opened and closed again, hesitantly, not quite latching.

“Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said.

Elizabeth turned and went out the side door, with Mrs. Emerson close behind.

“Elizabeth, in a way I think of you as another daughter.”

“I’m already somebody’s daughter,” Elizabeth said. “Once is enough.”

“Yes. I didn’t mean — I meant that I feel the same concern, you see. I only want you to be happy. I hate to see you wasting yourself. I mentioned what I did for your own good, don’t you know that?”

Elizabeth didn’t answer. She was climbing the hill so fast that Mrs. Emerson had to run to keep up with her. “Please slow down,” Mrs. Emerson said. “This isn’t good for my chest. If you must play chauffeur, couldn’t you have dropped me at the front door?”

“Oh, is that what they do?”

“It’s just that you seem so — aimless. You don’t make any distinctions in your life. How do I know that you won’t go wandering off with someone tomorrow and leave me to cope on my own?”

“You don’t,” said Elizabeth. But she had slowed down by now, and when they reached the back door she held it open for Mrs. Emerson before she entered herself.

It was one of Alvareen’s sick-days, and she had left the kitchen a clutter of dirty dishes and garbage bags that they had to pick their way through gingerly. Then when they reached the front hall they heard someone upstairs. Slow footsteps crossed a room above them. Mrs. Emerson clutched Elizabeth’s arm and said, “Did you hear that?”

“Someone upstairs,” Elizabeth said.

“Well, do you — should we — could you find out who it is?”

Elizabeth tilted her head back. “Who is it?” she shouted.

“I could have done that,” Mrs. Emerson said.

Then Timothy appeared in the upstairs hall, stuffing something into his suit pocket. “Hi there,” he said.

“Timothy!” said his mother. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in my room.”

“We thought you were a burglar. Well, it’s fortunate you’ve come, I have a favor to ask you.”

She climbed the stairs with both hands to her hat, removing it as levelly as if it were full of water. “Now, about this weekend—” she said.

“I thought we’d been through all that.”

“Will you let me finish? Come with me while I put my things up.”

Mrs. Emerson crossed the hall and entered her bedroom, but Timothy stayed where he was. When Elizabeth reached the top of the stairs he opened his mouth, as if he were about to tell her something. Then his mother said, “Timothy?” He gave one helpless flap of his arms and followed his mother.

Elizabeth went into her own room. She was fitting together a rocking horse that had arrived unassembled, a present for Mrs. Emerson’s grandchild. He might be visiting in July. “Fix it up and put it in Mary’s room,” Mrs. Emerson had said. “I plan to be a grandmother well-stocked with toys, so that he looks forward to coming. In time maybe he can visit alone, they say it’s quite simple by air. You tag the child like luggage and tip the stewardess.” The rocking horse had been packed with the wrong number of everything — too many screws, too many springs, not enough nuts. Elizabeth had spread it on the floor of her room, and now she sat down on the rug to look at the diagram. Across the hall, behind a closed door, Mrs. Emerson murmured endlessly on. When the words were unintelligible she always sounded as if she were reading aloud. It was the positive way in which she put things, without breaks or fumbles. From time to time Timothy’s voice rode over hers, but it never slowed her down.

Elizabeth emptied out a mayonnaise jar full of stray nuts from the basement. She picked up one after another, trying to fit them to the extra screws. “Now, this for this one,” she said under her breath. “This for this. No.”

“I already told you—” Timothy said.

Mrs. Emerson went on murmuring.

“Don’t you ever take no for an answer?”

Elizabeth shoved the nuts aside and went back to the diagram. She already knew it by heart, but there was something steady and comforting about printed instructions. “First assemble all parts, leaving screws loose. Do not tighten screws until entire toy has been assembled.” The author’s voice was absolutely definite. Timothy’s was frazzled at the ends. What was she doing here, still in Baltimore? She should have left long ago. She awoke almost nightly to hear the tape-recorder voice—“Why don’t you write? It’s not that I care for my own sake, I just think you’d wonder if I were dead or alive”—and she lay in bed raging at Mrs. Emerson and her children too, all those imagined ears putting up with such a loss of dignity. She kept promising herself she would leave. But never see Matthew again? Never play chess with Timothy? Lose the one person who leaned on her and go back to being a bumbler? She set a deadline: at the first mistake, the first putty knife through a windowpane, she would move on. That shouldn’t take long. But her magic continued to hold. What she couldn’t solve the hardware man down on Wyndhurst could, and there was always The Complete Home Repairman in her bureau drawer. All she had to do was disappear for a moment and refer to it, like a doctor keeping his patient waiting while he thumbed through textbooks in some hidden room. At this rate she would stay here forever. And always knowing, to the end of her days, that she should be out in the world again.

“You mistake the kind of twins we are,” Timothy said. “Did you think we were Siamese?”

“Fit tab A into slot B, making sure that …”

“We’re not even identical. Not even close to identical. We were an accident of birth!”

Elizabeth sighed and dropped the diagram. She rose to circle her room, twice, and then she padded out the door and down the stairs. In the kitchen, where she had meant to stop for milk, the clutter seemed like an extension of the argument above. She went through without slowing and continued on down to the basement. There everything was dim and silent, flickering like a pool of water in the sunlight that sifted through dusty windows. Dark, battered doors closed off the old servants’ rooms, with transoms above them that reminded her of school corridors and church fellowship halls. In the central part were tangled metal cast-offs, bicycles, a workbench, hunks of monster household appliances. There was a cabinet door laid across the zinc laundry tubs, with two huge canning kettles on top of it. Elizabeth and Matthew were making wine together. They had split the cost of the ingredients and shared the work, but it was up to Elizabeth to stir up the dregs once a day. She took a long-handled spoon from a nail, rolled the cheesecloth off the first kettle and dipped the spoon deep inside. A yeasty, spicy smell rose up, with bubbles that churned and snapped in a film across the surface.

“Where will we get the grapes?” Matthew had asked, and Elizabeth said, “Oh, grape wine we can buy. Just look in this recipe book — tomato wine, dandelion wine. Let’s make something different. Is there such a thing as mushroom wine?” And she had laughed at his expression. He was slow, thorough, too serious; she provided the lightness for him. What answering glimmers she found in him she nourished along, and then he would surprise her by laughing too and losing that dark, baffled look on his face. He was the only Emerson she knew of who was short of money. She seized on that as a base for all the flights she took him on — painting, wine-making, installing a shower in his cracked old bathtub. Once they mixed up a week’s supply of something called sludge that they found in a cookbook for the poverty-stricken. With Timothy it would have ended in silliness; sludge might have been rolled into balls and flung all over the kitchen. Well, that was fun too, of course. But Matthew enjoyed it in his own way, following a plan systematically with that knotted gaze he turned on everything, giving his slow smile when it was done.

They had made a batch of orange wine and another of wheat. They had chopped oranges, lemons, and raisins endlessly, baked wheat on cookie sheets in the oven until a musty golden smell filled the kitchen, all while Mrs. Emerson was out at a meeting. (She might not take to having a brewery in her basement, and they had never bothered about a government permit. Matthew was all for sending off for one but Elizabeth was too impatient to begin.) They had lugged the kettles down the stairs and filled them with buckets of water and sacks of sugar. “It may turn out too sweet,” Matthew said gravely. “It may,” said Elizabeth. They never talked much. When he found out she was planning a visit home he said, “I’ll miss you,” and Elizabeth, instead of answering as she would to someone else (“Miss me, what for? I’m only going for the weekend”), said, “I’ll miss you too. Want to come with me?” “That would be better,” he said, “and you won’t have to ride with strangers.” He was forever protecting her, but not in that fretful way that wore on her nerves. He lent her his rain-hat, and scooped her hair out of the way when she shrugged herself into her jacket. On walks through the woods to his house he would let her go single-file, unhampered by hand-holding or the troublesome etiquette of briars held back for her and roots pointed out; but once inside, in a living room splintery with cold, he might come up behind her to stand motionless and silent, his arms folded around her and his chin resting on her head, warming the length of her back.

“Any time the basement door is open there’s the strangest smell coming up,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Have you noticed?” She thought it was a new kind of detergent Alvareen was putting in the washing machine. Elizabeth never told her anything different.

She twirled the spoon dreamily, resting her head against a shelf, listening to the fizz of the bubbles. Up in one corner a spider spun a web between two waterpipes, but the strands looked like another slant of sunlight. Leaves that had sifted through the grate rustled in the window-well, as dry and distant as all the past autumns that had dropped them there.

Footsteps crossed the kitchen. “Elizabeth?” Timothy called.

“Down here.”

He came to the doorway above the basement steps; she saw the darkening of the patch of light on the floor. Then he snapped a switch on, paling the sunbeams. “Where?” he said.

“Here by the tubs.”

While he descended the stairs she uncovered the second kettle and began stirring it. It had a burned, toasty smell. She was afraid they might have overbaked the wheat. She lowered her head and breathed deeply, inches from the wine. “Ah,” said Timothy. “Eye of newt. Toe of frog.” But the scene upstairs must still be hanging over him; his voice was as heavy as the hand he laid on her shoulder. “What is it, anyway?” he asked.

“Just wine.”

“You handymen certainly have some odd chores.” He moved toward the window, and peered up at the spider in its web. “I came to see if you wanted to take a drive. Have lunch at my place or something.” He poked at the web and the spider scuttled higher, a fat brown ball with wheeling legs. “Are you scared of spiders?”

“Nope.”

He turned away, hands back in his pockets. “I hear you’re going home,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“But just for the weekend.”

“That’s right.”

Elizabeth straightened up. She hung the spoon on its nail, pulled the cheesecloth back over the kettles and knotted the strings that held it there. When she turned to go, she found Timothy just taking something from one pocket: a pistol, bluish-black and filmed with grease. “What on earth,” she said. He shifted it in his hands, as carelessly as if it were a toy.

“Evil-looking, isn’t it?” he said. “I found it in Andrew’s room.”

“Is it real?”

“Well, probably. How can you tell? I would break it open but I’m scared of the thing.”

“Put it down, then,” Elizabeth said. “Stop tossing it around like that, will you?”

“Me? Two-Gun Tim?” He set his feet apart like someone in a western, one thumb hooked in the pocket of his slacks, and tried to twirl the pistol by its loop but failed. When it dropped they both sprang away and stared at it, as if it might explode spontaneously. Nothing happened. Timothy bent to pick it up, holding it this time by the barrel, firmly, the way his mother must have taught him to hold scissors. “Ah, well,” he said.

“What would Andrew want with a gun?”

“He collects them.”

“Well, that’s a very silly hobby,” said Elizabeth, and she led the way to the stairs, making sure to keep out of the pistol’s aim.

“Oh, I don’t mean collects. I don’t mean as a hobby. I mean he collects them like a boat collects barnacles; they flock to him. What are you laughing at? I’m serious. When Andrew takes a walk he finds guns under bushes, when he goes to the attic he stumbles over them, when he answers the doorbell it’s a mailman with the wrong package, and what’s in the package? Guess. He’s never bought a gun in his life, he wouldn’t think of it. He’s the gentlest soul you can imagine. He spends all his days in the New York Public Library doing research for professors, but when he comes out to go home what does he find in the litter basket? A gun among the orange peels, handle up. It’s crazy.”

“He wouldn’t have to accept them,” Elizabeth said.

“Why not? It’s fate.”

“Then what does he do with them?”

“Oh, stows them away.”

They were in the kitchen now. Timothy had forgotten all his caution; he dropped the gun in his pocket, carelessly, and then gave the pocket a pat. “We don’t mention this to Mother, you understand,” he said. “I come pistol-hunting before every visit, just to be on the safe side. Not that he would do anything. I don’t want you thinking — oh, there was a sort of accident once, someone got shot through the foot. But you’re an outsider here. You don’t know what Andrew’s really like. He felt terrible about it. He was just—”

“Oh, stop, I’m not interested,” Elizabeth said, although up till then she had been. She had the sudden feeling that troubles were being piled in front of her, huge untidy heaps laid at her feet, Emersons stepping back waiting for her to exclaim over the heaps and admire them. She headed out the back door, toward the toolshed. Timothy followed. When he came up beside her she saw that one of his pockets hung heavier than the other. She thought of an old Sunday comic strip: Dick Tracy’s crimestopper’s textbook, warning against men with lopsided overcoats. “You be careful you don’t get yourself arrested,” she told him. Then she reached inside the toolshed for a hoop of hose, closing the subject.

But Timothy said, “The worst is getting rid of the damn things. You’d never believe how hard it is. The last one I sent out with the garbage, under the coffee grounds. Elizabeth?”

“What,” said Elizabeth. She backed across the lawn, feeding out coils of hose.

“I cheated on a test.”

Another trouble, added to the heap. “Did you?” she said.

“This is serious, Elizabeth.”

“Well, why tell me about it?” she said. “It’s always something. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. Go tell a professor, if it bothers you so much.”

“I can’t,” Timothy said. “I’ve already been caught.”

Elizabeth looked over at him.

“I was just walking past his desk, after it was over. He said, ‘Emerson, I’d like to have a word with you,’ and I knew, right then. I knew what he would say. It felt as if my stomach had dropped out.”

“What will happen?” Elizabeth said.

“I’ll be expelled.”

“Well, maybe not.”

“Of course I will. Those guys are tough as nails. And you know something? I knew that answer I cheated on. I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt about it. I wrote it down, and I turned to my left, and I read off the other guy’s answer just as cool as you please. It was like I forgot where I was, suddenly. I forgot the customs of the country. I just wanted to see if Joe Barrett knew the answer too.”

“Maybe if you told them that,” Elizabeth said.

“Not a chance. It wouldn’t help.” He kicked at the hose. “Come on, will you? It’s getting to be lunchtime.”

“The grass is drying up. If I don’t—”

“Look,” said Timothy. “I’ve been walking around by myself ever since this happened. Can’t you just drop everything and come with me?”

“Oh well. All right. Let me go and tell your mother.”

“Call from my place. Don’t go back in, she already knows something is wrong. Oh Lord, this is going to kill her.”

“I doubt it,” said Elizabeth.

But she didn’t go back in, even so.

Timothy’s apartment was downtown, in a dingy building with a wrought-iron elevator. All the way up to his floor, with the cables creaking and jerking above them, Timothy stood in the corner staring at his shoes. His face reflected the bluish light, giving him a pale, sweaty look. His silence was heavy and brooding. But once they entered his apartment, where tall windows let the sun in, he seemed to change. “Well now,” he said. “What shall we eat?” And he went off to the little Pullman kitchen while Elizabeth settled herself on the couch. His apartment had a smothered look. It was curtained, carpeted, and upholstered until there were no sharp corners left, and in the evenings carefully arranged lamps threw soft, closed circles on the tabletops. Elizabeth felt out of place in it. She shucked off her moccasins and curled her legs beneath her, but everything she looked at was so padded and textured that she couldn’t keep her eyes on it long. Finally she closed them, and tipped her head back against the couch.

“Here,” said Timothy. “Corned beef on rye. That all right? Cold beer.”

“Well, thanks,” said Elizabeth, sitting up. She took the plate and peered between the slices of bread. “Corned beef is what we had two weeks ago. Is this the selfsame can?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you get food-poisoning from canned corned beef?”

But Timothy, in a chair opposite her with his sandwich halfway to his mouth, stared into space.

“Timothy.”

“What.”

“Look, it’s not so bad. Find something else to do.”

“Like what, for instance,” he said.

“Well, I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not? Say something, can’t you? Give me a treatise on reincarnation, convince me I’m full of lives and can afford to throw one away. Convince my mother too, while you’re at it.”

“Well, it is a point,” Elizabeth said.

“Ha.” He took a swig from his beer can. “Women have it easy,” he said. “You can work or not, nobody minds. Men are expected to be responsible. There’s no room for variation.”

“Maybe you should make a big switch. Lumberjack? Fur-trapper? Deck-swabber?”

“I could answer one of those DRAW ME ads on the matchbooks,” Timothy said. He laughed.

“You could be a state hog inspector.”

But then he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his sandwich still untasted. “I can’t seem to picture a future any more,” he told her. “There’s nothing I hope for. No one I want to be. Yet I started out so promising, would you believe it? In grade school they thought I was a genius. No one but Andrew even knew what I was talking about. I invented weird gadgets, I played chess tournaments, I monitored Stravinsky on an oscilloscope that I rebuilt myself. Did you know that?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t even know what an oscilloscope is.”

“Why is everything you say so inconsequential? Can’t you understand when something serious is going on?”

But it was hard to take him seriously when he looked so much like the child he had been talking about. There was one of him in every classroom Elizabeth had ever sat in — chubby and too clever, pale and scowling, wearing an old man’s suit and cracking elderly jokes that made his classmates uneasy. She could picture him scuffing around the playground with his hands in his pockets while the others chose up softball teams; his name would come up by default, at the end, and he would play miserably and dodge the ball when it crossed the plate and then hit some pathetic, ticked-off foul and fling his bat in a panic and run toward first base anyway, hunched and desperate, until the hoots and curses called him back. “Oh, aren’t you glad you’re not still there?” she asked suddenly, for in spite of the traces of that child on his face he had at least grown into his suit and his friends had grown into his jokes. He had passed the age for softball and learned when not to sling long words around. But Timothy, off on some track of his own, merely blinked.

“Elizabeth,” he said. “Don’t go home this weekend. Let’s take a trip together.”

“Oh, well, no.”

“We could start off for anywhere! Drive without a plan. Stop when we felt like it.” He paused, having just then heard her answer. “What’s the matter with you? You love sudden trips. Are you worried what people might think?”

“I just—”

“I never thought you would be, somehow.” He looked down at his sandwich, and began tearing pieces out of it and dropping them on his plate. “We would have separate rooms, of course,” he said.

“No, you see—”

“If that’s what’s bothering you.”

“No.”

The sandwich had turned into a pile of shreds. “Maybe you think — we wouldn’t have to have separate rooms,” he said. “I just meant — I don’t know what you expect of me. What do you want, anyway? What am I supposed to be doing? Just tell me, can’t you? I don’t know why I should be making such a mess of saying this.”

“Oh well, that’s all right,” Elizabeth said helplessly. What she wanted to say was, “Of course I’ll come.” When would she learn not to plan ahead, when always at the last minute she felt tugged by something different? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really would like to.”

“Or take me home with you.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Why not? If you want I could stay in a hotel, I wouldn’t be bothering your family then. Would that be better?”

“You see, Matthew is coming,” Elizabeth said.

He stared at her.

“I invited him.”

“But why Matthew? Why does he always keep popping up like this?”

“I like him,” she said. And she decided she’d better go on with what she had planned to tell him earlier: “While we’re on Matthew, Timothy, I thought I should say something about—”

“You are going to turn into a very objectionable old lady, Elizabeth. You know that. The opinionated kind. ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ every other sentence — it’s fine now, but wait a while. See how it sits on people when you’ve lost your looks and you’re croaking it out.”

“That is something to think about,” said Elizabeth, glad to change the subject.

“Call up Matthew. Tell him I’m the one that needs to go.”

“Timothy, I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning and every single minute there’s been some Emerson dumping crisises on me.”

“Crises,” Timothy said into his beer can.

“Picking and bickering and arguing. Raking up all these disasters and piling them in front of me. Well, I’ve had my quota. I don’t want any more. I’m going to call your mother, and then I’m going off for an afternoon on my own and not coming back till supper.”

“Wait, Elizabeth—”

But she left. She went into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, and lifted the telephone from the table. Then she couldn’t remember Mrs. Emerson’s number. All this chaos was disrupting her mind. There were tatters of old arguments in the air around her, and she had a restless, hanging-back feeling as if there were something she had not done well. She listened to the dial tone droning in her ear and watched Timothy pace back and forth in the living room with his eyes averted, his face pink and rumpled-looking. Then Mrs. Emerson’s number flashed before her, and she leaned forward to dial.

The telephone rang four times. (Was Mrs. Emerson in some new frenzy, twirling through the house wringing her hands and far too upset to answer?) The fifth ring was cut off in the middle. “Hello!” Mrs. Emerson said.

“It’s Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth, where are you? There’s a man here delivering big sacks of something.”

“Oh, that’ll be the lime.”

“What will I do with it? Where will I tell him to put it? I thought you were around the house somewhere.”

“The lime goes in the toolshed,” Elizabeth said. “I’m at lunch. I may be late getting back, I’m spending the afternoon downtown.”

“Downtown? What — and I can’t find Timothy. One minute he was here and the — now, don’t take all afternoon, Elizabeth.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Bye.”

She hung up. Timothy was leaning against the doorframe, watching her. “Now call Matthew,” he said.

“I’m through with that subject.”

“That’s what you think.”

He took a step back and slammed the door between them, with a noise that shook the room. She heard the key in the lock. “Call him!” he shouted from the other side.

“Oh, for—”

She stood up and went to try the door. It was firmly locked. Timothy was standing so close behind it that she heard his breath, which came in short puffs. “Timothy,” she said. He didn’t answer. She gave the door a kick and then turned an oval knob at eye level that locked it from inside — a useless move, but the final-sounding click was a satisfaction. Then she flung herself on the bed again and lay back to stare at the ceiling.

When she had been there a few minutes she began to see some humor in the situation. She got off the bed and circled the room, stopping to look out the window. “I’m stripping your bed, Timothy,” she called. “Now I’m tying the sheets together. Now I’m tying the blankets. I’m knotting them to the headboard, I’m hanging them out the window. Whee! Down I go.”

Timothy said nothing. She imagined him waiting aimlessly, feeling sillier by the minute but unable to back down.

She went over to the bureau, found two military brushes, and brushed her hair with both at once. She picked up a textbook and went back to the bed with it and looked at a diagram of the circulatory system. There seemed no point in memorizing it. She went through her pockets, hoping to find something time-consuming — a scrap of sandpaper, maybe. Timothy’s windowsill was scarred and peeling. But all she came up with was a rubber band, an unwrapped stick of chewing gum, six wooden matches and an envelope flap with a number on it. The rubber band she flipped into a light fixture on the ceiling, and the gum she dusted off and popped into her mouth. The matches she struck one by one on the windowsill and then held in her fingers, testing to see if telepathy could make a flame go out before it burned her. It couldn’t. She was relieved to see the flickering knot of blue proceed steadily downward, unaffected by anything so insubstantial as her thought waves, which flickered also, veering from the match in her hand to the silent figure behind the door. When she had blown the last match out, and wiped the sting from her fingers, she dialed the number on the envelope flap. “Hardware,” a man said. She dialed again, choosing the numbers at random. “I’m sorry, we are unable to complete your call as dialed,” someone told her disapprovingly. “Please hang up and dial again, or ask your operator for assistance. This is a—” Elizabeth slammed the receiver down. “Timothee,” she said, in the tone she might use for the cat, “I’m ready to come out now.”

“Did you call Matthew?”

She blew a strand of hair out of her face and tried another number. This time she hit on one that existed. A woman said, “Hello? Barker residence.”

“Oh, Mrs. Barker,” Elizabeth said, shifting her chewing gum to the back of one cheek. “This is Miss Pleasance calling, from Baltimore Gas and Electric? Your name has been referred to us for an in-depth study. Would you care to answer a question?”

“Why, surely,” Mrs. Barker said.

“Could you tell me if—”

“But first, I want to say that I just love the little leaflets you send out. The ones with the bills? Your recipe-of-the-month is especially helpful and of course I’m always interested to see what new appliances are out. Why, every time the bill comes I just sit right down and read every word.”

“You do?”

“Oh, my yes. And try the recipes. Living on a budget, you know, I especially appreciate those meals-in-a-skillet. Rice and what-not. Of course my husband prefers straight meat. ‘I’m a meat-and-potatoes man,’ he says, but I say, ‘Joe, you supply the money and then I’ll supply the meat. Until then,’ I say, ‘it’s meals-in-a-skillet for you, my friend.’ Well, he’s very good-natured about it.”

“Mrs. Barker,” Elizabeth said, “is your—”

“One thing I might mention, though—”

“Is your refrigerator running, Mrs. Barker?”

“Oh, you’re preparing for summer, aren’t you. I read what the leaflet said about summer: don’t leave your icebox door open and then come crying to us if the bill is high. Well, you don’t have to worry, Miss Pleasance. I know how you people are working to save us money and I do try to co-operate in every way I can. One thing I might mention, though, is the amount you depend on tomato sauce in your recipes. I wouldn’t bring it up except you did ask, and I feel it might be helpful for you to know. My husband doesn’t like tomato sauce. He says it’s too acid. I don’t know about other families, maybe they love tomato sauce, but it’s something for you people to think over. Have you considered chicken broth? Look, I’m so glad you called. Any time, any questions at all, you just feel free to give me a ring. I’m home all day. I don’t go out much. We just moved here and we don’t find Baltimore very friendly, although I hope I’m not stepping on your toes when I say that. But I just know we’ll settle in. And I take a great deal of pride in my home and feel sure I could tell you just anything you want to know about the typical housewife’s opinions. Are you concerned about your meter-reading service?”

“Well, not just now,” Elizabeth said.

“Any time you are, then—”

“Fine,” said Elizabeth. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Barker.”

“You’re very welcome.”

Elizabeth hung up. “Oh, my,” she said, and pressed her index fingers to her eyelids. Then she rose and went over to the door. She knocked. “Timothy, I want to come out,” she said.

“Did you call Matthew?”

“This is getting silly.”

“Call Matthew.”

She went back to the telephone. With the receiver to her ear she stared vacantly out the window a minute, popping her chewing gum, and then she smiled. She dialed the operator. “I’d like to make a long-distance call,” she said, “to Ellington, North Carolina. Person-to-person. First class. Any other special charges you can think of.” Then she settled back, still smiling, unraveling a thread from the ribbing of one sock.

It was her mother who answered. “Oh, Elizabeth, what now,” she said.

“What?”

“Aren’t you calling to put off your visit again?”

“Not that I know of,” Elizabeth said.

“What is it, then?”

“I’m just saying hello.”

“Oh. Hello,” her mother said. “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

“Nice to hear yours.”

“Do you have enough money to be spending it like this?”

“That’s no problem,” Elizabeth said. “How is everything? Everybody fine? Spring there yet? Trees in bloom?”

“Well, of course,” said her mother. “Bloomed and finished. You’re using up your three minutes, Elizabeth.”

“How’s that dog getting along? Pop used to her yet?”

“You know he doesn’t like you calling him Pop.”

“Sorry. Well. Is Dommie still hanging around?”

“Elizabeth, that’s the saddest thing. I told you how often he’s asked after you, well, then Sunday he came to church with a red-headed girl. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, she could have been his cousin or something. But now what I hear: they’re engaged. Planning a fall wedding. Well, I suppose you could care less, I know you’re bringing home some Baltimore boy, but I always hoped, don’t you know, just way in the back of my—”

Oh, Dommie was good for a full fifteen minutes. Elizabeth stretched out on the bedspread and listened, every nowc and then sliding in a question to keep the flow going. When that was exhausted they talked about her father. (“I feel I ought to warn you,” her mother said, “that he looks upon this visit as a sign of some turning point in your faith. What are you laughing at? I won’t have you hurt his feelings for the world. He expects you to have changed some, and if you haven’t I don’t want to hear about it.”) Then Polly’s new baby. (“Her hair is brown, and I believe it’s going to curl. I’m so glad she has some, I never could warm to a bald-headed baby. Her eyes are a puzzle to me. They’re blue but may be turning, there’s that sort of opaque look beginning around the—”) Once, in mid-sentence, the bedroom doorknob rattled. What would happen if she said, “Excuse me, Mother, but I just wanted to say that I’ve been taken prisoner”? The connecting of her two worlds by a single wire made her feel disoriented, but when her mother ran out of conversation Elizabeth said, “Wait, don’t hang up. Isn’t anyone else there who would like to talk?”

“Have you lost all common sense? How much is this going to cost you?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

But she found out, as soon as the call was finished. She dialed the operator, who said, “Eight-sixty,” and then “Ma’am?” when Elizabeth laughed. “Ho there, Timothy,” she said. “Can you hear me? I just made an eight-sixty phone call.”

Silence.

“Timothy? Now I’m going to call California station-to-station. I’m going to tell some store they delivered the wrong package, and get switched from department to department to—”

Something was thrown against the door. Then he kicked the door until it shook, and then he turned the key and rattled the knob. It was still locked from inside, but Elizabeth didn’t open it. “Damn it, let me in,” he said.

“You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” she told him.

“Do I have to break the door down? I want to talk to you.”

“Say please.”

“I’m warning you, Elizabeth.”

“Pretty please?”

There was a pause. Then he said, “I’m pointing a gun at you.”

“Ho ho, I’m scared stiff.”

“I’m pointing Andrew’s gun. I’ll shoot straight through the door.”

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Elizabeth said. The whole situation was getting out of hand. She slid off the bed and went over to open the door. “You’re lucky I’m not the hysterical type,” she said, brushing past him. “How do you know that’s not loaded? Put it down. Send it out with the garbage.”

She stopped off by the couch to slip into her moccasins, and then she headed out to the entrance hall. It was a pity she had no money; she would have to thumb her way home. Or take a taxi, and have Mrs. Emerson pay for it.

Behind her there was a click, a metallic, whanging sound. She wheeled around.

“Stop there,” Timothy said.

But it wasn’t at her the gun was pointing, it was at himself, at an upward angle near the center of his chest. His wrist was turned in a sharp, awkward twist. “Timothy Emerson,” she said. “Did you just pull that trigger? What if there’d been bullets in it? Of all the—”

“No,” Timothy said, “I think I took the safety catch off.”

She started walking toward him, slowly and steadily. Timothy kept his eyes fixed on her. His hand was shaking; she saw a glimmer trembling on the gun barrel. “Stop there,” he said. But an edge of something was moving into his face, and she could tell that in a moment there would be a shift in the way he saw all this: he would laugh. Didn’t he always laugh? So she kept chewing her gum all the way across the room, the eternal handyman, unafraid. “This family is going to drive me up a wall someday,” she told him. “What did you do before I came along? What will you do when I’m gone?” Then she lunged.

Her hand closed on his. She felt the short blond hairs prickling her palm. There was an explosion that seemed to come from somewhere else, from inside or behind him, and Timothy looked straight at her with a face full of surprise and then slid sideways to the floor.