The Clock Winder

9. 1963

The trouble began on a Sunday morning in June. Margaret woke early, before her husband. She lay in bed feeling pleasantly hungry but too lazy to do anything about it, and she spent some time making pictures out of a complicated crack in the ceiling while she tried to remember a dream she had had. None of it came back to her. Only vague sensations — the smell of parsley in a brown paper bag, the feel of some rough fabric against her cheek. Then the crack in the ceiling dimmed, and she found herself looking directly into the face of her first husband. He was laughing at something she had just said. His black eyes were narrowed and sparkling; his mouth was open, lengthening his pointed chin. He had the carelessly put together look that is often found in very young boys. While she watched he stopped laughing and grew serious, but deliberately, exaggerating the effort, making a mockery of it, as if the laughter were still bubbling within him. He pretended to frown. All she saw in his eyes was love.

She buried her face in her pillow and started crying. Beside her, Brady stirred, and a minute later he had propped himself on one elbow and was trying to turn her over. “Margaret? Margaret?” he said. She kept her face in the pillow. She cried on and on, while Brady first asked questions and then watched helplessly. When her tears seemed to be used up, she stopped. She sat against the headboard and brushed away the damp hair that was plastered to her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“You don’t know? You’ve been crying for a quarter of an hour.”

“It must have been a bad dream,” Margaret said.

She watched him pacing the bedroom in his striped pajamas — a big, square, red-headed man with a kind face that screwed up into question marks when he was puzzled. In the sunlight, his hair turned orange and his eyelashes were white. He laid a hand on her forehead. “You sure you feel all right,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“I think you have a fever.”

“That’s just from crying,” Margaret said. Then she reached for a Kleenex and got up to fix Sunday breakfast.

He kept a close eye on her all that day, and every time she caught him looking at her she smiled. By evening he seemed satisfied that she was all right again. He might have forgotten all about it, if it weren’t that from then on — every two or three days, just when neither of them were expecting it — the tears returned. She would be breaking an egg into a frying pan, and all of a sudden her face would crumple and she would sink into the nearest chair. “Margaret?” Brady said. “Honey? What’s wrong?” She never told him. She didn’t know what was wrong. Why should Jimmy Joe come back like this? (Even his name seemed unrelated to her.) Why just now, when she was finally settled and happy and in love with someone who loved her back? She kept picturing Jimmy Joe’s ducktail haircut, and the baggy, gray delivery coat he had worn the first time they met. Pieces of their apartment would suddenly appear before her — a dusty basement room in which they had lived out the five weeks of their marriage. Antimacassars on the sagging chairs, red checked oilcloth thumbtacked to the table. Turning the page of a book, she would see instead Jimmy Joe’s bony, childish hands, with the nails bitten and the shiny new wedding ring much too loose once it got past the bulge of his knuckle. She ate breakfast staring blurrily at the sugarbowl, which had turned into the music box he brought her in a Kresge bag the night that they eloped. Subway wheels spun out the sound of his reedy voice, mocking lady customers, asking Little Moron riddles, telling her he loved her. “Honey? Honey?” Brady said. She looked at him from a distance, unable to remember for a moment what he had to do with her.

She gave him lists of reasons to explain away the tears. She had a headache. She had her period. She must be coming down with something. Brady didn’t listen. He watched her constantly, wearing on her nerves until she snapped at him, which made her feel terrible and then she started crying all over again for a different reason. If she said what was in her mind, he would think she had stopped loving him. She kept it to herself. She began watching him as closely as he watched her. They were so careful of each other, so quick to protect each other, that even while she slept Margaret was conscious of a tense alertness arching between them in the dark. She would wake and reach toward his hand, or move to lay her head on his shoulder, and then stop herself. Let him sleep. One touch and he would spring awake, asking, “Are you all right? Are you happy?”

Over and over, Margaret’s mother clicked through a long-ago shaft of sunlight in the basement room. She wore a cream wool dress. She lifted an antimacassar to stare at it and then plunked it down again, lopsided. “Margaret darling,” she said, “I’m sure you think you’re in love. But you’re only children! If it were really love would you be doing things this way — hidey-corner, fly-by-night?” And Margaret was crumbling, particle by particle, inch by inch, while she waited for Jimmy Joe to make a stand for her. He didn’t. He never said a word. He sat on the arm of a chair with one sneaker propped on a radiator. His shoulders were hunched, his elbows were close to his sides, he chewed on a thumbnail and looked up at Mrs. Emerson beneath eyebrows that met in the middle. Other images — the music box, their dimestore goldfish, the pack of Marlboros by Jimmy Joe’s side of the bed — came and went fleetingly, sometimes no more than once. The scene with her mother returned, and remained, and left only to return again. Mrs. Emerson’s kid shoe prodded an issue of House Beautiful. Jimmy Joe chewed his thumbnail and did nothing, said nothing, allowed Margaret to be taken away from him and never saw her again.

“What you need is a trip somewhere,” Brady said. She started to disagree. Travel? When even in her own apartment she was feeling torn out by the roots? But then she saw his face, which was strained and tired. “You’re probably right,” she told him. They dragged out road maps and travel brochures and puzzled over where to go. No place looked just right. Finally they flew to California to visit friends, and they spent a week lying on beaches and smiling at each other too often. Brady got sunburned. His back peeled, his nose was bright pink, but there were still smudges beneath his eyes. And Margaret sat on a towel in a black bathing suit, her skin eternally a pasty white, and imagined Jimmy Joe stalking toward her across the sand. She began to feel angry; the anger was so strong it caused ripples in everything she looked at. Why was Jimmy Joe doing this to her? If he was going to hang around then why hadn’t he stuck up for her all those years ago, when she needed him? She could feel the hurt and the shock all over again; she could see her mother repacking her clothes while Margaret herself stood numbly by. “This we can just leave behind, I believe,” her mother said, and she lifted a black lace nightgown between thumb and forefinger and let it slip to the closet floor.

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

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

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

“Are you saying you’re going alone?”

“Well, I thought, you know—”

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

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

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

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

“Well, sure.”

“But I can’t find Ellington.”

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

“Won’t I be in the way?”

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

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

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

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

“Elizabeth Abbott. Remember her?”

“No.”

“Elizabeth. Mother’s Elizabeth.”

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

“No, someone named Whitehill.”

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

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

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

“What for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Margaret, what in the world?”

“Drive, will you?”

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

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

“Oh, don’t be silly.”

“Well, what, then?”

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

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

“I just keep having these crying spells.”

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

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

“But not unreasonable crying,” Margaret said.

Melissa only shrugged and passed another car.

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

“Roll down the windows,” Margaret told her.

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

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

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

“He would be at work.”

“Do you suppose he knows about Elizabeth?”

Melissa didn’t answer.

“Do you?”

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

“Well, maybe not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s ridiculous,” Margaret said.

“I’m just saying what he told me.”

“Well, don’t.”

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

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

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

“Oh, stop,” said Margaret.

After that, they ate in silence.

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

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

“All right.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, don’t do that.”

“Why not? I have to eat myself.”

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

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

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

“Yes, thank you,” said Margaret.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where do you work?” Margaret asked.

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

“Do many people buy them?”

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

“It’s different from being a handyman,” Margaret said.

“Yes.”

“Did you like that job?”

“Oh, yes.”

But she didn’t say anything more about it. She hadn’t even asked how Margaret’s family was, and Margaret didn’t want to bring them up on her own.

The whole of that evening, as it turned out, was centered on packing. Elizabeth packed the strangest things. Five cardboard boxes were filled with broken odds and ends — cabinet knobs, empty spools, lengths of wire, wooden finials. “What are they for?” Margaret asked, and Elizabeth said, “I may want to make something out of them.” She dumped a handful of clock parts into a suitcase, and folded yards and yards of burlap down on top of them. Margaret watched in a beery haze. She was never able to remember much of her visit later — only in patches, out of chronological order. She remembered Elizabeth striding through a jumble of paint cans, munching on a hamburger. And her own trips from couch to refrigerator, and back to the couch with another beer. She sat in a slumped position, like something washed up on a beach and left to dry out and recover. Her shoes were abandoned on the rug; her dress became sprinkled with breadcrumbs and sawdust and bits of potato chips. “Oh, I feel so relaxed,” she said once, and Elizabeth stopped work to laugh at her. “You look it,” she said.

“I’ll never get up for the wedding tomorrow. Are there going to be many guests?”

“No. I don’t know. Just whoever they invited.”

“Why was I invited?” Margaret said — something she never would have asked sober. But Elizabeth didn’t seem to mind. She straightened up from a pile of books, thought a while, and then said, “I don’t know,” and went back to work again. Margaret decided it was better than a lot of answers she could have been given.

Twice some people stopped by — a married couple with a gift, two boys with a bottle of champagne. The couple stayed only a minute and kissed Elizabeth when they left. The boys sat down for a beer. Margaret couldn’t remember seeing them go.

And meanwhile Elizabeth worked steadily on, clearing the room. Her clothes were the last thing she packed. She threw them into a steamer trunk and slammed the lid. “Done,” she said.

“How are you getting all this to Ellington?” Margaret asked.

“Dommie will move it in a truck, later on.”

“Dommie? Oh. You haven’t said anything about him,” Margaret said. “What’s he like? What’s he do?”

“He’s a pharmacist. He’s taking over his father’s drugstore.”

“Well, that’ll be nice.”

“How’s your family?” Elizabeth asked suddenly.

“They’re fine.”

“Everything going all right? Everyone the same as usual?”

“Oh, yes.”

Margaret’s mind was still on Dommie, trying to picture him. It wasn’t until several minutes later that Elizabeth’s questions sunk in. Had she wanted to hear about Matthew? There was no way of knowing. By then Elizabeth was making up the daybed, moving around with sheets and army blankets while Margaret watched dimly and sipped the last can of beer. “On the way down here,” Margaret said finally, “we passed so close to Matthew’s house I was tempted to stop in and see him.”

Elizabeth folded the daybed cover, slowly and silently.

“He never married, you know,” Margaret told her.

But all Elizabeth said was, “Didn’t he?” Then she put a pillowcase on a pillow and laid it at the head of the daybed. “Well, here’s where you sleep.”

“How about you?” Margaret said.

“I have a sleeping bag.”

She brought it out from the closet and unrolled it — a red one, so new that a label still dangled from the zipper-pull. “We’re supposed to go camping on our honeymoon,” she said.

“But you can’t just sleep on the floor. Why don’t we change places? You need to rest up for tomorrow.”

“I don’t mind the floor, it’s the ground that’s going to bother me,” Elizabeth said. “Old roots and stobs and crackling leaves.”

“Why are you going, then?”

“Dommie likes nature.”

“Doesn’t the bride have some say?”

“I did. I chose camping,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t know Dommie. He’s so sweet. He makes you want to give him things.”

“Well, still—”

“You want first go at the bathroom?”

“Oh. All right.”

She had thought she would fall into a stupor the minute she was in bed, but she didn’t. She lay on her back in the dark, watching the windowpane pattern that slanted across the ceiling. Music and faint voices drifted over from the main house. A screen door slammed; crickets chirped. On the floor Elizabeth breathed evenly, asleep or at least very relaxed, as if tomorrow were any ordinary day. Her white pajamas showed up blurred and gray — the same pajamas, probably, that she had worn back in Baltimore. There they had slept in Margaret’s old twin beds, with fragments of Margaret’s childhood lining the bookshelves and stuffed in the closet. And she had lain awake, just as now. She had been going over and over Timothy’s death — not yet wondering why he died, or picturing how, but just trying to realize that she would never again set eyes on him. Tonight he seemed faded and distant. The sadness that washed over her wasn’t because she missed him but because she didn’t miss him; he was so long ago, so forgotten, a tiny bright figure waving pathetically a long way off while his family moved on without him. They were caught up in things he had never imagined. He had never met Brady, or Mary’s daughters, or Peter’s strange girlfriend. And he wouldn’t know what to make of it if he could see her here, in a garage in North Carolina the night before Elizabeth’s wedding.

She flowed from Timothy to Jimmy Joe, to what would happen if he should see her here. Anywhere she went, after all, it was possible to run into him. Anywhere but Baltimore — he must surely have moved on. Maybe to New York, to materialize beside her at a counter in Bloomingdale’s. Maybe to that beach in California. Maybe to Raleigh. He would come sauntering down the street with his windbreaker collar turned up, soundlessly whistling. His eyes would flick over her, veer away, and then return. “Oh,” he would say, and she would stop beside him, poised to rush on to somewhere important as soon as she had said hello. “How are you?” she would ask him, smiling a social smile. “Oh, how could you just let me go, as if five weeks of me were all you wanted?”

She saw his mouth starting to frame an answer. His lips were slightly chapped, his shoulders were thin and high, and his hands were knotted in his windbreaker pockets. This time when the tears came she thought of them as a continuation, interrupted on some days by dry-eyed periods. She rolled to a sitting position, disguising her sniffs as long deep breaths, and reached for her purse at the foot of the bed. Beneath the window, Elizabeth stirred.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

She must have been awake all along; her voice was firm and clear.

Margaret said, “No, I think it’s an allergy.” She fumbled for a Kleenex. Then she said, “I seem to keep having these crying spells.” “Anything I can get you?” “No, thank you.”

“Well, if you should think of something.”

“I’m really very happy,” Margaret said. “I’m not just saying that. I felt so happy. Everything was going so well. Now all of a sudden I’ve started thinking about my first husband, someone I don’t even love any more.”

“Oh, well, he’ll go away again,” Elizabeth said.

Margaret stopped in the middle of refolding a Kleenex and looked over at her. All she saw was a dim gray blur.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Nobody does. I keep remembering things I’d forgotten. I keep thinking about the last time I saw him, when my mother walked in and just took me away and he never said a word.”

“Took you away? How did she do that?”

“Just — oh, and he allowed it. I’ve never been so mistaken about anyone in my life. She packed me off to an aunt in Chicago. But do you think he even lifted a finger?”

“How did she find you?” Elizabeth asked.

“I’d written her a note once we got settled, telling her not to worry.”

“But took you away! She’s so little.”

Through her tears, Margaret laughed. “No, not by force,” she said. “She didn’t drag me out by the hair or anything.”

“How, then?”

“Oh, well—” Margaret stared past Elizabeth and out the window, where the sky was a deep, blotting-paper blue. Her tears had stopped. She zipped her purse and set it at the foot of the bed. “I feel much better now,” she said. “I hope I didn’t keep you from sleeping.”

Elizabeth said nothing. Margaret lay down and watched the ceiling. It tilted a little from all the beer she had drunk. She was conscious of an alert, unsettled silence — Elizabeth still wakeful, still not saying, “That’s all right,” or, “This could happen to anyone,” or some other soothing remark to round off the conversation. “You must think our family is pretty crazy,” Margaret said after a while.

“More or less.”

It wasn’t the answer she had expected. “They aren’t really,” she said, too loudly. Then she sighed and said, “Oh well, I guess they could wear on your nerves quite a bit.”

Elizabeth stayed quiet.

“Dragging you into all our troubles that way. It must—”

“Ha,” said Elizabeth.

“What?”

“They didn’t drag me in, they wanted me for an audience.” She clipped off the ends of her words, as if she were angry. “I finally saw that,” she said. “I was hired to watch. I couldn’t have helped if I’d tried. I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Oh no, I think Mother just liked having you around,” Margaret said.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“But I don’t see what you’re saying.”

“They were always asking me to do something,” Elizabeth said. “Step in. Take some action, pour out some feeling. And when I didn’t, they got mad. Then once, one time, I did do something. And what a mess. It was like I’d blundered onto the stage in the middle of a play. What a mess it made!”

“I think you must be talking about Timothy,” Margaret said.

Elizabeth only rolled over and plumped her pillow up.

“But you didn’t do anything,” Margaret said. “Nobody thinks you’re to blame.”

“Talk to your mother about that.”

“Why? Because she never kept in touch? Well, you have to see that—she just doesn’t want to be reminded. If there’s anyone she blames it’s herself.”

“Not that I ever heard,” Elizabeth said.

“She blames herself for telling Timothy that you were taking Matthew home with you.”

“Well, she — what?” Elizabeth sat up. “When did she tell him that?”

“Before he left the house, I guess,” Margaret said. “That morning. She says she should have let you do it, however you were planning to.”

“Before he left with me? Before we went to his place?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“He knew all along, then,” Elizabeth said. “All the while he was asking to come with me. He planned it that way. He was trying to make me feel bad.”

“Maybe so,” said Margaret. “Anyway, I don’t know how—”

“If I never see another Emerson in all my life,” Elizabeth said, “I’ll die happy.”

Which should have hurt Margaret’s feelings, but it didn’t. She was feeling too sleepy. Sleep took her by surprise, dropping the bottom out of her mind, and suddenly she was blinking and floating, losing track of what they were talking about, spinning off into blurry unrelated thoughts. She was barely conscious of the sound of a match striking. She heard Elizabeth inhaling on a cigarette and crumpling cellophane — wakeful, daytime sounds, but they only made her sink further away. She slept deeply, feeling trustful and protected, as if Elizabeth sitting alert on the floor were a sentry who would keep watch for her through the night.

The wedding was held in a red brick church in the middle of nowhere. Elizabeth directed Margaret there, along glaring highways. She wore her jeans, and her hair was not combed; it blew out like a haystack in the wind. She was going to change at her parents’ house, she said. In the back seat were her suitcase and her sleeping bag. A linen suit hung from a hook by the window. “Oh, you’re not wearing a long dress,” Margaret said. “No,” said Elizabeth. All her answers this morning were brief and vague. Her mind must be on the wedding. She watched the road with narrow gray eyes that looked nearly white in the sunlight. Her face was calm and expressionless, and her hands, curled around her pocketbook, remained perfectly still.

“Here’s where my family lives,” she said finally, and Margaret pulled over to the side of the road. The driveway was choked with cars, each one crinkling the air with heat waves. A woman stood on the cement stoop of the ranch-house, and as soon as the car doors opened she called, “Happy wedding day, honey!” and started down the steps. Margaret hung back, although it was she who carried the white suit. She hated to be the only stranger in someone’s family gathering. “I’ll just go straight to the church,” she told Elizabeth.

“Come in, if you want to.”

“No, I’ll just—”

She pushed the suit on top of Elizabeth’s sleeping bag and turned toward the church, barely taking time to wave at the woman. It must have been Elizabeth’s mother. She was saying, “You haven’t got much time, honey. Oh! Won’t your friend stay? Mrs. Howard’s already at the organ, you can hear her if you’ll listen. Your flowers are in the icebox but don’t you dare get them out till the very last thing, you know how they’ll — where are your shoes, Elizabeth? Are you planning to get married in moccasins?” If Elizabeth said anything, Margaret didn’t hear her.

She walked along the highway to the church, which had only one car in front of it and a Sunday school bus to the side. Although she felt awkward going in so early, it was too hot to stand out in the sun. She climbed the steps and entered through the arched door. Inside, she smelled lemon oil and hymn books. The light was so dim that she stood in the back of the nave for a moment, blinking and widening her eyes, listening to the organ music that wound its way down from the choir loft. The pews were empty, their backs long polished slashes. In front of the altar was a spray of white flowers. The windows were rose-colored and stippled with asterisks. Margaret crossed to the nearest one and opened the lower pane. Then she sat down in the pew beneath it, but still no breeze came to cool her. She picked up a cardboard fan stapled to a popsicle stick and stirred the warm air before her face.

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

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

“Oh, good,” said Margaret.

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

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

“Why is that?” Margaret asked.

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

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

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

The organ started up, louder this time. What it played was not the traditional march, but then it couldn’t be what Margaret thought it was either — the wedding music from Lieutenant Kije. She looked around her; no one else seemed to find anything funny. She looked toward the aisle and saw a frilly blonde in pink — Elizabeth’s sister, it must be, but softer and prettier — keeping pace with some more dignified music in her head and carrying a nosegay. Behind her came Elizabeth, on the arm of a young man whom Margaret assumed to be the brother-in-law. Elizabeth’s white suit was crisp and trim, but without her dungarees she seemed to lose all her style. She walked as if her shoes were too big for her. A short veil stuck out around her face like a peasant’s kerchief. Her escort scowled at the carpet, but Elizabeth’s face was serene and the music had brought out one of her private half-smiles. They passed Margaret and continued forward, beyond a multitude of flowered hats and whisking fans.

When everyone was in place, Margaret sat back and wiped her damp palms on her skirt. “Things are going to be all right, I believe,” the fat lady whispered. Margaret watched Elizabeth’s father open his black book and carefully lay aside a ribbon marker. “Dearly beloved …” he said. He was one of those ministers who develop a whole new tone of voice in front of a congregation. His words rolled over each other, hollow and doomed. Margaret forgot to listen and watched Elizabeth’s straight white back.

But Elizabeth wasn’t listening either. The moment her father started reading she turned toward Dommie, as if the ceremony were some commercial she already knew by heart. She spoke, not whispering but in a low, clear voice. Margaret was too far away to hear what she said. Dommie turned toward Elizabeth and parted his lips; Elizabeth waited, but when he said nothing she went on speaking. Her father’s voice crashed above their heads, unnoticed.

Now no one was listening. Everyone watched Elizabeth. Whispers traveled down the pews. “You would think just this once—” the fat lady said. Even Elizabeth’s father seemed to have stopped hearing what he was saying. He spoke with his eyes on Elizabeth, his finger traveling lower on the page, line by line, without his following it. He was going faster and faster, as if he were running some sort of race. “Do you, Dominick Benjamin …” Dommie’s face turned reluctantly from Elizabeth. “I do,” he said, after a pause. He had the strained, preoccupied look of someone interrupted in the middle of more important things. “Do you, Elizabeth Priscilla …”

Elizabeth’s pause was even longer. A fly spiraled toward the ceiling; someone coughed. Elizabeth drew herself up until she was straight and thin, with her elbows pressed to her sides and her feet close together.

“I don’t,” she said.

No one breathed. Elizabeth’s father snapped his book shut.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t,” she said.

Then she turned around, and the organ gave a start and wheezed into Lieutenant Kije again. Elizabeth came down the aisle slowly and steadily with her nosegay held exactly right and her head perfectly level. Oh, why didn’t she just turn and run out that little door at the front? How could she bear to travel all that long way by herself? Margaret thought of leaping up and shouting something, anything, just to pull people’s eyes from Elizabeth. But she didn’t. She stayed silent. After one glance at Dommie, frozen before the pulpit, she stared down the aisle as hard as anyone.

It took several minutes for people to realize what had happened. They just sat there — even the fat lady. Then the organ dwindled out in the middle of a note, and whispers and rustles started up. Mrs. Abbott rose and marched firmly toward her husband. She looped one arm through his and the other through Dommie’s, and led them back out the little door.

“Did you ever?” all the women were asking, rising and clustering together. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?” the fat lady said. “I always did want to see somebody do that,” a man told Margaret. She smiled and sidled out of the pew. In the doorway, Elizabeth’s sister stood circled by more flowered hats. She looked dazed. “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand,” she kept saying. A woman with feather earrings said, “Now tell me this, Polly. Had they had a little quarrel or something?”

“Dommie wouldn’t quarrel,” an old lady said.

“Did they—”

“She told us she’d changed her mind,” Polly said. “Told us just as we left the house. Father said no. He said, ‘Liz, now all the guests are here,’ he said, ‘and you owe them a wedding,’ and she said, ‘Well, all right, if a wedding’s what you want.’ But we never thought, I mean, we thought she meant — and Father said she was sure to feel differently, once she was standing at the altar.”

“Well, of course. Of course she would,” someone said. “All brides get cold feet.”

“That’s what he told her,” Polly said. “ ‘And they forget about it an hour later,’ he told her, but Liz said, ‘How do you know? Maybe they’re just saying that, and they regret it all their lives. It’s a conspiracy,’ she said — oh, but still I never thought — Mother asked if there were anyone else. I mean, anyone, you know, but she said no, and you could tell she meant it, she looked so surprised—”

“Excuse me,” Margaret said. She slid sideways through the crowd until she reached the front steps. Then she shaded her eyes and looked all around her. The sun had bleached everything — the grass, the walk, the highway — but in all that whiteness there was no sign of Elizabeth’s wedding suit. She had vanished. All she had left behind were two high-heeled shoes placed neatly side by side on the bottom step.

Margaret walked to her car very slowly. She wanted to give Elizabeth a chance to catch her, in case she needed a ride. But no one called her name. By the time she reached the highway she was feeling a letdown. Now I suppose I’ll never hear from her again, she thought, I’ll never know how this turned out. Then she opened her car door, and there was Elizabeth on the front seat.

She was slouched so far down that she couldn’t be seen from outside, but she didn’t have a fugitive look. She seemed flattened, exhausted, as if her sitting so low were merely poor posture. “Hi there,” she said.

“Elizabeth!”

“You think you could get me out of here?”

Margaret slid in and slammed the door and started the car, all in one motion. When she pulled onto the highway she left streaks of rubber. Anyone watching would have known it was a get-away car. “Elizabeth,” she said, “are you all right?”

“More or less,” said Elizabeth.

But from the stoniness of her face, Margaret guessed that she wanted to be left in peace.

They flew down the highway, across mirages of water that streaked its surface. Margaret wanted to make sure where they were going, but she was afraid to break the silence. Then they entered Ellington, and Elizabeth sat up straighter and looked out the window. “There’s where I went voting,” she said.

“Boating?” Margaret asked. There was no water anywhere, but she couldn’t believe that Elizabeth would mention voting at a time like this.

“Voting. Voting,” said Elizabeth. “Polly’s husband said I ought to.” She sighed and trailed a hand out the window. “There were all these people lined up. Shopkeepers and housewives and people, just waiting and waiting. So responsible. I bet you anything they wait like that every voting day, and put in their single votes that hardly matter and go back to their jobs and do the same chores over and over. Just on and on. Just plodding along. Just getting through till they die. You have to admire that. Don’t you? Before then I never thought of it.”

“I admire you,” Margaret said.

“What for?” said Elizabeth, absently. “But when I was waiting to vote I thought, Wouldn’t you think I could do that much? Make some decisions? Get my life in order? Let my parents breathe easy for once? Well, I tried, and you see what happened. Just before the finish line I think no, what if I’m making a mistake? Sometimes I worry that everyone but me knows something I don’t know: they set out their lives without wondering, as if they had a few extras stashed away somewhere. Well, I’ve tried to believe it, but I can’t. Things are so permanent. There’s damage you can’t repair.”

“But it took a lot of courage, doing what you did today,” Margaret said.

“Flashes of courage are easy,” said Elizabeth, with her mind on something else. Then suddenly she spun around and said, “What’s the matter with you? What are you admiring so much? If I was so brave, how’d I get into that wedding in the first place? Oh, think about Dommie, he’s always so sweet and patient. And my family doing all that arranging, and people coming all that way for the wedding. But Dommie. He’s never said a mean thing in his life, or done anything but hope to be loved. What am I going to tell him now?”

From far back in Margaret’s mind, where she hadn’t even known it existed, came the picture of Dommie’s face as he watched Elizabeth leaving him. His eyes were blank and stricken; his mouth was closed, unprotesting. He hadn’t yet realized what was happening to him. He unfolded before her eyes as complete and as finely detailed as if the glance she had given him had taken whole minutes, as if she had known him for years and had memorized that picture of him line by line and dreamed of it every night. She blinked and widened her eyes, tightening her hands on the wheel as she drove.

“Well, shoot, Margaret,” said Elizabeth. “It’s weddings you cry at, not the escapes from them.”

“So,” said Melissa, settling herself in the car. “How’d the wedding go?” “It didn’t.”

“It didn’t? What happened?”

“She got to the altar and said, ‘I don’t,’ ” said Margaret. She laughed, surprising herself. “Well, it really wasn’t funny, of course.”

“Sounds funny to me,” Melissa said. She frowned, briefly interested. Then she said, “Well, anyway, this patchwork skirt woman. She’s a nut. I’m sorry I ever came down. Do you know what she said to me? I said, ‘Look, you’re getting twenty dollars for these things. I’ll give you twenty-five apiece,’ I said, ‘if you’ll supply me with a dozen now and all you can make from now on.’ ‘Twenty-five?’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t know, there’s something fishy about that.’ You’d think I was trying to sell her something. ‘Look,’ I told her …”

Margaret gazed through a traffic light. She was thinking of Jimmy Joe, who might be sauntering down the sidewalk just a block from here. His collar would be turned up, he would be whistling beneath his breath. When he saw her, he would stop and wait. She reached out and touched his wrist, which was frail and bony. “Jimmy Joe,” she said, “I’m sorry I left you the way I did.” He smiled down at her and nodded, and then he walked on. If he ever came back it would be dimly, for only a second, in the company of others whose parts in her life were finished.

“ ‘How do I know I’ll feel like making all those skirts?’ she asked me. Feel like it! What next? ‘Oh, I believe I’ll just go my own little way,’ she said. Teeny old scrawny woman living all alone, you’d think she’d be jumping at the chance. In her front yard she’d set a bathtub on end and turned it into an icon.”

Margaret laughed.

“Why do you keep laughing?” Melissa said. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth? No. She wasn’t laughing at all.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Melissa said. “She’s all in the mind anyway. Margaret, what am I going to do? I was counting on patchwork skirts. What can I do instead?”

Margaret didn’t answer. She was out on the highway now, concentrating on driving, trying to get home before nightfall.