The Clock Winder

The Clock Winder Read Free Page B

Book: The Clock Winder Read Free
Author: Anne Tyler
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one stayed with me.” She laughed. “I must be hard to get along with,” she said.
    Elizabeth had pulled a red pocketknife from her dungarees. She opened out a screwdriver blade and began tightening the screw. “My,” said Mrs. Emerson, making an effort tolighten her voice. “Is that the kind with all the different blades? Corkscrew? Can opener?”
    Elizabeth nodded. “It’s Swiss,” she said.
    “Oh, a Swiss Army knife!” Mrs. Emerson blew her nose once more and then folded the handkerchief and blotted her eyes. “Matthew wanted one of those for Christmas once,” she said. “My oldest son. He asked for one.”
    “They come in handy,” said Elizabeth.
    “I’m sure they do.”
    But she had given him, instead, a violin and a record player and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Remembering that made her start crying all over again. “I’m sorry about this,” she said, although Elizabeth still had not looked up at her. “It must be bereavement. The aftermath of bereavement. I just lost my husband three months ago. At first, you know, things are very busy and there are always people calling. It’s only later you notice what’s happened. After the people have left again.”
    She watched the pocketknife being folded, the chair being set in the garage. “Goodness,
that
didn’t take long,” she said.
    Elizabeth returned, dusting off her hands. “I’m sorry about your husband,” she told Mrs. Emerson.
    “Oh, well. Thank you.”
    Mrs. Emerson rose from the steps. All her joints ached, and her knees felt tight and stiff where they had been scraped. They started together up the hill. “My friends say it’s often this way,” she told Elizabeth. “The delayed reaction, I mean. But I never expected it
now
, three months after. I thought I had felt bad enough at the time. Sometimes this terrible idea comes to my mind. I think, if he was going to die, then couldn’t he have done it earlier? Before I was all used up andworn out? I could have started some sort of new life, back then. I would have had some hope. Well,
that’s
a stupid thing to say.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.
    It was this girl’s silence that made Mrs. Emerson rattle on so. Mrs. Emerson had a compulsion to fill all silences. In an hour she would be wincing over what she had spilled out to a stranger, but now, flushed with the feeling of finally having someone stay still and listen, she said, “And I
can’t
go for comfort to my children. They’re not that kind, not at all. Oh, I always try to look on the bright side, especially when I’m talking to people. That makes me tend to exaggerate a little. But I never fool
myself:
I know I’d have to attend my own funeral before I see them lined up on this veranda again talking the way they used to. They are always moving away from me; I feel like the center of an asterisk. They
work
at moving away. If I waited for my sons to come carry this furniture it would rot first, they never come. They find me difficult.” She climbed the front steps and turned to flash a very bright smile at Elizabeth, who was looking at her blankly. “Those auto rides,” she said, “with all of us crammed inside. ‘There go the Emersons,’ people would say, and never guess for an instant that behind the glass it was all bickering, arguing, scenes, constant crisis—”
    “Oh, well,” Elizabeth said comfortably, “I reckon
most
families work that way.”
    Mrs. Emerson paused; her thoughts snagged for a second. Then she said, “They
live
on crisis. It’s the only time they’re happy. No, they’re never happy. They lead such complicated lives I can’t keep up with them any more. All I’ve seen of my grandchild is one minute little black-and-white photo of a bunch of total strangers, one of them holding the baby. A lady I’d never seen before. Elderly. The last time we were alltogether was by necessity, for the funeral—and they left the baby with his other grandmother. Two of my

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