Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [108]
“No,” said Elizabeth. “I have a job now. One I like.”
“You never used to—”
“Now I do, though,” Elizabeth said. “I stay with things more. I don’t go flitting off wherever I’m asked nowadays.”
But she hadn’t guessed the words correctly. “Never used to like, like children,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Oh. Well, not as a group, no. I still don’t. But these I like.”
She passed a hand across her eyes, which felt dry and hot. She was going to be exhausted by morning. “Are you sleepy?” she asked.
“Talk,” said Mrs. Emerson.
“I have talked. What more is there to say?” She wound a loose thread around her index finger. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll tell you how I happened to start working at the school. I was leaning out the window of this crafts shop where I used to sell things, watching a parade go by. There were people crammed on both sidewalks, mothers with babies and little children, fathers with children on their shoulders. And suddenly I was so surprised by them. Isn’t it amazing how hard people work to raise their children? Human beings are born so helpless, and stay helpless so long. For every grownup you see, you know there must have been at least one person who had the patience to lug them around, and feed them, and walk them nights and keep them out of danger for years and years, without a break. Teaching them how to fit into civilization and how to talk back and forth with other people, taking them to zoos and parades and educational events, telling them all those nursery rhymes and word-of-mouth fairy tales. Isn’t that surprising? People you wouldn’t trust your purse with five minutes, maybe, but still they put in years and years of time tending their children along and they don’t even make a fuss about it. Even if it’s a criminal they turn out, or some other kind of failure—still, he managed to get grown, didn’t he? Isn’t that something?”
Mrs. Emerson didn’t answer.
“Well, there I was hanging out the window,” Elizabeth said, “thinking all this over. Then I thought, ‘What am I doing up here, anyway? Up in this shop where I’m bored stiff? And never moving on into something else, for fear of some harm I might cause? You’d think I was some kind of special case,’ I thought, ‘but I’m not! I’m like all the people I’m sitting here gawking at, and I might just as well stumble on out and join them!’ So right that day I quit my job, and started casting about for new work. And found it—teaching crafts in a reform school. Well, you might not think the girls there would be all that great, but I like them. Wasn’t that something? Just from one little old parade?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Emerson. Then she was silent.
“Mrs. Emerson?”
But all Elizabeth heard was her soft, steady breathing. She slid off the bed and found her way back to the cot. She stretched out and pulled the cool sheets over her, but then she couldn’t sleep. She stayed wide awake and thoughtful. She was awake when Andrew’s shadow crossed a moonbeam, heading all alone to the gazebo. When she propped herself on an elbow to look at him, he had stopped close beside the sunporch. A thin silvery line traced the top of his head and slid down the slope of his shoulders, stopping at the white shirt whose collar was pressed open in a flat, old-fashioned style. Although he was looking toward the windows, he couldn’t see her. His face was a blank oval, pale and accusing. After a moment he turned and wandered off behind the tangled rosebushes.
“Look,” Matthew said. “From here you would think the house was on fire.”
Elizabeth followed the line of his arm. They were in the gazebo, balanced precariously on a rotten railing, and from where they sat they could look up and see the house reflecting the sunset from every window. Not as if it were on fire, Elizabeth thought, so much as empty. The windows were glaring orange rectangles, giving no sign of the life behind them. The scene had a flat, painted look. “I wonder why she keeps the place,” Matthew said.
“Maybe for her children to come home to.”
“We never come all at once anymore.”
He picked up her hand and turned it over. Elizabeth