Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [111]
“Oh, Elizabeth,” Andrew said. “Did I hurt you?”
When Matthew reached her she was laughing. He thought she was having hysterics.
. . .
They took her to old Dr. Felson, who wouldn’t make trouble. He had a dusty, cluttered office opening off his wife’s kitchen. It smelled of leather and rubbing alcohol. And Dr. Felson, as he hunted for gauze, talked like someone out of a western. “A graze,” he said. “A flesh wound. Would you happen to be sitting on my scissors? I’ve seen you here before, I believe.”
“You sewed up a cut for me,” Elizabeth said. “A knife wound on my wrist.”
“Came with young Timothy, didn’t you?” He straightened up from a desk drawer and scowled at Matthew, who was holding tight to Elizabeth’s bleeding arm. “Don’t go getting germs on that,” he said. “Well, Lord. Who was it cut your wrist now? I forget.”
“I cut my wrist,” Elizabeth said.
“You Emersons could support me single-handed.”
“I’m not an—”
“Mind if your blouse is torn?”
“No.”
He slit her sleeve and put something on her arm that burned. Elizabeth hardly noticed. She felt silly and lightheaded, and the pain in her arm was getting mixed up with the stab of light that cut through her brain: Now we are even, no Emersons will look at me ever again as if I owe them something; now I know nothing I can do will change a bullet in its course. “This’ll throb a little tonight,” the doctor said, but Elizabeth only smiled at him. Anyone would have thought Matthew was the one in pain. He held her wrist too tightly, and his face was white. “Don’t worry,” Elizabeth told him. “It looks a lot worse than it feels.”
“Of course it does,” said Dr. Felson. He was wrapping her arm in gauze, which felt warm and tight. “But how about next time? You may not be so lucky.”
“Next time!” Elizabeth said.
“What does Andrew have to say about this? I’ve looked the other way quite a few times in my life, but that boy’s beginning to bother me.”
“Oh, well, he’s apologized,” Elizabeth said.
Dr. Felson snorted and stood up. “If it gets to hurting, take aspirin,” he told her.
“Okay.”
She let Matthew lead her out again, across the wooden porch and into the street. He guided her steps as if she were an old lady. “I’m all right. Really I am,” she said, but he only tightened his arm around her shoulders. His car was waiting beside the curb, packed with people who had missed their travel connections all on account of her. Mary in the front seat, Margaret and Susan and Andrew in the back—peering out of the dusk, their faces pale and anxious, waiting to hear the outcome. “What’s he say?” said Andrew. “Is she all right? Will you be all right?” He loomed out through the window to take a better look, and at the sight of him bubbles of laughter started rising up again in her chest. “Of course I will,” she said, and laughed out loud, and opened the door to pile in among a tangle of other Emersons.
13
1970
While Peter drove P.J. slept, curled in the front seat with her head in his lap. Long skeins of tow hair strung across his knees, twined around the steering wheel and got caught between his fingers. He kept shaking his hands loose, as if he had dipped them in syrup. Then the hot wind blew up new strands. “P.J.?” he said. “Look, P.J., can’t you stretch out in the back?” P.J. slept on, smiling faintly, while blocks of sunlight crossed her face like dreams.
They were driving back to New Jersey after a week with P.J.’s parents—an old tobacco farmer and his wife who lived on a rutted clay road in Georgia. The visit had not been a success. The gulf between Peter and the Grindstaffs had widened and deepened until P.J., the go-between, could cause a panic if she so much as left the room for a glass of water. She had ricocheted from one side to the other all week, determinedly cheerful and oblivious. Now her