Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [115]
Once out of the downtown areas they drove faster, through streets that grew steadily greener and cooler. Then they entered Roland Park, and Peter suddenly felt eager to be home. He forgot all the misgivings he had had. There was the old locked water tower, which he had once tried to break into. There was the Women’s Club where his mother went for luncheons, always in a hat and gloves. And now the wooded road that led to the house, dark and cool and dappled with sunshine. He hid his eagerness from P.J. as carefully as if she might mock him for it, although he knew she wouldn’t. “We’re almost there,” he told her, keeping his face blank. P.J. nodded and sat up straighter and wet her lips.
In this neighborhood, people stayed out of sight more. All he saw was one lone maid with a shopping bag, heading toward the bus stop. And his mother’s house, when he drew up in front of it, was closed and silent. The curtains hung still, the veranda chairs were empty. A water sprinkler spun dreamily in the right side yard.
“Well,” said Peter. He let his hands drop from the wheel. P.J. said nothing. She was looking at the house, taking in the rows of gleaming windows and the wide expanse of grass, the multitude of chimneys rising from the slate roof.
“You never told me it was a big house,” she said finally.
“Shall we go in?”
P.J. began gathering up her possessions. She had a purse, sandals, a scarf, a sack of licorice shoestrings which had already lined her lips with black although Peter didn’t tell her so. When she had climbed out of the car she tugged at her shorts and slid into her sandals—leather soles with yards of straps which would have twined all the way to her knees if she had tied them. She shuffled up the front walk, curling her toes to keep the sandals on. She looked like a seal on dry land. Peter stayed where he was, watching her. He didn’t even open his door until she turned to look for him. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“Sure.”
He had expected his mother to burst out of the house the moment he cut the engine, ending a three-year vigil at the front window.
It wasn’t until he was halfway up the walk that he became aware of the noise. A clattering sound, like millions of enormous metal zippers stickily opening and shutting. It rose from every bush. It was so steady and monotonous that it could pass unnoticed, like a clock’s ticking. “What is it?” he asked, and P.J. only looked at him blankly. “That noise,” he said.
“Crickets? Locusts?”
A buzzing black lump zoomed into his face, and then veered and swooped away. He ducked, seconds after it had gone.
“Seventeen-year locusts,” he said.
“Never heard of them,” said P.J.
“Cicadas, in point of actual fact.”
The words were Timothy’s, dredged up from a long-ago summer, and so was the tone—dry and scientific, so unlike Peter that even P.J. noticed and looked surprised. The last time the locusts had been here, Peter was twelve. He remembered the fact of their presence, and Timothy’s lecture on them, but not what they were really like—not these viciously buzzing objects which, he saw now, swung through the air on invisible strings and hung like glittering fruit from all the bushes. P.J. had one on her shoulder; it rattled menacingly when he brushed it away. When he stepped on the sidewalk, he crunched countless pupa shells which lay curled and hollow, small beige shrimps with all their legs folded tightly inward.
They crossed the shiny gray floorboards of the veranda. P.J. knocked at the door. “Knock, knock!” she called out gaily. She always did that, but today Peter found it irritating. “There is a doorbell,” he said, and reached around her to press it. P.J. looked up at him, her eyes like round, rayed suns in her Innocence eyelashes.
It was a child who opened the door for them. A squat little blond boy with a solemn face, wearing miniature Levis.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi there,” said Peter, too heartily. “I’m your Uncle Peter. Remember me?”
“No.”
“So there, Peter Emerson,