Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [12]
Elizabeth said nothing.
“And the country, all these trips to the country and anywhere else that comes to mind. Washington. Annapolis. Lexington Market. The zoo. Any place you’re asked. It’s ridiculous, can’t you just stay put a while? Timothy said he might be here by lunch. I was counting on your standing by to help me.”
“Help you do what?” Elizabeth asked.
“Well, maybe we’ll need more firewood.”
“I just got through telling you, I brought some in. MacGregor delivered a truckload this morning.”
“What if we burn more than you’d planned on? Some problem will turn up. What if we need a repair job all of a sudden?”
“If you do, I’ll see to it later,” Elizabeth said. “And Timothy will be here.”
“To be truthful, Elizabeth, it’s nice to have things thinned out a little when just one of my children is here. Somebody to lighten the conversation. Couldn’t you stay?”
“I promised Benny,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh, go then. Go. I don’t care.”
When Elizabeth left, Mrs. Emerson had started opening all her bureau drawers and slamming them shut again.
Elizabeth’s room was across the hall from Mrs. Emerson’s. The air in it smelled heavily of cigarettes—the Camels Elizabeth chain-smoked whenever she was idle—and there was a clutter of paperback detective stories and orange peels and overflowing ashtrays on the dresser. In the lower drawers were odds and ends belonging to Margaret, who had lived in this room until she left home. Her Nancy Drew mysteries were still in the bookcase, and her storybook dolls lined one wall shelf. The other children’s rooms were stripped clean; Margaret’s was different because she had left in a hurry. Eloped, at sixteen. Now she was twenty-five, divorced or annulled or something and drawing ads for a clothing company in Chicago. “And moody, so terribly moody,” Mrs. Emerson said. “The few times she’s been back I’ve wondered if she’d go into a depression right before my eyes.” Mrs. Emerson had a way of summing up each child in a single word, putting a finger squarely on his flaw. Margaret was moody, Andrew unbalanced, Melissa high-strung. But coming from her, the flaws sounded like virtues. In Mrs. Emerson’s eyes anything to do with nerves was a sign of intelligence. Other people’s children were steady and happy and ordinary; Mrs. Emerson’s were not. They were special. On the bookshelf in the study Margaret’s pale, pudgy face scowled out from a filigree frame, her lipstick a little blurred, her lank hair a little mussed, as if being special were some storm that had buffeted her. In this pink lacy room she must have seemed as out of place as Elizabeth, who sat on the satin bedspread in her dungarees and scattered wood chips across the flowered carpet whenever she was whittling.
Wood chips marked the doorway to the room, and trailed across the hall and down the top few stairsteps. “You must think you’re Hansel and Gretel,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Everywhere you go you drop a few shavings.” She had seen Elizabeth’s carvings—angular, barely recognizable figures, sanded to a glow—and not known what to make of them, but apparently they had settled her mind. Before then she kept asking, “What are you going to do, in the end? What will you make of your life?” She liked to see plans neatly made, routes clearly marked, beelines to success. It bothered her that Elizabeth had just bought a multi-purpose electric drill that would sand, saw, wirebrush, sink screws, stir paint—anything—which she kept in the basement for her woodworking. “How much did that thing cost? It must have taken every cent I’ve yet paid you,” Mrs. Emerson said. “At this rate you’ll never get to college, and I have the feeling you don’t much care.” “No, not all that much,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. Mrs. Emerson kept nagging at her. That was when Elizabeth showed her the woodcarvings. She dragged them out of her knapsack, along with