Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [28]
He stretched out on the floor with another mug of wine and imagined a federal law ordering everybody to switch parents at a certain age. Then butter-fingered Elizabeth, her family’s cross, could come sustain his mother forever and mend all her possessions, and he could go south and live a happy thoughtless life assisting Reverend Abbott at Sunday vespers. There would be a gigantic migration of children across the country, all cutting the old tangled threads and picking up new ones when they found the right niche, free forever of other people’s notions about them. He stared up at the ceiling with a blank smile while words buzzed over his head. His damp, stockinged feet were poked under a radiator. Elizabeth was next to him, and when the ceiling started whirling he turned to watch her hands clasped around her mug. His eyes became fixed on them. He sank into the grainy texture of her skin, he thought he could taste on his tongue the sharp, scraped knuckles. Who else would have hands in such terrible shape? There must be some special meaning to them. On her left wrist was a deep, slow-healing cut, running diagonally across the radial artery. She had done that in his presence. He had seen the knife flash too far along the grain of a carving, watched blood spurt instantly across the kitchen table. “Find the pressure point. Here,” he had said, and wound a dishtowel around it and bundled her into his car. “Keep it tight. Push down harder.” He had sped her to old Dr. Felson’s office, frantically honking his horn. The dishtowel grew bright red. Elizabeth pressed beneath it with sawdust-covered fingers and watched the scenery through her side window. “What on earth?” she said once. She was looking at a man and woman struggling beside a bus stop, the man flailing his fists and the woman taking swipes at him with her pocketbook. Timothy slammed on his brakes, cursed, and speeded up again. He hadn’t known Elizabeth very well at the time. He had thought her unconcern was due to a misguided faith in medical students—people who could supposedly take charge of these things. Responsibility weighed on his head as if she had dumped it there. He was unable to tell her that for him, medicine was only so many words in a textbook; that humans were fragile, complicated networks encased in envelopes nearly as transparent as the diagrams made them out to be; that faced with blood, his stomach froze and his throat closed up and he wondered why his mother expected so much of him.
An image of his mother’s house rose up, cupped in his own hands like the Allstate insurance ad.
Now Elizabeth was trying to convince some stranger that the length of a person’s forearm was always exactly the length of his foot. “It’s a scientific fact,” she said (more earnestly than she had said anything else this evening, especially to him), and the boy said, “That’s ridiculous.” But he tried it, anyway—took off a shoe and knelt on the floor with his arm flat alongside his foot. All over the room, other people were trying it too. The place was turning into a contortionists’ convention. Timothy felt like the lone human being in a jumble of machinery, intricate wheels and gears and sprockets, all churning busily. He closed his eyes and sank away, following green fluorescent threads that criss-crossed behind his lids.
Then Elizabeth was saying, “Timothy? Wake up, it’s time to go.” When he opened his eyes everyone was smiling down on him. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head, and let someone bundle him into his coat. The other guests were leaving too. The room had a ragged, broken look as they stood around in knots saying goodbye. Elizabeth led him over to Ian and Lisa, and then through the swamp of galoshes by the door. As she was pulling on