Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [31]
“I tend to develop symptoms in waiting rooms,” Elizabeth said. She drove lazily, one arm resting on the hot metal frame of the open window. Her hair whipped around her neck in the breeze, and sometimes she had to reach up and steady her cap. “Isn’t it funny? If I go into a waiting room sick all my symptoms disappear. If I’m well it works the other way.”
“Thank goodness there were no real chauffeurs around,” said Mrs. Emerson. “I would have found you all playing poker, I’m sure. Discussing carburetors.” But she watched the scenery as she spoke, as if her mind were only half on what she was saying. During these last eight months, her life and Elizabeth’s had come to fit together as neatly as puzzle pieces. Even the tone of their voices was habit now—Mrs. Emerson’s scolding, Elizabeth’s flip and unperturbed. Outsiders wondered how they stood each other. But Mrs. Emerson, as she talked, kept dexterously erect in spite of Elizabeth’s peculiar driving, and Elizabeth went on smiling into the sunlight even when Mrs. Emerson’s voice grew creaky with complaints. “How will I manage breakfast now?” Mrs. Emerson asked.
“He say no eggs at all?”
“No more than two a week. A precautionary measure, he said. He kept comparing me to clocks and machines and worn-out cars, and the worst of it was that it all made sense. You keep hearing about the body being a machine, but have you ever given it any real thought? Here I am, just at the stage where if I were a car I’d be traded in. Repairs growing more expensive than my value. Things all breaking down at once, first that bursitis last winter and now my chest grabbing, only it’s worse than with a machine. All my parts are sealed in, airtight. No replacements are possible.”
“That’s true,” said Elizabeth.
She tried picturing Mrs Emerson as a machine. Sprung springs and stray bolts would be rattling around inside her. Her heart was a coiled metal band, about to pop loose with a twang. Why not? Everything else in that house had come apart. From the day that Elizabeth first climbed those porch steps, a born fumbler and crasher and dropper of precious objects, she had possessed miraculous repairing powers; and Mrs. Emerson (who had maybe never broken a thing in her life, for all Elizabeth knew) had obligingly presented her with a faster and faster stream of disasters in need of her attention. First shutters and faucets and doorknobs; now human beings. A wrist dangled suddenly over her shoulder. “See, how knobby?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Nobody ever told me to expect varicose bones.”
Elizabeth touched the wrist and returned it, unchanged.
“Could it be all those pregnancies?” said Mrs. Emerson, sitting back. “Eight of them, Elizabeth. One born dead. People are always asking if I’m Catholic, but the truth is I’m Episcopal and merely had a little trouble giving up the habit of a baby in the house. Could that harm my health?”
Elizabeth drove slowly, changing lanes in long arcs when the mood hit her. Buttery sunlight warmed her lap. The radio played something that reminded her of picnics.
“It doesn’t seem just that I should be getting old,” Mrs. Emerson said.
She removed her gloves and took a cigarette from a gold case—something she rarely did. Elizabeth, hearing the snap as she shut it, looked in the rear-view mirror. “Oh, don’t frown at me,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“I wasn’t.”
“I thought you were. The doctor told me not to smoke.”
“It’s all right with me if you smoke.”
“I plan to stop, of course, but not till I get over this nervous feeling.” She flicked a gold lighter which sputtered and sparked and finally rose up in a four-inch flame that blackened half the cigarette. She took a puff, not inhaling, and held it at an awkward angle with her elbow tight against her side. “What a beautiful day!” she said, just noticing. “It’s nice to be driven places.” And then, after a pause, she cleared her throat and said, “I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, Elizabeth, but I appreciate having you here.”
She had stepped far enough out of the pattern