Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [60]
“Don’t mull it over,” Matthew had said. But he was under the impression that they were talking about a straightforward suicide. And he didn’t have the picture of death from a bullet wound to struggle against every night of his life.
She tapped Hilary with a loop of leash. “Let’s go,” she said. Then she set off toward the ranch-house, with Hilary trotting beside her casting helpful, anxious glances. Red dust had worked into the stitches of Elizabeth’s moccasins. A hot wind stiffened her face. Everywhere she looked seemed parched and bleak and glaring, but at least she was back where she was supposed to be.
When she got home Polly was in the kitchen with her baby, the smallest, fattest baby Elizabeth had ever known. Creases ringed her wrists like rubber bands; she not only had a double chin but double thighs, double knees, double ankles as well. Polly jostled her in her lap absentmindedly, speaking over her wispy head. “Look at you,” she said. “I wish I could just go tearing off with the dog any time I wanted.”
“Why don’t you?” Elizabeth said. “Leave Julie with Mother.”
“Oh, no,” said Polly. She sighed. She was smaller than Elizabeth, with a heart-shaped face and a tousle of yellow curls like a frilled nightcap. “You’re the one with the cute little sister,” people used to tell Elizabeth. In high school Polly had been Queen of May Day. She had kept to the style of the fifties ever since—spitcurls framing her forehead, her lipstick a pure bright pink. Her flower-sprigged shirtdress was immaculate, except where the baby had just spit down the front. “Hand me a Kleenex, will you?” she asked Elizabeth. “What did I take all that Good Grooming for, if this was what I’d come to?”
“If you wore a bibbed apron—” her mother said. “That’s what I always did.” She was laying sheets of foil across the casseroles, which lined one counter from end to end. Without looking around she said, “Polly brought the mail in with her. What’d you do with that letter, Polly?”
“Here it is.”
From the look Polly gave her as she handed her the envelope, Elizabeth guessed that they had been discussing it before she came in. She made a point of ripping it open in front of them, not even bothering to sit down. It was written in Matthew’s looped, rounded hand. Dear Elizabeth, Why don’t you ever answer my letters? Did your suitcase arrive safely? Why do you—She folded the sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. “What’s for lunch?” she asked her mother.
“One of these casseroles.”
“Funeral food?”
Polly settled her baby into a new position and studied Elizabeth’s face. “You certainly have been getting a lot of mail these days,” she said.
“Mmm.”
“All from Baltimore. You used to be the world’s worst letter-writer. Have you changed? Or is someone an optimist.”
“Oh, you know, these are just people I met,” Elizabeth said vaguely.
“People? They look like mostly one handwriting.”
“Now, Polly, leave her alone,” her mother said. “Elizabeth, honey, I wish you’d take these down to the freezer for me.”
She stacked foil pans into Elizabeth’s outstretched arms. They were still warm, almost hot. Elizabeth rested her chin on the uppermost pan and started for the basement. Behind her, a deep meaningful silence linked her mother and Polly.
Most of the basement was a recreation room, which smelled of asphalt tile. A phonograph sat in one corner. When she was still in secretarial school Polly used to bring her friends here, and they had danced and drunk Cokes and eaten endless bags of Fritos. Then Carl had proposed to her on that vinyl loveseat in front of the TV. Elizabeth remembered the night it happened—Polly making the announcement, smiling up at Carl as she spoke. She was still the younger sister then; it wasn’t until she was married that she