Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [62]
“Did Mom say that?”
“She has enough to do as it is.”
“How can she say that? I help out. I did the dishes the last four nights running. Why didn’t she come to me about it?”
“It’s not only the dishes,” said her father. “It’s your general presence. You’re disrupting an entire household. Now I suggested, if you remember, that you find something to keep you busy until fall term. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want to remain idle all that time,’ I told you. Well, it seems I was mistaken. You do want to. Your mother says you’ve taken no steps whatever toward finding a job. You haven’t even left the house, except to walk Hilary. What kind of life do you call that?”
“I can’t think of any job I’d be good at,” Elizabeth said. She drew a pack of Camels from her shirt pocket, causing her father to wince. “It’s not as if I could type, or take shorthand, or do anything specific,” she said, tamping a cigarette on the edge of his desk.
“You know what smoke will do to my asthma,” her father said. “Liz, honey. I know all about young people. It’s part of my job. But you’re twenty-three years old. We’ve been waiting twenty-three years for you to straighten out a little. Isn’t it time you shaped up? Don’t you think you’re past the stage for teenage rebellion? It’s just not becoming. Why, I would expect you to be married and starting a family by now. Whatever happened to young Dommie?”
“He’s engaged,” Elizabeth said. She slid the cigarette back into its pack and studied a double photograph frame on the desk—Polly at eleven, dimpling and looking upward through long lashes; Elizabeth at twelve, an awkward age, with her face sullen and self-conscious and her organdy dress too tight under the arms. “I bet you were a tomboy,” Timothy once said, but she never had been. She had dreamed of being rescued from fire or water by some young man; she had experimented with lipsticks from the five-and-dime until she realized she would never look anything but garish in make-up. She grimaced, and without thinking took the Camel out again and struck a kitchen match on the arm of her chair. Her father buried his face in his hands.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Elizabeth told him cheerfully. “I’ll find something. And school begins in September.”
“September!” her father said. “You’ll have rotted away by then.” He raised his head and stared at the photograph. Long deep lines pulled the corners of his mouth down. Was he thinking of when she had been twelve, when he still had some hope she might turn out differently? She suddenly felt sorry for him, and she leaned forward to pat his knee. “Look,” she said. “Maybe I could ask if they need help at the newspaper office.”
“I already did.”
“Oh. You did?”
“I even asked my secretary if she needed an envelope-stuffer. She doesn’t. There is something at the hospital, though—a sort of nurse’s aide, working on the children’s ward—”
“I wouldn’t like it,” Elizabeth said.
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, well, seeing all those children with leukemia and things—”
“There’s nobody in Ellington with leukemia.”
“And there’s so many things you could cause there, I mean, giving out the wrong paper pill cup—”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.”
“Someone did it to me once,” Elizabeth said darkly. “When I was there having my wisdom teeth cut out.”
“That was only a vitamin, Liz.”
“If I did it, it would be cyanide.”
“Dear heart,” said her father, gathering himself together again, “I don’t know where you get all these thoughts, but if you keep on with them you’re going to render yourself immobile. Now, I gather something must have happened up there in Baltimore. All you say is there was a death in the family. Well, it must have been a mighty important death to make you come live here so suddenly, but if you don’t want to discuss it I