Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [77]
But she heard no more from Matthew. He never wrote her again.
9
1963
The trouble began on a Sunday morning in June. Margaret woke early, before her husband. She lay in bed feeling pleasantly hungry but too lazy to do anything about it, and she spent some time making pictures out of a complicated crack in the ceiling while she tried to remember a dream she had had. None of it came back to her. Only vague sensations—the smell of parsley in a brown paper bag, the feel of some rough fabric against her cheek. Then the crack in the ceiling dimmed, and she found herself looking directly into the face of her first husband. He was laughing at something she had just said. His black eyes were narrowed and sparkling; his mouth was open, lengthening his pointed chin. He had the carelessly put together look that is often found in very young boys. While she watched he stopped laughing and grew serious, but deliberately, exaggerating the effort, making a mockery of it, as if the laughter were still bubbling within him. He pretended to frown. All she saw in his eyes was love.
She buried her face in her pillow and started crying. Beside her, Brady stirred, and a minute later he had propped himself on one elbow and was trying to turn her over. “Margaret? Margaret?” he said. She kept her face in the pillow. She cried on and on, while Brady first asked questions and then watched helplessly. When her tears seemed to be used up, she stopped. She sat against the headboard and brushed away the damp hair that was plastered to her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
“You don’t know? You’ve been crying for a quarter of an hour.”
“It must have been a bad dream,” Margaret said.
She watched him pacing the bedroom in his striped pajamas—a big, square, red-headed man with a kind face that screwed up into question marks when he was puzzled. In the sunlight, his hair turned orange and his eyelashes were white. He laid a hand on her forehead. “You sure you feel all right,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“I think you have a fever.”
“That’s just from crying,” Margaret said. Then she reached for a Kleenex and got up to fix Sunday breakfast.
He kept a close eye on her all that day, and every time she caught him looking at her she smiled. By evening he seemed satisfied that she was all right again. He might have forgotten all about it, if it weren’t that from then on—every two or three days, just when neither of them were expecting it—the tears returned. She would be breaking an egg into a frying pan, and all of a sudden her face would crumple and she would sink into the nearest chair. “Margaret?” Brady said. “Honey? What’s wrong?” She never told him. She didn’t know what was wrong. Why should Jimmy Joe come back like this? (Even his name seemed unrelated to her.) Why just now, when she was finally settled and happy and in love with someone who loved her back? She kept picturing Jimmy Joe’s ducktail haircut, and the baggy, gray delivery coat he had worn the first time they met. Pieces of their apartment would suddenly appear before her—a dusty basement room in which they had lived out the five weeks of their marriage. Antimacassars on the sagging chairs, red checked oilcloth thumbtacked to the table. Turning the page of a book, she would see instead Jimmy Joe’s bony, childish hands, with the nails bitten and the shiny new wedding ring much too loose once it got past the bulge of his knuckle. She ate breakfast staring blurrily at the sugarbowl, which had turned into the music box he brought her in a Kresge bag the night that they eloped. Subway wheels spun out the sound of his reedy voice, mocking lady customers, asking Little Moron riddles, telling her he loved her. “Honey? Honey?” Brady said. She looked at him from a distance, unable