Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [78]
She gave him lists of reasons to explain away the tears. She had a headache. She had her period. She must be coming down with something. Brady didn’t listen. He watched her constantly, wearing on her nerves until she snapped at him, which made her feel terrible and then she started crying all over again for a different reason. If she said what was in her mind, he would think she had stopped loving him. She kept it to herself. She began watching him as closely as he watched her. They were so careful of each other, so quick to protect each other, that even while she slept Margaret was conscious of a tense alertness arching between them in the dark. She would wake and reach toward his hand, or move to lay her head on his shoulder, and then stop herself. Let him sleep. One touch and he would spring awake, asking, “Are you all right? Are you happy?”
Over and over, Margaret’s mother clicked through a long-ago shaft of sunlight in the basement room. She wore a cream wool dress. She lifted an antimacassar to stare at it and then plunked it down again, lopsided. “Margaret darling,” she said, “I’m sure you think you’re in love. But you’re only children! If it were really love would you be doing things this way—hidey-corner, fly-by-night?” And Margaret was crumbling, particle by particle, inch by inch, while she waited for Jimmy Joe to make a stand for her. He didn’t. He never said a word. He sat on the arm of a chair with one sneaker propped on a radiator. His shoulders were hunched, his elbows were close to his sides, he chewed on a thumbnail and looked up at Mrs. Emerson beneath eyebrows that met in the middle. Other images—the music box, their dimestore goldfish, the pack of Marlboros by Jimmy Joe’s side of the bed—came and went fleetingly, sometimes no more than once. The scene with her mother returned, and remained, and left only to return again. Mrs. Emerson’s kid shoe prodded an issue of House Beautiful. Jimmy Joe chewed his thumbnail and did nothing, said nothing, allowed Margaret to be taken away from him and never saw her again.
“What you need is a trip somewhere,” Brady said. She started to disagree. Travel? When even in her own apartment she was feeling torn out by the roots? But then she saw his face, which was strained and tired. “You’re probably right,” she told him. They dragged out road maps and travel brochures and puzzled over where to go. No place looked just right. Finally they flew to California to visit friends, and they spent a week lying on beaches and smiling at each other too often. Brady got sunburned. His back peeled, his nose was bright pink, but there were still smudges beneath his eyes. And Margaret sat on a towel in a black bathing suit, her skin eternally a pasty white, and imagined Jimmy Joe stalking toward her across the sand. She began to feel angry; the anger was so strong it caused ripples in everything she looked at. Why was Jimmy Joe doing this to her? If he was going to hang around then why hadn’t he stuck up for her all those years ago, when she needed him? She could feel the hurt and the shock all over again; she could see her mother repacking her clothes while Margaret herself stood numbly by. “This we can just leave behind, I believe,” her mother said, and she lifted a black lace nightgown between thumb and forefinger and let it slip to the closet floor.
At the end of July, Brady’s patience was beginning to show the strain. He suggested a minister, a doctor, a visit home. Margaret refused them all. “What do you want?” he said, and she said, “Nothing.” What she wanted was a trip on her own, but at the same time she wanted to stay close to Brady. She shifted from one decision to the other, sometimes within minutes, without ever mentioning what was going through her mind. Then a chance for a trip rose all by itself: a wedding invitation. She met him at the door with it one evening when he came home from work. “Guess what,” she said. “Elizabeth Abbott is getting married.”
“Is that someone I’m supposed to know?”
“No, maybe not. She