Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [90]
Margaret laughed.
“Why do you keep laughing?” Melissa said. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth? No. She wasn’t laughing at all.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Melissa said. “She’s all in the mind anyway. Margaret, what am I going to do? I was counting on patchwork skirts. What can I do instead?”
Margaret didn’t answer. She was out on the highway now, concentrating on driving, trying to get home before nightfall.
10
1965
Mary’s letter said, “Good news, Morris and I are going off for a week in July. Just the two of us, no children. Finally we’ll be able to finish a conversation, I told him.…”
Mrs. Emerson read it several times, trying to figure out what was expected of her. Was this a hint? Was Mary hoping her mother would babysit? No, probably not. The last time she visited Mary she had overstayed her welcome. Only four and a half days, and she had overstayed. She had replaced a scummy plastic juice pitcher with a nice glass one—nothing special, just something she picked up in downtown Dayton—and Mary had thrown a fit. “What is my juice pitcher doing in the garbage?” she had said. “What is this new thing doing here? Who asked you? What right did you have?” Mrs. Emerson had packed and left, and held off writing for three weeks. Then just a bread-and-butter note, brief, formal, apologizing for waiting so long but life had been so cram-packed lately, she said. And now what?
She wandered through the house carrying the letter, pressing her fingers to her lips while she thought things over. If she didn’t offer to babysit she would be missing a chance to see her grandchildren. If she did offer, she might be turned down. The insult pricked her already; imagine how much worst if it actually happened! But if she didn’t offer …
She climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Lately her legs had grown stiff. She moved like an old lady, which she had promised herself she would never do, and although her shoes were still frail and spiky she had lately been eying the thick, black walking shoes in store windows. If she wore sheer stockings with them, after all, if she bought the kind of shoe with a fringed flap so that people thought she had merely changed into a tweedy type.… Her hand rested heavily on the banister, and when she reached the top she had to pause to catch her breath before she went into her bedroom.
Dear Mary, she wrote on cream notepaper. How nice to hear about the vacation. It will do you a world of good. You don’t mention a babysitter, and maybe you’ve already found one, but I did want to let you know that just in case you haven’t—
She stopped to read over what she had written. Although she had chosen her words carefully, her handwriting was deliberately a little more slapdash than usual. Let it look casual, spur-of-the-moment. But when she took up her pen again, she paused and read the letter a second time. She was thinking of her grandchildren. Four of them, three girls and a boy, and she would like to know where people got the idea that girls were quieter. Oh, they ran her ragged. Climbing too high, jumping too far, running too fast. Talking in their high-pitched voices with excited gulps for air. Always hiding her things and giving shrieks of laughter when she missed them. Was she even sure she wanted to do this?
Grandchildren were not all they were cracked up to be. She held onto that thought a minute, enjoying it, before she flicked it away again. Grandchildren were wonderful. What else did she have to live for? Her committee work was fading out; her friends were turning into droning old ladies or even, some of them, dying. Mornings, when she came downstairs in a fresh crisp dress and looked all around her at the high ceilings dripping cobwebs, she sometimes wondered why she had bothered