by Anne Tyler
Elizabeth pulled the knapsack out of her closet and dug down to the bottom of it, coming up finally with a man’s ragged shirt that was rolled into a cylinder. She shook it out and put it on over her jacket. Down the front of the shirt were streaks of paint in several different colors, but no blood. She had never even killed a chicken before. Not even a squirrel or a rabbit, and that at least would have been killing at long distance.
Across the hallway Mrs. Emerson was talking into her dictaphone. “This is going in Melissa’s letter. Melissa, are you sure you don’t need that brown coat with the belted back that’s hanging in the cedar closet? Something else, now. What was it I wanted to say?” There was a click as the dictaphone was shut off, another click to turn it on again. “Yes. Mary. Now, the last thing I want is to offend that husband of yours. I’m not any ordinary mother-in-law. But would you be able to use my old fur coat that I got four years ago? I never wear it, I was just going through my winter things this morning and stumbled across it. Young men can’t generally afford fur coats so I thought—but if you feel he’d be offended, just say so. I’m not any ordinary …”
Elizabeth stood by her window, flattening the rolled sleeves of her paint-shirt and wondering what she would do if it took more than one chop to kill the turkey. Or could she just refuse to do it at all? Say that she had turned vegetarian? But that would give Mrs. Emerson an excuse to clap her into housework. Elizabeth had nothing against housework but she preferred doing things she hadn’t done before. She liked surprising herself.
“Andrew, I understand about Thanksgiving but on Christmas I set my foot down,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I’m not thinking of myself, you understand. I’m managing quite well. But Christmas is a family holiday, you need your family. Tell your doctor that. Or would you rather I did? It doesn’t matter to me what he thinks of me.”
She could go on like this all night, sometimes. To Elizabeth it seemed like so much busywork. If she couldn’t write those messages right then, or bother remembering them, were they worth committing to tape? Maybe she just liked pressing all those buttons on her little beige machine. But Mrs. Emerson said, “I take pride in my correspondence, letter-writing is a dying art. I refuse to turn into one of those people who sit themselves at a desk to say, ‘Well, nothing to report at this end, everything going as usual …’ ” At two or three in the morning, waking just enough to shut her window or reach for another blanket, Elizabeth would hear sudden, startling sentences floating across the dark hallway. “I resent what you said in your last letter, Melissa. Everyone knows I am not the sort of mother who interferes.” “Where is that necklace I lent you? I never said you could keep it.” Her voice was clear and matter-of-fact, the ordinary daytime voice of a woman who had been awake for hours. “How could you just hang up on me like that? I’ve been thinking and thinking, the older you get the less I understand you.” “Do you have Emily Barrett’s address?” “Someday you will be alone.” “Where is the photograph you promised?”
On the student desk in the corner sat Elizabeth’s own mother’s letter, weeks old, sheets and sheets of church stationery hoping for an answer.
… Honey if you were going to be gone so long you should have said so when you left. We would never have let you for one thing and for another we would have cooked you a finer last meal and made a bigger to-do. I could just cry thinking of that plain old meat loaf and succotash I gave you. But your sister’s wedding was still on my mind and I never knew you were planning anything but hopping off for a short summer job. I thought sure you would be back for school. Well the college called and I didn’t know what to say, I remembered you had talked about taking time off but we never thought you were serious. And we thought you meant to go by bus like ordinary people, not with just a wedding guest that none of our side knew. How could you be sure what he drove like? Nowadays they let just anyone on the road, all kinds of things can happen. But there you went and didn’t say a word more about it. I don’t know if you were planning to be gone so long or it just happened. You often do get carried away. Anyway here you are now in Baltimore you say. You should see all the times I’ve crossed addresses out and written new ones in for you since you sat here back in May eating that meat loaf and succotash.
Well there is not too much to report here. Everybody is fine although as usual your father is working too hard. He just lets these women walk all over him, taking up his time for missionary circles and all kinds of lectures and tea-parties and slide-showings and paltry illnesses and so forth, when I tell him he should rest more and behave like ordinary pastors, confine himself to sermons and funerals and maybe a few deathbeds. He eats it all up, I believe. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself if they would stop pestering him. Now Mrs. Nancy Bledsoe has gone and given him a dog, a female collie that chews up everything including magazines and table legs, and you know how scared he is of dogs and never would have anything to do with them. She says it is a token of appreciation for all he did while her mother was dying. He said thank you kindly although I notice he has no notion what to do with the thing, doesn’t know how to pet it, backs off when it jumps on him, asked me right out one day after a lot of hemming and hawing what was wrong with her that she squats to piddle when everyone else’s dogs raise their legs. Now Christmas will be coming up which is the busy time for all those deaths and melancholies as well as church services and so on.
Polly is looking so sweet and pretty now that she is married and she is just real active in the Young Wives Fellowship. I don’t know if she has told you yet about the event they are expecting in March. Me a grandmother, I’m just tickled pink. I always did want to have someone to spoil rotten but hand back when he got to fussing. Honey I just wish you would settle down yourself some, finish at Sandhill College or get married, one. I know you don’t like to hear me say that but I just have to tell you what’s on my mind. Mrs. Bennett talking the other day said there is always one in every family that causes twice as much worry as all the others, not that you would love them any the less for it, well, I knew what she meant although of course I didn’t say so.
Dommie Whitehill still comes calling on us and asks all about you, where you are and what you are doing and who you are going around with and so forth. I could just cry for that boy. You will never find anyone sweeter than Dommie, I don’t care how far you look, and that is something that is getting mighty hard to find these days and nobody waits forever.
Elizabeth I have oftentimes told your father he should drop you a line. He says it is up to you to write first and take back all you said so I wish you would. Honey he is just so hurt but would never show it for the world, you know how proud he is. Nobody is as strong as they look. I have thought of calling you on the long distance but not knowing how your employer might feel about it I didn’t. You could, though. Just one word is all it would take and it would make him so …
Elizabeth changed into older dungarees, tattered and spotted and faded white at the seams. She took a leather belt from her dresser, but instead of putting it on she raised it over her head and spun it by the buckle like a lariat, in a huge wide beautiful circle. The tongue of the belt flicked a storybook doll—Margaret’s doll but Elizabeth’s room, no one’s but her own. She awoke here every morning feeling amazed all over again that she had finally become a grownup. Where to go and when to sleep and what to do with the day were hers to decide—or not to decide, which was even better. She could leave here when she wanted or stay forever, fixing things. In this house everything she touched seemed to work out fine. Not like the old days.
When she descended the stairs, threading the belt through her jeans, she found Alvareen in the front hallway wiping the baseboards. “I’m going to take care of that turkey now,” Elizabeth told her.
“That right?”
“You wouldn’t like to do it, I don’t guess.”
“Not me.” Alvareen sat back on her heels and refolded the dustcloth. “Honest to truth, you think she could find the money somewhere to buy one. Wha
t you all have for supper last night?”
“Tuna fish on saltine crackers, open-face, topped with canned mushrooms.”
Alvareen rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, a sign she was amused. She loved to hear what was served up on her sick-days.
“For vegetables she spread oleo on celery sticks, with a line of green olives straight down the middle.”
“You making this up?”
“No.”
“Can’t be anyone to cook as bad as that by accident,” said Alvareen. “Must be she wants to discourage your appetite. She’s tight with a dime.”
“Elizabeth?”
“Just going,” Elizabeth called up the stairs.
“I thought you’d have left by now.”
“Just on my way.”
She waved a hand at Alvareen and walked out the front door, crossing the veranda briskly but slowing as she reached the yard. There wasn’t a person in sight, no one to offer to help. She dragged her feet all the way to the toolshed. When she opened the door the turkey rushed to the back of his crate with a scrabbling sound. Elizabeth squatted and peered inside. “Chick, chick?” she said. He strutted back and forth within his three-step limit, his wattle bobbing up and down. Away from the light his wings lost their coppery sheen. He looked drab and shabby, his feathers a little ragged, like someone who had slept with his clothes on. “Well, anyway,” Elizabeth said after a moment. She untwisted the wire that held the crate shut and reached in, carrying out a set of motions that she had rehearsed in her mind. One arm circled his body and pinned his wings down, the other clutched his legs. He struggled at first and then relaxed, and she straightened up with the turkey tight against her chest. “You surely are a big buster,” she told him. There by the chopping block lay the axe, right outside the toolshed door, but it would take her a minute longer to get herself prepared. She set the turkey down. He was too fat to run far. He ambled out the door and down the hill, jerking his neck self-righteously with each step, while Elizabeth followed a few feet behind. She could still grab him up if he started running, but neither of them seemed in any hurry. They walked single file through the trellis, past the blackberry bush, under the rotting roof of the gazebo that showed squares of sky between its warped shingles. Then back again, toward the toolshed. That turkey had no sense at all. He circled the chopping block twice, and still Elizabeth let the axe stay where it was. He headed back through the trellis. They walked like two people filling time, sauntering with exaggerated carelessness, trying to look interested in the scenery. Then the turkey started speeding up. He didn’t run, just took longer and longer steps, never losing his dignity. Elizabeth walked faster. Trees and shrubs and the second trellis skated past them, perfectly level. Then they reached the end of the yard and Elizabeth suddenly darted beyond the turkey and skidded down the bank into the alley, heading him off. A car screeched to a stop not two feet from her. The turkey became interested in something on the ground and stayed there, just at the edge of the bank, pecking unconcernedly.
The car was a dirty white sportscar. The driver was a round-faced blond boy wearing an Alpine hat with a feather in it. When he climbed out he bumped his head against the doorframe. “I wish you would watch where you’re going,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Elizabeth. She couldn’t give him more than a glance because she had to keep her eyes on the turkey. Without looking around she reached toward a bush behind her, snapped off a switch, and started up the bank. “Shoo, now, shoo!” she said.
“Out walking your turkey, I see,” said the boy.
“I’m getting up nerve to kill him.”
“I see. Are you Elizabeth? My name’s Timothy Emerson. I knew we were going to have a turkey dinner, but Mother never mentioned it was still on foot.”
“It may be forever on foot,” Elizabeth said. “This whole business is harder than it looks.”
“Can I help?”
But he wore a plaid sports coat and wool slacks, much too good for killing turkeys in, and even the effort of climbing the bank after her had turned his face pink. “Just stay where you are, keep him off the road,” Elizabeth told him. “That’s all I need.”
“I could run over him with my car if you like.”
She smiled, but her attention was still on the turkey. She gave a flick of her switch and the turkey moved away, slowly now, still examining the ground. “What you need is a leash,” Timothy said.
“I can get him to the chopping block easily enough, but then what? I just hate to tell your mother I’m not equal to this.”
“Let him run off,” Timothy said. “Buy one at the supermarket. Mother’ll never know.”
Elizabeth bent one ankle beneath her and sank down to the ground, still holding the switch. The turkey moved a few steps further off. “Is it you that the unicycle in the basement belongs to?” she said.
“Me? Oh, no, that’s Peter’s. I was never one for exercise. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used it, though.”
“I was just hoping to see it used,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not one for exercise either.”
“Really? I thought you would be.”
“How come?”
“I expected to see you out playing football with the little neighborhood boys,” Timothy said.
“What would I want to do that for?”
“Well, you are the handyman, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” said Elizabeth, “but that’s got nothing to do with football. I wonder if other people have the same idea? I’ve been getting the strangest invitations lately. Tennis, bicycling, nature walks—if there’s one thing I don’t like it’s nature, standing around admiring nature. I come home feeling empty-headed.”
“Why go, then? Look, your turkey is heading toward the road again.”
The turkey was a good twenty feet off, but Elizabeth merely glanced at it and then settled herself more comfortably on the ground. “I always go where I’m asked,” she said. “It’s a challenge: never turn down an invitation. Now, does Peter really know how to ride that unicycle? I mean, bump downstairs on it? Shoot basketballs from it, like they do in the circus?”
“Your turkey!”
Elizabeth looked around. The turkey was picking his way down the shallowest part of the bank, talking to himself deep in his throat. “What about him?” she asked.
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?”
“Oh, I thought I was going to give up on him and go buy one from the supermarket.”
Timothy stared at her. “Well, I only said—you didn’t seem—I never heard you make up your mind about it,” he said. So that Elizabeth, for the first time giving him her full attention, wondered why he wore such a jaunty feathered hat set at such a careless angle. He sounded like his mother, who was forever tying herself into knots over plans and judgments and decisions. But his eyes must have been his father’s—narrow blue slits whose downward slant gave him a puzzled look—and she liked his hair, which stuck out in licked-looking yellow spikes beneath the hat. She smiled at him, ignoring the turkey.
“Are you really going to let him just walk off?” he said.
“Sure,” said Elizabeth, and did—rose and brushed off her dungarees, stood on the edge of the bank to watch the turkey cross the road at an angle and start up someone’s back yard. Finally he was only a jerking coppery dot among the trees. “Now I have to go to the grocery store,” she said. “Anything you need?”
“Maybe I could take you there.”
“Oh no, I like to drive. You could get your car off the road, though.”
“Or I might come with you. Is that all right? I’m always on the lookout for something to do while I’m home.”
He hadn’t been home at all yet, but Elizabeth didn’t bother reminding him. “Fine,” was all she said, and she reached under her paint-shirt to pull, from her jacket pocket, a set of keys dangling from Mrs. Emerson’s lacy gold initials.
The car was a very old Mercedes with a standard shift that tended to stick and make grinding
noises. Elizabeth was used to it. She drove absentmindedly, keeping the clutch halfway in and watching the scenery more than the road, but Timothy changed positions uneasily every time she shifted gears. He kept one hand tight on the dashboard, the other along the back of the seat. “Have you been driving long?” he asked her. “Since I was eleven,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t had time to get a license yet, though.” She swerved neatly around an on-coming taxi. The roads here in the woods were so narrow that one car always had to draw aside when it met another, but Elizabeth made a game out of never actually coming to a full stop. She ducked in and out of parking spaces, raced other drivers to open sections of the road and then rolled easily toward their bumpers as they backed to let her by. “I can see that I’m making you nervous,” she told Timothy, “but I’m a better driver than you realize. I’m trying to save the brakes.”
“I’d rather you saved us,” Timothy said, but he loosened his grip on the dashboard. Then they hit Roland Avenue, and he settled back in his seat. “I don’t suppose you know if Andrew’s coming,” he said.
“He’s not.”
“I was afraid to ask Mother on the phone. She can go on and on about things like that. But Matthew will be there.”
“Nope.”
“What, no Matthew? He practically lives there.”
“He used to,” said Elizabeth. “Then your mother said he was wasting his life on a dead-end job. Running a dinky country newspaper and getting all of the work but none of the credit. I don’t know why.”
