by Isla Morley
An antique clock is mounted on the wall to the left of the dressing table mirror, and because it never chimes is more decorative than functional. Before, its hands would be frozen on the same time for months, seven years, for lack of attention. I wind it every other day now. There is also a clock in the guest room in which Greg pretends he has not moved, although his clothes are draped on the back of the chair and the debris from his pockets is strewn on the bedside table. Located inconveniently on the high shelf, the clock requires that I bring in the rattan chair from the hallway and get up to wind it.
They are all Greg’s clocks, except the one in the dining room in the glass display cabinet that was my mother’s twentieth-anniversary gift to my father. It is the only thing of his I have. Greg used to keep his clocks going; companionship, he called it, an old habit from his decadelong bachelorhood. But now I have assumed responsibility for them, and it is the only thing I am diligent about.
The kitchen has two clocks, both built into the appliances—one in the microwave and the other in the oven. I watch them both whenever I am in the kitchen, which is seldom. The one on the VCR I finally figured out how to set, but there is no setting the grandfather clock that Greg’s mother gave—it either goes too fast or too slow, but either way, it is of its own choosing. It is the only inanimate object about which I have harbored homicidal thoughts, chiming as it did boldly off-key and off the hour, often just when I had rocked the baby to sleep. When it chimes now I long for the baby’s cry that used to accompany it.
The poets write of time standing still when someone dies. It is not true. Time comes alive and takes up space. Time-past and time-tocome compete for turf in my ticktocking house. Every second mushrooms; every minute is counted in deliberate increments. Hours march steadily, calculatedly, through the afternoon like the Night Marchers on their ghostly patrol through the valley. The colon blinks like a heartbeat, as though it can push blood through the veins of a pallid day.
Greg does not approve of my clock-watching. He draws in a deep, nasally breath each time he sees my clock-winding ritual, steadying himself like an arrow drawn tight on a bow, the epitome of restraint. What he does not know is how the clocks all tell me the same thing: I am alive and she is dead. I have lived four thousand four hundred and twenty hours since she died, four thousand four hundred and twenty hours when I wanted to stay asleep, be unconscious, die. A captive to time, I am the mute witness to past events as they unfurl around me in uninterrupted and overlapping sequences: accidentally closing the car door on Cleo’s finger, staying late at work too many evenings, walking out of Cleo’s room when she cried for me to stay and read one more book.
Cleo’s is the only room where there are no clocks, where time is neither kept, marked, nor marching. At the threshold of her room, I watch the way the light comes in through the blinds. If I have gotten a late start to the day, like today, the sun shines in through the southfacing window and almost reaches her bed. If it is before ten o’clock, the light spills in through the east window and her bed is bathed in light. After taking stock of all her toys and her pajamas still lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of her bed, I sit down next to Mimi, her first doll, at her rightful place on the pillow. It all stays the same, as though Cleo has been hurried off to day care and will return anytime. Only the shadows and light move, and the dotted line of ants that have taken up residence around the discarded lollipop stick on her bedside table.
Today Pilgrim is sprawled out on the sunny spot next to her tea set, having left another gift on her bed: the remains of a ghost-colored gecko. Startled at the shattering of quiet by the ringing of the phone, I walk downstairs to answer it. It is twenty to twelve, according to the grandfather clock.
“Hello?”
There is only a wide silence on the other end.
“Greg?” I ask, knowing immediately it is not him. I hear the deep inhale that can only be a drag on a cigarette, and the breath-hold that follows while the nicotine does its job.
“What do you want, Theresa?” I ask crisply.
My name comes out in a rush of wind, a reed shaking in a stiff breeze, “Abbe . . . I just want to talk.”
“There is nothing to talk about,” I tell her.
“Please, Abbe; please don’t hang up.” We are both quiet while I watch the granddaddy big hand snap up to the next minute marker.
“I can’t do this on the phone,” she finally says. “Can we meet somewhere?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We are leaving Hawaii, Abbe. We’ll be gone at the end of the month. I would like to see you before we go. There are things Greg said in his sermon about forgiveness and grace, and I just thought—”
“You will have to talk to Greg about those things, not me.”
“If I can just—”
“I’m sorry, I have to go. Please don’t call me again,” I say.
“Abbe—I loved her too . . .”
I put the phone down at the same time Granddad begins to peal.
Greg hadn’t told me that they were still attending services, and I wonder now if he had to shake their hands at the door after each service. Had he talked to them? Had he served them communion?
I sit down at the table and begin to cry. Yes, she had loved Cleo. Shortly after Cleo was born, when the call came that my grandmother had died, Jenny and Theresa, with Tess on her hip, drove up to our house to look after the baby while we grieved. Greg and I walked to the top of the hill where the houses were expensive and the view stretched from Diamond Head to Waianae. When we returned a couple of hours later, a pot of chili simmered on the stove, the dishes sat soaking in sudsy water, and a pink-faced Cleo nursed at Theresa’s breast. “Whoa, slow down, little one,” Theresa was saying. As I watched my little girl draw at her nipple, I felt my own milk let down and my guard go up. For a moment I wanted to snatch my baby from her bosom. She’s not yours! I had the impulse to say. You have your own children! But nobody was stealing anything. My child had been crying from hunger, there were still tears on her cheeks, and I had been away, stealing moments to attend to my own needs. Theresa had let Cleo cry as long as she could bear it.
I watched and marveled at how easily the lines between mother and child blur. In what was then a tender moment, I felt that we were all mothers to all the children of the world, and whose womb bore whom did not matter much. But it does matter when the one from my womb has gone and left a carapace for a mother in her aftermath.
. . .
GREG COMES HOME and sets about making sandwiches for lunch. When he sits at the table across from me, he begins the laborious task of starting a conversation. It follows the same predictable route: He tells me something I pretend to care about. I do this by blinking instead of staring at the clock. It is never about anything important, usually something to do with the church: Mrs. Freemount’s kidneys; Betty has booked him for another wedding even though he told her he wouldn’t do any more; the trustees chairman trimmed the poinciana trees too much so that they now resemble baobabs; the front page of the church newsletter misspelled Al Firth’s name in the birthday list so it appeared as “Girth,” which is particularly unfortunate given the fact that Al hastily regained all the weight he lost on his yearlong zero-carb diet.
Today it is about Mrs. Scribner’s dog, Puffy. Puffy has been on the prayer list longer than Mrs. Freemount, well over a year, for one or another health reason, and was even trotted to the chancel for an anointing during the biannual healing service. Liver cancer, the vet said. Advised to end the dog’s misery, Mrs. Scribner could not bring herself to make that one last trip to the veterinarian, so we added her name, along with Puffy’s, to the weekly prayer list.
“Puffy died,” Greg says.
“She had him put down?” I ask, feeling sad for the old woman losing her only companion.
“Actually, he fell from her balcony. Eighteen stories. She said the condominium manager called yesterday afternoon to ask if Puffy was with her and she told him that he was taking his
usual nap on the lanai, but when he asked her to check and make sure, she found only his chew toy on the blanket.”
“Oh my gosh, Greg, how terrible.”
“She says the little guy committed suicide because she didn’t have the guts to end his suffering. She’s very distraught.”
“Did you go visit her?”
“That’s where I’ve been all morning. She has him in her old knitting box, covered up with an old sweater.”
“What is she going to do with him?” I ask.
“She doesn’t know yet. I suggested she bury him in the church’s memorial garden, but she said she’d think about it. She told me she didn’t think she’d be coming to church for a while.”
When Greg leaves for the office, I get out the shoe box marked “church photos” and dig around till I find the one I am looking for. Greg is holding up Puffy in one hand and laying his other on top of the poodle’s fuzzy white head. “Blessing of the Animals—1999,” is written on the back. It is not the nervous little mutt that stands out in the picture, or Greg’s wide smile, but the beaming background that is Mrs. Scribner’s proud face. In a notecard, I write, We will miss Puffy, and then a hasty postscript, I stopped going to church too. I enclose the photo with it, pop it in an envelope, and walk it down to the mailbox, past Mrs. Chung’s peering eyes.
I know why Mrs. Scribner doesn’t want to go to church. The lead weight of those well-wishings and good intentions only serve to take a drowning woman farther into the depths. The things people said were not lifelines but chum thrown into already treacherous waters. The sharks circled, the monsters of the deep rose up to clasp thrashing feet, while all the while polite ladies in their Sunday best cut tea cakes into perfect squares and tch-tched not quite out of earshot.
Mrs. Scribner knew what the people at church said behind her back. That she had gotten soft in the head ever since her husband, Alfred, had died. That she had no business bringing a dog to church. It was sacrilegious, some gossiped, after Carolyn Higa swore she had seen Mrs. Scribner bite off a corner of her communion wafer and feed it to Puffy. Mrs. Scribner knew they were not her friends, although they expected her to attend every women’s auxiliary meeting, and pouted when she didn’t. Puffy’s death gave her a reason to finally stop participating in a ritual in which she had long since stopped believing and for which she finally had no energy. I knew all too well about that. However, death, I was coming to realize, replaced one set of rituals for a set all its own. Like winding clocks and counting the hours.
. . .
IT IS FIVE MINUTES TO SEVEN, Greg is leaving for church, sermon packed, wearing his lace-up shoes and smelling of cologne. It must be Sunday again. Tiptoeing around our room, retrieving his clerical collar and his belt, Greg does not know I am awake. I pretend to be asleep so he won’t give me the awkward kiss goodbye and I won’t struggle to find a suitable valediction: Good luck, God bless? What are the things ministers’ wives ought to say to the fathers of their dead children?
I breathe evenly and pretend to inhabit the wind-burnt plains of my dreams.
When I hear the front door close, I get up even though it is too early. There is still steam in the bathroom, and the mirror is fogged up. I rub it viciously and stare at the haunted face that gazes back at me. I know this mood; my only mood. Hollowed out by grief, I ought to manicure my coiffure, arrange it around the bleakness that might be mistaken for a face. I look in the cupboard and find the shears, plug them in. In a few swift sweeps I hack off my hair. It falls in matted clumps in the sink. There. I stare at my reflection. I look like a convict. I am a convict. And I cry. Sunday morning, the Christians are gathering to sing “Amazing Grace.” And won’t it sound so sweet when they sing “that saved a wretch like me”? I am truly lost.
THE PHONE RINGS just after I have brewed my morning tea and I let the machine get it, but when it rings again I imagine it is Greg with something urgent to say. Something he has forgotten to take with him to church—a poem photocopied from one of his books, the last page of his sermon.
“Greg?”
“No, dear,” I hear the woman say, “it’s Pearl Scribner.”
“Mrs. Scribner, how are you? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, dear. Well, no, not really. I have been cooped up in this apartment for a week and the only thing I can think of to do is go to church.”
“Yes?”
“Well, the thing is, my dear, I feel rather peculiar going by myself. There was always Alfred, you know, and after him—God rest his soul—there was always Puffy.”
“It must be very hard not having him around anymore,” I offer.
“It is, thank you, dear. You know all about it, I am sure. But the thing I am trying to say is I was wondering whether you could find it in your heart to accompany me . . .”
“I don’t have the car this morning, I’m afraid. Greg has already taken it,” I say, the excuse quick in coming.
“I was thinking of picking you up,” she counters. And I am quite at a loss. “Are you there, dear?”
“Yes, Mrs. Scribner.” I pause again.
“Well, will you?”
“It seems that there is just one other problem,” I say, rubbing my prickly head. “I have just chopped off almost all my hair.”
Without skipping a beat, she says, “I have the most excellent hat. Wait right there.”
Mrs. Scribner’s most excellent hat is wide-brimmed with a blue gingham band, and scares the hell out of the cat. “It matches your trousers,” she says, and opens the passenger door of her little Fiat. “I think you should keep it.” We talk about Puffy and how he could not stand little children or men, and we laugh about the day he took a nip at Kelsey Oliver’s ankle. All too soon we are at the church, where Mrs. Domingo pounds out the prelude on the organ with the vexation of a woman doing her laundry by hand.
I sit with Mrs. Scribner in her usual spot, second pew left of center. Several people in the pew behind dust us with attaboy pats. Greg is visibly surprised, and during the opening hymn comes to embrace first me and then Mrs. Scribner. It is difficult to concentrate on Greg’s sermon, so it is only after the offertory, when the Wai twins—shooed from the front pew by Helen Wai—hand out bookmarks to the men standing in the aisles that I realize it is Father’s Day. Ikaika, seeing that his sister has covered all of her assigned territory and much of his, looks around desperately to offload his stock. Spotting some of the members who are pointing behind him, he spins around and dashes in inspiration to the four men sitting in the choir loft. On his way down the chancel steps, he stops next to Greg’s seat to give him a bookmark, then hesitates, and the look of pure turmoil is visible to everyone. He looks over at his mother and, seeing her nod vigorously, hastily hands Greg a bookmark and rushes back to the front pew, sliding down as he sits.
One by one the parishioners come up to me, their brows sloping, their Emmett Kelly mouths, their sympathies tucked up like handbags. No one mentions Mrs. Scribner’s excellent hat or my hair. They smother me with hugs.
“We miss Cleo so much,” “A precious angel,” “So special.” Sylvia Horton can only cry and shake her head apologetically as though it were covered in cobwebs till Jenny, coming to the rescue, ushers her into the choir room. Among the faces crowding closer is Theresa’s. It is an old face, with dark smudges beneath her eyes. Seeing her intent, the determination to talk to me set on her mouth, I sneak out the side exit and head for the ladies’ room on the second floor of the administration building, the one no one uses on Sundays.
I stare at my reflection. If I half close my eyes, the hat makes me look like a madam on the deck of a ship, out for a leisurely stroll in the midday sun. But when I lean across the sink, eyes wide open, there is a vacant gaze shadowed by heavy lids . . . the look of a madwoman. Not for the first time I think I look more and more like my mother. I try to picture the next few minutes, try to plan a way around Theresa’s purpose, when Carolyn Higa walks in with a reed of a woman in tow. Built like a wrestler, Carol
yn is both despised and tolerated as the church bully. Today she is wearing a fuchsia muumuu and white pumps that add another inch to her almost six-foot stature. Her stringy gray-streaked hair is rolled up into a bird’s nest of a bun and is decorated with a spray of fake hibiscus flowers. The scent of cheap perfume assails me.
“Morning, Carolyn,” I say, pulling at the paper towel dispenser.
“We didn’t expect you this morning, Elizabeth,” she says (the only person who uses my full name) with her characteristic bluntness. We have not talked to each other since the day a group volunteered to assemble Christmas gift bags for the homebound members and she told poor Sylvia Horton off for putting the angel ornament in the wrong corner of the bag. “There is no need to be rude, Carolyn,” I told her. “She should do it right or not do it at all,” Carolyn fired back. “If you find it that intolerable, perhaps you should go home,” I said, sticking to my guns. “Well, if that’s the way you feel, I think I will,” she replied, and stomped out. Except she did not go home but marched the ten steps from the church library to Greg’s office door, where she interrupted his sermon preparation to tittle-tattle for the better part of an hour.
“This is Lily Otai, a friend of mine from the YWCA; Lily, meet Elizabeth Deighton—our minister’s wife,” she introduces us, and we shake hands. Quivering neighbors and browbeaten tennis partners are frequently the people Carolyn pesters into accompanying her to church, a function that corroborates her self-appointment as chairperson of the evangelism committee.
“You came with Pearl?” Carolyn asks.
“Yes.”
“At least we don’t have to put up with that mongrel in church anymore,” she trills.
My shorn hair begins to itch around the brim, bristling like centipedes. I throw the towel away and head for the door, but she steps in front of me.
