And Jerry didn’t either. With a rush, I knew that as certainly as I used to know he’d come back. He never loved me at all. My knees went shaky and weak and I went down into the dirt.
“The clock is ugly!” I hollered. “You said it was pretty like me, but it wasn’t! It was ugly!” I sobbed. “Like me!” I scooped up handfuls of dirt and threw it at the stone. It fell in clumps on the clock. I knew if I dug far enough, I could get to the coffin, pull it open, and smack Jerry across the face. Because that’s what he deserved; one of those loud, neck-snapping slaps you see on television that leave red marks on pale cheeks.
But digging through six feet of dirt just wasn’t in me. I stopped after a few inches and staggered to my feet. “You can have the clock, Jerry,” I whispered. “It kept me company for all these years. Now I don’t want your company anymore.” But I knew I was lying. I knew that if Jerry suddenly plunged through the dirt, offered me his arm and said, “Let’s go home, Elizabeth,” I’d link up with him in a minute. I knew if I could, I’d be the dirt that rested around his coffin. I knew I was dirt.
My mama was right. She always said she was right, and she was. Free milk just doesn’t make anyone buy a cow.
As I turned to walk away, I knocked right into a woman. I let out a yelp and nearly went backwards. Looking closer, I recognized the wrinkled crinkled big-nose from the funeral. Jerry’s wife. As dark as it was, it was hard to see her expression. But she wasn’t crying, I saw that much. She just stared at me, so I stuck my toe in her husband’s dirt and said nothing.
Then she said, “Are you Elizabeth?”
And I startled. Only Jerry called me Elizabeth; he said it suited me. He said it was regal and…beautiful. I was always plain Betty to everyone else. I looked over my shoulder at the clock. Its face glowed. Then I nodded.
“I thought so. Jerry talked about you all the time.” She moved forward and looked down at the stone. “I don’t know why I’m here, exactly. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking…I kept thinking he might be cold. I even put a blanket in my car.” She laughed. “And you…you brought him a clock?”
“He talked about me?” I stepped sideways, off Jerry’s dirt, and steadied myself on my rolling suitcase.
She grimaced. “All the time. It was Elizabeth this and Elizabeth that. It was like competing with a ghost I could never see.” She moved next to me and touched my sleeve. “I always pictured you as younger.”
I stuck my chin out. “I was younger, when he met me.”
She stared, then shook her head. Reaching down, she touched the clock. “Why the clock? Why a broken old clock?”
I looked down at it and it didn’t look so broken anymore. In this dark light, it was beautiful again and when I listened hard, I could hear its tick. I knew in the middle of the night, its chime would ring out and Jerry would hear it and I would hear it back at home as I sat listening on my couch. “I wanted to give it to him,” I said. “So…so he would know that he’s still mine for all time.” Then I grabbed my suitcase and left, running as fast as I could over the graves.
“Hey!” I heard her call. “Hey, take your clock! I don’t want it here!” I smiled when I heard her grunt and mutter, “Damn, this thing is heavy.”
I knew she wouldn’t be able to move it. It would hold fast to Jerry’s dirt, just as it held fast to my mantel for so long. It was Jerry’s clock now and Jerry’s time to wait. When I met him in heaven, he would have the clock in his arms.
And then he would have me. He was mine for all time. And I would be beautiful again.
A
nd so school teaches you a lot more than about letters and numbers. Through your reading, imagine learning that mothers make beef stew and gingerbread houses, they remember to turn on nightlights that slice the dark into brightness, they comb unruly hair and help with homework. Dick and Jane’s mother always wears dresses. Their mother plays. Their mother smiles.
You look up from your reading at your own mother and you are confused. How else can you feel, in your world where childhood memories involve a parade of collars, a small red one with a buckle and a bell, a blue one with dancing white bones, black leather with bright silver teeth. A choker. Imagine hearing your mother’s voice, sliding from a soft to a shrill yowl, her hand snatching the leash that holds you, her child, and jerking you off your feet and skidding your bare bottom across the dirt floor of the root cellar. Imagine spankings with a rolled-up newspaper, a hairbrush, a belt. You are called an animal by the woman who, the books tell you, is supposed to love you from your first bubbly kick inside of her skin until you stand next to her to catch her last breath. You are supposed to love her forever. She is supposed to love you.
Imagine.
You listen carefully to the conversations your classmates have in the lunchroom. There are some sad tales, tears shared when a child complains of a raised voice, or a spanking with an open palm, or being sent to a room for the rest of the night. These punished children speak of hating their mothers then, they say it out loud, with clogged and wet voices, “Oh, I hate her! I hate her! She is so mean!”
Imagine hating your mother. You think of your spankings, with belts and wooden hairbrushes, that go on until your skin is ruptured and red. You think of her shriek, of the damp and dark of the root cellar, the days spent there. The nights. You think of sitting on your bed in your room, your arms crossed, your feet not even swinging, and how you control your breath to make the littlest inhale, the littlest exhale, and you try and you try and you try to be quiet, and yet somehow, she manages to even hear you think and so you are in her way again. You’ve always thought of yourself as a very naughty boy, even though you’re never quite sure what it is that you do.
At the cafeteria table, you blink.
Yet there are other times too. Times when your mother is asleep, curled in the warm bath of sunshine, and her hair is spread on the floor, and her face is smooth and thoughtless. The sun pinks her cheeks and she is so beautiful.
And sometimes she remembers to make meals. She mostly remembers to buy food. Sometimes she sits right next to you at the table and she looks at you. She looks at you and you know from the steadiness of her eyes that she’s actually seeing you. And sometimes, rarely, she even smiles.
No. You don’t hate your mother.
Imagine.
In the stories you read, it’s the stepmothers who are evil, who do mean things, and you consider that for a while. Maybe your mother is really your stepmother, and your real mother died at your birth and no one has ever told you about her. Your father never mentioned anything like that before he disappeared. He always referred to your mother as your mother. But maybe?
Yet your hair is the same shade of blonde, and has that gentle wave in it that gets snarled if it’s not brushed enough. And your eyes are as blue as hers.
You know she is your mother. You know this in the deepest way. She is your mother. You belong to her.
And so you listen to the conversations, read your books, and wonder what it is that makes you so different. Why do other mothers reach out, draw children in with a hug, while your mother’s arm flares back, then connects with your cheek in a dizzying smack? Why do other mothers insist that their children go out for fresh air while yours is content to have you strain for the thin slat of sunshine coming between two bolted wooden doors? What have you done?
What have you done?
Imagine.
James never understood what he did, not exactly. Sometimes, he thought his mother was so angry just because he breathed. Just because he’d been born. And as he sat through days and nights, either collared and leashed to the root cellar wall or locked in a dog kennel, sometimes with a bowl of water, sometimes not, sometimes with a bowl of whatever stale snack was in the pantry, sometimes not, the alarm clock ticking near his ear, the tiny baby blanket barely draped over his shoulders or resting on his knees, James often wished he’d never been born at all.
T
he graveyard clock was a sad clock and James knew it. Sadness was in its voice, in the slowness of its tick. He kept its black enameled cast iron body so shiny, it reflected the flames in the fireplace, licks of orange and yellow splintering the solid black. But even that glow couldn’t cheer this clock up. James felt its sorrow when he wound it every other week, in the catch in the gears that just couldn’t be repaired.
James repaired this clock twice, lifted it from death and returned it to the light of day. The first time, years ago, a woman brought the clock to him. She said it hadn’t worked in all the time she had it, that she’d just let it sit silently on her dresser. James couldn’t imagine walking past a muted clock for years and never once attempting to resurrect it. When he fixed it, he felt like he performed open heart surgery. More than that; he imagined he gave that clock back its soul. He found all original parts in his skeleton boxes and in antique shops all around Iowa and Wisconsin. When that clock chimed for the first time in decades, James sat back and applauded. He applauded the clock as much as himself. James fixed it; but it remembered its voice and heart and it used them well.
When the woman picked up her clock and heard the voice for the first time, a flush went around her cheeks and up to her eyebrows. When the chime stopped, she whispered her thanks, whispered as if her own voice wasn’t worthy next to the sound of that song. James watched the way she touched the clock; first with the tips of her fingers, then sliding her whole palm over its body. She loved that clock and for that moment, James loved her too and forgave her ignorance.
But several years later, the clock came back when another woman found it in the graveyard. She held the clock like it was the ugliest thing on earth. She dumped it on him, dumped it like an abandoned baby or a box of unwanted puppies. When James caught it, cradled it against his chest, all its parts jangled inside. There wasn’t one working part left out of all that he’d so painstakingly replaced and repaired in its body; even the hands hung loose and broken. But it was the dirt that was unforgivable. There was loose dirt pushed up through the clock’s skin, through its legs and through cracks into its insides.
No clock deserved that. No clock deserved this abuse. Nothing and no one belonged in the dirt. James knew what that was like; he understood the darkness and the smell of heavy dankness pressing down until it seemed that there was no air at all. The first thing he did was take the clock down to his shop and shine a light upon it. A warm and big light that illuminated the clock’s skin and the sadness in its face. And then James started to clean.
Most of the parts were tucked away inside, but they needed to be individually washed and straightened and oiled. It took James months to restore it. It was like putting an entire life back together, piece by piece.
The original woman, that whispering woman, showed up at James’ door a couple months after he finally fixed the clock. She told him some story about losing the clock and asked if there were any others like it. She said she missed the clock’s voice. James told her no, straight out and flat, and then he shut the door in her face. He forgave her once. But he never made a mistake twice.
From the other side of his door, James listened as the whispering woman cried. The clock knew and grew sadder still, but James couldn’t let it go. Not in good conscience. Not to her, definitely not to her. She didn’t deserve that clock. And it didn’t deserve her.
Standing by it now, listening to the hesitation in its tick, thinking about the graveyard, James tried to let it know that everything was okay. It was safe.
All James’ clocks were safe.
J
ames had to go out again that day, but he waited awhile, catching his breath, building his nerve. He could only handle people a little at a time and dealing with Sophie and with his memories of the two mantel clock women were enough for one morning. But there were things he needed at the grocery store and so he steeled himself with lunch before heading back out. He told himself, like he told himself every day, afternoons were a dead time in a grocery store. Most people do their shopping in the morning or on their way home from work. He wouldn’t have to talk much, maybe not at all, he might just be able to buy the necessities, pay with cash and a quick smile, and then go. Bolstering his spirits, James grabbed his little cart and took off for the store.
For a while, James tried doing the grocery shopping just once a week. He thought it would lessen the stress of having to be out in public, facing the long aisles of too much food and too many bodies pushing around carts, if it wasn’t on a daily basis. But only going once a week extended his time actually inside the grocery store. Instead of dashing in and dashing out, laden only with whatever he ran out of that day, he had to push a full-sized store cart and fill it and stand in line behind everyone else who had too many items for the express lane. It was too much. Facing it once a day for only fifteen or so minutes at a time was hard, but manageable; a necessary moment of discomfort.
Trying to fit in with the theme after the town’s revitalization, the grocery store renamed itself the Shop Around The Clock. It used to be Marv’s 24-Hour Shopper. James’ picture was in a frame at the entry. In it, he held a ridiculously huge pair of scissors, preparing to cut the ribbon for the grand re-opening, the grocery store newly repainted and decorated with psychedelic neon wall clocks. The owner spent weeks creating cassette tapes of songs that mentioned clocks or time. Rock Around The Clock, of course. Time In A Bottle. If I Could Turn Back Time. Clock of the Heart. These songs played continuously, but from the looks on the shoppers’ faces, they never listened so it was an exercise in futility. Other than that, the grocery store was the same. Still just Marv’s 24-Hour Shopper under the glitz and forced glamour. Same food, same prices. Even with James’ picture at the front, the cashiers still asked for James’ identification when he wrote a check. Though they smiled at him now. So he used cash; cash was faster. Another reason for going every day and keeping the order small.