Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
“I wouldn’t call divorce a little trouble,” Willa said.
He lifted his glass and drank the last of his water, and then he set the glass back on the table and stared down into it.
“Can I get you a refill?” she asked him.
“What I’m trying to say is, I thought I was doing okay but really I’m just going through the motions. Even now. Most of my meals nowadays are just cold cereal.”
“Well, that’s not good,” she said.
“I forget to mail things and I drop things and spill things, and several times I’ve gotten lost when I’m driving somewhere I’ve driven to a million times before.”
“That’s how it is after a death, too,” Willa told him. “I’ve been that way since my husband died. Sometimes I think I have Alzheimer’s! I guess divorce is just another kind of bereavement, really.”
“Except friends don’t know what to say about it,” he said.
“They don’t know what to say about a death, either.”
He said, “It used to irk me when people got divorced and they’d say, ‘Oh, we just drifted apart,’ or ‘We just decided to go our separate ways.’ ‘Come on!’ I wanted to tell them. ‘How about saying she was so bossy you couldn’t stand it, or he was sleeping around?’ ”
“Oh, I know!” Willa said. “Who’s going to believe a couple would bother divorcing if they’ve only developed different hobbies or something?”
“So when friends ask me, I tell them straight out: ‘She fell in love with another man.’ I mean, they’ll learn the truth sooner or later anyhow, am I right?”
“Yes, it always comes out in the end,” Willa said.
“But then they look uneasy and they change the subject. Or a guy friend might say something like, ‘Gee, what a slut.’ Miriam isn’t a slut.”
“Of course not,” Willa said.
He looked into her eyes now, maybe for the first time. “Did he know I was there?” he asked her.
“What…?”
“Did he see me? My car, I mean? Or did he cut in front of me not knowing I was so close behind?”
“Oh,” Willa said. “No, he saw you. But I think he was…annoyed with you.”
“Annoyed! Oh, God, so I did cause it.”
She’d liked it better when they were discussing his divorce. It had been so long since she’d had a conversation that didn’t center on Derek’s death—what a shock it was, how on earth it could have happened—that she was sick of the subject. She said, “Look. He was a short-tempered driver, that’s all. He was the kind of driver who’s always talking to other cars. ‘Make up your mind now, right lane or left,’ he’d say; ‘you can’t have both.” Or ‘Let’s think about this: green light. What exactly might that signify, do you suppose?’ ”
Carl Dexter flicked one corner of his mouth again, but he didn’t look any happier.
“Once when he was teaching our younger son how to drive he made him stop the car and get out and walk home. And they were far from home. Miles. He said Ian was letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry get in front of them.”
“You’re a very nice woman,” Carl Dexter told her out of nowhere.
She said, “Well. Too nice, my sons always claim.”
“No, I mean it. I would have understood if you’d said you couldn’t bear the sight of me. ‘If you’d been paying attention, everything would be different now,’ you might have said.”
“Well, you could say that about any situation,” Willa told him.
Then she stood up, and Carl Dexter stood up too and held out his hand. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
* * *
—
In September she and Ian delivered Sean to UC Santa Barbara—Sean driving there and Ian driving back in her suddenly too-empty Toyota—and Ian started his junior year in high school and Willa signed up for a full load at her college. She packed Derek’s clothes into cartons and donated them to a charity. She turned his study, where he’d mostly watched TV, into a place where Ian could hang out with his friends, and once he’d learned that she didn’t mind having his band practice there, too, he actually did start staying home more than he used to.
At night she still woke up, she still mulled and worried and reflected and regretted, but after an hour or so now she would drift back into sleep, and by morning she felt well rested. She felt more or less normal, in fact.
She was reminded of rainy days in her childhood when she would resign herself to staying in, reading or watching daytime TV, and then in the afternoon the sun would break through unexpectedly and she would think, Oh. I guess I can go outside now. Isn’t that…a good thing, I guess.
* * *
—
In October she and Ian flew east to visit her father, because he kept making excuses not to come to them. He seemed pleased enough to see them, in his muted way, and she enjoyed feeling useful—giving his house a good turning-out and stocking his freezer with individually wrapped meals. They went only for Columbus Day weekend, a three-day whirlwind of activity, and the Tuesday after they got back Willa was so jet-lagged that she fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the afternoon.
She dreamed about Derek, which she didn’t usually do even though she kept hoping to. She dreamed he wasn’t dead after all; there had been a misunderstanding. The doorbell rang and there he was, the same as always—his dear freckled face and the sun lines around his eyes. He was looking irritated, though. She knew that look. He said, “Really, Willa? You threw all my clothes out?”
“Oh, Derek!” she said. “I’m so sorry! I thought—”
“I turn my back for one minute and you throw away all I own?”
And meanwhile the doorbell kept ringing. She couldn’t explain that.
She woke and the doorbell was ringing, for real. Blearily, she sat up and smoothed her hair. She struggled up from the couch and went out to the front hall and opened the door. Carl Dexter was standing on the stoop. “Oh,” she said.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”
“No.”
She supposed she should invite him in, but she still hadn’t quite surfaced from her dream. She blinked at him.
“I was wondering,” he said. “Is there any chance you’d be interested in coming out to dinner with me? I mean, either this evening or some other time; you could choose the time.”
Willa said, “Oh.”
She considered a moment.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I think not.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I understand.”
He gave her an awkward little wave and turned and walked away.
Willa shut the door and went back to the living room. First she sat down on the couch, and then she stretched out and closed her eyes and tried to retrieve her dream—rewinding to it, so to speak. She summoned the jingling sound of Derek ringing the doorbell; she relived the act of getting up and going out to the hall to answer. But her mind stayed stubbornly awake, as alert as if she’d drunk a whole pot of coffee.
Even so, she kept trying. She crossed the hall. She opened the door. She saw Derek on the stoop, looking mad as hell. “For shit’s sake, Willa,” he said.
“It’s you,” she said, and she stepped out to throw her arms around him and rest her head on his chest.
PART II
2017
1
The phone call came on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July. Willa happened to be sorting her headbands. She had laid them out across the bed in clumps of different colors, and now she was pressing them flat with her fingers and aligning them in the compartments of a fabric-covered storage box she’d bought especially for the purpose. Then all at o
She crossed to the phone and checked the caller ID: a Baltimore area code. Sean had a Baltimore area code. This wasn’t Sean’s number, though, so of course a little claw of anxiety clutched her chest. She lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”
“Mrs. MacIntyre?” a woman asked.
Willa had not been Mrs. MacIntyre in over a decade, but she said, “Yes?”
“You don’t know me,” the woman said. (Not a reassuring beginning.) She had a flat-toned, carrying voice—an overweight voice, Willa thought—and a Baltimore accent that turned “know me” into “Naomi,” very nearly. “My name is Callie Montgomery,” she said. “I’m a neighbor of Denise’s.”
“Denise?”
“Denise, your daughter-in-law.”
Willa didn’t have any daughters-in-law, sad to say. However, Sean used to live with a Denise, so she went along with it. “Oh, yes,” she said.
“And yesterday, she got shot.”
“She what?”
“Got shot in the leg.”
“Who did that?”
“Now, that I couldn’t tell you,” Callie said. She let out a breath of air that Willa mistook at first for laughter, till she realized Callie must be smoking. She had forgotten those whooshing pauses that happened during phone conversations with smokers. “It was just random, I guess,” Callie said. “You know.”
“Ah.”
“So off she goes in the ambulance and out of the goodness of my heart I take her daughter back to my house, even though I don’t know the kid from Adam, to tell the truth. I hardly even know Denise! I just moved here last Thanksgiving when I left my sorry excuse for a husband and had to rent a place in a hurry. Well, that’s a whole nother story which wouldn’t interest you, I don’t suppose, but anyhow, I figured I’d be stuck with Cheryl for just a couple of hours, right? Since a bullet in the leg didn’t sound all that serious. But then lo and behold, Denise had to have an operation, so a couple of hours turns into overnight and then this morning she calls and tells me they’re keeping her in the hospital for who-knows-how-much-longer.”
“Oh, dear…”
“And I’m a working woman! I work at the PNC Bank! I was already dressed in my outfit when she called. Besides which, I am not used to dealing with children. This has been just about the longest day of my life, I tell you.”
Willa had known that Denise was a single mother, although she’d forgotten how old the child was and she had only a vague recollection that the father was “long gone,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Helplessly, she said, “Well…that does sound like a problem.”
“Plus also there is Airplane who I think I might be allergic to.”
“Excuse me?”
“So I go over to Denise’s house and check the numbers on the list above her phone—doctors and veterinarian and whatnot—thinking I will call Sean if I have to although everybody knows Denise wouldn’t even let him back in the house that time to pack his things, and what do I see but where she’s written ‘Sean’s mom’ so I say to myself, ‘Okay, I’m just going to call Sean’s mom and ask her to come get her grandchild.’ ”
Willa couldn’t imagine why her number would be on Denise’s phone list. She said, “Actually—”
“What state is this, anyhow?”
“Sorry?”
“What state is area code five-two-oh?”
“It’s Arizona,” Willa said.
“So, do you think you could find yourself a flight that gets in this evening? I mean, it must be afternoon for you still, right? And I am losing my mind here, I tell you. I cannot wait to set eyes on you. Me and Cheryl and Airplane all three—we’ll have our noses pressed to the window watching out for you.”
Willa said, “Actually, I’m not…”
But this time she stopped speaking on her own, and there was a little pause. Then Callie let out another whoosh of smoke and said, “I live two doors down from Denise. Three fourteen Dorcas Road.”
“Three fourteen,” Willa said faintly.
“You’ve got my number on your phone now, right? Let me know when you find out what time you’re getting in.”
“Wait!” Willa said.
But Callie had hung up by then.
* * *
—
Of course Willa wouldn’t go. That would be crazy. She would have to call Callie back and confess she was not the child’s grandmother. But first she spent an enjoyable moment pretending she might really do this.
The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn’t even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn’t exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed, in fact. And Peter was out for hours every day with his golf chums, and her sons lived far away—Sean managing the Towson, Maryland, branch of Sports Infinity, Ian doing something environmental in the Sierra Nevada mountains—and both of her parents were dead and she rarely laid eyes on her sister. She didn’t even have any woman friends here, not close ones.
What would a person pack, she wondered, if this person were to contemplate making a trip to Baltimore? It would certainly not be a formal place. She tried to remember whether that A-line dress she liked to travel in was back from the cleaners yet. She went to her closet to check.
By the time her husband returned from his game, she had a seat on the first available flight the next day.
* * *
—
“I don’t understand,” Peter said.
He was watching from the bedroom doorway as Willa packed the suitcase that lay open on their bed.
“I’ve never heard you so much as mention a Denise,” he said.
“Oh, I’ve mentioned her a million times! Sean and she lived together for a couple of years, remember?”
“Well, still, who is she to you? Why would she ask you to come?”
“Have you not been listening?” Willa said. “Her neighbor asked me. Callie. Denise is in the hospital, and her little girl is—”
“But it isn’t Sean’s little girl.”
“Well, no.”
“How old is this child, anyhow?”
“I’m not sure,” Willa said.
Peter shut his mouth and looked at her, patiently waiting for her to realize how illogical all this was.
He was eleven years Willa’s senior, a tanned, trim, serious-looking man with a crisply etched face and close-cut silver hair, and sometimes he could make her feel sort of naïve and inexperienced. He often addressed her as “little one,” for instance. He did it now. “Little one,” he said. “I know you’ve been at loose ends since the move. And I know you wish you had more of a connection with your boys. But this just doesn’t make sense. You’ve never even met this woman!”
“Well…I’ve talked to her,” she said.
“You have?”
“I talked to her on the phone a couple times, when I called to speak to Sean.”
He gave her that patient look again.
“Oh, Peter,” she said, “can’t you see my side of this? I haven’t felt useful in…forever! And here are these people who say they need me, Callie and Cheryl and Airplane with their noses pressed to the window! Surely you can understand that!”
“Airplane?” Peter asked.
“Airplane the dog,” she said, taking a guess.
There was a pause.
“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m coming too.”
“Coming to Baltimore?”
“How long has it been since you traveled alone, hmm? When have you ever traveled alone? And someone needs to make sure these people don’t take advantage of you.”
“Of course I can,” he said. “These things can always be arranged.”
And he went off to take care of it.
* * *
—
She waited till later, when he was watching the evening news, before she called Sean. She dialed from the phone in their bedroom and then walked through the French doors to the terrace overlooking the golf greens. It was beginning to get a bit cooler out, thank heaven. One thing she was never going to adjust to was how you needed constant air conditioning here. People were dependent upon it in the same way that space travelers were dependent upon their oxygen tanks. It seemed possible that if the electricity went off, they could actually die. When Willa thought about that too long, it made her feel kind of panicky.
Sean answered his phone on the third ring. “Mom?”
“Hi, honey. I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“Nah, I’m good,” he said. He had his father’s casual, sauntering style of speech. It always made her sad.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m coming to Baltimore tomorrow,” she said.
“You are? What for?”
“Well, you remember Denise,” she said.
“Denise. Denise. My Denise?”
“Right. So she got…I don’t suppose anyone’s told you, but she got shot in the leg and I said I would—”
“Shot!”
“It seems it was something random. I don’t know the details. But anyhow, I said I’d come tend her daughter until she gets out of the hospital.”
“What?”
“Her daughter. Cheryl. And…is Airplane a dog?”
“What? Who’s Airplane?”