The Birthday Present
Jen Michalski
The last thing Stanley expected on his birthday was company. From the living room window he watched the gold El Dorado arc into the driveway next to his truck. The small explosions of gravel underneath its faded white wall tires, along with the engine’s choppy motor, threw his pulse off kilter. He smoothed the Brill-creamed locks of blond hair, what was left of it, to his skull, wondering if Cindy had come back from the dead. It was the only present he wanted. His hand rattled against the doorknob as he opened the door.
The woman was blond and blue eyed, and that was where her resemblance to Cindy ended. But she had the long, sloped nose of Stanley’s own mother, her square, grim face, and she held a baby that looked like not any of them, skin the color of ginger with amber eyes and honey hair.
“Dad, it’s me. Twila” The woman slung the alien child to her other hip, swathed in rust-colored corduroys. “Are you going to invite me in?”
She walked past him into the living room, dropping the infant onto the sofa. She sank down next to it and grabbed Stanley’s pack of cigarettes from the coffee table.
“How’s Wendell?” He thought of Twila’s stepfather.
“I don’t talk to Wendell anymore.” She swung her hair over her shoulders with a flick of her chin and lit a cigarette. “You weren’t the only person he swindled.”
“I gathered. Why else would you be here?”
“You’re going to turn your own child away? Meet your granddaughter Heidi while you’re at it.”
The light-eyed child stared at him, and he stared at her. She wore a caftan-like dress, made of hemp or burlap or some other earthy seventies fabric Stanley could not imagine wearing, and no shoes.
“Does Wendell know you have a child?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Like I said, I don’t talk to him anymore.”
“How’d you get my address?”
“Mom gave it to me years ago. I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here.”
“If I was still alive?”
“Well, I’m happy you’re here.” She pulled a set of keys attached to a leather key chain and held them out toward the baby, who touched them curiously with her fingers.
“When you were a baby, you were a grouchy, colicky little thing.” Stanley went into the kitchen and returned with two tepid cups of coffee. He sat down so that the baby was between them. “And I should know. I was the one who took care of you at first.”
“I know you did, Dad.” Twila cupped the mug between her hands. “Mom didn’t speak badly of you. Just said you weren’t cut out for the show business life.”
“Neither was she, I reckon.” He sipped at his coffee, mostly so she would not see him choke up a little. Cindy Lee had fit him just right, physically and emotionally, and all the other women he’d picked up over the years at the roadhouses were clunky and ill-fitting, belts that squeezed too tight or shirts with short cuffs or pants with hems that dragged and caught his heels.
“Say hi to your granddaughter.” Twila turned her knees toward him on the couch, nodded at the baby. “She’s your only one, unless you’ve had kids I’m not aware of.”
He held out his pointer finger to the baby, and she grasped it, her hand warm and moist and weak. He remembered the nights holding Twila while Cindy was singing at the old radio barn dances, walking back and forth in the dressing room or the hotel as Twila wailed, red and bright with perceived injustice and pain as he spoke to her, softly, and hummed, told her mommy would be back and would sing her the most beautiful lullaby. Back and forth and back and forth until he was dozing on his feet, her sporadic wails and wriggles jostling him from the space between waking and sleep. Back and forth until he thought he’d go crazy, that she would never stop, and then silence. And Cindy would come back to the dressing room, drop in the chair, sweat glistening like the radiance of birth, and take Twila from him. Such a good, quiet baby. Such a little angel.
“Who’s the father?” He picked up the baby, sat it in his lap. She smelled sour. The openings of her cloth diaper leeched the long-forgotten but still memorable odor.
“An Algerian. French-Algerian. He runs an art gallery out in the Haight.” Twila crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Don’t worry—she’s not black.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.” But who knows what he was thinking? A grandfather. That morning he only had his clocks, his memories. “I was thinking she needs to be changed.”
***
Stanley had been alone the last thirty years. The farmhouse had become his wife. He knew where the drafts curled under the doors, and during which seasons, how the light moved across the floor and up the walls. A conversation began each morning with the groaning of the pipes from the shower and the steam of the teapot for his instant coffee to the ticking of the cuckoo clocks and mantel clocks and quartz and Timex and Swiss Army watches that lay in various stages of assembly everywhere. He had begun to collect them in bulk after he stopped drinking. Ironically, time had had an elastic quality when he was, and days turned into weeks and he would need to ask the bartender or the clerk at the packaged goods store for the day, sometimes the month. When he woke up one morning with a pain in his side rivaling what he imagined nuclear detonation, he turned his head from the floor to the front window and saw the snow collecting outside. Why, he thought as he dipped his chin to his chest and looked for a gunshot wound or some other obvious cause of his distress, was he wearing Bermuda shorts?
Two weeks later, dried out and missing an appendix, he returned from the hospital and resolved to take inventory of his life. There was no inventory, at least in the physical sense, to speak of, only his musette and duffel bags from the war, a few dusty and creaky pieces of furniture, some clothes, a tube of lipstick Cindy had left behind that he had not the desire to throw away. And bottles. Empty amber bottles of Wild Turkey and sometimes Jack Daniels and Seagram’s but mostly Wild Turkey, bottles that stood on the kitchen counter, lay on their side on the dining room table, tucked between sofa cushions and rolling under beds. Pieces of bottles lay at the bases of walls, outside by the truck. These bottles told a story, long and redundant but without any clarity, any redeeming features. He collected the bottles in a crate and bought a deer rifle, spent afternoons refining his aim long lost since the war.
***
He saw the tracks after dinner, after he fried them some eggs and toasted some bread and moved the clock parts to the basement so they could eat at the table. He saw them when Twila picked Heidi up and twirled her around to make the baby laugh and the loose cuffs of her tunic fell to her elbows. He went to the El Dorado to get her luggage, looking through the glove compartment, under the front seat, and then found the rip in the back seat where the leather case with the needles was stuffed. He left it there and brought the suitcase and the baby bag into the house and put them on the stairs.
“So how long would you like to stay?” He watched Heidi take small, unsteady steps across the dusty hardwood floor of the living room, lurched instinctively when she pitched forward. She fell on the hard floor and began to cry. He waited for Twila to pick her up. When she didn’t, he scooped the baby up in his arms.
“Not real long.” She watched him walk back and forth, humming while Heidi wailed. “I have places I need to be.”
“Today’s my birthday.” He cupped the baby on the head, felt an electricity move from her scalp through her honey-colored sprouts. Or maybe it was an electricity that moved from him to her. His granddaughter. His stuff and Cindy’s stuff (and apparently some Algerian guy’s stuff) sprinkled into the bloody soup of this child. He could smell himself, feel himself in her somewhere. “Why don’t we go out for an ice cream?”
“Really? Your birthday? Well, how’s that for serendipity?” She came over and laced her fingers overtop his shoulder, gazing at Heidi. “How old are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. Feel younger than I have in a long time.”
“Let me go to the bathroom first.” She kissed his cheek but, instead of going upstairs she went out to the car. He watched her through the window as she rummaged in the back seat, tucked the leather case into her pants underneath her tunic. Then she jogged back to the house and thudded up the stairs.
“You got any shoes, pudding?” he asked the baby. She looked at him, so quiet, and he wondered if she would be abandoned in her life because she lacked the instinct to cry, to demand what was hers.
When Twila did not return he went upstairs with the baby and knocked on the bathroom door. He could hear her breathing, snoring, actually, and pushed the door open with his elbow. She lay curled in the tub, drool clinging to her chin and the open V of her neck. The leather bag sat open, a narrow swatch of rubber, her tourniquet, hanging out like a tongue on the white hexagonal tiles. He closed the door and took the baby out to the truck, set her on the passenger seat as he looked for some blankets in Twila’s car. When he came back with a quilt he’d found in the trunk, smelling of motor oil and rubber, the baby was smiling, reaching her hand toward the pocket watch, a glint of oval in the late sun, on the rearview mirror. He laughed and took it down, rolled Heidi up in the quilt, and slid the watch deep in the folds against her. When he got to the Dairy Queen in town, she was fast asleep, her little hands on the disk-shaped mound, and he didn’t have the heart to wake her.
***
When he had gotten home Twila was awake, apologetic, feigning the flu and her period and a million other excuses.
“How you gonna care for this baby, you shooting up all the time?” He stood at the door of his bedroom, where Twila and Heidi lay wrapped in the sheets. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m gonna get clean, Dad.” The body in the sheets turned away from him. “That’s why I came.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do that here. You need to go to a treatment place or something.”
“And who’s going to take care of Heidi? I need you, Dad. We both need you.”
“Well, give me the junk, then.”
“It’s gone.”
“Is it? Well, I’ll just go have a look in your things, all right?” He opened the door wider.
“Dad!” She sat up in the sheets, sending the baby tumbling to the other end of the bed. “We’re trying to sleep now. We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll go through everything together, my inventory. Okay? Heidi’s got to sleep, Dad.”
He closed the door and went to the living room, where he laid on the couch. He listened to the empty house that was no longer empty. He wondered how he could help Twila overcome her addiction. He supposed it was his duty as her father. She had come to him, quite possibly because she had nowhere else to go, but she had come to him. And Heidi, who had nothing to do with anything, who did not ask for a French-Algerian art dealer in San Francisco for a father and the heroin-addicted daughter of a Pollack and a dead country music singer, needed someone as well. Perhaps not him, but who else was there?
He dreamed of Cindy in her little red satin dress with the white leather naugahyde fringes and the rhinestone cherry necklace. She patted his forearm, like she used to do on the tour bus when he had trouble sleeping, when Twila was teething and he’d been up all night with her cries.
You’re a natural, baby. She would say to him. I’m a natural singer, and you’re a natural daddy. And we’re a natural family.
He did not know what was so natural about him and Twila and Heidi being a family. All he knew was that was the way it was going to be, like it or not.
***
The first clock he had bought was from the secondhand store, the day in ’61 he had almost hanged himself. It was a basic Lucite alarm clock with glow-in-the-dark hands. He felt that structure would be good for his sobriety. He set the alarm for 5 a.m. every morning. But then he found it a hassle to run upstairs throughout the evening to determine when it was 10 o’clock, his self-imposed bedtime. He went back to the secondhand store and bought a cheap Timex with a canvas strap. He liked to watch the ticking minute hand make several of its 86,400 daily revolutions while he counted the time, wet-sweated, knot-stomached, from his last drink.
But it wasn’t enough. If he was going to be sober, he was going to have to be aware of every minute of it. He bought a wall clock for the kitchen, a cuckoo clock from The Salvation Army for the living room. He also picked up a pocket watch, which he hung from the rear view mirror of the truck. He liked the ticking through the house, a birdish, happy chatter. But he needed synchronicity, for all the clocks to be faithful to him and each other in their essential duty of timekeeping. He took the clocks down and spread them on the table of the dining room, studying the brass gear wheels and the main springs, the escapements, the oscillators. He watched the mechanical hearts tick laboriously, quickly, irregularly. He ordered a manual on clockmaking and cleaning supplies and the smallest instruments of surgery, the doll-sized screwdrivers and tweezers.
His hands shook so hard the first few weeks, and he wondered if twenty years of drinking had fried his neurological circuits to no return. But, over time, he was able to concentrate and move the screwdrivers and the tweezers inside the millimeter cracks, to extract screws smaller than moles, to align wheels. Gradually, the oscillators began to move with one force, and one powerful heartbeat throbbed through the house.
***
When he woke up, he could tell without looking at the clock, by the strip of light that cut across the coffee table, that it was late, nine-thirty or ten o’clock. He stretched the kink out of his back from where the short couch had jammed it funny and glanced toward the window as he reached for his cigarettes. Twila’s car was gone. He wondered whether she’d gone for cigarettes, for baby food. He’d seen neither in the car.
He sat on the porch and lit a cigarette. He had a little pension from the Army, disability from work. They’d need a crib, a baby seat, maybe even a stroller. Clothes. Little jars of food, and juices. Baby things. Another bed for Twila. His life seemed to be gaining all the momentum of a boulder, and here he was not even aware he had been near a hill. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the breeze on his face, not too strong yet, and tried to acclimate himself before his eyelids and the corners of his mouth stretched against bone, before too much air rushed his nostrils, his forced-open mouth. Too much air to even breathe.
He wondered whether Twila had skipped out on him. It was not an unreasonable thought, and yet he was surprised he thought of it, nonetheless. But it was noon now. He looked at the ashtray, full of his cigarettes, and stood up. His chest clogged and burned as he took the stairs slowly. He would have to quit for his sixty-first. He knocked on the closed bedroom door and waited. He thought he heard a rustle, faint, in the sheets.
“Twila?” He knocked again. No one answered, and he pushed the door open.
Twila was gone, along with her suitcase. Her junk was gone from the bathroom floor. He went back to the doorway of the bedroom, leaned his head against it. He’d probably dodged a bullet, he knew, even as the whirlwind of the last twenty-four hours fermented in him like a hangover, stale and dull-pained. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of it, the flick of the sheet.
The baby had not cried when her mother left, when it was time, he supposed, for feeding. She was not crying now as she sat up, looking him with her amber eyes. Her baby bag—a knapsack, really, with a few poorly folded cloth diapers, a rattle, two shapeless dresses, no coat or shoes, lay on the floor. He picked up the baby and the knapsack and went down the stairs. In the kitchen a clock ticked, and the tick of the living room clock lagged slightly behind it.
“You hungry, pudding?” He dropped the knapsack and opened the refrigerator with his now-free hand. The milk carton was almost empty. Half a steak, unappealing to him and certainly to her, curled on a plate next to some fossilized carrots. Tick-tick, tock-tock. Tick-tick, tock-tock. His teeth ground against each other. In a few days the clocks would all be out of whack, all crying for attention. And what would he do then, with this baby, another hungry mouth?
He put the best pieces, an Empire mantel clock he’d gotten tarnished and broken at a yard sale and then restored, and a Waltham banjo clock he’d gotten from an estate sale that had George Washington and Mount Vernon painted on it, and put them in a box in the truck, where they clicked and chattered agitatedly like cats on the way to the vet. He thought about the pocket watch, too, but the baby seemed to like it. She lay on her back beside him, holding it up with both hands, like a sun, a false idol. At the pawn shop Stanley got two-hundred dollars for the clocks, and with it he bought Heidi a high chair at Sears, a package of Pampers, some Gerber food and milk at the A&P, a pair of sandals at Kmart. Those things now sat in the box on the floor of the truck on the way home, and they were as quiet as him and the baby.
The woman was blond and blue eyed, and that was where her resemblance to Cindy ended. But she had the long, sloped nose of Stanley’s own mother, her square, grim face, and she held a baby that looked like not any of them, skin the color of ginger with amber eyes and honey hair.
“Dad, it’s me. Twila” The woman slung the alien child to her other hip, swathed in rust-colored corduroys. “Are you going to invite me in?”
She walked past him into the living room, dropping the infant onto the sofa. She sank down next to it and grabbed Stanley’s pack of cigarettes from the coffee table.
“How’s Wendell?” He thought of Twila’s stepfather.
“I don’t talk to Wendell anymore.” She swung her hair over her shoulders with a flick of her chin and lit a cigarette. “You weren’t the only person he swindled.”
“I gathered. Why else would you be here?”
“You’re going to turn your own child away? Meet your granddaughter Heidi while you’re at it.”
The light-eyed child stared at him, and he stared at her. She wore a caftan-like dress, made of hemp or burlap or some other earthy seventies fabric Stanley could not imagine wearing, and no shoes.
“Does Wendell know you have a child?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Like I said, I don’t talk to him anymore.”
“How’d you get my address?”
“Mom gave it to me years ago. I wasn’t sure if you’d still be here.”
“If I was still alive?”
“Well, I’m happy you’re here.” She pulled a set of keys attached to a leather key chain and held them out toward the baby, who touched them curiously with her fingers.
“When you were a baby, you were a grouchy, colicky little thing.” Stanley went into the kitchen and returned with two tepid cups of coffee. He sat down so that the baby was between them. “And I should know. I was the one who took care of you at first.”
“I know you did, Dad.” Twila cupped the mug between her hands. “Mom didn’t speak badly of you. Just said you weren’t cut out for the show business life.”
“Neither was she, I reckon.” He sipped at his coffee, mostly so she would not see him choke up a little. Cindy Lee had fit him just right, physically and emotionally, and all the other women he’d picked up over the years at the roadhouses were clunky and ill-fitting, belts that squeezed too tight or shirts with short cuffs or pants with hems that dragged and caught his heels.
“Say hi to your granddaughter.” Twila turned her knees toward him on the couch, nodded at the baby. “She’s your only one, unless you’ve had kids I’m not aware of.”
He held out his pointer finger to the baby, and she grasped it, her hand warm and moist and weak. He remembered the nights holding Twila while Cindy was singing at the old radio barn dances, walking back and forth in the dressing room or the hotel as Twila wailed, red and bright with perceived injustice and pain as he spoke to her, softly, and hummed, told her mommy would be back and would sing her the most beautiful lullaby. Back and forth and back and forth until he was dozing on his feet, her sporadic wails and wriggles jostling him from the space between waking and sleep. Back and forth until he thought he’d go crazy, that she would never stop, and then silence. And Cindy would come back to the dressing room, drop in the chair, sweat glistening like the radiance of birth, and take Twila from him. Such a good, quiet baby. Such a little angel.
“Who’s the father?” He picked up the baby, sat it in his lap. She smelled sour. The openings of her cloth diaper leeched the long-forgotten but still memorable odor.
“An Algerian. French-Algerian. He runs an art gallery out in the Haight.” Twila crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Don’t worry—she’s not black.”
“I wasn’t thinking that.” But who knows what he was thinking? A grandfather. That morning he only had his clocks, his memories. “I was thinking she needs to be changed.”
***
Stanley had been alone the last thirty years. The farmhouse had become his wife. He knew where the drafts curled under the doors, and during which seasons, how the light moved across the floor and up the walls. A conversation began each morning with the groaning of the pipes from the shower and the steam of the teapot for his instant coffee to the ticking of the cuckoo clocks and mantel clocks and quartz and Timex and Swiss Army watches that lay in various stages of assembly everywhere. He had begun to collect them in bulk after he stopped drinking. Ironically, time had had an elastic quality when he was, and days turned into weeks and he would need to ask the bartender or the clerk at the packaged goods store for the day, sometimes the month. When he woke up one morning with a pain in his side rivaling what he imagined nuclear detonation, he turned his head from the floor to the front window and saw the snow collecting outside. Why, he thought as he dipped his chin to his chest and looked for a gunshot wound or some other obvious cause of his distress, was he wearing Bermuda shorts?
Two weeks later, dried out and missing an appendix, he returned from the hospital and resolved to take inventory of his life. There was no inventory, at least in the physical sense, to speak of, only his musette and duffel bags from the war, a few dusty and creaky pieces of furniture, some clothes, a tube of lipstick Cindy had left behind that he had not the desire to throw away. And bottles. Empty amber bottles of Wild Turkey and sometimes Jack Daniels and Seagram’s but mostly Wild Turkey, bottles that stood on the kitchen counter, lay on their side on the dining room table, tucked between sofa cushions and rolling under beds. Pieces of bottles lay at the bases of walls, outside by the truck. These bottles told a story, long and redundant but without any clarity, any redeeming features. He collected the bottles in a crate and bought a deer rifle, spent afternoons refining his aim long lost since the war.
***
He saw the tracks after dinner, after he fried them some eggs and toasted some bread and moved the clock parts to the basement so they could eat at the table. He saw them when Twila picked Heidi up and twirled her around to make the baby laugh and the loose cuffs of her tunic fell to her elbows. He went to the El Dorado to get her luggage, looking through the glove compartment, under the front seat, and then found the rip in the back seat where the leather case with the needles was stuffed. He left it there and brought the suitcase and the baby bag into the house and put them on the stairs.
“So how long would you like to stay?” He watched Heidi take small, unsteady steps across the dusty hardwood floor of the living room, lurched instinctively when she pitched forward. She fell on the hard floor and began to cry. He waited for Twila to pick her up. When she didn’t, he scooped the baby up in his arms.
“Not real long.” She watched him walk back and forth, humming while Heidi wailed. “I have places I need to be.”
“Today’s my birthday.” He cupped the baby on the head, felt an electricity move from her scalp through her honey-colored sprouts. Or maybe it was an electricity that moved from him to her. His granddaughter. His stuff and Cindy’s stuff (and apparently some Algerian guy’s stuff) sprinkled into the bloody soup of this child. He could smell himself, feel himself in her somewhere. “Why don’t we go out for an ice cream?”
“Really? Your birthday? Well, how’s that for serendipity?” She came over and laced her fingers overtop his shoulder, gazing at Heidi. “How old are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. Feel younger than I have in a long time.”
“Let me go to the bathroom first.” She kissed his cheek but, instead of going upstairs she went out to the car. He watched her through the window as she rummaged in the back seat, tucked the leather case into her pants underneath her tunic. Then she jogged back to the house and thudded up the stairs.
“You got any shoes, pudding?” he asked the baby. She looked at him, so quiet, and he wondered if she would be abandoned in her life because she lacked the instinct to cry, to demand what was hers.
When Twila did not return he went upstairs with the baby and knocked on the bathroom door. He could hear her breathing, snoring, actually, and pushed the door open with his elbow. She lay curled in the tub, drool clinging to her chin and the open V of her neck. The leather bag sat open, a narrow swatch of rubber, her tourniquet, hanging out like a tongue on the white hexagonal tiles. He closed the door and took the baby out to the truck, set her on the passenger seat as he looked for some blankets in Twila’s car. When he came back with a quilt he’d found in the trunk, smelling of motor oil and rubber, the baby was smiling, reaching her hand toward the pocket watch, a glint of oval in the late sun, on the rearview mirror. He laughed and took it down, rolled Heidi up in the quilt, and slid the watch deep in the folds against her. When he got to the Dairy Queen in town, she was fast asleep, her little hands on the disk-shaped mound, and he didn’t have the heart to wake her.
***
When he had gotten home Twila was awake, apologetic, feigning the flu and her period and a million other excuses.
“How you gonna care for this baby, you shooting up all the time?” He stood at the door of his bedroom, where Twila and Heidi lay wrapped in the sheets. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m gonna get clean, Dad.” The body in the sheets turned away from him. “That’s why I came.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to do that here. You need to go to a treatment place or something.”
“And who’s going to take care of Heidi? I need you, Dad. We both need you.”
“Well, give me the junk, then.”
“It’s gone.”
“Is it? Well, I’ll just go have a look in your things, all right?” He opened the door wider.
“Dad!” She sat up in the sheets, sending the baby tumbling to the other end of the bed. “We’re trying to sleep now. We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll go through everything together, my inventory. Okay? Heidi’s got to sleep, Dad.”
He closed the door and went to the living room, where he laid on the couch. He listened to the empty house that was no longer empty. He wondered how he could help Twila overcome her addiction. He supposed it was his duty as her father. She had come to him, quite possibly because she had nowhere else to go, but she had come to him. And Heidi, who had nothing to do with anything, who did not ask for a French-Algerian art dealer in San Francisco for a father and the heroin-addicted daughter of a Pollack and a dead country music singer, needed someone as well. Perhaps not him, but who else was there?
He dreamed of Cindy in her little red satin dress with the white leather naugahyde fringes and the rhinestone cherry necklace. She patted his forearm, like she used to do on the tour bus when he had trouble sleeping, when Twila was teething and he’d been up all night with her cries.
You’re a natural, baby. She would say to him. I’m a natural singer, and you’re a natural daddy. And we’re a natural family.
He did not know what was so natural about him and Twila and Heidi being a family. All he knew was that was the way it was going to be, like it or not.
***
The first clock he had bought was from the secondhand store, the day in ’61 he had almost hanged himself. It was a basic Lucite alarm clock with glow-in-the-dark hands. He felt that structure would be good for his sobriety. He set the alarm for 5 a.m. every morning. But then he found it a hassle to run upstairs throughout the evening to determine when it was 10 o’clock, his self-imposed bedtime. He went back to the secondhand store and bought a cheap Timex with a canvas strap. He liked to watch the ticking minute hand make several of its 86,400 daily revolutions while he counted the time, wet-sweated, knot-stomached, from his last drink.
But it wasn’t enough. If he was going to be sober, he was going to have to be aware of every minute of it. He bought a wall clock for the kitchen, a cuckoo clock from The Salvation Army for the living room. He also picked up a pocket watch, which he hung from the rear view mirror of the truck. He liked the ticking through the house, a birdish, happy chatter. But he needed synchronicity, for all the clocks to be faithful to him and each other in their essential duty of timekeeping. He took the clocks down and spread them on the table of the dining room, studying the brass gear wheels and the main springs, the escapements, the oscillators. He watched the mechanical hearts tick laboriously, quickly, irregularly. He ordered a manual on clockmaking and cleaning supplies and the smallest instruments of surgery, the doll-sized screwdrivers and tweezers.
His hands shook so hard the first few weeks, and he wondered if twenty years of drinking had fried his neurological circuits to no return. But, over time, he was able to concentrate and move the screwdrivers and the tweezers inside the millimeter cracks, to extract screws smaller than moles, to align wheels. Gradually, the oscillators began to move with one force, and one powerful heartbeat throbbed through the house.
***
When he woke up, he could tell without looking at the clock, by the strip of light that cut across the coffee table, that it was late, nine-thirty or ten o’clock. He stretched the kink out of his back from where the short couch had jammed it funny and glanced toward the window as he reached for his cigarettes. Twila’s car was gone. He wondered whether she’d gone for cigarettes, for baby food. He’d seen neither in the car.
He sat on the porch and lit a cigarette. He had a little pension from the Army, disability from work. They’d need a crib, a baby seat, maybe even a stroller. Clothes. Little jars of food, and juices. Baby things. Another bed for Twila. His life seemed to be gaining all the momentum of a boulder, and here he was not even aware he had been near a hill. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the breeze on his face, not too strong yet, and tried to acclimate himself before his eyelids and the corners of his mouth stretched against bone, before too much air rushed his nostrils, his forced-open mouth. Too much air to even breathe.
He wondered whether Twila had skipped out on him. It was not an unreasonable thought, and yet he was surprised he thought of it, nonetheless. But it was noon now. He looked at the ashtray, full of his cigarettes, and stood up. His chest clogged and burned as he took the stairs slowly. He would have to quit for his sixty-first. He knocked on the closed bedroom door and waited. He thought he heard a rustle, faint, in the sheets.
“Twila?” He knocked again. No one answered, and he pushed the door open.
Twila was gone, along with her suitcase. Her junk was gone from the bathroom floor. He went back to the doorway of the bedroom, leaned his head against it. He’d probably dodged a bullet, he knew, even as the whirlwind of the last twenty-four hours fermented in him like a hangover, stale and dull-pained. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of it, the flick of the sheet.
The baby had not cried when her mother left, when it was time, he supposed, for feeding. She was not crying now as she sat up, looking him with her amber eyes. Her baby bag—a knapsack, really, with a few poorly folded cloth diapers, a rattle, two shapeless dresses, no coat or shoes, lay on the floor. He picked up the baby and the knapsack and went down the stairs. In the kitchen a clock ticked, and the tick of the living room clock lagged slightly behind it.
“You hungry, pudding?” He dropped the knapsack and opened the refrigerator with his now-free hand. The milk carton was almost empty. Half a steak, unappealing to him and certainly to her, curled on a plate next to some fossilized carrots. Tick-tick, tock-tock. Tick-tick, tock-tock. His teeth ground against each other. In a few days the clocks would all be out of whack, all crying for attention. And what would he do then, with this baby, another hungry mouth?
He put the best pieces, an Empire mantel clock he’d gotten tarnished and broken at a yard sale and then restored, and a Waltham banjo clock he’d gotten from an estate sale that had George Washington and Mount Vernon painted on it, and put them in a box in the truck, where they clicked and chattered agitatedly like cats on the way to the vet. He thought about the pocket watch, too, but the baby seemed to like it. She lay on her back beside him, holding it up with both hands, like a sun, a false idol. At the pawn shop Stanley got two-hundred dollars for the clocks, and with it he bought Heidi a high chair at Sears, a package of Pampers, some Gerber food and milk at the A&P, a pair of sandals at Kmart. Those things now sat in the box on the floor of the truck on the way home, and they were as quiet as him and the baby.
