Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother’s absences—her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.

Did all these kids come from perfectly happy families? Weren’t any of them hiding something that was going on at home? They didn’t seem to be. They didn’t seem to have a thing on their minds but lunch and friends and lipstick.

there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on TV.” She thought that over. “But…” she said. He waited. “But…is that enough?” she asked him. “Well, yes, it turns out that it is,” he said.

Now she settled into the dailiness of grief—not that first piercing stab but the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence.

cognates

I’m not that much of a kid. I’m way more grown-up than I seem.” “So you think now,” Peter told her. “Just wait till you look back on this time.” But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.

Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa’s experience.