Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

“I broke my days into separate moments,” he said. “See, it’s true I didn’t have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, 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.”

“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. Sean graduated from high school, but Derek was not there to clap and cheer. Ian dropped all talk of taking a year off, but Derek would never know about it.

She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.

Alone she could only reflect, and worry, and wince at something she had said yesterday and dread something she had to do tomorrow.

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.

Sometimes Willa felt she’d spent half her life apologizing for some man’s behavior. More than half her life, actually. First Derek and then Peter, forever charging ahead

while Willa trailed behind picking up the pieces and excusing and explaining.

originally.” Though she didn’t have what Willa would consider

“Will you be having wine, Mom?” “I

“I am puny,” he said. “We all are. We’re all just infinitesimal organisms floating through a vast universe, and whether we remembered to turn the oven off doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

If Willa were to invent a clock dance, it wouldn’t look like the one the three little girls had shown her. No, hers would feature a woman racing across the stage from left to right, all the while madly whirling so that the audience saw only a spinning blur of color before she vanished into the wings, pouf! Just like that. Gone.

How did it happen, Willa wondered, that people apologizing for their anger so often got angry all over again? She said, “Well, I’m sorry, Denise. I didn’t mean to be hurtful. I hope you can forgive me.”