Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

“Do you want to be like your friend Sonya, or the Barnes girl, or Maddie Lennox? All those girls who got hitched in their teens and have a houseful of babies now?”

“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.

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.

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.”

‘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.

Willa loved saguaros. She loved their dignity, their endurance. They were the only things in Arizona she felt a deep attachment to.

She felt the same kind of pity that she would feel for a caged tiger. Saguaros were not supposed to be cute! There was nothing cute about them! Saguaros were calm and forbearing; they had stoically weathered everything from Apache arrows to strip malls.

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.

sounds were what brought the past alive most clearly!

Marriage was often a matter of dexterity,

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.

you’re so tiny and petite and got those bitsy little bones and all. You have a whole nother metabolism. Plus, you’re already married and you can relax now. I am still hunting.”

“My father told me once that after my mother died, he started breaking his days into moments. Like, not worrying how to get through the whole rest of his life but just enjoying the baseball game he was watching right then on TV.”

I’m the type who goes on vacation and spends the whole time wondering if I remembered to turn the oven off, and whether we can manage that tight connection when we fly home.”

it’s more a question of…you know. Figuring out what to live for. That’s the great problem at my age.”

“Well, look at it this way,” Denise said, returning the phone. “If you don’t have grandchildren, you won’t have to worry about them going through the death of the planet.”

How did it happen, Willa wondered, that people apologizing for their anger so often got angry all over again?