by Anne Tyler
Joanne reached over and took the carrot away, replacing it with a soda cracker immediately so that Carol didn’t have time to start crying. Ben Joe’s mother turned back to her meal, resigned. Neither she nor Gram paid much attention to these quibbling arguments of theirs; they were used to them. Gram said Ellen Hawkes was coldhearted and Ellen Hawkes said Gram was soft-cored. The rest of the family was as used to the feud as they were. They went on eating now, cheerfully, and Carol began gnawing at her cracker.
“The reason I asked about the Dowers,” Ben Joe said, “is that I met an old man from the train by that name. He said he was born right here in Sandhill.”
“That’s funny. Good Dower or bad Dower?”
“Well, Gram. I doubt if he’d have said.”
“If he was a bad Dower he would have. He would have said he was a good Dower.”
Joanne laughed.
“He said there was a street named for his father,” Ben Joe said. “I remember that much. He said that when he was here, Main and Dower were the only real streets in town.”
Gram looked up, interested now. “That’s so,” she said. “It’s true, that’s so.”
Carol spilled her milk. It trickled off the high-chair tray and into her lap, and when she felt the coldness of it she squealed.
“I’ll get a rag,” said Tessie.
She started for the sink, but her mother reached around and grabbed her back by the sash. “You sit right there, young lady. You have to be at school in fifteen minutes.”
“It won’t take long, Mama.”
But Joanne was already up, reaching for paper towels and then lifting Carol out of her high chair to sponge her off. “There, there,” she was saying, although Carol was only squealing for the joy of hearing her own voice now and had started pulling out all the bobby pins from Joanne’s hair.
“He went off to help his uncle make bed sheets in Connecticut!” Ben Joe shouted above the uproar.
His mother stopped chewing and stared at him.
“Mr. Dower, I’m talking about. And then his family moved away because his mother’s ankle bones started hurting—”
“Ben Joe,” his mother said, “if all of you children would cast your minds back to when you were small and I told you never, on any account, to speak to those strange-looking people you seem to keep meeting up with—”
“How old was he when he began in bed sheets?” Gram asked.
“Eighteen, he told me.”
“My Lord in heaven!” She laid her fork on the table and stared at him. “Why, that couldn’t be anyone but Jamie Dower. Jamie Dower, I’ll be. My Lord in heaven.”
“Was he a good Dower?”
“Good as they come. Shoot, yes. He was six years older’n me, but you’d never believe the crush I had on him. That was the reason I practically lived at the Dowers’—following him around all the time. I thought he was Adam, back then.”
“Adam?” Tessie said. “How was he dressed?”
Her mother pushed her plate closer to her. “Eat your beans, Tessie. Stop that dawdling.”
“Where was he going to?” Gram asked.
“Well, um—the home for the aged, is what he told me.”
“The home for the aged.” She shook her head. “My, my, who’d have believed it? He was a real handsome boy, you know—kind of tall for back then, though nothing to compare with some of those basketball players you see around nowadays. Real fond of stylish clothes, too. What would we have thought, I wonder, had someone told us back then where Jamie Dower would end up?”
“Tessie,” said Ellen Hawkes, “I give you to the count of five to drink that milk up. What’s that on your front? Beans?”
“Nothing,” said Tessie. She finished the last of her milk and wiped the white mustache off her upper lip with the back of her hand.
“That’s a funny-looking nothing.”
“Well, anyway, I gotta go. Good-by, Mama. Good-by, everybody.”
She vanished out the kitchen door, grabbing her jacket as she went. Her mother stared after her and shook her head. “You practically have to drag her to school,” she said. “Sometimes I think the brains just sort of dribbled away toward the end in this family.”
“She’s plenty bright,” said Gram.
“Well, maybe. But not like Joanne and Ben Joe were—not like them.”
“Rubbish,” said Gram. She began reaching for the plates and scraping them while she sat at her place. “Too much emphasis on brains in this family. What good’s it do? Joanne quit after one year of college and the others, excepting Ben Joe, never went. And Ben Joe—look at him. He just kept trying to figure out what that all-fired mind of his was given him for, and first he thought it was for science and then for art and then for philosophy and now what’s he got? Just a mishmash, is all. Just nothing. Won’t read a thing now but murder mysteries.”
“Neither one of you knows what you’re talking about,” Ben Joe said cheerfully. He had been through all this before; he listened with only half an ear, tipping back in his chair and watching his grandmother scrape plates. “And pooh, what do the girls want to go to college for? I say they’re smart choosing not to—”
“Well, sure you do,” his mother said. “Sure you do, when all you’ve got to judge it by is Sandhill College. Might as well not have gone at all, as far as I’m concerned—”
“No fault of his,” Gram said.
“Well, it’s no fault of miner
“If my son’d had his say,” Gram said, “Ben Joe’d have gone to Harvard, that’s where.”
“Your son could’ve had his say. If he’d come back he could’ve had his say and welcome to it, but what’d he do instead?” She was sitting up straight now, with one hand clasping her fork so tightly that the knuckles were white.
“Who made him like that?” Gram shouted. “Who made his house so cold he chose to go live in another’s, tell me that!”
Ben Joe cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “if I’d made better grades I’d have gotten a scholarship to Harvard. I don’t see how it’s anyone’s fault but my—”
“And who didn’t give a hoot when he left?” Gram shouted triumphantly above Ben Joe. “Answer me that, now, answer me—”
“That will do, Gram,” said Ellen Hawkes.
She unclasped her hand from the fork and rose, suddenly calm. “I’ll be home by six,” she said to Joanne and Ben Joe. They nodded, silently; she pushed her chair in and left. Joanne was staring at the tablecloth as if it were impossible to drag her eyes away from it.
“Cracker,” Carol said.
Ben Joe handed her one. She seized it and immediately began crumbling it over her tray.
“I am sorry,” Gram said after a minute. “There was no call to act like that. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
Joanne nodded, still staring at the tablecloth. “I thought you’d have settled that,” she said.
“Oh, no. No, just let it slip from being uppermost in my mind, is all. You missed the worst of it. Things went on like before even after you up and left home over it, though you’d think some people might try and change a little. Ah, well, least said soonest …”
She sighed and rose to take the stack of dishes to the sink. “Ben Joe, honey,” she called over her shoulder, “you reckon Jamie Dower might like a visitor?”
“I don’t know why not, Gram.”
“You and me’ll go, then, sometime this week. I’ll start thinking about it.”
Joanne rose to help Gram, with her face still pale and too sober. For a while Ben Joe watched them, following their quick, sure movements around the kitchen, but then Carol began blowing cracker crumbs at him and he turned back to her and lifted her out of the high chair.
“Does she get a nap?” he asked Joanne.
“Well, yes. But I’m reading this book that says the same person has got to put her to bed all the time. You better wait and
let me do it.”
“All right.” He headed for the living room, with Carol snuggled in the crook of his arm. “Wouldn’t want to make you maladjusted,” he told her. She smiled and sucked on a corner of her cracker.
In the living room he sat down in the rocking chair. He pried the soggy mass of cracker from Carol’s hand and put it in the ash tray, and then he began absent-mindedly rocking. Carol’s head dropped heavily against his chest; her red hair was tickling a point just under his chin. He could feel the small dead weight of her, but he remained unconvinced of her realness and for a long time he just rocked silently, frowning above her head at the faded wallpaper.
5
By evening Ben Joe was beginning to feel the weight of home settling back on him, making him feel heavy and old and tired. He had eaten too much for supper; his stomach ached and he didn’t want to admit it to anyone, or to show it by lying down, for fear that his mother and his grandmother would be hurt after all that special cooking. So he wandered aimlessly through the house, searching out something to do or think about. In the den Tessie and Jenny watched television, scowling intently at the screen and not looking up when he came to stand in the doorway. The twins, dressed in different colors now that they were older but still looking exactly the same in every other way, were popping popcorn with their dates in the kitchen, and Susannah and Gram were playing honeymoon bridge. None of them took any notice of him. He went upstairs, hoping to find someone up there who would talk to him, but his mother was using the sewing machine, her mouth full of pins and her eyes narrowed at the sleeve of a dress for Tessie. Joanne was giving Carol a bath. He could hear them even with the door half shut—Carol squealing and splashing, Joanne calming her with low, soothing noises and then occasionally laughing along with her.
“Can I come in?” Ben Joe called.
“Carol, you mind if a man comes to watch your bath?”
Carol made a louder splash, probably with the flat of her hand, and giggled.
“Well, she didn’t say no,” said Joanne.
Ben Joe pushed the door open and stepped inside. The room was warm and steamy, and cluttered with towels and cast-off clothes. Beside the bathtub knelt Joanne, wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, with her hair hanging wet and stringy down her neck and her face shiny from her own bath. She had rolled the sleeves of the robe up to her elbows so that she could bathe Carol, who sat in a heap of rubber toys that blocked out almost all sight of bathwater and laughed at Ben Joe.
“Can’t be a true Hawkes,” said Ben Joe. “No bubble bath.”
“Oh, that’ll start soon enough.”
Ben Joe leaned back against the sink with one foot on a tiny old step stool that read: “For doing some job that’s bigger than me.” He tested his full weight on the edge of the sink, decided not to risk it, and stood up again.
“I meant to tell you,” Joanne said. “Don’t feel bad.”
“What?”
“Don’t you feel bad about what Gram said. About your mind being a mish-mash. It’s been in the back of my mind all day to tell you, she didn’t meant it. She just said it for the sake of argument.”
“I don’t feel bad.”
“Okay.”
She started soaping Carol’s hair, expertly, turning the pinkish-red hair dark auburn with her quick, firm fingers. For the first time he noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. What had she done with it? He pictured her throwing it in Gary’s face, but it sounded improbable. Even in her ficklest days, Joanne had never done things that way. No, it would be more like her not even to tell Gary she was going. Or maybe it had been Gary who had left her, who knew?
“Where’s your wedding ring?” he asked.
“In my jewelry box.”
“What on earth for?”
“Well, I don’t know. I thought maybe I should wear it so I wouldn’t look like an unwed mother, but when I got here Mama said there was no point. She never wears hers, she said. It would just keep reminding her.”
She took Carol by the chin and the back of the neck and ducked her back into the water swiftly. Before Carol could utter more than one sharp squeak she was upright again, with her hair rinsed and streaming.
“Mom’s advice is the last I would take,” Ben Joe said.
“Now, don’t go being mean.”
“I’m not. She wants you to say, ‘Oh, who cares about him?’ and then your whole problem is solved. You saw what that did for her.”
“Mom’s not as coldhearted as Gram keeps telling you, Ben Joe. You know that.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Besides, this isn’t the same kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing is it?” Ben Joe asked.
Joanne picked out a rubber duck and pushed it toward Carol, who ignored it. Carol was raising and lowering one round knee, watching it emerge sleek and gleaming and then lowering it again when the water had drained off to mere drops on her skin. Joanne watched too, thoughtfully, and Ben Joe watched Joanne.
“I always did like first dates,” she said after a minute. “I was good at those. I knew what to wear—not so dressy it made them shy and not so sloppy they thought I didn’t give a hoot—and how to act and what to say, and by the time I was ready to come in I’d have them all the way in love with me or know the reason why. But the dates after that are different. Once they loved me, what was I supposed to do then? Once I’ve accomplished that, where else is there to go? So I ended up confining myself to first dates. I got so good at them that I could first-date anyone—I mean even the people that were on seventh dates with me, or even people that weren’t dates at all. I could first-date my own family, even—just figure out what would make them love me at a certain moment and then do it, easy as that.”
She leaned forward suddenly, resting her elbows on the rim of the bathtub and staring into the water at Carol’s gleeful face.
“Then I got married,” she said.
Ben Joe waited, not pushing her. Joanne stood up and reached for a towel and then just stayed there, holding the towel forgotten in her hands.
“The trouble is,” she said, “you have to stop clinking your bracelets and dancing like a maniac after a while. You have to rest now and then. Which may have been okay with Gary, but not with me. I didn’t know what to do once I had sat down to rest, and so I started being just terrible. Following him around telling him what a awful wife I was. Waking him up in the middle of the night to accuse him of not believing I loved him. He was all sleepy and didn’t know what was coming off. He’d say sure he believed me and go back to sleep leaving me to lie awake counting the dust specks that floated around in the dark, and making all kinds of plans to get my hair done and have him take me dancing.” She frowned at the towel. “Got so I couldn’t bear my own self,” she said. “I left.”
She wrapped the towel around Carol and lifted her out onto the bath mat.
“What’d you come back here for?” Ben Joe asked.
She dried Carol silently for a minute. Then she said, “Well, I want Carol to be with some kind of people that know her if I am going to get a job. That’s why.”
She had finished scrubbing Carol with the towel and now she pulled a white flannel nightgown over the baby’s head, saying, “Where’s Carol? Oh, I can’t find Carol. Where’s Carol?” until Carol’s face poked through the neck of the nightgown, small and round and grinning.
“Besides,” Joanne said, tying the ribbon under Carol’s chin, “it’s not the same place I’m coming back to, really. Not even if I wanted it to be.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben Joe.
“What’s wrong?”
“You and Mama. You and the girls. And Mr. Dower, even. Of course it’s the same place. What would it have gone and changed into? Always pulling up the same silly argument to fool yourselves with—”
“Now, now,” said Joanne soothingly. She picked Carol up. “It’s not the same place really, i
s it?”
He gave up, helplessly, and followed her out of the bathroom. There was no argument he could give that would convince her; she was too blindly cheerful, giving Carol little pecks on the cheek and talking to her happily as she crossed the hallway. At her mother’s door she stopped and looked in. “Gone downstairs,” she said. “Come on, Ben Joe. I want to ask you something.”
“What?” he asked suspiciously.
“Come on.”
He followed her to her own room. It was cluttered with Joanne’s odds and ends, and the old white crib had been moved down from the attic to a spot beside Joanne’s bed. Other than that, it was almost the same as when she had left it. Huge stuffed animals, won by long-ago boy-friends at state fairs, littered the window seat; perfume bottles and hair ribbons and bobby pins lay scattered on the bureau. She laid Carol carefully in the crib and said, “Where were you when Dad died?”
“Where—Oh, no,” Ben Joe said. “No, don’t you start that.”
“Why not?” She straightened up from kissing Carol good night and turned to face him. “That’s not fair, Ben Joe. Nobody’ll tell me anything about it. I even wrote a letter asking them to tell me. Nobody ever answered.”
“Well, you were away,” Ben Joe said.
“That doesn’t change anything.” She spread a blanket over Carol and began tying it down at the corners. “It happened just after Jenny began writing all the family’s letters,” she said. “Only Jenny didn’t write this particular one, I remember. She went through a stage when she wouldn’t write or speak the fact that Dad was dead. Susannah told me that. So the twins had to take over the letter writing. Jane and Lisa, they handled everything, although neither one of them will touch a pen ordinarily and you can tell it from their letters. But it was just as well, I guess—their writing the letters, I mean—because I suppose Jenny would just have sent a list of the funeral costs. Or would she, that far back? When did Jenny learn to be so practical? Anyway, there was this note from Lisa saying, ‘Dad just passed away last night but felt no pain’—as if anyone could know what he felt—and that’s all I ever heard. What happened, Ben Joe?”
