by Anne Tyler
“Well, it was a long time ago,” Ben Joe said.
“It was. I know. Well, don’t you worry, Ben Joe, I’m dating a real nice boy now. You’d like him. His name is John Horner and he’s starting up a construction firm in Sandhill. You know him?”
“Horner.” Ben Joe frowned. “Not offhand,” he said.
“Well. You’d like him, though. Course we aren’t too serious yet—I only been in town a month or so. But he is the kindest man. I don’t know if I could marry him, yet.”
“Has he asked you?”
“No. But I reckon he will one of these days.”
The idea of Shelley’s marrying someone else surprised him. He looked at her as a stranger suddenly, evaluating her. She smiled back at him.
“Course,” she said, “I was surprised he even wanted to date me. But I figured if maybe he could just endure through the first few dates, till I got easy with him and not so silly and tongue-tied any more, it’d be all right. And he did. He endured.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”
She nodded, finished with that piece of news, and then frowned into space a minute as if she were fishing in her mind for the next piece.
“Oh, I know,” she said finally. “I know. Ben Joe, I was so sorry to hear about your daddy. I wrote you about it and you never answered. But I hope it was a peaceful passing. He was a sweet man, your daddy.”
“Thank you,” said Ben Joe.
“Susan Harpton told me about it. And about your going to work at the bank after classes and Joanne getting married and all. She said the whole town missed your daddy.”
“I did too,” said Ben Joe. “Took to riding trains.”
“What?”
“Trains. Riding trains. I rode trains all the time. One time I spent a whole month’s salary that way. Mom about had a conniption fit—I was almost the family’s only support back then.”
“Oh,” Shelley said. She frowned; she was on uncertain ground now. “Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you I missed him. And if he lived a little different from most people, I don’t think anybody held it against him. Not your daddy. Remember how when he got to drinking he always wanted someone to sing to him? ‘Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad,’ that’s what he liked. Many’s the time I’ve sung it to him.”
“And ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ” said Ben Joe.
“That’s right.” She smiled into her coffee cup and then looked up again, with the next subject decided upon. “I hear you’re in law school up north,” she said. “Mrs. Murphy told me that. She’s the one that’s been keeping an eye on the house all these years. She’s nice, though I found when I came back that she’d looked through the photograph albums and all Mama’s love letters. When your mama and grandma passed by the porch as I was sweeping I called out ‘hey’ to them, meaning to ask about you, but I had trouble making myself heard, as your grandma was doing some of that singing of hers and your mama was trying real hard to hush her. When your grandma saw me she recognized me right off, though. She shouted out to tell me you weren’t married yet, which I already knew, and a minute later your mama remembered me too. Your mama is a little slow in recognizing folks, but I don’t hold with what Mrs. Murphy says, that she’s on purpose slow. This town has always been of the opinion she is coldhearted, but I think it’s because your daddy was their fair-haired boy, and they didn’t want him hurt. Not that I think she meant to hurt him. I reckon she is just a little prideful and thinks pride’s the same as dignity so she doesn’t try and change herself. Mrs. Murphy said many’s the time she herself went to your mama to tell her all she had to do was let herself get to crying and then, as soon as the tears got started good, go to … urn, where your father lived at and tell him she wanted him back, but your mama always just tossed her hair and said who cared and offered Mrs. Murphy a slice of angel-food cake. It was the doctor’s business and no one else’s, she would say, though if it wasn’t the doctor’s wife’s business too, then what did they get married for?
“Well, anyway, I never did get to ask how you were doing up north, since your mama and grandma were in a hurry. But I know it can be a lonely place. I went up there once to work for the Presbyterian church and stayed for a month, rooming with a girl I’d met who turned out to be a bit touched in the head. Went around in a chiffon gown with a candle in her hand at four a.m. and talked about craning her swanlike neck in the rain. I went home again. I always have been a homebody. I don’t know what I’ll do without my family. Even Phoebe, and her so mischievous. The last night that Phoebe was … was living, the last night I ever saw her, she was in the kitchen with her boy-friend and when—”
“Phoebe had a boy-friend?” Ben Joe asked.
“Well, yes, and when I walked in, they were robbing this loose-change bank of my mama’s, shaped like an Indian with a slot in the top of his head where she puts the money in, for odds and ends-like that she wants to buy—they were robbing this bank so they could go to the movies. The boy-friend had just got out his pocketknife to put through the slot and Phoebe was holding out her hand and saying, ‘scalpel,’ and that’s the last I ever saw of her. I’m awful glad to meet up with you again, Ben Joe. All these years I been missing you.”
“I’m glad to see you,” said Ben Joe. He smiled at her in silence for a minute and then looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got to go. I was on the train all last night. Need to catch up on my sleep.”
“Oh, don’t you hurry.”
“I’ve got to.”
He picked up his jacket from the couch and put it on as he followed Shelley to the door. Outside it was raining; the sight surprised them both and they stood there looking at it.
“Don’t come out with me,” Ben Joe said.
“I won’t melt.”
“No, stay inside.”
“I want to see you safely to the street,” Shelley said.
Her face was serious, and she looked worried about him. Without knowing why, Ben Joe said, “Urn, this Jack Horner—”
“John Horner.”
“John Horner. Do you think he’d mind if I came back again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—You come see me anyway, Ben Joe. You come anyway.”
She was smiling now, looking up at him with the porch light shining clear through those sky-blue eyes of hers. Her face was so close he could bend down and kiss her. He had never kissed her on her doorstep before, despite all Phoebe’s hopes; he had kissed her in his mother’s old Buick, parked somewhere in the darkness, with that pink smell of her perfume circling him and her arms thin and warm around his neck. Her face hovered under his, still close; she looked up at him. But as he was about to bend toward her he thought that maybe this might commit him again; maybe everything would begin all over again, and time would get even more jumbled up in his head than it was already. So he drew back from the pale oblong of her face and said, “Is Sunday evening all right? About nine?”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
He stood looking at her for a minute longer, and then straightened his shoulders.
“I’ll see you then,” he said.
“Good night, Ben Joe.”
“Good night.”
He turned and started down the long steps, being careful not to slip on the soggy layers of leaves beneath his feet. The rain was no more than an unsteady dripping sound now, with an occasional cool drop landing on his face. Once on the street again, he shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets and walked very slowly, frowning, sorting his thoughts out. But his thoughts wouldn’t sort; he felt as if he was never again going to know the reason for anything he did. The puddles on the sidewalk began soaking into his shoes, and he started running toward home.
7
The next day was Saturday. Ben Joe awoke with a hollow, bored feeling; he dawdled over his breakfast until it was cold and then went back to his room to read a detective novel upside-down o
n an unmade bed. Halfway through the morning one of the girls knocked on his door and said, “Ben Joe?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“It’s me. Lisa. Can I come in?”
“I guess so.”
She stuck her head in the door and smiled. She was much calmer than her twin; it was the way Ben Joe had first learned to tell them apart. She was wearing a neat blue suit and high heels. “We’re going downtown,” she said. “Want to come?”
“You have to dress up that much just to go downtown?”
“Never can tell who you’ll meet.” She grinned, and crossed to his bed to hand him a postcard. “Mail,” she said. “Who’s Jeremy?”
“My roommate. Do you have to read all my mail?”
He looked at the picture on it—the Guggenheim Museum, in an unreal shade of yellowish-white—and then turned the card over and began reading the large, rounded handwriting:
Dear Ben J.,
Hope you are thawing out down there. I borrowed your dinner jacket. That frizzly-haired girl keeps calling wanting to know when you’ll be back, and I said Monday or so, right? Pack one of those sisters of yours in a suitcase and bring her along.
Jeremy.
“Which one are you going to pack up?” Lisa asked.
“What?”
“Which sister?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Why—you feel like leaving home?”
“I surely do,” Lisa said. She sat down with a little bounce on the foot of the bed and looked at her shoes. “I’ve used up all the boys in this town, that’s what.”
“What about those two you and Jane were with last night?”
“I’m getting tired of them. I keep thinking maybe I could start new someplace else, in another town.”
“Well, I know the feeling,” said Ben Joe. He turned the card over again and looked at it, frowning. “I wonder if I’ve missed any quizzes. Jeremy’s right—I’ve got to get started back there pretty quick.”
“Well, do you want to come to town or don’t you?”
“No. I guess not.”
Lisa stood up and left, and Ben Joe looked after her thoughtfully. “Don’t you worry,” he said when she reached the door. “New boys’re always showing up.”
“I know. Yell if you change your mind about coming downtown, Ben Joe.”
“Okay.”
He stared at the closed door for a few minutes and then got up and padded over to his bureau in his stocking feet. The top drawer looked like Jeremy’s had in New York—stuffed with postcards and envelopes and canceled checks. He threw the postcard on top of the heap and then idly leafed through what was underneath. At the bottom was a stack of Shelley’s letters from Savannah, neatly rubber-banded together. And a few postcards from the times his father had gone to medical conventions. They were dry and formal; his father had trouble saying things in writing. He stacked everything carelessly together again and was about to close the drawer when he saw something pink lying in the right-hand corner. It was a unique shade of pink—a deep rose that was almost magenta and never should have been used in writing paper—and it was one that had stuck in his mind for some six years now. Even when he saw something nearly that color in a dress or a magazine ad, even now, it made him wince. He pulled the envelope up and made himself examine it. Large, slanted pencil writing ran in a straight line across it, addressed to his father at his office on Main Street. Only his father had never seen it; Ben Joe had taken it from the box when he had gone to bring his father home for supper one day. He had seen the “L.B.M.” on the upper left-hand corner and quietly stuffed it in his pocket. Now he stood staring at it without opening it, letting it lie flat in the palm of his hand. When he had stared at it so long that he could see it with his eyes shut, he suddenly slapped it into his shirt pocket, grabbed up his sneakers from the floor in front of the bureau, and slammed out of his room.
“Lisa!” he called.
His grandmother was on the landing, polishing the stair rail and singing only slightly more softly than usual, because she was intent upon her polishing:
“When I was si-ingle,
I wandered at my e-ease.
Now that I am ma-arried,
Got a flat-heeled man to please …”
“Gram,” Ben Joe said, “has Lisa gone downtown yet?”
She refolded her cloth and smiled at it, still singing, because she was at the loudest part and no one could stop her at a loud part:
“And it’s oh, Lo-o-ord,
I wish I was but one lone girl again …”
“Oh, hell,” Ben Joe said. He galloped on down the stairs, two at a time, with his sneakers still in his hands. “Lisa!”
“What do you want, Ben Joe?”
He stepped over Carol, who was sticking toothpicks upright into the nap in the hall rug. Lisa was in the living room arguing with Jenny and Joanne over the grocery list.
“If she wants all those outlandish things,” Jenny was saying, “she can darn well go get them herself, that’s what I think.”
Joanne took the list from her and ran her finger down it. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t reckon it would hurt us any to start drinking burgundy with our meals—”
“But I’m the one Ben Joe left in charge of the money. What’s the matter with Gram lately? Ben Joe, I want you to look at this.”
Ben Joe sat down on the couch and began putting his sneakers on. “I’ve decided to hitch a ride downtown with you,” he said.
“Look, will you, Ben Joe? Now Gram’s making me go out and buy all her silly notions. Burgundy my foot. And her upstairs singing loud on purpose, been singing all morning without taking breath so that no one can interrupt and ask her what she wants with burgundy and oyster crackers and kippered herrings—”
“Oh, she’s just tired of the same old things,” Ben Joe said. “You going right away? Because if not, I’ll just walk instead of—”
“No, we’re coming. Come on, Joanne.”
Jenny led the way, looking sensible and businesslike in her open trenchcoat. At the front door she took the car keys off a hook on the wall and stuck them in her pocket. “Where’s Tessie?” she asked Lisa.
“In the car. Says you and she are going shoe shopping and she’s in a hurry to get started.”
“Okay. Close the door behind you, Ben Joe.”
They crossed through the weedy grass to the driveway beside the house where the car was parked. Inside, on the front seat, Tessie bounced up and down in a short-sleeved plaid dress.
“Where’s your jacket?” Jenny asked as she opened the door.
“In the house.”
“Well, better go get it.”
“Aw, Jenny—”
“Jenny, for Pete’s sake,” Ben Joe said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Well, I can’t help that. Run on and get it, Tessie.”
Tessie slammed out of the car, and Jenny turned the motor on to let it warm up. She seemed resigned to all these hindrances; she sat patiently waiting, while Ben Joe, squeezed between Joanne and Lisa, drummed his fingers on his knees and squirmed about irritably. When Tessie came out of the house, dragging her feet slowly as she worked her way into an old corduroy jacket, Ben Joe leaned forward and shouted, “Come on, Tessie!”
“What’s the matter with you?” Jenny asked. She leaned across to open the door for Tessie. “What you suddenly in such an all-fired hurry for?”
“I’ve got a lot to get done.”
“Ten minutes ago you were going to stay home all day,” said Lisa.
“Well, not any more.”
“Where you going?”
“Just around.” He leaned back with his hands between his knees and stared out the window as the car slipped down the driveway into the street. “Got a couple of things I want to attend to,” he said. “And Jeremy’s postcard reminded me I don’t have all year to do them in.”
“Better
go see your old music teacher,” Lisa said. “And Miss Potter, the one that taught you third grade. She asks about you every time she sees me.”
“Okay.”
“She wants to know if you’re a famous poet yet. Says you wrote your first poem in her class.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, she does. Says it went, ‘My fish, my cat, my little world,’ and she’s keeping it still for when you get famous.”
“My land,” Ben Joe said. “Jenny, how far downtown are you going?”
“Just to the A & P.”
“And the shoe store,” Tessie reminded her.
“And the shoe store. Why you want to know?”
“Not past that?” asked Ben Joe.
“Well, no. What is past that?”
“Where is it you’re going, anyway?” Joanne asked him.
He scowled at her and remained silent, and Joanne turned back to the window. They were still among lawns and houses; Jenny drove so slowly that a man walking at a brisk pace could keep up with her. At one point Joanne said, “Was that the Edmonds’ house?”
Ben Joe leaned forward to see where she was pointing. Between two houses was a charred space with only a set of cement steps and a yellow brick fireplace left intact.
“It was,” he said. “Burned down the year you left.”
“Nobody told me about it.”
“You used to date their son, I think.” He had come upon them kissing in the den one night; Bobby was hugging her and kissing the hollow in her neck, and Ben Joe had left the room again without a sound.
“I’d forgotten that,” Joanne said.
Sometimes he thought his sisters had been born senile.
