If Morning Ever Comes

by Anne Tyler

  “What?” she said.

  Ben Joe turned to her. “Mom, I’m asking you, now. Do you think Joanne ought to go out on a date?”

  His mother frowned. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t know. If it’s just an old friend of hers, I don’t see the harm in her getting out of the house for a while. It’s up to Joanne, after all. None of our business.”

  “But he’s nor just an old friend!”

  “What is he, then?”

  There was a silence. Everyone looked at him.

  “Frankly,” John said finally, “I don’t see how—”

  “No, listen. Please listen!”

  “We’re listening, Ben Joe,” said his mother.

  “No, you’re not. You never are. Look, I was just worrying if people would talk.”

  “What would they talk about?”

  He sat down, realized immediately the disadvantage at which this put him when everyone else was standing, and stood up again.

  “Joanne,” he said, “don’t you see my point?”

  “No,” Joanne said.

  “John? You do.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” said John.

  “You talk, don’t you?” Ben Joe said. He took a step closer to him. “Don’t you?”

  John blinked his eyes at him.

  “Look,” Ben Joe said. He was facing all of them now, with his arms straight by his sides and his fists clenched. “All I’m trying to do is stop one more of those amazing damned things that go on in this family and everyone takes for granted, pretends things are still all right and the world’s still right-side up. The most amazing things go on in this family, the most amazing things, that no one else would allow, and this family just keeps on—”

  “Just what sort of amazing things are you talking about?” his mother asked. She was looking at him straight on and sternly, with her eyes just slits. “This family’s just like any other family, Ben Joe. There’s nothing going on here that—”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No.”

  He slitted his eyes back at her.

  “Just to give you a for-instance,” he said, “I don’t know if you all can dredge far enough back in your memories or not, but I can recall a time when Dad and the sheriff were out all one night in their pajamas—”

  “That is enough,” his mother said.

  “—pajamas, chasing down to Dillon, South Carolina, because Joanne had run off with a total stranger that came here selling clear plastic raincoats one autumn afternoon, run off to get married as soon as he asked her, which as near as we could figure it was three seconds after she had opened the front door to his ringing, and Dad was frantically chasing down every highway to Dillon and finally found them at seven-thirty in the morning waiting to fill out a marriage license. And he brought her back and everyone just said, ‘Well, let her sleep.’ ”

  “It’s true!” Gram said. “It’s true. I remember it all!”

  “What else could we have done?” his mother asked the clock.

  “Which was fine, except didn’t they wonder even what led to it, or why, or try to do something to help her? No, and at supper they all told jokes and passed the biscuits and there was Joanne with a new trick, a piece of plastic that looked just exactly like vomit—she’d bought it at the magic store—and she was retching and then throwing the plastic on the floor, and she squealed, ‘Ooh, wouldn’t my vomit go good on the living room rug!’ and you all laughed and ran with her to the living room and life went on, and on, while—”

  Joanne stepped up, and for a minute he thought she was going to hit him, but instead she pushed her coat in his face, choking him with the force of it, leaving him in a forest-green darkness that smelled of wool and spice perfume. He could feel the bones of her hands pressing through the wool to his face, and above the uproar John Horner was shouting, “Stop it, stop it!” but the coat was still being pushed against his face.

  “Anybody home?” someone called.

  There was a long, deep silence.

  The coat fell away from Ben Joe’s face and hung, crumpled, around his shoulders. He blinked his eyes several times. Everyone in the room was looking toward the door, with their faces blank, staring at the tallest man Ben Joe had ever seen. He was bony and freckled with a long, friendly face, and though his overcoat hung on him badly, there was something very easy and graceful about the way he was standing.

  “I would have called,” he said cheerfully, “but then if I had, you probably would be gone when I got here. And I would have waited for you to answer the door, but a man can’t wait forever. Can he?” he asked, and grinned at Ben Joe.

  People were coming out of their surprise now, opening their mouths to speak, but the stranger had moved rapidly into the center of the room with his hands still in his pockets and he said, “I knew the house. Know it anywhere. Though that glider has got to be new. I didn’t know that. You people are—” he looked around at them, still cheerfully—“Gram, Ben Joe, Mom, uh … Jenny? and a man I don’t know with, of course, Joanne—”

  “You go away,” Joanne said softly.

  “But I only just got here.”

  “I’m telling you, Gary …”

  But before the name was out of her mouth, Ben Joe knew. He suddenly recognized the hair, flaming red and pushed carelessly back from his forehead exactly like Carol’s, and the familiar-looking eyes that had stared out of the dim snapshot. He stood gaping at the three of them—Joanne and Gary and John—in a brightly tensed, three-cornered group in the center of the room.

  “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Ben Joe!” his mother called.

  “I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m leaving!”

  And he shoved the coat back in Joanne’s face. It fell to the floor, but she let it stay there and didn’t look his way. Jenny was in his path; he pushed her aside without even knowing it and flew through the hallway and out the door. Then he was outside. He was in the dark wind, with the cold already slapping at his face.

  13

  Shelley’s face was small and white; her hair was a mass of sausage-shaped curlers, shrouded under a heavy black net. She stood behind her screen door and looked out to where Ben Joe stood on the porch, under the yellow outside light, and to Ben Joe it seemed as if she was suddenly considering every detail of him, weighing him in the back of her faraway mind. With one hand she reached up vaguely to touch her curlers, obeying that part of her that wondered always, no matter what, whether she was fit to be seen. But it was only the most absent-minded gesture. Her eyes were still fixed on him, and she frowned a little and bent forward to see him more clearly.

  “It’s me,” Ben Joe said.

  “I know.”

  She kept watching him. The two of them seemed to be standing between the two ticks of a clock, in a dead silence of time where there was no need to hurry about anything; as long as she stayed silent and watchful they were frozen stock-still between that clock’s ticking. Then she gave up, not finished with whatever it was she was trying to do but just giving up in the middle of it, and, clutching her quilted bathrobe more tightly about her, opened the door for him.

  “I’ve been walking for hours,” he said.

  She nodded. Nothing seemed to surprise her. When he stepped inside she held up both hands, in a gesture like a doll’s in a toy-shop window, to take the light sweater he was wearing, and he shucked it off and handed it to her.

  “I know you weren’t expecting company,” he told her as she turned to hang up his sweater. “You can go on and do whatever you were doing before. I won’t mind.”

  She didn’t answer. The hangers in the closet tinkled flatly as she rummaged among them, and when she lifted one from the rod another fell with it, making a blurred explosive sound as it landed on a floor full of old rubbers and high-heeled galoshes. She ignored it; her eyes concentrated upon what suddenly seemed, to Ben Joe, the impossibly complicated
task of getting his sweater upon the hanger. What was wrong with Shelley? Her fingers fumbled tightly at the collar of the sweater, taking hours to make it lie straight around the hook of the hanger. If it had been any other night, Ben Joe would have gone on in, would have left her in the hallway and headed for the living-room sofa. But tonight he felt uneasy. He wanted to tread as delicately as possible so that she would turn out to be glad he came. So he stood clenching his cold aching hands together and waiting hopefully for Shelley to finish this interminable business of getting his sweater up, and he never even looked toward the living room.

  “I reckon you’ll want some bourbon,” she said.

  “No.”

  “It’ll do you good, if you’re cold.”

  She headed toward the kitchen, making only the softest whispering noise across the floor in her bare feet. After a minute Ben Joe followed her. If she took so long to hang a sweater up, how long would she spend making a drink? And he really didn’t want one; he felt awkward and foolish stumbling in here like this, and he didn’t want to make it worse by accepting anything.

  “I’m sorry I came without warning,” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I should have called first.”

  “It’s all right, Ben Joe.”

  She stood on tiptoe to reach a liquor bottle from the cupboard, and Ben Joe leaned against the kitchen sink. He was surprised at how messy everything was; ordinarily Shelley was almost old-maidishly tidy. He could remember her spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread and then washing the knife and putting it and the peanut butter away even before she finished making the sandwich. And she had some sort of phobia about seeing that all the cannisters were neatly aligned along the counter and all the measuring spoons hung in order on the wall according to their sizes. But tonight the place was in chaos. Dishes and leftovers littered the counter; a recently washed sweater was balled up in the dish drainer and a shower cap was flung over the towel rack. He looked around at Shelley, trying to figure out what sort of mood she must be in. In her pale flowered bathrobe, a little too small for her, she looked wire-thin and brittle. But that shyness was gone, so much forgotten that she seemed not at all embarrassed at being caught in her bathrobe. In place of the shyness was a sort of heavy sullenness that he hadn’t often seen in her before, that made her face look fuller and the lower lines of her cheeks sag. Her eyebrows had lost the high, uncertain arch they usually had and sat straight over blank eyes, and she was poking out her mouth in a way that made it seem like a pouting child’s mouth. When she poured the drink she did it heavily, with finality.

  “Have you got something on your mind?” Ben Joe asked.

  She stopped, looked at the bottle, and then reached for another glass and poured a drink for herself.

  “If you do,” he said, “I wish you’d tell me. I hate this ferreting things out of people. I ask what’s wrong and they say nothing, and then I say please to tell me and they say no, really, it’s nothing, and I say well, I can just feel something’s wrong. And by then we both hate each other. I keep thinking of everything bad I’ve done in the last ten years, things you wouldn’t even begin to know, but somehow I start thinking maybe you’ve found out—”

  “Oh, Ben Joe,” Shelley said tiredly.

  She handed him his drink and then picked up her own and headed for the living room. Behind her Ben Joe walked slowly, dragging his feet and watching the back of Shelley’s head. The curlers bobbed up and down cheerfully, but her shoulders were slumped and careless. When they entered the living room, Shelley chose a seat in the wicker chair by the fireplace and Ben Joe had to sit alone on the couch opposite her. He felt exposed and defenseless, with all that bare expanse of couch at either side of him.

  “I would do anything to help,” he said. “But I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Shelley raised her eyebrows slightly, as if what he was saying was a curious little toy he had handed her and she wanted to act polite about it. He had forgotten that she could be this way. He had seen her angry only a few times in his life—once or twice when he had dated other girls, and then one memorable time when she had taken three months to knit him a sweater in high school and then found he had grown two inches while she was busy knitting. Each time that she had been angry, the change in her had surprised him all over again. She became suddenly cool and haughty, and she left him feeling bewildered. Tonight no matter how hard he looked at her, no matter how patiently he waited for her to speak, she was unchangingly cool and blank-faced, sitting aloof in her solitary wicker chair. He sighed and took a long drink of the straight warm bourbon. He thought about the bourbon winding slowly to his stomach; with his head cocked, he seemed to be listening to it, noting carefully which part of him it was burning now. Shelley was turned into a carefully shutout inanimate object on the other side of the room. A tune began in his head, hummed nonchalantly by that sexless, anonymous voice that lived inside him and always spoke words as he read them and thoughts as he thought them.

  “So I guess I won’t be coming tomorrow night,” he said absently. Shelley’s fingernail, tapping rhythmically against her glass, was suddenly stilled. “I’ve got to go back to New York.”

  The fingernail resumed its tapping. Ben Joe watched a specific place on the coffee table, a corner where the dust had gathered between the table top and the raised rim of it in a tiny triangle. He suddenly thought, without meaning to or wanting to, that tomorrow night when he was rattling northward on the rickety little train, this table corner would be exactly the same, would exist solid and untouched no matter where he was. Shelley would wash and neatly stack her dishes, and Gram would roar songs at the top of her lungs while she polished the silver, and everything—the solid little coffee table, the narrow polished windows, the hundreds of curtained front doors, all this still, unchanging world of women—would stay the same while he rushed on through darkness across the garishly lit industrial plains of New Jersey and into the early-morning stillness of New York. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand, and stared at the floor.

  “Every place I go,” he said, “I miss another place.”

  Shelley was silent.

  “I don’t know why,” he said, just as if she’d asked. “When I am away from Sandhill, sometimes the picture of it comes drifting toward me—just the picture of it, like some sunny little island I have got to get back to. And there’s my family. Most of the time I seem to see them sort of like a bunch of picnickers in a nineteenth-century painting, sitting around in the grass with their picnic baskets and their pretty dresses and parasols, and floating past on that island. I think, I’ve got to get back. I think, they need me there and I have got to get back to them. But when I go back, they laugh at me and rumple my hair and ask why I’m such a worrier. And I can’t tell them why. There’s nothing I can tell them. Pretty soon I leave again, on account of seeing myself so weak and speechless and worried. I get to thinking about something I just miss like hell in another town, like this tree on a street in Atlanta that has a real electric socket in it, right in the trunk, or the trolley cars in Philadelphia making that faraway lonesome sound as they pass down an empty street in the rain, through old torn-down slum buildings with nothing but a wallpapered sheet of brick and a set of stone steps left standing.…”

  Shelley was staring at him now, with her forehead wrinkled, trying to understand and not succeeding. When he saw that he wasn’t making sense he stopped, and spread his hands helplessly.

  “Oh, well,” he said.

  “No, I’m listening.”

  “Well.” He paused, trying to arrange his words better, but finally he gave up. “Nothing,” he said. “So you go to Atlanta, and you see the damn electric socket, and you go to Philadelphia and you see the damn trolley cars. So what? They only turn out to be an electric socket and a trolley car, in the long run. Nothing to keep you occupied longer than five minutes, either one of them. Then, in the middle of being loose an
d strong and on my own, wherever I am, along through my mind floats this island of a town with my family on it, still smiling on the lawn beside their picnic baskets …”

  Shelley nodded several times slowly, as if she understood. He couldn’t tell if she really did or not. He thought probably she didn’t, but what mattered more than that right now was whether she was still in that black mood of hers and whether she would tell him why. He looked across at her steadily; her face returned to its original blankness and she stared back at him.

  “So you’re going back to New York,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  She was silent again. He began twirling the bourbon around in his glass, watching it slosh up and leave its oily trail along the sides.

  “So you just come,” she said, “and then you leave.”

  “Well, that’s what I’ve just been explaining to—”

  “You’re not fair, Ben Joe Hawkes.”

  He looked up. Shelley’s eyes were narrowed at him and she was angry. As soon as he looked at her she reached one hand up to her curlers again and then began pulling them down, with hasty, fumbling fingers, ripping them out and tossing them into her lap, where her other hand was clenched so hard that the knuckles were white. In spite of all his worries, in spite of being concerned at her anger and sad at the way this whole night had been, a part of Ben Joe wondered detachedly why she was taking her curlers out and why she was choosing this moment to do it. He watched, fascinated. Her hair without the curlers remained still in little sausage shapes around her head, and since she had no comb handy, she began raking her fingers through the curls in order to loosen them. But all the while her face seemed unaware of what was going on, as if this business with her hair was just a nervous habit.

  “You come and then you leave,” she repeated, “just like that. You’re not fair. The trouble with you, Ben Joe Hawkes, is you don’t think. You’re a kind enough person when you think about it, but that’s not often, and most of the time you—”