Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Benjy returned to the clothesline with three spongy, muddy clothespins. With one he pinned five washcloths, and with another a bunch of cleaning rags, and with the third, he hung his mother’s two white blouses together by the collars. The clothesline creaked, then sagged closer to the ground. He caught the pole just in time. He looked up to see Norm coming down the driveway. His eyes were red and puffy, and one side of his face was streaked with dirt.

  “You little faggot!” Norm growled. “C’mere! You get in here!”

  “Norm! I can’t! The—” Benjy was trying to explain as he braced up the clothesline, but Norm flung his glove at him and growled, “I want to talk to you! Now!” He stormed inside and slammed the door.

  “He’s mad at you!” Louie whispered from the box. Just then the dog darted out and snagged Norm’s big webbed, deeply oiled glove, then rolled on its back, whipping the glove from side to side.

  “Louie!” Benjy called. With both hands supporting the line there was nothing he could do. “Get the glove!”

  But the dog was already on its feet and trotting toward the woods with Louie scrambling after him. At the edge of the yard Louie froze.

  “Get him!” Benjy called, but Louie wasn’t allowed to leave the yard, so Benjy let go of the sopping-wet line, and before it had even hit the ground, he was running after the dog, calling to it, panting, begging it to stop, come back, drop the glove. “Please! Please! Please!” he cried as he ran. But the dog was gone. He had lost him.

  The dog, ears perked back, head slung low, ran with a mighty speed, disappearing into the woods, galloping some distance until it came to the rich ooze of the lower banks of Moon Brook, foul with runoff from the pig farm and the dump. Suddenly the dog stopped. It sniffed the air, then turned and crept deep into a viny thicket. Here in the dark earthen coolness, it lay down panting, its drooling muzzle on the soft glove while it watched the man’s quiet quiet body.

  Benjy was confused. Norm acted as if the drunken scene outside school yesterday had been all Benjy’s fault. Norm said he should have gone the other way the minute he saw him. Benjy said that he had tried to. Then he shouldn’t have talked to the asshole. Benjy said that he hadn’t really. “But you were there,” Norm exploded. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get it?”

  He didn’t, and yet he did. Somehow he was culpable. Everyone was. Everyone but his father, whose condition, whose very nature absolved him of responsibility.

  They were eating dinner now and every time Norm looked at him, he felt sick inside. He’d really hate him when he found out about his glove, Benjy thought. Alice asked where the salesman had gone, but their mother interrupted to ask Norm about the street department job interview with Jarden Greene. Norm said he hadn’t made it to town hall today. She put down her fork and for a moment seemed to be smiling. Relieved, Benjy smiled too. “What, what do you mean, you didn’t make it? You didn’t feel like it? You didn’t have time?” She kept hitting the table. “Or maybe you’ve got something better, is that it?”

  “I got held up,” Norm said. “But I’m going tomorrow, I promise.”

  “Right after school!” she said, seeming disarmed by his earnest gaze.

  “Right after school,” Norm said.

  “You damn well better,” she warned.

  “I said I would,” Norm said softly. He smiled. “And I will.”

  “Make sure you do,” she said, her chin out.

  Benjy was shocked. The big game was tomorrow, but he didn’t dare remind Norm for fear he’d ask about the glove.

  “Where’s that Mr. Duvall?” Alice asked again, her cheeks red and irritated-looking. Her lips were chapped and her eyes were bright and her blouse was inside out.

  “I have no idea,” their mother sighed, looking toward the back door. “Probably got his car back and now he’s on his way.”

  “Weird guy.” Alice sighed with a distant little smile as she pushed food around her plate. “A traveling salesman! Can you imagine!”

  Marie looked quickly at Alice, her eyes narrowing. “Where’d you go after school?”

  “Oh”—Alice shrugged—“around. You know…stopped in to see Mrs. Stoner, and I was looking for a job, of course. Before I saw Mrs. Stoner….”

  “Where’d you go? What places?” Marie interrupted.

  Benjy and Norm watched their mother lay the trap. They watched Alice stumble toward it.

  “Some stores.”

  “What stores?”

  “The Taylor Shop and then Pilgrim’s.” She shrugged.

  “With your blouse inside out?” Marie said, the words forced through lips of wire.

  Alice’s hand flew across her chest. “Oh no!” she said, her face reddening as she looked up at them. “It must’ve been like this all day. Ever since this morning.”

  Marie got up and picked up her plate. “No, it hasn’t,” she said, staring down at Alice. “When you left, it was on right.”

  After dinner, Norm said he’d be in his room studying for the two finals he had tomorrow. And then he’d be going to bed. The radio played loudly in his room and Marie called up twice for him to turn it down.

  Alice was taking a bath. The sweet steam of soap, shampoo, and talcum powder seeped under the bathroom door. Benjy didn’t know why wearing a shirt inside out was so bad, but Alice and his mother still weren’t speaking.

  His mother had set up the ironing board in the kitchen doorway so she could see the television. Benjy watched from the couch. Milton Berle was under a sheet on an operating table. Every time the doctors and nurses touched him, he giggled. His mother laughed and Benjy smiled. Though he didn’t think Milton Berle was very funny, he loved watching this show with his mother because it made her so happy. She held up Norm’s ironed shirt and put it on a hanger. She paused now as Milton Berle ran around the operating room in his hospital johnny with the doctors and nurses chasing him. Suddenly Norm’s radio blared so loudly that they couldn’t hear the show. Marie sent Benjy upstairs to tell Norm to turn it down. When he opened the door the lights were on, and the bed was covered with textbooks and folders and papers, but Norm was gone. The window was open. Benjy turned down the radio and hurried back downstairs.

  “Is he still studying?” his mother asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “I don’t know how he can think with all that racket,” she said as she unrolled a wet towel on the arm of the couch. She shook out another damp starched shirt. The iron hissed as she pressed it into the collar. Benjy squirmed, wishing he’d turned the radio off. What if it got loud again and she went up herself?

  “God, he’s funny!” she said, shaking her head, as a new skit began. Milton Berle wore a wig and a dress as he battered a policeman with a purse. The audience screeched with laughter. Leaning over the ironing board, Benjy’s mother hugged herself and laughed until there were tears in her eyes.

  He smiled uneasily. Be careful, he was thinking. Be careful.

  “He’s so funny!” she gasped.

  Outside, a car had just pulled into the driveway. Klubocks’ dog was barking. The rap on the door was hard and curt. His mother opened the front door, which was beside the television, so in an odd way it seemed to Benjy that he was watching two screens, two shows. There was a Pepsodent ad now on one screen with a toothbrush dancing around a tube of toothpaste, while in the other stood Billy Hendricks with head bowed and a swollen lip he kept touching. Beside him was Mr. Hendricks, who still wore his mailman’s uniform.

  “Oh,” Marie said, stepping directly in front of them, making it clear they couldn’t come in. “It’s you, Eddy. The light’s broken….”

  “We just came from the dentist, Marie. Billy here’s got to have a new cap made and I know times are tough right now, but it seems to me fair’s fair, which is how I brung my boys up, so your Norm’s the one ought to be responsible now, Marie, because a lesson lived is a lesson learned, I always say. And believe me, I know how hard it is for—”

  “Eddy! What’re you talking about?” she fina
lly broke in.

  “His cap,” Mr. Hendricks said, nudging his son. He was nervous. “Show her…show her!” Mr. Hendricks ordered until Billy opened his mouth, revealing the black gap of a missing front tooth.

  Just then, Alice came out of the bathroom in her old red chenille bathrobe with its raised white roses on the pockets. Her wet hair dripped onto her shoulders. “Oh!” she said when she saw Billy, his lip being stretched up now by his father, who was pointing at the damage and explaining that Dr. Yale had promised a rush job so it would look all right for graduation. “Agh…agh,” Billy groaned, pushing away his father’s hand.

  “Oh, hi,” Alice muttered, turning her head. Looking just as miserable, Billy muttered “Hi.” She ran so fast up the stairs that she tripped on her bathrobe and fell forward. Benjy stared down at the floor.

  “Norm!” Marie called. “Get Norm,” she said through clenched teeth.

  He closed his eyes on his way upstairs, praying, hoping that Norm had climbed back in through the window.

  “Bastard,” his mother groaned, flying past him into the room. “Where is he? Where the hell is he?” she cried, turning in a bewildered little circle. She ran to the window and looked out, and then she locked it. “He’ll pay,” she cried, kneeling by Norm’s bed and reaching under the mattress. “Damn right he’ll pay,” she said, pulling out Norm’s thirty-one dollars. Benjy couldn’t believe she’d do that. That money was for the used car Norm wanted. For the past year he had saved every penny that came his way.

  At ten o’clock, Norm still wasn’t home. Marie sat on the couch staring at the door, waiting.

  Alice lay in bed. She saw the lights go out in the Klubocks’ upstairs windows and she stroked her thigh, imagining Mrs. Klubock in a sheer nylon gown opening her soft arms to Mr. Klubock.

  In his room Benjy heard the first clink. Clink clink clink from the backyard. Then louder and more insistent. Clink! Clink clink! He crept to the foot of his bed and with his cheek against the cool wood of the window frame, he could see the tall white-suited form of Omar Duvall, bracing the clothesline while he pounded the metal pole into the wet night earth with a rock, down deeper and deeper.

  At ten o’clock, Weeb Miller peeled his father’s white-and-coral Pontiac out of the weedy gully where they’d spent the last hour drinking and waiting for parkers. They threw their empty cans out the window, and Norm unwrapped three sticks of gum for himself, Weeb, and Tommy Mullins, who sat in back, his huge arms hanging over the front seat between Weeb and Norm.

  “Sit back!” Weeb hollered. “For chrissakes all I can see in the mirror’s your fat face, Mullins!”

  Tommy laughed. Instead of sitting back he lowered his head, digging his chin into the top of the seat.

  “That’s no good!” Weeb groaned, and so Tommy laid the side of his head on the back of the seat. Norm laughed. Mullins was a hopeless creep, but his father owned the bakery and he always had money. When they couldn’t get beer out of Weeb’s father’s refrigerator in the garage, they always picked up Mullins to buy it for them from Mrs. Carper up in the Flatts.

  “So what do you think, Norm?” Weeb said, once again bringing up tomorrow’s game. “It’s worth a try anyway.” All night long, Weeb had been after him to have his mother’s boss, Ferdinand Briscoe, call Coach Graber like he had the last time Norm got in trouble for fighting. “At least ask him,” Weeb said, his voice getting whiny. “Graber’d eat shit if Briscoe said to.” Mr. Briscoe supplied Saint Mary’s with free baseball uniforms.

  “Hey”—Norm laughed—“I just don’t give a shit.” And right now he didn’t. Not after six beers. Plus he’d rather miss the game than have his mother find out he’d been kicked off the team again.

  “You give a shit,” Tommy Mullins said. “’Course you give a shit.”

  They both looked back at him. This was none of Mullins’s business. Mullins shook a cigarette from his pack and offered it to Norm, who was about to say he was in training. Instead he lit it with a deep satisfying drag. Norm turned up the radio. Ricky Nelson was singing “It’s Late.” Weeb reached under the seat for his drumsticks, which he beat on the wheel, dashboard, and windshield as he drove. Tommy sang loudly. He knew the words to every song, and he had a loud catchy voice Norm envied. Norm put his head back with his eyes closed while he smoked. He was thinking of Alice with her blouse inside out and the horrible look on her face as their mother bore down on her. Jesus Christ, sometimes he thought they were all nuts. Sometimes all he wanted was to get as far away as he could from this whole fucking disaster his life was turning into. He thought of Billy Hendricks’s startled, flattened face, and he turned toward the open window and couldn’t help smiling.

  When they got to the 4-Clover Bowling Lanes, Weeb’s father’s team was still bowling, so they headed in to watch. Norm caught their reflection in the plate-glass window. Their walk was the same, thumbs tucked into their side pockets and on their faces a scowl that was supposed to be menacing, but instead came off looking peevish.

  He saw his uncle Renie bowling inside. He was afraid his uncle might say something about the job interview at town hall. If he did get the job, he didn’t want everyone knowing it had been with the help of a creep like Renie LaChance. He hung back in the doorway and watched Uncle Renie’s short thick body approach the lane. Nervously, Renie kept wiping his hand on the sides of his pants. Then he wiped his brow and, taking the ball, went into a frantic running delivery that wobbled the ball along the edge of the lane, missing every pin. Someone laughed. Asshole, Norm thought as his uncle tried again, rolling the ball into an erratic spin that sank into the gutter halfway down the lane. Renie wiped his hands on his pants as he hurried back to his seat. When he sat down, none of the men spoke to him. Renie smiled happily, watching each man get up, and when his team did well, he shook his fist in the air and hollered to no one in particular.

  While Weeb and Tommy stood behind Mr. Miller’s team, Norm waited by the desk, watching Bernadette Mansaw up on her platform, where she gave out shoes and, when they were returned, sterilized and buffed them.

  Bernadette was the same age as Alice, but here under the fluorescent lights she looked older, her flesh faintly lined in purple creases. Her eyelids were painted deep blue and her full mouth was a slick red. She sat on a stool smoking. She yawned and smiled at Norm, then watched the shoes pass slowly by on the conveyor belt that fed them through the sterilizing ultraviolet rays of the glass box. Every time the light in the box flashed on, it outlined the long sling of her heavy breasts in her thin white sweater that was buttoned down the back.

  “League night sucks,” she said, yawning again.

  Norm glanced back, then realized she was talking to him. To him! The ball rolled down the alley. The pins rattled and fell with a roar from the crowd.

  Bernadette sighed. “I’m glad someone’s happy. I missed my ride and now I gotta walk home and I got my groceries.” She nodded at the two full bags on the floor. She looked at Norm. “You waiting for somebody?”

  He nodded, still chewing his gum.

  “Who you waiting for?”

  “My friend Weeb. Well, his father…Weeb’s waiting, too.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. Her gaze fell dully back to the glass box. She passed another pair of shoes through, then with a chamois dipped in cream buffed their heels and toes. “The thought of walking all that way kills me,” she sighed.

  Norm looked back at the lanes. With all the beer and now this glare and racket, his head was starting to spin.

  “They’re almost done,” she said, picking up another pair of shoes. “Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Oh yah!” she said when he told her. “You’re Alice Fermoyle’s brother.” She ground out her cigarette in a large ashtray loaded with red-ringed butts. “I was in school with Alice. All the way to freshman year. After that I kinda quit on school. Couldn’t take the nuns.” She lit another cigarette. “I never could figure them out. I mean never getting married or having kids or having a g
ood time, but Jesus Christ, lemme tell you, they got the life!” She laughed. “The voice of experience, that’s two kids later talking!”

  The men were coming out of the alleys, jabbing each other’s arms and wiping their faces with towels. After them came Tommy and Weeb, who carried his father’s duffel bag. Mr. Miller was a serious red-faced man who always looked worried. He had a government job, the nature of which Weeb had only recently confided to Norm. Mr. Miller was a venereal disease specialist with the State Health Department. Weeb said his father was afraid people might take it the wrong way. Weeb said it was mostly the kidding his father couldn’t take. He said his father hated kidding, hated fooling around, especially about sex.

  “See you next week, doll…. Take it easy, sweet lips…. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, unless I’m there,” the men called out to Bernadette in spite of the fact that most of them had children her age.

  “Yah…Hey…sure…you can bet on it…. Hey, Harry, up yours.” She laughed, then whooped as Harry Temple vaulted the counter and bent her back in a swooning embrace. As she giggled and struggled to get free, Norm watched those thick fleshy breasts drag over Mr. Temple’s arm. He followed Mr. Miller, Weeb, and Tommy outside. “Hey!” he heard his uncle call. “Norm! Hey, that’s my nephew there! Quite a baseball player, that one…”

  “Norm!” Mr. Miller said, getting into the car. Norm was already in back with Tommy. “That’s your uncle calling.” Norm waved as Weeb pulled out. “Renie’s an alternate,” Mr. Miller said. “Somebody couldn’t come.”