Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes

“Oh, now, don’t you give me that.”

He stood up and began tugging at the window. It screeched open; a gust of wind blew the newspaper’s society section into Ben Joe’s lap.

“Will you shut that window!” Ben Joe said.

“In a minute, in a minute. I’m trying to see what the thermometer says. Thirty-four. Thirty-four! Not even freezing.”

“It’s the wind,” Ben Joe said.

The window slid shut again, leaving the apartment suddenly silent.

“Want to walk with me to the drugstore, Ben Joe?”

“Not me.”

“I got to get a toothbrush.”

“Nope.”

Jeremy sighed and headed for the bedroom, twirling his empty coffee cup by the handle.

“Last night,” he said as he walked, “I figured out the prettiest-sounding word in the English language. I did. And now I can’t remember it.”

“Hmm,” Ben Joe said. He reached behind him to flick on the wall switch and smoothed out the newspaper in his lap. It was last Sunday’s, but he hadn’t got desperate enough to read the society section till now. It crackled dully on his knees, looking gray and smudgy under the flat light from the ceiling.

“I mean,” Jeremy said from the bedroom, “usually you can think of a word that’s one of the prettiest-sounding. But no, sir, this was the word. Really the word. I meant to tell this comp professor about it, that I see in the cafeteria. And then I woke up this morning and it was gone. It had an s in it, I think. An s.”

“That should narrow it down,” Ben Joe said. He grinned and tipped his head back so that it was resting against the wall.

“You want a date tonight, Ben Joe?”

“Who with?”

“This real cute freshman, has red hair and brown eyes, which is my favorite combination, and comes from, um—”

“Too young.”

He opened the society section and folded it back, letting his arms emerge partway from the blanket.

“Thank you anyway,” he called as an afterthought.

“Oh, that’s okay.” Jeremy was standing in the doorway now, with one end of a pillow in his teeth. “I’ve decided to clean the bedroom,” he said. The words came out muffled but still intelligible. “I haven’t changed my sheets in three weeks.” He shook out a pillowcase, held it below a pillow, and opened his mouth to let the pillow drop into the case. Then he tossed the pillow toward his bed and vanished from sight again.

Ben Joe started reading the society section, holding it upside-down in front of him. He had started learning to read when he was three, but his parents wanted him to wait until school age; they made him stand facing them when they read him bedtime stories, so that the book was turned the wrong way around. It wasn’t until too late that they realized he was reading upside-down. Usually he read the right way now unless he was bored, and then upside-down words came to his mind more clearly. He held the newspaper at arm’s length and frowned, studying an upside-down description of a golden anniversary where the couple had had another wedding performed all over again.

“What’s this mess of lima beans doing on the floor of the closet?” Jeremy called.

“Oh, leave them. I’ll take care of them.”

“I know, but what are they doing there?”

“I forget. Hey, Jeremy, if you were having your golden anniversary would you have another wedding performed all over again?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t have the first one.”

On the next page there were ads to run through, detailed little line drawings of silver patterns and china patterns and ring sets. He yawned and then set to picking out a ring set, ending up with a large, oddly shaped diamond and a wedding band that was fine except for a line of dots at each edge that bothered him. Then he chose a silver pattern and a very expensive china pattern, platinum-rimmed, but he was already beginning to be tired of the game and abruptly he turned the paper right-side up, picked out a bride for himself that he considered most likely to meet all his requirements, and, with that finished, pushed the society news to the floor and stood up.

“Where’s last Sunday’s crossword?” he called.

“I already did it.”

“You did it the week before, too.”

“Well, I waited till Wednesday , for God’s sake.”

Ben Joe went into the bedroom. Jeremy was sitting on the floor with one of the bureau drawers beside him; he was slowly going through a stack of postcards and throwing some out but keeping most of them. The rest of the room was in chaos; Ben Joe’s bed was unmade, Jeremy’s was made but covered with the things he had decided to throw out, and there was a heap of dirty sheets on the floor between the two beds.

“Worse than it was before,” Ben Joe said.

“I know. That’s the trouble with cleaning up.”

Ben Joe leaned his elbows on the dresser and looked into the mirror with his chin in his hands. The mirror was wavy and speckled, but he could at least recognize himself: his thin, flat-planed face, which almost never needed shaving and took on a sort of yellow look in the wintertime; his level gray eyes, so narrow that they looked as if he were constantly suspecting people; and his hair, dark yellow and hanging in shocks over his forehead. It was getting shaggy at the back and sides; he looked like an orphan. And walked like one, letting his shoulders hitch forward and burying his hands deeply in his pockets so that his arms could remain stiff and his elbows could dig into his sides. One of his sisters had once told him, meaning it kindly, that he was homely, all right, but trustworthy-looking; if people could do what they liked to strangers on the street, they would stop him and reach up to pat the top of his head. He sighed and straightened up and began moving around the room, kicking dust balls with his stockinged feet.

“I thought you were going out for a toothbrush,” he said to Jeremy.

“I am. Soon as I finish this drawer. A red one.”

“A red what?”

Toothbrush.” Jeremy threw a stack of postcards in the direction of the wastebasket. “I always buy a red toothbrush for the wintertime.”

“Oh.” Ben Joe sat down on the edge of his bed and frowned at the sheets on the floor. After a minute he said, “You ever seen one of those toothbrushes with a bird on the end? The kind that gives a soft little whistle when you blow on it?”

“Sure. That’s for kids, to make them want to brush their teeth.”

“Well, I know it.” He lay back crosswise on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “My sister had one of those once,” he said. “My older sister, Joanne. She’s away now. But she had a little pink toothbrush with a bird on the end, and it wasn’t when she was a little girl, either. It was when she was in high school and had taken to wearing red dresses and gold hoop earrings and flinging that black hair of hers around. One night I was writing this philosophy paper. I came out of my room for a drink of water and I felt like hell — my mind all confused and tired but still popping off like a machine gun. And out of the bathroom just then came Joanne, not in red but in a little quilty white bathrobe, and sort of dreamily blowing the bird on her toothbrush. She didn’t see me. But it was so damned comforting . I went to bed and slept like a rock, no more machine guns in my head.”

He lay quiet for a minute, following the sculptured molding around the ceiling with his eyes.

“What was I saying?”

“About toothbrushes.”

“Oh. Well, that was all.”

He turned and rose up on one elbow to see what Jeremy was doing. Jeremy was reading all the postcards he had saved.

“Hey, Ben Joe,” he said.