Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“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?”