Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“You’ve been dreaming about your father,” she said.

“I haven’t,” said Ben Joe.

“Ben Joe, please . Wake up.”

He opened his eyes for the second time; this time he knew without a doubt that he was really awake. At the foot of his bed stood his mother, with a faded corduroy bathrobe tossed hastily around her. She was bent over a little the way Jenny had been earlier, and she was watching him with kind, worried eyes.

“What?” he said.

“You had a bad dream, I guess,” she said. “You screamed ‘Mother!’ I thought — Where’s your pillow?”

“Oh … on the floor,” said Ben Joe. He watched dazedly as she reached down to pick it up for him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. She had stepped closer now, and he could see the deep lines around her mouth and the anxious twisting motion of her hands upon the cord of her bathrobe.

“I’m all right,” he said. “You go back to bed now. I’ll be fine.”

“If you’d like for me to sit with you awhile—”

“No, no. You go back to bed. Please.

She stayed another minute, looking down at him anxiously, but he made his face smooth and cheerful and eventually she sighed and straightened up again.

“Well, all right,” she said. “But if there’s anything I can get you, now—”

“Good night, Mom.”

“Good night.”

He thought she would never leave. Finally she turned and went absently to the door, and after looking back at him one more time she was gone. He tried to unstiffen his muscles. His legs were rigid and cold, and he couldn’t relax them for more than a second before they stiffened again. But gradually, as the dream faded piece by piece and image by image from his memory, his body relaxed again. All that was left was a faintly sad feeling because he was afraid he had been rude to his mother. In this house there was only one recognized cure for nightmares; you rushed to the dreamer’s room and offered him Postum and pleasant conversation. Only with Ben Joe that always seemed to make it worse. Probably that was what his mother was telling the others now. He could hear her voice in the hall, murmuring along against a background of other voices, low and questioning. When was night going to end?

He lay back tensely, and with great determination he began naming all the places he had ever been. Even one-night stays in hotels. He pictured every single place (though the hotels tended to merge into a single dreary prototype) in his mind’s eye, exactly as it would look at this very hour. His New York apartment, with Jeremy curled up like a bear in the pale light from the dirty window. The camp cabin he had slept in when he was ten, with half-finished lanyards dangling from all the nails on the wall. The boat he had stayed on one summer in Maine with his uncle, where the sunlight came to pick up the colors in the Hudson Bay blankets at something like five o’clock in the morning. Only no, it was winter now. He’d forgotten. Maine would be icy and gray with only the bleak Nova Scotia lobster boats moored in the tiny harbor. Maybe not even they would be there; he’d never seen it in the winter.

He reached back, turned his pillow over to the other side, and let his head fall back into the coolness of it. At the back of his mind the little voice began prodding him, pushing him into the next subject. Shelley. He frowned at the ceiling, turning the idea of Shelley every possible way and trying to think how all this had come about. He pictured himself walking to the train station and meeting Shelley, taking her to New York and surprising the daylights out of Jeremy and the few other friends he had. Writing home and announcing he was married. It sounded to him like one of those wild little what-if thoughts that was always wandering through his head — nothing logical or concrete but only a little tale to pass the time. But when he forced himself to believe it, when he went over all the plain facts of it like actually buying Shelley’s ticket, he began to believe it. He sat up straighter now, tenser than ever. He caught himself in the act of sitting up and tried to lie back down, but his eyes were doing their springing-open act again; it was no use.

The clock said 6:45. He stood up and stumbled to ward the closet, not caring now how much racket he made. From the hangers he pulled down a white shirt and an old pair of slacks and piled himself into them hurriedly. He didn’t want to stay in this room another minute.

Again the door opened. He heard the creak.

“What now?” he said, with his back to the door. He threaded his belt through the loops.

“Ben Joe?” Tessie said.

“Yes.”

She padded over in her bare feet to stand beside him. In her too-long bathrobe and rumpled hair, she looked no older than Carol, and so cross and sleepy that Ben Joe felt sorry for her.

“Ben Joe,” she said, “is it time to get up yet?”

“I think we could say so.”

“I’m so glad ,” she said.

She turned around and walked out again. Out in the hallway Gram started singing, just a little more softly than usual, as she came down the stairs from her attic room:

“If you don’t love me, love whom you please.

Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease …”

The shower in the bathroom was turned on. One of the twins opened the door of their bedroom and shouted out, “Susannah, does milk chocolate remind you of Chicago?”

“Of what?” Susannah said. It sounded as if she were in her closet.

“ ‘Chicago,’ I said.”

“I’ve never been to Chicago.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all night,” said the twin. “Milk chocolate reminds me of Chicago.”

“You’ve never been to Chicago either.”

“Well.”

Someone downstairs started playing the piano. Ben Joe got down on his hands and knees beside his bed and began fishing under it for his shoes with an unstrung tennis racket.

“Gary,” Ben Joe said. “Hey, Gary. Wake up, will you?”

He hated to wake people up. His grandmother had told him after breakfast that it wasn’t good for people to sleep late and especially not in the middle of the living room, and that it was his job to see that Gary got up, but Ben Joe had put it off all morning. Now it was almost eleven; he had spent the last half-hour whistling very loudly in other parts of the house and kicking the furniture in the hallway, but Gary was still peacefully asleep with his mouth open.

“You’re worse than Joanne,” Ben Joe said to the freckled face. “Gary?”

Gary opened his eyes, opaquely blue, and stared up at Ben Joe. “Hmm?” he said.

Ben Joe was instantly embarrassed, caught peering at the privacy of a man’s face asleep.

“Uh, would you like some breakfast?”

“That wouldn’t be half bad,” Gary said. It was amazing how quickly he came alive. He sat straight up and swung his incredibly long, pajamaed legs off the couch and scratched his head.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“About eleven.”

“Oh, Lord.”

He reached for the faded blue bathrobe at the foot of the couch and stood up to put it on. “It’s a disgrace,” he said, grinning happily. “I should’ve been up hours ago. What goes on in this house at night? All night long it sounded like mice above my head, just scurrying around as busy as you please. They went to bed so early and I thought it was a peace-loving family. And then I find out they didn’t go to bed at all, seems like, just adjourned upstairs to carry on where they’d left off before, slamming doors and visiting back and forth. Me, I’ve always thought sleep was a wonderful invention. Not that being awake isn’t nice too, of course. But when I get up in the morning I think, boy, only fourteen more hours and I can be back to sleep again. I like to see the covers turned down and waiting and the pillows puffed up so I can hop right in. And I never dream, because it distracts my mind from pure sleeping, so to speak …”