Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

He smiled into his plate and then clasped both hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling.

“She was like that about me once,” he said. “Followed me around reading books about marriage. But when Carol came along she got sidetracked, sort of. It happens. So if she was too busy with Carol I’d just go bowling with the boys or watch TV maybe. And Joanne’d start feeling bad — say it was her fault and she was making the house cold for me. First time she said that was in a heat wave. You couldn’t hardly see for the little squiggly lines of heat in the air. ‘Cold?’ I says. ‘Cold? Honey, you make this house cold and I’ll love you forever for it,’ but Joanne, she didn’t think it was funny. Carol was crawling across the table in rubber pants and Joanne picked her up and spanked her for no reason and then started crying and saying history was repeating itself. Huh. You believe in history repeating itself, Ben Joe?”

“Well, not exactly,” Ben Joe said.

“No, I mean it, now. Do you?”

“No,” said Ben Joe. “I can’t believe history’s going anywhere at all, much less repeating itself.”

Gary lit a slightly bent Chesterfield that he had pulled from his shirt pocket. He was enjoying himself now — as wrapped up in his story as if he were watching it unfold right there on the kitchen ceiling, he never even looked at Ben Joe.

“Course she meant you-all’s history,” he said, “which is so confusing I never have got it straight and don’t intend to. Hardly worth it at this late date. But whatever it was, it’s got no bearing on us and Joanne’s house wasn’t a cold one, no. But Joanne, she gets i -deas. And up and left one day. Well, I don’t know why. But here I am, come to get her. I always say,” he said, looking suddenly at Ben Joe, “no sense acting like you don’t miss a person if you do. Never get ’em back pretending you wouldn’t have them if they crawled.”

“I hope you do,” Ben Joe said suddenly. “Get her back, I mean.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you. It’s a right nice house you have here. You born in this house?”

“Yes.”

“I figured so. I always have wanted to come visit you all. Joanne, she sometimes talks about this place when she’s rested and just sort of letting her mind drift. Tells about all the things that go on here just in one day. It’s right fascinating to listen to. Tells about your daddy, and how his one aim in life was to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and watch real country-music singers, the way some people want to go to Paris, only he never did get there—”

“I’d forgotten that,” Ben Joe said.

“Oh, Joanne didn’t. She was full of things. I know about the time when your mamma and daddy were just married, and he bet her that she’d drop out first on a fifteen-mile hike to, to …

“Burniston,” said Ben Joe.

“Burniston, that’s it. Only neither one of them dropped out, they both made it, but what really got your daddy peeved was that the whole town of Sandhill followed them for curiosity’s sake, and none of them dropped out, either … O, ho …” He threw his head back, with his mouth wide and smiling for pure joy, so that Ben Joe had to smile back at him. “And how you are the only boy in Sandhill that they made a special town law for, forbidding you to whistle in the residential sections because it was so awful-sounding. And Susannah’s cracker sandwiches, made with two pieces of bread and then a cracker in between—”

“Joanne told you all that?”

“She did.”

Ben Joe was quiet for a minute. For the first time he actually pictured Joanne married, telling a person what she had noticed in a lifetime and giving someone bits of her mind that none of them had even known she had. What bits, he wondered, would he give Shelley (if there were any to give)? And how did one go about it? Would he just lie back and say what came into his mind the minute it came, removing that filter that was always there and that strained the useless thoughts and the secret thoughts from being made known? But how could that be any gift to her? He frowned, and marked the tablecloth over and over with his thumbnail.

“I’ll do the dishes,” Gary said.

There were some things Ben Joe didn’t want to tell; he didn’t care if she was his wife. He wouldn’t want to tell all about his family, for instance, the way Joanne had done. Or about the little aimless curled-in-on-themselves things he was always wondering, like if you were an ant, how big would the rust on a frying pan look and could you actually see the molecules going around; and why was it that a sunlit train going through a tunnel did not retain the sunlight for a minute, the way the world did just at twilight, so that it was a little trainful of sunshine speeding through the dark like a lit up aquarium — useless things that a child might think and that Ben Joe had never seemed to grow out of. What would Shelley say to him if she knew all that?

“Did you hear me?” Gary said. “I said, I’ll do the dishes.”

Ben Joe pulled his thoughts together. “No,” he said, “Gram gets mad if we do them. She says that the only thinking time she has is when she’s doing the dishes.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then …”

For the first time that Ben Joe knew of, someone managed to interrupt Gary. It was Gram, bellowing from somewhere near the front of the house:“ Soft as the voices of a-angels …”

“What on earth,” Gary said.

He scraped his chair back and stood up to head for the sound, with Ben Joe trailing aimlessly after him. They found Gram in the den, standing in the middle of the floor with her head thrown back and her arms spread like a scarecrow’s, roaring at the top of her lungs: “Whispering ho-o-ope

Da da da da da …”

In front of her, Carol sat in her rocking chair and rocked like mad. Her little feet stuck out in front of her; her head was ducked so that she could throw her weight forward.

“You’re not listening ,” Gram told her. She dropped her arms and beamed at Gary and Ben Joe. “I’m teaching her ‘Whispering Hope.’ ”

“What for?” asked Ben Joe.

“What for? Every little girl should know something like that. So she can stand up in a lacy little pinafore like the one she’s got on now — that’s what reminded me of it — and perform before refreshments are served on Sunday afternoons when callers come. All your sisters know how to do it. Joanne used to recite Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’ and then Susannah would sing ‘Whispering—’ ”

“I don’t remember that,” Ben Joe said.

“Well, we never actually did it in front of guests. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. But we had our own private tea parties, sort of.”

“Well, I’m leaving,” Ben Joe said.

But behind him, as he left, Gary was saying, “That’s a great idea. Do you know ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’? I’d like—”

Ben Joe climbed the stairs two at a time and crossed the hall to Joanne’s door.

“Joanne?” he called.

“Who is it? That you, Ben Joe?”

“Yes. Can I come in?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

He opened the door. Joanne was at the door of her closet, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung there. She had on one of the gypsy-red dresses that she used to wear in high school and that had been left behind in her closet because it had faded at the seams. Faded or not, it was still a brighter shade of red than Ben Joe had been used to seeing lately. He blinked his eyes, and Joanne laughed and turned around to face him.

“I found it hanging there,” she said. “I’d forgotten I had it. Do you remember when I used to wear this?”