Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. “You wore it up till the time you left home.”

“I’d forgotten all about it.”

She spun once more in front of the mirror and then stopped smiling and sat down abruptly on the bed with her shoulders sagging.

“Did you want something?” she asked.

“Well … no.”

“Is Gary up?”

“Yes.”

He took his hands out of his pocket and crossed to sit in the platform rocker opposite her.

“How do you like him?” she asked.

“Oh, fine.”

There seemed to be no words that would fill in the silence. He got up again and wandered aimlessly around the room. At the bureau he stopped and began looking through a silver catch-all tray under the mirror, full of odds and ends like rolled-up postage stamps and paper clips and pieces of lint.

“Hey,” he said, “here’s my nail clippers.”

“Take them.”

“I can prove they’re mine. See this little license tag on the chain? I got it from a cereal company when I was about twelve. It has the year on it and the—”

“Take it, for goodness’ sakes.”

She lit a Salem and threw the match in the direction of the window. With the nail clippers in his pocket Ben Joe wandered back to his seat, still with nothing to say.

“I’ve been looking all over for them,” he said finally. “Also there’s a dent in the file part, where Jenny bit it when she was only—”

“Ben Joe!”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said after a minute.

“Well, what’d you say ‘Ben Joe’ for?”

“No reason.”

“It seems kind of funny,” he said, “just to scream ‘Ben Joe!’ at the top of your lungs as a way of making small talk. Why, I could think of a better topic than that if I—”

“Are you trying to irritate me?”

“Well, maybe so.” He examined his fingernails. “Yes,” he said after a minute, “I liked him fine. I did. Gary, I mean.”

“You did?”

“Yes.”

He looked up, saw that she was waiting for him to go on, and went back to frowning at his fingernails. “Came all the way here for you,” he said finally. “That’s something.”

Joanne blew out an enormous cloud of smoke and nodded. She seemed still to be waiting for him to say more, but there was nothing else he could think of to say. When she saw that he was through speaking, she went over and sat down at her dressing table, still not speaking. She put her cigarette in the groove of a glass ash tray and began unpinning her knot of hair.

“If I could just get organized, ” she said. “I never have believed in going backwards instead of forwards.”

Ben Joe looked up at her. He knew suddenly, without her telling him, what she had decided she was going to do about Gary. He could tell by her face, half happy and half embarrassed at having to announce that she was as reversible as anyone. He could almost read what she was thinking, and how she was trying to figure out the best way to say it gracefully.

Her hair fell to her neck in a little puff. She put the bobby pins in a china coaster, and picked up a comb and began pulling it through her hair. The red dress made her different, Ben Joe thought. It turned her into exactly the same old Joanne, right down to the swinging hair that she tossed with a little teasing movement of her neck. And this could be any day seven years ago: Ben Joe in the chair watching her get ready to go out, funny old fussy Ben Joe telling her she really should start coming in earlier; and Joanne thin and quick and vaguely dissatisfied in front of her oval mirror. Any minute one of the children would come in (they were still called “the children” back then, not “the girls”) to watch, too. Going out was something exciting and mysterious then, something only Ben Joe and Joanne and Susannah were allowed to do; and the others always liked coming to watch the preparations. He felt suddenly sad, thinking about them — as if instead of merely growing up and still being right here they had died, and he was only now realizing it. He pictured all the children in a circle on the floor, newly bathed and ready for bed (it would have to be evening, then), all looking in the mirror to see the miraculous things Joanne did to her face. Joanne would be talking rapidly, teasing the children behind her and giving that saucy smile as she stared at her mascara in the glass—”Oh, it’s only old Kim Laurence I’m going out with. I think I’ll just stay home and let the baby go instead. You hear that, Tessie?” She would turn around and make a little face at Tessie, only three years old and already half asleep in the lap of a twin. “And won’t Kim Laurence be surprised when his date comes rolling toward him in a baby carriage?” Or: “I’ll tell you who I’m seeing tonight — it’s Quality Jones. Quality Jones, and he’s taking me to a New York night club and he’s such a fascinating conversationalist. All he says is, ‘What time is it, Joanne?’ and I say, ‘If morning ever comes, Quality, I’ll be happy to tell you.’ ”

The image of the real Joanne, seven years older, glimmered in the mirror. Ben Joe bent his head and laid his index fingers across his eyelids, just lightly enough to cool them, but the muscles of his throat stayed hot and aching with all those tears held back, pressing forward for no reason he could name.

“Headache?” the face in the mirror asked.

Ben Joe nodded silently.

“I’ll get you an aspirin.” She stood up and started for the door. When she was directly in front of him she stopped there — looking down at him, he guessed — but she didn’t say anything and after a minute she went on out.

She was gone long enough for him to be sitting up straight and whistling a little tune under his breath before she entered again.Soft as the voices of a-angels …

he whistled. Downstairs Gram’s voice, coming loudly and only a little indistinctly through three closed doors, tramped along with him.

“Here,” Joanne said. She handed him an aspirin and a glass of water.

“Thank you,” he said cheerfully.

He swallowed the pill with one gulp of water and set the glass down on the floor beside his chair. There was a frown on his face now; he sat with his hands clasped tightly together and tried to think of a way to help Joanne say what she wanted to.

“Um, if by any chance you changed your mind about leaving Kansas …”he said.

He paused, waiting without realizing it for Joanne to interrupt, but she didn’t.

“If just by chance you did,” he said finally, “I don’t know that I would call it going backwards instead of forwards. Sometimes it’s not the same place when a person goes back to it, or not the same …”

That little inner mind of his, always scrutinizing him as if it were a separate individual from him, winced. Ben Joe nodded and tipped his hat to it; the separate mind returned his bow and withdrew.

“Not the same person,” he finished.

“Oh,” Joanne said. She was looking down at her hands, acting as if this were a brand-new idea that would have to be given time to soak in.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. Her voice was relieved, and lighthearted. “That is something to think about, I guess …”

Ben Joe stood up. “Thank you for the aspirin,” he said.

“That’s all right. Bye.”

“Good-by.”

He bowed again, this time for real, and left, clicking the door gently shut behind him.

Ben Joe came downstairs as slowly and quietly as possible; his feet instinctively veered away from the centers of the steps, where the slightest pressure always brought forth a creaking noise. In his left hand was his suitcase, held high and away from his body so that it wouldn’t bang against anything. His right hand was on the polished stair railing. His whole face seemed to be concentrated on the sleek wood of it and the thin film of wax that clung a little to his skin. He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and fingers together, frowning down, and then abruptly dropped his hand to his side and descended to the next step. As yet he had not made a single sound. He could go all the way downstairs and out the front door without anyone’s ever knowing it if he wanted to. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to. If he left without saying good-by, could he really feel he had left for good? He switched the suitcase to his other hand and began descending more rapidly, still frowning at how silly he would feel to announce so suddenly that he was leaving. In the back of his mind he knew he would never leave the house without telling anyone; yet his feet still moved cautiously and he still held the suitcase carefully away from the railing.