by Anne Tyler
“Aha,” said Ben Joe. He took her face in his hands and turned it first one way and then the other, examining the tiny gold rings in her ears. “What for?”
“Oh, just because. Joanne and Susannah and the twins have pierced ears. Why not me?”
“Did it hurt?”
“Yup.”
“Did you cry?”
“Nope. Well, tears came out, but I went on smiling.”
“Good girl,” Ben Joe said. “Better run along and get ready for school, now. You’ll be late.”
“You’ll all be late,” Susannah said.
The others got up and left; the pinks and blues of their bathrobes clustered together for a minute at the doorway and then vanished into the hall. Ben Joe could hear their soft slippers padding up the stairs, and somewhere a door slammed. “What about you?” he asked.
“I’ve got another half-hour.”
“Is Gram up?”
“Yes. She’s up in her room, making a gun belt for Tessie out of an old leather skirt.”
He watched Susannah silently for a while, following her quick little movements around the kitchen. She hadn’t changed any; she got the coffee grounds half emptied and fled to the orange-juicer and then to sponge the top of the stove off before she remembered the coffee grounds again.
“Have you talked to Joanne?” he asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“What’d she say?”
“What about?”
“About leaving Gary.”
“Oh.” She tossed the insides of the coffee pot into the sink and went dashing across the kitchen after a cream pitcher. “I don’t know,” she said. “It never came up.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“Well, it’s none of my business.”
“She’s your sister, isn’t she?”
“That still doesn’t make it my business.”
“What does, then?” Ben Joe asked.
“Nothing. “ She lifted up one soapy hand and pushed a piece of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “You’re the one that’s so worried. Why don’t you talk to her, if you think you know where she’d be happier.”
“It’s not that I much want her to go back to him,” Ben Joe said slowly. “Gary’s an awful name. Whatever he’s like. It reminds me of a G.I. with a crew cut, and ‘Mom’ tattooed on his chest, and lots of pin-up pictures on his wall.”
“Oh, you,” Susannah said. “That’s beside the point. Go up and get some sleep, Ben Joe. The house’ll be bedlam when Carol wakes up.”
“Okay. Have a good day at work.”
“Thank you.”
He stood watching her for a minute, but Susannah had already forgotten him. She was on her hands and knees under the table now, crawling after one of her slippers, and it was as if Ben Joe had never been there.
4
When he awoke, his mother was in the doorway watching him. He was not sure whether she had spoken his name or not; in his sleep he seemed to have heard her voice. But maybe all that had awakened him was the feel of her eyes—wide eyes, as dark as her daughters’, but with small lines now at the corners. She was the kind of woman who did not become very wrinkled as she aged but instead acquired only a few lines around her mouth and eyes, and those so deep that they were actual crevices even when her face was calm. She was smiling a little, so that the mouth lines curved and deepened even more, and she stood with one hand on her hip and the other on the doorknob and watched Ben Joe.
“Ben Joe Hawkes,” she said finally, “what on earth are you doing home?”
Ben Joe sat up in the familiar wooden bed and pushed his hair back from his forehead. “I already told you,” he said. “I told you the reason on the phone.”
“That was no reason.” She shook her head. “Of all the things to do … What’s going to happen to your school work?”
“I don’t have to be there every minute.”
“If you make good grades you do. If you’re going to be any kind of decent lawyer.”
Ben Joe shrugged and pulled his pillow up behind him so that he could sit against it. The sheets smelled crisp and newly ironed; his mother had smoothed them tight on the bed herself and turned the covers down for him, and he could hold that thought securely in his mind even when she scolded him for returning. You had to be a sort of detective with his mother; you had to search out the fresh-made bed, the flowers on the bureau, and the dinner table laid matter-of-factly with your favorite supper, and then you forgot her crisp manners. He wondered, watching her, whether his sisters knew that. Or did they even need to know? Maybe it was only Ben Joe, still watching his mother with those detective eyes even though he was a grown man now and should have stopped bothering.
“Have you had breakfast?” his mother was asking.
“Yes’m. Had it with the girls before they went to work.”
“Well, I’m home for lunch now. You want a bite to eat?”
“I guess.”
She came further into the room and opened his closet door. From the front rack she took a bathrobe and tossed it to him, not watching where it landed, and then crossed to pull the shade up. He saw that she was still wearing those wide walking skirts with the mid-calf hem that had been popular some fifteen years ago. On her, with her bony height and her swinging walk, they still looked up to date. Her hair was a light, dusty color, once as blond as his and Tessie’s. It was short and a little too frizzy around the sharp angles of her face, but she still didn’t seem like an old woman. He gave up watching her and, pulling the bathrobe around him, stepped barefoot to the floor.
“You’re thinner,” she said. She had stopped fiddling with the window shade and was taking stock of him now, with her hands deep in the pockets of her skirt. “You’ve been cooking for yourself, I’ll bet.”
“Yes’m. What time is it?”
“About twelve.”
“Is Joanne up?”
“Oh, yes. She and Carol are in the den, I think.”
“Is she okay?”
“Of course she’s okay. And it’s her own business, Ben Joe—nothing we have any right to touch. I don’t want to hear about your meddling in it. Hurry up and get dressed, will you? Lunch is nearly ready.”
She swung out of the door and vanished, humming something beneath her breath as she went downstairs. Behind her, Ben Joe sighed and tied his bathrobe around him. It would be a good time to shave; none of the older girls came home for lunch.
When he came downstairs he could smell lunch already—all the varied smells of odds and ends left over in the refrigerator and reheated now in tiny saucepans. Although he was rested now, his stomach still felt shaky from the trip and he made a face as the smell of lunch hit him on the stairs. Gram must be doing the cooking today; she was an old Southerner and floated all her vegetables in grease.
He pushed open the kitchen door and found his grandmother standing by the stove just lifting the lid off a steaming saucepan. She was his father’s mother, and close to eighty now, but there was a steely, glinting endurance to her. Joanne used to say her grandmother reminded her of piano wires. She was small and bony; she wore men’s black gym shoes that tied around her bare ankles, and her dress, as usual, was a disgrace—a sort of blue denim coat that was fastened with one string at the back of the neck and hung open the rest of the way down the back to expose a black lace slip. (Her underwear was her one luxury; she had seven different colors in her bureau drawer.) As she stirred the leftovers she sang, just as she always did, in a deafening roar that came effortlessly from the bottom of her tiny rib cage:
“I ain’t gonna knock on your window no more,
Ain’t gonna bang on your door …”
“Hello, Gram,” Ben Joe said in her ear.
She spun around, just missing him with the saucepan lid. “Ben Joe!” she said. “I hear you came in this morning and didn’t even say hey to me. That true?”
“You were up in the attic making a gun belt,” he said.
He hugged her and she hugged him back, so hard that he could feel her hard, bony chest and the point of her chin just below his shoulder.
“We’re having leftovers,” she said. “I know what view you hold of leftovers, but you just wait till tonight. You just see what manner of things we’re preparing.”
She replaced the saucepan lid and undid her hair. It was her habit to take three bobby pins from her head, at least twenty times a day, and let her straight white hair fall almost to her shoulders. Then, with the bobby pins clamped tightly in her mouth, she deftly wound her hair around one finger, squashed it on top of her head in a bun, and nailed it there again with the bobby pins. All this took less than a minute. While she was doing it she kept right on talking, shifting the bobby pins to one corner of her mouth so that they wouldn’t interrupt her speech.
“Turkey we’re having,” she said, “and giblet dressing, and yams—Ben Joe, you got to talk to Jenny about her grocery rut. She’s got into a rut about grocery shopping. Buys the same old thing every time. No imagination. Now, Jenny, she is a right good cook and I want to see her get married, real soon. I don’t hold with a girl staying and looking after her family and being a little old secretary all her life when she is as home-minded as Jenny is. Got to get a family of her own. But what man’ll marry a girl feeds him hamburgers every night? Course she does all manner of clever things to dress them up a little, but still and all it’s hamburger and the cheap kind of hamburger at that. Ever since you left and put her in charge of the money matters she’s been parsimonious, is what, taking it too serious. Call people to eat, will you? Your ma’s upstairs and the others’re in the den.”
“Yes’m.”
He left the kitchen and headed for the den, which was through the living room and at the other end of the house. It had once been his father’s study, and although the medical books on the shelves had long since been disposed of, there was still the extra telephone on the desk, installed when the girls had first become old enough to tie up the lines on the regular phone. Since their father’s death the room was used as a TV room, and now the set was blaring so loudly that Ben Joe could hear it way before he crossed the living room. And once he was inside the den the sound hurt his ears. The shades were down and at first it was too dark to see anything but the silhouettes of the people watching and beyond them the screen, bluish and snow-flecked. A fat man was shouting, “Whaddaya say, kiddies? Huh? Whaddaya say?” and behind his voice was a loud, angry humming from the set itself. Ben Joe blinked and looked around.
All he could see of Joanne was the white line that edged her profile from the light of the TV screen on her face. She had her eyes lowered to something in her lap—a piece of cloth. And she was sewing on it, pushing the needle through and then stretching her arm as far out as it would reach in order to pull the thread tight. Joanne was the type of person who used just one enormous length of thread instead of several short practical lengths. On the cane chair in front of her sat Tessie, also just a silvery profile but with a snatch of yellow over her forehead where the light hit her blond hair. And farthest in front, so that her back was toward Ben Joe, sat a small child in a child’s rocking chair. Of her Ben Joe could see nothing, except that she was so small (she would have been two only last June) her feet stuck out in front of her on the chair, and she was rocking violently. He could make out her small hands gripping the chair arms tightly; she flung her head first forward and then back, to make the chair rock. From here he could almost swear her hair was red, although that was improbable. He took another step into the room and said, “Has she got red hair?”
Joanne started and looked at him.
“Hi, Joanne,” he said.
“Ben Joe, come here! No, wait. Come out into the living room. It’s dark as night in here.”
She rose and pulled him out into the light and kissed him on both cheeks, hard, and hugged him around the waist. The little dress she was sewing was still in one hand, but the needle had slipped off its thread and was lying on the rug at her feet. It was funny how the tiniest thing Joanne did was exactly like her, even now, even after all these years. Any of the other girls would have stuck her needle into the cloth for safekeeping before she went to kiss her brother. “God, you’re thin,” she said. She was laughing, and her hair was mussed from hugging him. “I can’t believe it’s really you. Have you gone back to being a vegetarian?”
“No. Mom says it’s eating my own cooking that does it.”
“Mm-hm. You’re older, too. But that’s all right. I don’t reckon you’re ever going to get any lines in your face.”
“That’s from having no character,” he said absently. He was trying to decide what was different about her; something was making him feel a little shy, as if she were a stranger. Probably the way she dressed was partly responsible for it. In place of the blazing red dress of the old days was a soft yellow sacklike thing that hung loosely from her shoulders. She was still thin, though, with a face just slightly rounder than her sisters’. Almost immediately he decided what the change in her was; she was pretty much the same, with that same warm chuckly laugh, but she had a different way of showing it. A subtler one, he thought. Yet the bangles were still on her arms, and the twinkling, chin-ducking smile still on her face. He smiled back.
“I see you’re not old yet,” he said.
“Almost I am. Did you have a good trip?”
“I guess so. I came to call you to lunch, by the way. Gram’s dishing up.”
“I’ll get the children.”
She pattered back into the den, barefoot, and came out again with Carol in her arms and Tessie trailing behind her, blinking in the sunlight. The TV had been forgotten; accordion music seesawed out noisily from the empty room.
“You met Carol yet?” Joanne asked.
Ben Joe looked at Carol, checking her hair first because he was curious to see whether it was red or not. It was. It was cut, cup-like, around a small, round face that was still so young it could tell Ben Joe nothing. “Can you talk yet?” he asked her.
She smiled, not telling.
“Only when she’s in the mood,” Joanne said. “She’s got to say a word exactly right or she refuses to say it at all. A perfectionist. I don’t know where she gets it.”
“What about her red hair?”
“What?”
“Where’s she get that!”
Joanne frowned. “Where you get any kind of hair,” she said finally. “Genes.”
“Oh.”
“I sure am glad to see you, Ben Joe,” she said as they crossed the living room. “I am. You don’t know how glad.”
Embarrassed, Ben Joe smiled down at her and said nothing. At the stairway he stopped and yelled up, “Mom!” and then continued on into the kitchen, not looking at Joanne or waiting for his mother’s answer. But just before they reached the doorway he said, “Well, I’m happy to see you.”
“That’s good,” she said cheerfully.
In the kitchen Gram was bustling around, ladling food onto the plates on the table. Joanne pulled the old high chair up and sat Carol in it. “Don’t you go wiggling around,” she told her. She gave her a little pat on the knee. It made Ben Joe feel strange, watching Joanne with Carol. He never had really thought about the fact that she was a mother now with a child of her own.
“Where’s your mama?” Gram asked.
“Coming.”
“Well, her meal’s getting cold. Sit down, Joanne. Sit down, Ben Joe. Tessie, you got to hurry now. What happened to your napkin?”
“It’s on the screen porch.”
“Well, it’s not supposed to be. No, don’t go get it. More important to get your meal down you hot—stave off germs that way. Ben Joe, honey, aren’t you tired to pieces?”
“Not any more I’m not.”
“Well, you have a big helping of these he
re beans. Carol just threw her bib on the floor, Joanne.”
She put another scoop of beans on Ben Joe’s plate, shaking the spoon vigorously. Seeing her hands, so much older than the rest of her, reminded Ben Joe of the old man from the train. He said, “Gram, did you ever know a man named Dower?”
“Dower.” She sat down at her own place, smoothing the front of her apron across her lap. “Lord yes, I did. There was a whole leap of Dowers here at one time, though most have died out or moved on. There was the good Dowers and there was the bad Dowers. The good ones were very great friends of the family once. I near about lived at their house when I was a teeny-iney girl. They’re all dead now, I reckon. But the bad ones are living here yet. Wouldn’t you know. No relation to the good ones, of course. Living off the county and letting chickens in the kitchen. That kind just hangs on and hangs on. I don’t know why. They’re so spindly-legged and pasty-faced, but they keep on long after stronger men’s in their graves.”
She stopped to take a breath. Ben Joe’s mother came into the kitchen and pulled up a chair for herself. Carol threw her bib on the floor again and said, “Carrot.”
“We’re going to have to tie a double knot in your bib from now on,” Ben Joe’s mother told her. She took a raw carrot from the plate on the table and handed it to her. “Gram, what are those little things in the dish over there?”
“Smoked oysters. And that child shouldn’t have a carrot.”
“Smoked oysters?”
“That’s what I said. Won’t have this grocery rut of Jenny’s one day longer. My mind’s made up. Ellen, take that carrot away from her.”
“Why? She’s got teeth.”
“But it’s a big thick carrot.”
“Well, we can’t mollycoddle her. The rest of the girls had carrots at her age.”
“Not while I was around,” Gram said. “She’ll choke on it.”
Joanne looked up anxiously and Gram nodded to her.
“On the little pieces of it. She’ll choke. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Ellen Hawkes.