If Morning Ever Comes

by Anne Tyler

  “Hmm.”

  “Where’s the guitar and the hourglass and all?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What you mean, you’re not sure?”

  She brushed a piece of hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist and then switched a card in her hand from the left end of the fan to the right.

  “I asked you if you wanted them,” Ben Joe said. “I asked if you would take care of them. ‘Yes, Ben Joe. Oh yes, Ben Joe.’ ” He made his voice into a silly squeak, imitating her. Of all his sisters, Susannah was the only one he was ever rude to—maybe because she was always so cool and brisk that he figured she wouldn’t change toward him no matter what he did. “I can just see it,” he said now. “Bet the whole shebang has just mildewed away to nothing, right?”

  “In the winter?” Gram said.

  “I bid two spades,” said Susannah. “Ben Joe, I am sure everything’s right where you left it. Except the guitar. The rest of the things I just hadn’t assimilated yet.”

  “Well, where’s the guitar, now that you’ve assimilated that? In the bathtub? Out in the garden holding up a tomato plant?”

  “In the winter?” Gram said again. “A tomato plant in the winter?”

  Ellen Hawkes laughed. When they turned to look at her she stopped and looked down at her sewing again, still smiling.

  “I declare,” said Gram, “you got no sense of season, Ben Joe.”

  “Where’s the guitar?”

  “Under the couch in the den.”

  “Aha, I wasn’t far wrong. Right where it belongs.”

  “Ben Joe,” said his mother, “there’s no reason to get so excited about a few possessions you’ve already given away. What’s the matter with you tonight?”

  “But they’re my favorite possessions. That I missed all the time I was gone.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have given them away. You’re too old to be missing things, anyway. Why don’t you stop that pacing and read something?”

  He picked the newspaper up from the coffee table and began to read it listlessly as he stood there.

  “And not upside-down!” his mother said.

  “Ah, hell.”

  He threw down the paper and turned toward the den.

  “You need someone to take you out walking with a leash around your neck,” said Susannah. “Are you going to bid or not, Gram?”

  “Pass.”

  Ben Joe stuck his head inside the doorway of the TV room. “Tessie,” he said.

  “Sssh.”

  “Tess, I want to ask you something.”

  “I’m watching television.”

  “It’s only a cigarette commercial.”

  “Leave her in peace,” said Jenny. “And don’t hold that door open, Ben Joe. The noise’ll bother the others.”

  “Don’t either one of you want to go to the movies?”

  Tessie shook her head, not taking her eyes from the screen. “It’s only what it just about always is,” she said. “Phantom of the Opera.”

  “Why don’t you come in and watch TV?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t feel like it. I feel all yellow inside.”

  “Well, close the door, then.”

  He closed the door and came back into the living room.

  “What happened to all those boys you used to go around with?” his mother asked.

  “They went north, all of them. A long time ago.”

  “Do you know any girls any more?”

  “Them too,” he said.

  “What?”

  “They went north too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Gram,” said Susannah, “if you keep holding your hand that way I’m going to have to shut my eyes not to see what cards you have.”

  “What about Shelley Domer?” his mother asked.

  “Oh, Mom. She was my first girl. Her family went off to Savannah seven years ago.”

  “Gram, wasn’t that Shelley Domer we saw the other day?”

  “It was,” said Gram. “You have another diamond, Susannah. I know you do.”

  “I don’t either. Want to see my hand?”

  “What’s she doing here?” Ben Joe asked.

  “I don’t know,” said his mother. “Their family kept their house here, I think. Kept planning to come back someday.”

  “You mean she’s living in her old home?”

  “She wouldn’t have been sweeping the front porch of it if she wasn’t, would she?”

  “I’d go see her if you’ve nothing better to do,” Gram said. “Be something to keep you occupied. And you saw right much of her once upon a time.”

  “Oh, she was all right.”

  “That all you can find to say about her? Spades are trumps, Susannah. Keep your mind on your game. Only thing I ever had against Shelley Domer was her family, to be frank.”

  “What was wrong with her family, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Well, I’m not saying they didn’t have money. Or weren’t nice. But money and niceness neither one isn’t all there is. Mrs. Domer still went grocery shopping in shuffly old slippers with pansies sewn on them, and that Shelley, well, she was a sweet child and it was no fault of hers, but many’s the time I seen her in a flowered calico skirt and a plaid blouse together, like a tenant farmer’s girl would wear, and in wintertime overalls under her dress, which is a sure sign, a sure sign. As if having those glass-blue, empty-looking eyes like the bad Dowers have wasn’t enough—”

  “Well, for one who wears black gym shoes to the grocery store—” Ellen Hawkes began.

  “I can afford to. My family is different, and don’t have to worry about being taken for the wrong kind.”

  Ben Joe’s mother bit a thread off the white collar. “Well, I don’t see what slippers have to do with it,” she said. “Shelley Domer can’t help her ancestry, that’s for sure. No, all I ever had against her was the way she hung on Ben Joe all the time. None of my girls has ever been a boy chaser, I’ll say that for them. They’ve been raised to have pride, and—”

  “Pride nothing,” Gram snapped. “Nicest thing about that girl was her being so sweet on Ben Joe. She used to wait for him every day after school, I remember. Even in wintertime. Till he’d come ambling out at whatever hour he chose to say hey to her.”

  “That’s what I’m—”

  “Oh, forget it,” said Ben Joe. “I’ll go and see her now while you two are arguing.” He went to the hall closet and pulled his jacket from a hanger. “Anyone want anything from outside?”

  “No, thank you. Have a nice evening.”

  “Okay.”

  Outside it was beginning to get cold. There was a little chill around his neck where his collar was open, but he just walked more quickly to make up for it. With his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed in a silent whistle he headed east, down past rows of medium-sized, medium-aged houses that jangled faintly with the TV or radio noises locked inside them. Occasionally he caught glimpses of families moving around behind lace curtains, but no one was out on the sidewalk. A dog rushed past, trailing a leash; nobody attempted to follow him. And at one house an old woman in a man’s overcoat rocked on a cold porch glider.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” said Ben Joe.

  “No moon out tonight.”

  “No.”

  He turned up Evers and walked more slowly. None of the walk took any thinking. When he was in high school it had become second nature, like going downstairs in the morning for breakfast and then realizing, once he was down there, that the actual descent had been an utter blank in his memory. The first few times he had come here actually shaking, with his hair slicked down and his face thin from the tension of keeping his teeth from chattering. He would have gone to the bathroom six or seven times in the half-hour before, just from nervousness. But gradually it became just an ordinary thing, this walk. Even when the
re was no definite date planned he would go, just to sit in the living room with Shelley and talk to her. She wasn’t very quick-witted and she didn’t entertain him with fast talk and bubbles of laughter the way his sisters entertained their dates, but she did listen. No matter what he talked about she would listen, smiling happily at him all the time, and when he was done she would just hug him or tell him how much she liked the way the barber had cut his hair this week, but he knew she had heard what he had to say, anyway. He smiled into the darkness, thinking about that, and cut through a vacant lot to Holland Street and the Domer house.

  The lights were turned on inside. The place was the same as always—big and worn and comfortable, with years of dead leaves piled around it. He would have thought Mr. Domer had raked those up by now; Mr. Domer was a small and tidy man. When Ben Joe crossed the front lawn the leaves roared around his ankles. He climbed the long steps to the front door. Years ago, in the summertime, they would stop at this top step when they came in from a date. They would look up to the open window upstairs and there would be the little triangular-faced, white-nightgowned blur of Shelley’s sister Phoebe peering down at them. She must have been about seven, that first year. She had thought, from seeing the cartons in the Saturday Evening Post, that all boys kissed their dates on the girls’ doorsteps, and every night she had lain in wait in her bedroom, watching hopefully. How old would she be now? Sixteen or seventeen, he supposed. And gone from that window. There was only the closed glass pane now, and the still white organdy curtains behind it.

  He knocked twice. A figure came toward him and peered out the window glass in the door, still only a silhouette behind a mesh curtain. Then she opened the door and let him step in. She seemed stunned for a minute; her mouth was slightly open.

  “Ben Joe!” she said. “Is that you?”

  “Sure it is. Have I gone and changed all that much?”

  “No. No, only it’s been such a long … Well, hey, anyway.”

  “Hey.”

  Shelley stood awkwardly in front of him, beginning to look happy and a little scared. She never had known what to do about greeting people. If she had been one of the girls he had dated after her, she would have come tripping up and shrieked, “For goodness’ sake!” and kissed him loudly on the mouth even if she didn’t remember his name. But not Shelley. Shelley stood straight before him, with her hands pleating little bunches of her skirt at the sides, and smiled at him.

  “Mom said she saw you sweeping the front porch,” he said. “I’m home for a little vacation. I thought I’d stop by and see how you were getting on.”

  “Oh, well, I’m fine. Just seems funny to see you, I think …”

  She moved over almost soundlessly to shut the door behind him, and he turned to watch her. There were little changes in her; he could see that even under the dim light in the hallway. Her hair, which used to hang almost to her shoulders in such straight blond ribbons that it had made him think of corn syrup, was bunched scratchily behind her head now and held there by a few pins, much like Gram’s bun. Her face was prettier and more clearly defined, but she still gave the impression of a waifish kind of thinness that made her seem more like fifteen than twenty-five. Partly it was because she was pale and without make-up, and her eyes were such a light blue; partly it was because she was wearing old clothes that must have been her mother’s and were far too big for her. The skirt was a dingy pink, accordion-pleated and very long; the sweater was an old bulky maroon one that somehow made her shoulder blades stick out more in back than her breasts did in front. But she still moved the same way—almost frightenedly and without a sound, and always in slow motion. Now she slowly opened her hands at her sides, as if she were consciously telling herself to relax, and looked down at her clothes.

  “Now, Ben Joe,” she said, “I have to go put another dress on. I didn’t know I was about to have company. You wait in the living room, hear? I’ll be right—”

  “But I’m just going to stay a minute,” Ben Joe said. “I only came to say hello.”

  “Well, you just wait.”

  She turned and darted up the curving stairs, and Ben Joe had to go into the living room alone. He chose a seat at the end of the sofa, nearest the unlit fireplace. The room seemed to him like the huge front room of a long-unused summer house; all the things that were not particularly liked and yet still too good to discard had been left here by the Domers when they moved South. Wicker armchairs and threadbare sofas sat on an absolutely bare wooden floor, and the few decorative items scattered around were worthless—a china spaniel with three puppies chained to her collar by tiny gold chains; a huge framed photograph of a long-ago baseball team; a rosebudded cracked china slipper with earth in it but no plant. Ben Joe shivered. This had been a cheerful room once, back when he was in high school.

  He heard Shelley’s shoes on the stairs and a minute later she was in the living room, crossing in front of him with a company smile and a white skirt and sweater that fit better than the old ones. She had combed her hair, although he was sorry to see that it was still in a bun, and there was a little lipstick on her mouth.

  “I’m going to get you some coffee,” she said.

  “No, I don’t want any.”

  “It’s already made, Ben Joe. You wait here and I’ll—”

  “No, please. I don’t want any.”

  “Well, all right.”

  She sat down on the edge of a wicker armchair with her hands on her knees.

  “Where’s Phoebe?” Ben Joe asked.

  “Phoebe.”

  “Phoebe your sister.”

  “Oh,” she said. All the breath seemed to have left her; she gasped a little and said, “Phoebe and Mama and Daddy, all of them, they’re dead, you mustn’t have heard, it only happened a while—”

  “Oh, no, I never—”

  “They had a wreck.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben Joe said. He thought of the small white blur in the upstairs window, still almost realer than Shelley herself. He watched Shelley’s fingers twisting a pearl button on her sweater. “Nobody told me,” he said helplessly.

  “I only been back a while now. Not many people know about it.”

  “Was … How old was Phoebe?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Oh.” He fell silent again, and tugged gently at one of the little cotton balls on the sofa upholstery.

  “How are your sisters?” Shelley asked suddenly.

  “They’re fine.” Almost immediately he felt guilty for that; he thought a minute and then offered: “Joanne’s left her husband, though.”

  “Left him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I declare.”

  “She’s back home now.”

  “Well.”

  “Her and her baby.”

  “I’m going to get you some coffee,” Shelley said.

  “No, wait. I’ve got to be—”

  “It’s hot already.” She stood up and almost ran to the kitchen, still managing to make it slow motion. Behind her, Ben Joe shifted in his seat uneasily and crossed his legs.

  “You’re hungry too, I bet,” she said when she entered the room again.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “You look right thin to me, Ben Joe. I got this marble cake from the Piggly-Wiggly. Course it’s not real homemade, but anyway—”

  “Shelley, I really don’t want it.”

  “Well, all right, Ben Joe.”

  She was carrying a chipped tin tray with two cups of coffee on it and a sugar bowl and cream pitcher that didn’t match. When she set it on the coffee table everything clinked like the too-loud clinking of tea sets in movies.

  “You take yourself lots of sugar,” she said. “I declare, you are thin.” She hovered over him, shadowlike, while he took up his coffee cup. He could smell her perfume now—a light, pink-smelling perfume—and when she bent over the table to hand him the sugar bowl
, he could even smell perfume in her hair. Then she moved back to her seat, and he relaxed against the sofa cushions.

  “Seems like I have got to get used to you all over again, it’s been so long,” Shelley said. “Are you feeling talky?”

  He had forgotten that. She always asked him that question, to give him a chance before she plunged into her own slow, circuitous small talk. This time he remained silent, choosing to have her carry on the conversation, and smiled at her above his coffee cup because he liked her suddenly for remembering. Shelley waited another minute, sitting back easily in her chair. Once the first awkward moments were over, Shelley could be as relaxed as anyone.

  “I don’t know if I did right or not,” she said finally, “coming back here like this. But my family’s passing came so sudden. Left me strap-hanging in empty space, like. And I chose to come to Sandhill. I don’t know why, except I was helping to run this nursery school for working mothers’ children down in Georgia and so sick of it, you’ve got no idea, and saw no way out. I think I got something against Georgia. I really do. Seems like if there is one thing makes me ill, it’s those torn-up circus posters on old barns. You know? And Seven-up signs. Well, Georgia’s plumb full of those, though one time this girl I worked with told me she thought it was real snotty of me to say a thing like that. That’s what our trouble was down there—the trash thought we were snotty and the snotty thought we were trash. Now, my daddy had to work himself up the hard way, but you know how fine he was, and anyway his mama’s folks were Montagues, which should have some bearing. And there’s nothing wrong with Mama’s side of the family, either. But anyway I was lonely there. Didn’t seem like there was any group we could really say we belonged to. Back in Sandhill it was better. I always have remembered Sandhill. And I still carry your picture.”

  She smiled happily at Ben Joe.

  “That real goofy-looking one,” she said, “that we had taken of you in the Snap-Yourself Photo Booth. Mama used to tease me about keeping it—said I might as well throw it out now. Though she always did like you. When you wrote me that letter, after we’d moved, about you starting to date Gloria Herman I thought Mama would cry. She said Gloria was real fast and loud, though it was my opinion that you knew better than Mama who was good for you. And at least you were right honest, telling me. I said that to Mama, too. And then a month later Susan Harpton wrote to tell how Gloria had moved on to someone new and you’d started dating Pat Locker. It got so I couldn’t keep up with you any more. But I wasn’t mad. Things like that happen when people get separated from each other.”