Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
About the Book
Ben Joe is the only boy in a family of six sisters, Mama and Gram. He is studying for a law degree in New York when he hears his eldest sister Joanne has left her husband and returned home with her baby girl. Out of a mixture of homesickness and duty Ben Joe returns to the home in which he has always felt like an outsider.
About the Author
Anne Tyler is one of America’s most acclaimed novelists, and in 1994 was nominated ‘greatest living novelist writing in English’ by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby. Her fiction includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, which was made into a major film, and most recently, The Amateur Marriage and the bestselling Back When We Were Grownups. Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941, but has lived for many years with her family in Baltimore, where her novels are set.
Also by Anne Tyler
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgan’s Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grown-Ups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America
1
WHEN BEN JOE Hawkes left home he gave his sister Susannah one used guitar, six shelves of National Geographic, a battered microscope, and a foot-high hourglass. All of these things he began to miss as soon as he hit New York. He considered writing home and asking for them – Susannah probably hadn’t even listened when he gave them to her – but he figured she might laugh at him. His family was the kind that thought only children during their first summer at Scout camp should miss anything. So he kept quiet about what he missed and just dropped Susannah a postcard, with a picture on it of the UN building by night, asking if she had learned to play the guitar yet. And six weeks later he got a card back, but not the picture kind, postmarked Sandhill, N.C., and badly rained-on. He turned the card over and learned, from Susannah’s jet-black, jerky script, that she had just changed to a job with the Sandhill School Library and was getting rich and could have her hair done every week now. She signed it “So long – S,” and then there was a P.S. saying she was going to start learning to play the guitar tomorrow. Ben Joe read this over two or three times, although what she had said was perfectly clear: she had only just now remembered that the guitar existed. Probably she had got up in the midst of doing something else to drag it from his closet and twang the slack strings, but having discovered that she wasn’t born knowing how to play and might have to work at it awhile she had dropped it again and drifted on to something else that came to mind. Ben Joe thought about starting up a whole string of cards – asking on the next one, for instance, whether that hourglass was still keeping time okay – until she got snappy with him and packed everything up and sent it to New York. But Susannah was flighty, like almost all his sisters, and rarely finished anything she started reading even if it was as short as a postcard; he didn’t think she would notice that he might be missing something. So he stopped the postcards and just wrote his regular letters after that, addressed to the family as a whole, asking about the health of his mother and all his sisters and saying he thought of them often.
By then it was November. He had left home late in August, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, to start law school at Columbia, and although he was doing well, even with three years of empty space behind him since college, he didn’t like Columbia. On campus the wind up from the river cut clean through him no matter what he wore, and his classmates were all quick and sleek and left him nothing to say to them. They looked like the men who modeled Italian wool jackets in men’s magazines; he plodded along beside them, thin and shivering, and tried to think about warm things. Nor did he like law; it was all memory work. The only reason he had chosen it was that it was at least practical, whereas the other ideas he had had were not, and practicality was a good thing when you headed up a family of six women. So all through September, October, and most of November he sat through Columbia’s law classes and jiggled one foot across his knee and peeled his fingernails off.
On this particular Thursday the wind was so cold that Ben Joe became personally angry at it. He stepped out of the law building, pulling his collar up over his ears, and the wind suddenly hit him full in the face and left him gasping. That decided him; he changed direction and headed toward the apartment. Lately he had taken to spending the really cold days in bed with a murder mystery, and he was beginning to think he should have done that this morning.
On Broadway he stayed close to the buildings, hoping that there would be less wind there. He passed the brass nameplate on one of the concrete walls and for an instant saw his face reflected there, made yellow by the brass, with his mouth open and his jaw clenched and his teeth gnashed against the cold. If it had been any other day he would have smiled, and maybe stopped to peer into the brass until the passers-by wondered what he was doing, but not today. Today he only hunched his gray topcoat around him more securely and kept going.
His apartment was five blocks from the campus, in a tiny dark old building with unbelievably high, sculptured ceilings. Opening the front door of it took all the strength he had. And all the way up the three flights of stairs he could smell what every family had eaten for the last day and a half – mainly bacon and burnt beans, he gathered. Ordinarily the smells made him feel a little sick, but today they seemed warm and comforting. He climbed more quickly, making each wooden step creak beneath his feet. By the time he was at his own door and digging through his pockets for the keys he was whistling under his breath, even though his face was stiff with cold.
“That you?” his roommate called from the kitchen.
“It’s me.”
He took the key out of the door and slammed the door shut behind him. Inside it was almost as cold as it was in the street; all it needed was the wind. The living room was taller than it was wide, and very dark, with high-backed stuffed furniture and long, narrow windows that rattled when a gust of wind blew. The mantel and the coffee tables were bare and dusty. There were none of the flower pots and photographs and china do-dads that he was used to from the houseful of women in which he had been raised, but a huge clutter of other objects lay around – newspapers, tossed-off jackets, textbooks, playing cards. In the middle of the dark wooden floor was a square scatter rug colored like a chessboard, and ridiculously tiny plastic chess pieces sat upon it in a middle-of-the-game confusion.
Ben Joe stripped his topcoat and his suit jacket off and threw them onto an easy chair. He untied his tie and stuffed it into the pocket of the jacket. From the daybed he picked up a crazy quilt from home and began swaddling himself in it, covering even his head and huddling himself tightly inside it.
“For Pete’s sake,” his roommate said from the kitchen doorway.
“Well, I’m cold.”
He backed up to the daybed and sat down. The bed was a wide one; he worked himself back until he was leaning against the wall and his legs were folded Indian fashion in front of him, and then he frowned.
“Forgot to take off my shoes,” he said.
He patiently undid the quilt and untied his shoes. They fell to the floor with two dull thuds. With his cold feet pressed beneath the warmth of his legs, he reached again for the quilt and began pulling it around him.
“Hey, Jeremy,” he said, “grab this corner, will you?”
His roommate left the doorway and came over, carrying a cup of coffee in one hand. “I’ve never seen the like,” he said. “You wait till it’s really winter. Which one?”
“The one in my left hand. There. Thanks.”
He leaned back against the wall again and Jeremy drifted over to the window, slurping up his coffee as he went. He was younger than Ben Joe – twenty-one at the most, and an undergraduate – but Ben Joe liked him better than most of the other people he had met here. Maybe because he didn’t have that sleek look either. He was from Maine, and wore sneakers and dungarees and dirty red Brewster jackets to class. His hair was so black it was startling; it gave him a wild look even when he smiled.
“I thought you had two classes on Thursdays,” Jeremy said.
“I did. But I only went to the one. I got cold.”
“Oh, pooh.” He sat down on the edge of the window sill and swung one sneaker back and forth. “In Maine,” he said, “we’d be swimming in this weather.”
“In Sandhill we’d be sending for federal aid.”
“Oh, now, don’t you give me that.”
He stood up and began tugging at the window. It screeched open; a gust of wind blew the newspaper’s society section into Ben Joe’s lap.
“Will you shut that window!” Ben Joe said.
“In a minute, in a minute. I’m trying to see what the thermometer says. Thirty-four. Thirty-four! Not even freezing.”
“It’s the wind,” Ben Joe said.
The window slid shut again, leaving the apartment suddenly silent.
“Want to walk with me to the drugstore, Ben Joe?”
“Not me.”
“I got to get a toothbrush.”
“Nope.”
Jeremy sighed and headed for the bedroom, twirling his empty coffee cup by the handle.
“Last night,” he said as he walked, “I figured out the prettiest-sounding word in the English language. I did. And now I can’t remember it.”
“Hmm,” Ben Joe said. He reached behind him to flick on the wall switch and smoothed out the newspaper in his lap. It was last Sunday’s, but he hadn’t got desperate enough to read the society section till now. It crackled dully on his knees, looking gray and smudgy under the flat light from the ceiling.
“I mean,” Jeremy said from the bedroom, “usually you can think of a word that’s one of the prettiest-sounding. But no, sir, this was the word. Really the word. I meant to tell this comp professor about it, that I see in the cafeteria. And then I woke up this morning and it was gone. It had an s in it, I think. An s.”
“That should narrow it down,” Ben Joe said. He grinned and tipped his head back so that it was resting against the wall.
“You want a date tonight, Ben Joe?”
“Who with?”
“This real cute freshman, has red hair and brown eyes, which is my favorite combination, and comes from, um—”
“Too young.”
He opened the society section and folded it back, letting his arms emerge partway from the blanket.
“Thank you anyway,” he called as an afterthought.
“Oh, that’s okay.” Jeremy was standing in the doorway now, with one end of a pillow in his teeth. “I’ve decided to clean the bedroom,” he said. The words came out muffled but still intelligible. “I haven’t changed my sheets in three weeks.” He shook out a pillowcase, held it below the pillow, and opened his mouth to let the pillow drop into the case. Then he tossed the pillow toward his bed and vanished from sight again.
Ben Joe started reading the society section, holding it upside-down in front of him. He had started learning to read when he was three, but his parents wanted him to wait until school age; they made him stand facing them when they read him bedtime stories, so that the book was turned the wrong way around. It wasn’t until too late that they realized he was reading upside-down. Usually he read the right way now unless he was bored, and then upside-down words came to his mind more clearly. He held the newspaper at arm’s length and frowned, studying an upside-down description of a golden anniversary where the couple had had another wedding performed all over again.
“What’s this mess of lima beans doing on the floor of the closet?” Jeremy called.
“Oh, leave them. I’ll take care of them.”
“I know, but what are they doing there?”
“I forget. Hey, Jeremy, if you were having your golden anniversary would you have another wedding performed all over again?”
“Hell, no. I wouldn’t have the first one.”
On the next page there were ads to run through, detailed little line drawings of silver patterns and china patterns and ring sets. He yawned and then set to picking out a ring set, ending up with a large, oddly shaped diamond and a wedding band that was fine except for a line of dots at each edge that bothered him. Then he chose a silver pattern and a very expensive china pattern, platinum-rimmed, but he was already beginning to be tired of the game and abruptly he turned the paper right-side up, picked out a bride for himself that he considered most likely to meet all his requirements, and, with that finished, pushed the society news to the floor and stood up.
“Where’s last Sunday’s crossword?” he called.
“I already did it.”
“You did it the week before, too.”
“Well, I waited till Wednesday, for God’s sake.”
Ben Joe went into the bedroom. Jeremy was sitting on the floor with one of the bureau drawers beside him; he was slowly going through a stack of postcards and throwing some out but keeping most of them. The rest of the room was in chaos; Ben Joe’s bed was unmade, Jeremy’s was made but covered with the things he had decided to throw out, and there was a heap of dirty sheets on the floor between the two beds.
“Worse than it was before,” Ben Joe said.
“I know. That’s the trouble with cleaning up.”
Ben Joe leaned his elbows on the dresser and looked into the mirror with his chin in his hands. The mirror was wavy and speckled, but he could at least recognize himself: his thin, flat-planed face, which almost never needed shaving and took on a sort of yellow look in the wintertime; his level gray eyes, so narrow that they looked as if he were constantly suspecting people; and his hair, dark yellow and hanging in shocks over his forehead. It was getting shaggy at the back and sides; he looked like an orphan. And walked like one, letting his shoulders hitch forward and burying his hands deeply in his pockets so that his arms could remain stiff and his elbows could dig into his sides. One of his sisters had once told him, meaning it kindly, that he was homely, all right, but trustworthy-looking; if people could do what they liked to strangers on the street, they would stop him and reach up to pat the top of his head. He sighed and straightened up and began moving around the room, kicking dust balls with his stockinged feet.
“I thought you were going out for a toothbrush,” he said to Jeremy.
“I am. Soon as I finish this drawer. A red one.”
“A red what?”
“Toothbrush.” Jeremy threw a stack of postcards in the direction of the wastebasket. “I always buy a red toothbrush for the wintertime.”
“Oh.” Ben Joe sat down on the edge of his bed and frowned at the sheets on the floor. After a minute he said, “You ever seen one of those toothbrushes with a bird on the end? The kind that gives a soft little whistle when you blow on it?”
“Sure. That’s for kids, to make them want to brush their teeth.”
“Well, I know it.” He lay back crosswise on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “My sister had one of those once,” he said. “My older sister, Joanne. She’s away now. But she had a little pink toothbrush with a bird on the end, and it wasn’t when she was a little girl, either. It was when she was in high school and had taken to wearing red dresses and gold hoop earrings and flinging that black hair of hers around. One night I was writing this philosophy paper. I came out of my room for a drink of water and I felt like hell – my mind all confused and tired but still popping off like a machine gun. And out of the bathroom just then came Joanne, not in red but in a little quilty white bathrobe, and sort of dreamily blowing the bird on her toothbrush. She didn’t see me. But it was so damned comforting. I went to bed and slept like a rock, no more machine guns in my head.”
He lay quiet for a minute, following the sculptured molding around the ceiling with his eyes.
“What was I saying?”
“About toothbrushes.”
“Oh. Well, that was all.”
He turned and rose up on one elbow to see what Jeremy was doing. Jeremy was reading all the postcards he had saved.
“Hey, Ben Joe,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“You want to hear something funny?”
“What.”
“It’s from this buddy of mine that goes to college out west, with a picture of this gorge, real deep down with a river at the bottom. Says, ‘This gorge is habit-forming. Threw a bowling ball down it to hear how it sounded and it sounded so good I moved on to bigger and better things and last night me and some buddies threw a piano down it.’ A piano. What do you guess it looked like when it hit? Ben Joe?”
Ben Joe looked up.
“Ah, you’re not listening,” said Jeremy. He put the postcard back in the drawer and moved on to the next one.
Ben Joe sat up, running his fingers through his hair. “What time is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Eleven or so.”
He reached over and pulled open the top drawer of his own bureau. At the right was a stack of letters; he pulled the top one out, looked at it to make sure it had been signed by his sister Jenny (she was the official family letter writer), and then lay back down, holding the letter over his head, right-side up, to read it:
Dear Ben Joe:
We received yours of the 12th. Yes, of course we are well. I don’t know why you keep asking us, since you know as well as we do that the last time any of us was in the hospital was five years ago when Susannah had all four wisdom teeth pulled at once. Mama says to tell you you worry too much. We are getting along beautifully & hope you are too.
Financially things are going smoothly. Next month both of the twins are getting raises at the bank, but Lisa is getting $6 more a month than Jane, which make family relationships kind of tense. Tessie is taking drawing lessons after school now for $2 a lesson, which I think we can afford, & the only extra expense this month has been the eaves pipe falling down from the roof outside Tessie’s & my window due to Tessie’s standing on it. Tessie didn’t, tho. Fall, I mean. I’ll never know why.
I wish you would write a letter to the family suggesting that we go back to a policy of my doing the grocery shopping. Specially since it was me you left in charge of the money. Gram has been doing it lately & the results are disaster. She gets anything she feels like, minced clams & pickled artichoke hearts & pig’s feet & when I ask where are the meat & potatoes she says it’s time we had a little change around here. She’s ruining us.
Enclosed is next month’s check for your expenses, etc. I hope you will remember to send a receipt this time as it makes my bookkeeping neater.
Sincerely,
Enc. |
Jennifer. |
Ben Joe folded the letter and sat up again. “I wish someone besides Jenny would do the letter writing in my family,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He began walking around the room with his hands in his pockets. “You never know what’s going on, exactly. Just about the dratted eaves pipes and stuff.”
“The what?” Jeremy sat back and stared, and when Ben Joe didn’t answer, he said, “Oh, now, are you getting started on your family again? What you worried about?”
Ben Joe stopped in front of the window and looked out. There was a venetian blind between him and the outdoors; the buildings across from him were divided into dozens of horizontal strips.
“Someone’s lost a red balloon,” he said. “They must’ve lost it out a window, it’s flying so high.”
“Maybe it’s a gas balloon.”
“Maybe. What bothers me is, sometimes I think my family doesn’t know when to get upset – the most amazing things happen and they forget to even tell me. I try to keep quiet, but all the time I’m thinking, ‘I wonder what’s going on back there. I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t just chuck everything and go on back and see for myself, set my mind at rest if nothing . . .”’
He was sitting on Jeremy’s bed now, and reaching for the phone.
“You going to call home?” Jeremy asked.
“I reckon.”
“You want me to get out?”
“Nah, that’s all right— Operator, I want Sandhill, North Carolina, two four oh—”
“You got a Southern accent,” she said. She was snappy and cross, with a New York twang to her voice. “I can’t tell if you said ‘four’ or ‘five’; you don’t—”
“I haven’t got one, either. I said ‘two, four, oh—”’
“Yes you do. You said ‘Ah.’ ‘Ah haven’t got—”’
“I did not. My mother’s a Northerner, even.”
“Number, please.”
“Two four oh, six seven five four. If I had an accent I’d say ‘foh.’ No ‘r.’ But I said the ‘r.’”
“And your number, please.”
“Academy four, six five five nine.”
“Station to station?”
“Yes’m.”
The telephone had a familiar plastic smell; the receiver was warm and already a little damp in his hand. He hated using the telephone. The thought of speaking to someone, and listening to him, without seeing him was as panicky as not being able to breathe. How could he tell anything about a person if he couldn’t see him? Sometimes he thought something must be wrong with his ears; what he heard told him almost nothing. And usually he read too much harshness into a voice. He could hang up a telephone receiver and feel hurt and bewildered for days and then find out, weeks later when he asked what he had done to annoy them, that they were just talking above the noise from a TV set. So now, to make it easier for himself, he tried to picture exactly what was going on at the other end. He pictured the house in Sandhill at eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning, with the autumn sun shining palely through the long bay windows in the living room. His sisters would all be at work, he guessed, except for Tessie, who was still in grade school. Or was it her lunch hour? No, too early. That left only his mother, and maybe even she would be gone; she worked part time at a book store. The phone rang twice. He waited, tensed against the pillows.
“Hello?” his mother said. He could tell her from his sisters, although their voices were almost the same, by that way she had of seeming to expect the worst when she answered the telephone.
“Hi,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s me. Ben Joe.”
“Ben Joe! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I called to see how you were.”
“Didn’t you get our last letter?”
“Well, yes. I guess I did. The one about the eaves pipe falling down?”
“I think that was it. Did you get it?”
“Yes, I got it.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you were worried because you hadn’t heard from us.”
“No, I heard.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
Ben Joe waited, frowning into the receiver, twining the coils of the telephone cord around his index finger. He tried desperately to picture what she looked like right now, but all he came up with was her hair, dust-colored with the curls at the side of her face pressed flat by the receiver. That was no help. Give him anything – eyes, mouth, just a stretch of cheek, even – and he could tell something, but not hair, for goodness’ sake. He tried again.
“Well,” he said, “how is everyone?”
“Oh, fine.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“It’s too bad you called while the girls were away. Joanne’s the only one here now. They’d have liked to talk to you.”
“Susannah, you mean.”
“What?”
“You mean, Susannah’s the only one here.”
“No, Susannah’s switched to a full-time job now. I thought Jenny told you. She’s working at the school library. I don’t know why that should be tiring, but apparently it is. She comes home all cross and snappy, and last night she had a date with the Lowry boy and ended up shoving his face into a cone of buttered popcorn at the Royal Crown theater. I forget what movie they were showing.”
“Never mind,” said Ben Joe. “What I’m asking is, who is it that’s the only one home but you?”
“Joanne. I told you.”
“Joanne?”
“Well, yes.”
“Mom,” Ben Joe said, “Joanne’s been gone for seven years.”
“Oh. I thought Jenny wrote you about that.”
“Wrote me about what?” He was up off the bed now; Jeremy looked over at him curiously.
“I think maybe you didn’t get our last letter,” his mother said. “Come to think of it, it was the next-to-the-last letter about the eaves pipe falling down. The last one should get there today or so. Have you gotten today’s mail yet?”
“No.”
“Why, what time is it?”
“Mom,” Ben Joe said, “is Joanne home or isn’t she?”
“Yes, she’s home.”
“Well, then, why? And when did she get there? Why didn’t you—”
“She left,” his mother said vaguely.
“Just now? Didn’t she know I was on the phone?”
“No, I mean she left Kansas.”
“Obviously she left.”
“She took the baby and ran away from her husband.”
“What?”
Ben Joe sat down again on the edge of Jeremy’s bed. Jeremy took a sidelong glance at him and then got up and left the room.
“Ben Joe, is there a bad connection on your end? Can’t you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Well, don’t be so dramatic, then. What’s done is done, and it’s none of our affair.”
Ben Joe closed his eyes, briefly; he wondered how many times in his life he had heard his mother say that.
“Are you there, Ben Joe?”
“Yes’m. How is she?”
“Oh, fine. And the baby’s a darling. Very well behaved.”
“Has she changed much? Joanne, I mean. What’s she like now?”
“Oh, the same as ever.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s asleep. She stayed up last night to watch the late show.”
Ben Joe took a breath, hesitated, and then said, “I’m coming home, Mom.”
“Ben Joe—”
“It won’t hurt to cut a few classes. I want to just see how everything is.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I know, but I want to set my mind at rest. I’ve been worrying.”
“You’re always worrying.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom.”
“Ben Joe—”
Ben Joe hung up, neatly and quietly. There was that giddy feeling in his head that always came from talking for any period of time with his mother, or even sometimes with his sisters; he felt confused and uncertain, as if he and his family were a set of square dancers coming to clap the palms of their hands to each others’, only their hands missed by inches and encountered nothing. It was only after he had gone over the conversation in his mind, arranging it in a logical order and trying to convince himself that everything was really all right, that he felt better. He stepped to the door and said, “Jeremy?”
“Yeah, Ben Joe.” Jeremy came in, looking quickly at Ben Joe’s face. “Trouble?”
“I’m going home for a few days. If the university calls, you tell them I’ll be back, will you?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll take that night train. Be there by morning.” He pulled his suitcase out from under the bed and then sat down, staring at it blankly.
“You see what I mean,” he said. He spread his arms helplessly, looking up at Jeremy, who was leaning against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his dungarees and his face worried. “You get these cheerful little financial statements, and meanwhile what’s going on? Joanne’s run away from her husband and come home, after seven years of only phone calls and letters from her—”
“Joanne,” Jeremy said. “She the one with the red dress and bangles?”
“Yep. Her. On the way out to get your toothbrush, will you pick up today’s mail? I bet they tell about it in a P.S., that’s what.”
“You going to try and make her go back to her husband?”
“No, just going to see her.”
“Well, I’ll go get the mail,” said Jeremy.
“Okay.”
Ben Joe crossed back to his bureau. The drawer was still open; he pulled out a large leather jewelry box and flipped the lid up. Inside were all the odds and ends that he never knew what to do with. He searched through two-cent postage stamps and Canadian nickels and old scraps of addresses and worn-out snapshots and eventually he came across the torn-off flap of an envelope with train times scrawled across it. He picked out the night train to North Carolina. Then, whispering the time to himself as he walked, he went to his closet to choose the clothes he would wear home.
2
HIS CAR ON the train was only half full; rushing through the darkness it made a hollow, rattling sound. It was cramped and peeling inside, with dirty plush seats and a painted tin roof. At the front hung a huge black-and-white photograph of some people on a beach in Florida, to show that this was the southbound train. Maybe once the photograph had been shiny and exciting, so that passengers gazing at it had counted the hours until they could see the real thing. But now the plastic sheet over it had grown scratched and dull, and the people in it – dozens of tiny people in homely old bathing suits, caught forever in the act of skipping hand in hand toward gray waves or sitting close together under gray-and-white umbrellas – seemed as sad and silent as the flat, still palm trees above them. For a while Ben Joe gave himself up to just staring at it, until the strange feeling it gave him was gone and it was only a photograph again. Then he turned away and looked at the people who shared this car with him.
Mostly they were upright, energetic Negro housewives, sitting like wide shade trees over their clusters of children. Around their feet were diaper bags and paper sacks and picnic baskets; above their heads, in the baggage racks, was an abundance of feathered hats and woolen scarves and sturdy, dark-colored coats. Like Ben Joe, who had a sheepskin-lined jacket folded across his lap, they had come prepared for the time when the hot, stuffy car would suddenly turn too cold for sleeping. They clucked to their children constantly and passed them hot lemonade and pieces of Kleenex, dug up from the bottoms of grocery sacks whenever they heard someone sniff, whether it was their own child or not.
“Here your pacifier, Bertie.”
“You let Sadie at the window now; you been at it a sufficient time.”
A thin blond man in a pea jacket passed through, carrying a box of toys with “80 cts” printed on it in purple nail polish. He came even with the children just across the aisle from Ben Joe and from the box he pulled out a toy – a rubber donkey with a cord and squeeze-bulb attached to it. The children reached for it, their hands like four little black spiders.
“Want it?” the man asked.
The children looked at their mother. She was a comfortable, smiling woman sitting in the seat ahead of them with a friend. When she heard the man’s voice she turned and looked at the children and smiled more broadly, and then frowned and gently shook her head.
“Watch,” the man said.
He pressed the bulb and the donkey bucked, tossed his head, kicked up his heels. Then the little rubber knees buckled in the wrong places and the donkey was lying down in the man’s hand, limp and ridiculous-looking.
“Only eighty cents,” the man said.
The children watched, round-eyed. With one hand the little girl began stroking the back of her mother’s head, patting the curls of her hair with soft, tiny pats.
“How much you say?” the mother asked. She turned only halfway, so that she seemed to be asking the woman beside her.
“Eighty cents, ma’am. Eighty little pieces of copper.”
“No sir,” the mother said. She turned to the children and said, “No sir. You wait, chirren, we’ll get us something in Efram. In Efram, we’ll see.”
“Eighty cents,” the man said.
“No sir.” She reached out to straighten the collar of the smaller child, the girl, and then gave her a soft pat on the shoulder and smiled at her.
“How about you?” the man said to Ben Joe.
“No.”
“No kiddies at home?”
“No.”
“Ah, well.”
The man moved on. At the back of the car it began to be noisier; that was where the men sat. Some of them were apparently the women’s husbands, and others – the younger, more carelessly dressed ones, slouching in their seats and tipping hip flasks – belonged to no one. They offered swigs to the married men now and their conversation became gayer and louder. Up front, the women clicked their tongues at each other.
“Lemuel Barnes, I coming back there after you if you don’t hush!” one called.
“You watch it now, you men, you watch it!”
That was the woman ahead of Ben Joe, a young, plump woman with a baby whose head rested on its mother’s shoulder like a little brown mushroom button. She was sitting alone, but she had been talking steadily ever since she boarded the train, calling to her husband at the rear and soothing her baby and carrying on conversations with the other women passengers. Now she stood up and faced the rear, with the baby still over her shoulder, and shouted in a piercing voice:
“You all going to wake the baby, Brandon, you hear? Going to wake up Clara Sue. You want me come back and check on you?”
She started into the aisle, obviously not meaning to go through with it, and stopped when Brandon shouted back, “Aw, Matilda, this Jackie boy the one. He stirring all the trouble up.”
The other women chuckled.
“That Jackie, he become a pest afore we even got out of the station.”
“Brought him two bottles. Say no one bottle’d do him.”
“Need a wife to keep him still, that boy.”
“Hoo, Lord.”
Matilda smiled down at them and sat down slowly. “Going to make that Brandon come up here he don’t behave,” she said loudly to the window. “I mean it, now.”
Ben Joe tried smiling at the children across the aisle, stretching his mouth farther than it wanted to go, but the children stared soberly back at him with little worried frowns. Ahead of them, their mother opened a paper sack and handed back two pieces of fried chicken. The children accepted them automatically, their eyes still fixed on Ben Joe.
“When I get home,” their mother said to the woman beside her, “I going to have me a mess of collard greens.”
“You got you a good idea there,” Matilda called.
The woman turned back and nodded gravely. “They don’t feed you right in New York,” she said. “Don’t know how a person keep himself alive, in New York.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
They were quiet a minute, picturing home. For a minute Ben Joe pictured it with them, knowing almost for a certainty exactly what their homes were like. Who could be that definite about where he came from? A hundred years ago, maybe, you could look at a Carolina white man and know what he would have for supper that night, in what kind of house and with what sort of family sitting around him. But not any more – not in his case, at least. He felt suddenly pale and plain, going back to a big pale frame house that no one could tell was his. He looked at his reflection in the black windowpane and frowned, seeing only the flat planes of his cheeks and the worried hollows of his eyes.
“The way they does their chicken in New York,” called Matilda, “they puts it in the oven stark nekkid and let it lay awhile. I seen it done that way. With a cut-up frying chicken I seen it.”
“That’s so, I know. That’s so.”
“Ticket, please.”
Ben Joe looked up at the conductor, standing stolidly beside him and smiling down over a huge stomach. He handed him his ticket, already a little frayed, and the conductor tore off one section of it.
“Won’t have to change,” he said. He gave the rest of the ticket back and swayed on to the next passenger.
Someone sat down beside him, so suddenly that Ben Joe was almost frightened for a minute by the jounce in the springs. He turned from the window and found himself no more than three inches from the pointy nose of a curly-haired boy, who was leaning so closely toward him in order to see his face that he was practically lying on his side against Ben Joe.
“Pardon me,” the boy said. He sat up straight again, folded his coat in his lap, and stared ahead of him at Matilda’s baby.
Ben Joe settled back more firmly on his side of the seat and examined the boy’s face. He would judge him to be about fifteen, but a New York fifteen; he was very self-assured and his face, except for that one moment of inquisitiveness, was tightly closed and smooth. When he became aware of Ben Joe’s stare, he turned toward him again and said, explaining himself, “Just wanted to see what you looked like. See you didn’t talk a lot or weren’t drunk or nothing.”
“I don’t talk and I’m not drunk,” Ben Joe snapped.
“Okay, okay. But I was sitting with this old man, see, and he was talking all the time. Made me nervous. All these guys make me nervous.”
“That’s your problem,” Ben Joe said.
“The old man’s dying.”
Ben Joe looked around, alarmed. “Which one?” he asked.
“White fellow, sitting way back. Can’t see him from here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? What—”
“Relax. He’s only dying slowly, of old age.”
“But—”
“He’s okay, see.”
Ben Joe sat back and stared out the window. The rushing sound of the train and the deep blackness outside made everything seem dreamy and unreal. It was hard to believe that the train was going anywhere at all; it was only standing still and swaying slightly, against a moving screen of darkness and the occasional pinpoints of lights. He told himself that he was finally going home, after all that worrying about his family and wanting desperately to see them again. He told himself what was even more real than that: that when he got there he would immediately feel sad and confused again, the way he always did. But no, Joanne was back. Joanne could change things; just by smiling that smile of hers she could make everything seem safe and in its right place. He closed his eyes, picturing home. He pictured his house as another kind of train, lighted also, floating through darkness. But with the sound of his own train in his ears he couldn’t hear their voices; he stood outside his family’s windows and watched their movements without hearing a single sound.
His mother would be moving rapidly around the house, pursing her lips tight and flouncing her hair because Ben Joe couldn’t come home, she wouldn’t have it, and then going off to put clean sheets on his bed. His grandmother would be standing on a counter in the kitchen to see what Ben Joe might like from her special private stock of food on the top shelf. And in the ruffly, perfumey closed circles of their worlds, his sisters would hear Ben Joe was returning and then forget again until his return was an actuality and they could get briefly excited over it. Joanne would laugh. She would look at her feet, propped bare on their father’s leather hassock, and laugh easily for no reason at all.