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.