“Oh, I know.”
“Besides, this isn’t the same kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing is it?” Ben Joe asked.
Joanne picked out a rubber duck and pushed it toward Carol, who ignored it. Carol was raising and lowering one round knee, watching it emerge sleek and gleaming and then lowering it again when the water had drained off to mere drops on her skin. Joanne watched too, thoughtfully, and Ben Joe watched Joanne.
“I always did like first dates,” she said after a minute. “I was good at those. I knew what to wear — not so dressy it made them shy and not so sloppy they thought I didn’t give a hoot — and how to act and what to say, and by the time I was ready to come in I’d have them all the way in love with me or know the reason why. But the dates after that are different. Once they loved me, what was I supposed to do then? Once I’ve accomplished that, where else is there to go? So I ended up confining myself to first dates. I got so good at them that I could first-date anyone — I mean even the people that were on seventh dates with me, or even people that weren’t dates at all. I could first-date my own family, even — just figure out what would make them love me at a certain moment and then do it, easy as that.”
She leaned forward suddenly, resting her elbows on the rim of the bathtub and staring into the water at Carol’s gleeful face.
“Then I got married,” she said.
Ben Joe waited, not pushing her. Joanne stood up and reached for a towel and then just stayed there, holding the towel forgotten in her hands.
“The trouble is,” she said, “you have to stop clinking your bracelets and dancing like a maniac after a while. You have to rest now and then. Which may have been okay with Gary, but not with me. I didn’t know what to do once I had sat down to rest, and so I started being just terrible. Following him around telling him what a awful wife I was. Waking him up in the middle of the night to accuse him of not believing I loved him. He was all sleepy and didn’t know what was coming off. He’d say sure he believed me and go back to sleep leaving me to lie awake counting the dust specks that floated around in the dark, and making all kinds of plans to get my hair done and have him take me dancing.” She frowned at the towel. “Got so I couldn’t bear my own self,” she said. “I left.”
She wrapped the towel around Carol and lifted her out onto the bath mat.
“What’d you come back here for?” Ben Joe asked.
She dried Carol silently for a minute. Then she said, “Well, I want Carol to be with some kind of people that know her if I am going to get a job. That’s why.”
She had finished scrubbing Carol with the towel and now she pulled a white flannel nightgown over the baby’s head, saying, “Where’s Carol? Oh, I can’t find Carol. Where’s Carol?” until Carol’s face poked through the neck of the nightgown, small and round and grinning.
“Besides,” Joanne said, tying the ribbon under Carol’s chin, “it’s not the same place I’m coming back to, really. Not even if I wanted it to be.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben Joe.
“What’s wrong?”
“You and Mama. You and the girls. And Mr. Dower, even. Of course it’s the same place. What would it have gone and changed into? Always pulling up the same silly argument to fool yourselves with—”
“Now, now,” said Joanne soothingly. She picked Carol up. “It’s not the same place really, is it?”
He gave up, helplessly, and followed her out of the bathroom. There was no argument he could give that would convince her; she was too blindly cheerful, giving Carol little pecks on the cheek and talking to her happily as she crossed the hallway. At her mother’s door she stopped and looked in. “Gone downstairs,” she said. “Come on, Ben Joe. I want to ask you something.”
“What?” he asked suspiciously.
“Come on.”
He followed her to her own room. It was cluttered with Joanne’s odds and ends, and the old white crib had been moved down from the attic to a spot beside Joanne’s bed. Other than that, it was almost the same as when she had left it. Huge stuffed animals, won by long-ago boy-friends at state fairs, littered the window seat; perfume bottles and hair ribbons and bobby pins lay scattered on the bureau. She laid Carol carefully in the crib and said, “Where were you when Dad died?”
“Where — Oh, no,” Ben Joe said. “No, don’t you start that.”
“Why not?” She straightened up from kissing Carol good night and turned to face him. “That’s not fair, Ben Joe. Nobody’ll tell me anything about it. I even wrote a letter asking them to tell me. Nobody ever answered.”
“Well, you were away,” Ben Joe said.
“That doesn’t change anything.” She spread a blanket over Carol and began tying it down at the corners. “It happened just after Jenny began writing all the family’s letters,” she said. “Only Jenny didn’t write this particular one, I remember. She went through a stage when she wouldn’t write or speak the fact that Dad was dead. Susannah told me that. So the twins had to take over the letter writing. Jane and Lisa, they handled everything, although neither one of them will touch a pen ordinarily and you can tell it from their letters. But it was just as well, I guess — their writing the letters, I mean — because I suppose Jenny would just have sent a list of the funeral costs. Or would she, that far back? When did Jenny learn to be so practical? Anyway, there was this note from Lisa saying, ‘Dad just passed away last night but felt no pain’—as if anyone could know what he felt — and that’s all I ever heard. What happened, Ben Joe?”
“What difference does it make?” he asked.
“It makes a lot of difference. Who won makes a lot of difference.”
“What?”
“Who won. Mama or that other woman.”
“Well, that’s the—”
“I know.” She turned the lamp around so that it wouldn’t shine in Carol’s eyes and sat down on the foot of the bed. “It’s an awful thing to wonder. And none of my business, anyway. But it’s important to know, for all kinds of reasons.”
He began searching through his crumpled cigarette pack for the last cigarette, not looking at her.
“Here, take mine,” she said.
“Not menthol.”
“They won’t kill you.”
She threw the pack at him; it fell on the floor in front of him and he picked it up and leaned back against the bureau.
“Two weeks before he died,” Joanne said, “he was at home. I know he was. Jenny put it just beautifully, in this letter she wrote me. She said, ‘You’ll be happy to know Daddy has got back from his trip’—‘trip’; that’s an interesting choice of words—‘and he’s living at home now.’ Now, where was he when he died? Still at home?”
“At Lili Belle’s,” Ben Joe said.
“At — Oh.” She shook her head. “Lately I’ve stopped thinking about her by her name,” she said. “What with Gram calling her ‘Another’s House’ all the time.”
“Well, he didn’t mean to go and die there,” said Ben Joe. “He’d just been drinking a little, is all. Went out to get ice cubes and then forgot which home he was supposed to be going back to. Mom explained that to Lili Belle.”
“Mom explained it to Lili Belle?”
“Well, yes. It was her that Lili Belle called soon as he died. He got to Lili Belle’s with a pain in his chest and died a little after. So Lili Belle called Mom, and Mom came to explain how it was our house he’d really intended going back to and not hers; just a mistake. And Lili Belle hadn’t really won after all.”