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 makes 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,
Jennifer.Enc.
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 eavespipes 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 are 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 eavespipe 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?”