She didn’t answer. The hangers in the closet tinkled flatly as she rummaged among them, and when she lifted one from the rod another fell with it, making a blurred explosive sound as it landed on a floor full of old rubbers and high-heeled galoshes. She ignored it; her eyes concentrated upon what suddenly seemed, to Ben Joe, the impossibly complicated task of getting his sweater upon the hanger. What was wrong with Shelley? Her fingers fumbled tightly at the collar of the sweater, taking hours to make it lie straight around the hook of the hanger. If it had been any other night, Ben Joe would have gone on in, would have left her in the hallway and headed for the living-room sofa. But tonight he felt uneasy. He wanted to tread as delicately as possible so that she would turn out to be glad he came. So he stood clenching his cold aching hands together and waiting hopefully for Shelley to finish this interminable business of getting his sweater up, and he never even looked toward the living room.
“I reckon you’ll want some bourbon,” she said.
“No.”
“It’ll do you good, if you’re cold.”
She headed toward the kitchen, making only the softest whispering noise across the floor in her bare feet. After a minute Ben Joe followed her. If she took so long to hang a sweater up, how long would she spend making a drink? And he really didn’t want one; he felt awkward and foolish stumbling in here like this, and he didn’t want to make it worse by accepting anything.
“I’m sorry I came without warning,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“I should have called first.”
“It’s all right, Ben Joe.”
She stood on tiptoe to reach a liquor bottle from the cupboard, and Ben Joe leaned against the kitchen sink. He was surprised at how messy everything was; ordinarily Shelley was almost old-maidishly tidy. He could remember her spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread and then washing the knife and putting it and the peanut butter away even before she finished making the sandwich. And she had some sort of phobia about seeing that all the cannisters were neatly aligned along the counter and all the measuring spoons hung in order on the wall according to their sizes. But tonight the place was in chaos. Dishes and leftovers littered the counter; a recently washed sweater was balled up in the dish drainer and a shower cap was flung over the towel rack. He looked around at Shelley, trying to figure out what sort of mood she must be in. In her pale flowered bathrobe, a little too small for her, she looked wire-thin and brittle. But that shyness was gone, so much forgotten that she seemed not at all embarrassed at being caught in her bathrobe. In place of the shyness was a sort of heavy sullenness that he hadn’t often seen in her before, that made her face look fuller and the lower lines of her cheeks sag. Her eyebrows had lost the high, uncertain arch they usually had and sat straight over blank eyes, and she was poking out her mouth in a way that made it seem like a pouting child’s mouth. When she poured the drink she did it heavily, with finality.
“Have you got something on your mind?” Ben Joe asked.
She stopped, looked at the bottle, and then reached for another glass and poured a drink for herself.
“If you do,” he said, “I wish you’d tell me. I hate this ferreting things out of people. I ask what’s wrong and they say nothing, and then I say please to tell me and they say no, really, it’s nothing, and I say well, I can just feel something’s wrong. And by then we both hate each other. I keep thinking of everything bad I’ve done in the last ten years, things you wouldn’t even begin to know, but somehow I start thinking maybe you’ve found out—”
“Oh, Ben Joe,” Shelley said tiredly.
She handed him his drink and then picked up her own and headed for the living room. Behind her Ben Joe walked slowly, dragging his feet and watching the back of Shelley’s head. The curlers bobbed up and down cheerfully, but her shoulders were slumped and careless. When they entered the living room, Shelley chose a seat in the wicker chair by the fireplace and Ben Joe had to sit alone on the couch opposite her. He felt exposed and defenseless, with all that bare expanse of couch at either side of him.
“I would do anything to help,” he said. “But I don’t know what’s wrong.”
Shelley raised her eyebrows slightly, as if what he was saying was a curious little toy he had handed her and she wanted to act polite about it. He had forgotten that she could be this way. He had seen her angry only a few times in his life — once or twice when he had dated other girls, and then one memorable time when she had taken three months to knit him a sweater in high school and then found he had grown two inches while she was busy knitting. Each time that she had been angry, the change in her had surprised him all over again. She became suddenly cool and haughty, and she left him feeling bewildered. Tonight no matter how hard he looked at her, no matter how patiently he waited for her to speak, she was unchangingly cool and blank-faced, sitting aloof in her solitary wicker chair. He sighed and took a long drink of the straight warm bourbon. He thought about the bourbon winding slowly to his stomach; with his head cocked, he seemed to be listening to it, noting carefully which part of him it was burning now. Shelley was turned into a carefully shutout inanimate object on the other side of the room. A tune began in his head, hummed nonchalantly by that sexless, anonymous voice that lived inside him and always spoke words as he read them and thoughts as he thought them.
“So I guess I won’t be coming tomorrow night,” he said absently. Shelley’s fingernail, tapping rhythmically against her glass, was suddenly stilled. “I’ve got to go back to New York.”
The fingernail resumed its tapping. Ben Joe watched a specific place on the coffee table, a corner where the dust had gathered between the table top and the raised rim of it in a tiny triangle. He suddenly thought, without meaning to or wanting to, that tomorrow night when he was rattling northward on the rickety little train, this table corner would be exactly the same, would exist solid and untouched no matter where he was. Shelley would wash and neatly stack her dishes, and Gram would roar songs at the top of her lungs while she polished the silver, and everything — the solid little coffee table, the narrow polished windows, the hundreds of curtained front doors, all this still, unchanging world of women — would stay the same while he rushed on through darkness across the garishly lit industrial plains of New Jersey and into the early-morning stillness of New York. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand, and stared at the floor.
“Every place I go,” he said, “I miss another place.”
Shelley was silent.
“I don’t know why,” he said, just as if she’d asked. “When I am away from Sandhill, sometimes the picture of it comes drifting toward me — just the picture of it, like some sunny little island I have got to get back to. And there’s my family. Most of the time I seem to see them sort of like a bunch of picnickers in a nineteenth-century painting, sitting around in the grass with their picnic baskets and their pretty dresses and parasols, and floating past on that island. I think, I’ve got to get back. I think, they need me there and I have got to get back to them. But when I go back, they laugh at me and rumple my hair and ask why I’m such a worrier. And I can’t tell them why. There’s nothing I can tell them. Pretty soon I leave again, on account of seeing myself so weak and speechless and worried. I get to thinking about something I just miss like hell in another town, like this tree on a street in Atlanta that has a real electric socket in it, right in the trunk, or the trolley cars in Philadelphia making that faraway lonesome sound as they pass down an empty street in the rain, through old torn-down slum buildings with nothing but a wallpapered sheet of brick and a set of stone steps left standing.…”