“Oh, you silly,” Shelley said. She hunched forward and began crying in earnest now, without trying to hide it any more, burying her face in her brittle white hands.
“Well,” Ben Joe said for no reason. He searched hurriedly through his pockets, but there wasn’t a handkerchief. On the mantel he spied a purse, a black leather clutch purse with a clasp, that always reminded him of old ladies. He rose and went to it just at the moment when the tune started up in his head again, but this time not even the little voice could drown out the whispery choking sounds behind him. He rushed through the contents of the purse — glasses, keys, coin purse, lipstick, arranged neatly inside — and found beneath them an unused Kleenex. Shaking the folds out of it as he went, he crossed over to Shelley and stuck the Kleenex in her hand.
“The way you talk,” she said in a thick voice as she took the Kleenex, “you haven’t done a thing in the world and are just asking what you did wrong to humor me, like. Well, I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” She blew her nose lightly. Ben Joe, standing over her, felt as if she might be Tessie or Carol. He wanted to say, “Come on now, blow hard. You’ll never breathe again if you blow that way,” but he resisted the urge and only waited silently for her to continue. “You just come to me when you want comforting,” she said, “without ever thinking, without giving it any thought. My own mama told me that, although she thought the world of you. Like when things got bad at home you would drop over to get comforted and then leave, bam, no thought to it, and when it came time for the Pom-Pom prom you asked Dare Georges, who I will say was as flighty as the day is long, her and that little majorette suit she wore everywhere but church—”
“Oh, Shelley,” Ben Joe said wearily, “try and stick to the subject, will you?”
She blew her nose and nodded at the floor. When Shelley cried she became almost ugly, with that translucent skin of hers suddenly mottled and blurred. As if she were thinking of this now, she passed one hand across her face and then through her uncombed hair, and she sat up straighter.
“It’s worse this time,” she said. “Worse than the times before, I mean. Because this time I had a steady boyfriend, who was getting serious, and then along you came and superstition nothing, it’s plain fact I had to tell John Sunday night was out because of you. Well, I know it’s my fault going out with you. And I know I shouldn’t be crying if I turned him down for you, but he’s someone, isn’t he? Someone that’ll stay, and think about me sometimes, and let me have a kitchen with pots and pans?”
She had worked herself up to a good crying session again. Her voice was shaky and her chin wobbled. Sometimes Ben Joe thought girls must actually enjoy crying, the way they kept dwelling on what made them sad. He reached down for her drink, which stood almost untouched beside her chair, and bent over her with it.
“Take a good drink,” he said.
“No.”
“Come on.”
He held it to her mouth and she took a swallow and tried to smile. Her face was puffy, with her eyes sleepy little slits, like a child’s, and her mouth smooth and swollen. He thought there must be something about tonight that made it right for crying. First Gram, and then Shelley, and in a way even he felt like crying now.
“One more drink,” he said.
She drank obediently.
“You want a cigarette?”
She pressed her lips together stubbornly and shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “They give me halitosis.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He took one for himself and lit it. It was the first he had had all day and it tasted bad, but he kept puffing hard and not looking at her.
“Well, it’s really me to blame,” Shelley said, as if they were in the middle of an unfinished conversation. “It’s me. For years, now, I haven’t let anyone sweep under my feet.”
“Under your—”
“So that I wouldn’t be an old maid. I worry too much about having someone to settle down with, but I can’t help it. Back home, when my family was alive, I would come in from work every day at the same time and climb the front steps of where we all lived thinking, ‘It’s five-ten just like it was yesterday and the day before, and just like then I am climbing these steps with no one but the family to greet me and the family to spend my evening with playing parcheesi and no man to care if I ever get home.’ And I’d come in and head up the stairs toward my room and Mama would call from the parlor, she’d say, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me.’ I’d climb the rest of the stairs and go toward my room and then out of Phoebe’s room Phoebe would call, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me—’ ”
“Shelley, I don’t think we’re really getting anywhere with this,” Ben Joe said.
“I’m explaining something, Ben Joe. I’m explaining. I’d go to my room and change to my house clothes, and I’d hang up my work dress neatly and I’d take my stockings to the bathroom and wash them out and hang them over the shower rail. Then I’d go back to my room and rearrange my underwear drawer, which I’d rearranged the week before, or I’d mend something or work a double crostic. At suppertime there’d be two questions for me. Daddy always said, ‘You have a good day, Shelley?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Daddy,’ and Mama’d say, ‘You going to be doing anything special tonight?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t guess so, Mama.’ Which was true and which went on and on, so sometimes I think I could have just sent a tape recording home from work with my same old answers on it and done as well—”
“Well, what are you telling me for?”
“I’m explaining why I’m mad at you.”
“You’re still mad?” he asked.
“Course I am.”
“Oh, look now. Look, don’t be mad at me.”
“You come, you go,” she said doggedly.
“I don’t either.”
“You don’t?”
“Well, I won’t,” he said. He had a desperate, sinking feeling; there swam into his mind again the picture of himself on the train and Shelley behind in Sandhill calmly washing dishes as if he’d never been there.
“I don’t believe you’ll ever change, Ben Joe,” she said.
“Shelley, I won’t come and go. I won’t go on not thinking. Look, you come with me. You come to New York.”
“Oh, now, wouldn’t that give people—”
“No, I mean it. We could … hell, get married. You hear? Come on, Shelley.”
She stopped looking at her hands and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“We could …” The words in his mouth sounded absurd, like another line from the unknown play in his nightmare. He hesitated, and then went on. “Get married,” he said.
“Why, Ben Joe, that wasn’t what I was after. I wasn’t asking—”
“No, I mean it, Shelley. I mean it. Don’t be mad any more. You come with me on the train tomorrow and we’ll be married in New York when we get there. You want to? Just pack a bag, and Jeremy will be our best man …”
She was beginning to believe him. She was sitting up in the chair with her mouth a little open and her face half excited and half doubtful still, trying to search underneath his words to see how much he meant them.
“Sure,” he said. “Oh, hell, who wants to go away and leave you with the dishes—”
“The what?”
“And come back like, I don’t know, Jamie Dower maybe, with no one to recognize him but a girl, and even she went on and married someone else—”
“Ben Joe,” Shelley said, “I’m not following you too well, but if you mean what you say—”