“Did you hear me?” Gary said. “I said, I’ll do the dishes.”
Ben Joe pulled his thoughts together. “No,” he said, “Gram gets mad if we do them. She says that the only thinking time she has is when she’s doing the dishes.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“Well, then …”
For the first time that Ben Joe knew of, someone managed to interrupt Gary. It was Gram, bellowing from somewhere near the front of the house:“Soft as the voices of a-angels …”
“What on earth,” Gary said.
He scraped his chair back and stood up to head for the sound, with Ben Joe trailing aimlessly after him. They found Gram in the den, standing in the middle of the floor with her head thrown back and her arms spread like a scarecrow’s, roaring at the top of her lungs:“Whispering ho-o-ope
Da da da da da …”
In front of her, Carol sat in her rocking chair and rocked like mad. Her little feet stuck out in front of her; her head was ducked so that she could throw her weight forward.
“You’re not listening,” Gram told her. She dropped her arms and beamed at Gary and Ben Joe. “I’m teaching her ‘Whispering Hope.’ ”
“What for?” asked Ben Joe.
“What for? Every little girl should know something like that. So she can stand up in a lacy little pinafore like the one she’s got on now — that’s what reminded me of it — and perform before refreshments are served on Sunday afternoons when callers come. All your sisters know how to do it. Joanne used to recite Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’ and then Susannah would sing ‘Whispering—’ ”
“I don’t remember that,” Ben Joe said.
“Well, we never actually did it in front of guests. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. But we had our own private tea parties, sort of.”
“Well, I’m leaving,” Ben Joe said.
But behind him, as he left, Gary was saying, “That’s a great idea. Do you know ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’? I’d like—”
Ben Joe climbed the stairs two at a time and crossed the hall to Joanne’s door.
“Joanne?” he called.
“Who is it? That you, Ben Joe?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
He opened the door. Joanne was at the door of her closet, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung there. She had on one of the gypsy-red dresses that she used to wear in high school and that had been left behind in her closet because it had faded at the seams. Faded or not, it was still a brighter shade of red than Ben Joe had been used to seeing lately. He blinked his eyes, and Joanne laughed and turned around to face him.
“I found it hanging there,” she said. “I’d forgotten I had it. Do you remember when I used to wear this?”
“Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. “You wore it up till the time you left home.”
“I’d forgotten all about it.”
She spun once more in front of the mirror and then stopped smiling and sat down abruptly on the bed with her shoulders sagging.
“Did you want something?” she asked.
“Well … no.”
“Is Gary up?”
“Yes.”
He took his hands out of his pocket and crossed to sit in the platform rocker opposite her.
“How do you like him?” she asked.
“Oh, fine.”
There seemed to be no words that would fill in the silence. He got up again and wandered aimlessly around the room. At the bureau he stopped and began looking through a silver catch-all tray under the mirror, full of odds and ends like rolled-up postage stamps and paper clips and pieces of lint.
“Hey,” he said, “here’s my nail clippers.”
“Take them.”
“I can prove they’re mine. See this little license tag on the chain? I got it from a cereal company when I was about twelve. It has the year on it and the—”
“Take it, for goodness’ sakes.”
She lit a Salem and threw the match in the direction of the window. With the nail clippers in his pocket Ben Joe wandered back to his seat, still with nothing to say.
“I’ve been looking all over for them,” he said finally. “Also there’s a dent in the file part, where Jenny bit it when she was only—”
“Ben Joe!”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said after a minute.
“Well, what’d you say ‘Ben Joe’ for?”
“No reason.”
“It seems kind of funny,” he said, “just to scream ‘Ben Joe!’ at the top of your lungs as a way of making small talk. Why, I could think of a better topic than that if I—”
“Are you trying to irritate me?”
“Well, maybe so.” He examined his fingernails. “Yes,” he said after a minute, “I liked him fine. I did. Gary, I mean.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
He looked up, saw that she was waiting for him to go on, and went back to frowning at his fingernails. “Came all the way here for you,” he said finally. “That’s something.”
Joanne blew out an enormous cloud of smoke and nodded. She seemed still to be waiting for him to say more, but there was nothing else he could think of to say. When she saw that he was through speaking, she went over and sat down at her dressing table, still not speaking. She put her cigarette in the groove of a glass ash tray and began unpinning her knot of hair.
“If I could just get organized,” she said. “I never have believed in going backwards instead of forwards.”
Ben Joe looked up at her. He knew suddenly, without her telling him, what she had decided she was going to do about Gary. He could tell by her face, half happy and half embarrassed at having to announce that she was as reversible as anyone. He could almost read what she was thinking, and how she was trying to figure out the best way to say it gracefully.
Her hair fell to her neck in a little puff. She put the bobby pins in a china coaster, and picked up a comb and began pulling it through her hair. The red dress made her different, Ben Joe thought. It turned her into exactly the same old Joanne, right down to the swinging hair that she tossed with a little teasing movement of her neck. And this could be any day seven years ago: Ben Joe in the chair watching her get ready to go out, funny old fussy Ben Joe telling her she really should start coming in earlier; and Joanne thin and quick and vaguely dissatisfied in front of her oval mirror. Any minute one of the children would come in (they were still called “the children” back then, not “the girls”) to watch, too. Going out was something exciting and mysterious then, something only Ben Joe and Joanne and Susannah were allowed to do; and the others always liked coming to watch the preparations. He felt suddenly sad, thinking about them — as if instead of merely growing up and still being right here they had died, and he was only now realizing it. He pictured all the children in a circle on the floor, newly bathed and ready for bed (it would have to be evening, then), all looking in the mirror to see the miraculous things Joanne did to her face. Joanne would be talking rapidly, teasing the children behind her and giving that saucy smile as she stared at her mascara in the glass—”Oh, it’s only old Kim Laurence I’m going out with. I think I’ll just stay home and let the baby go instead. You hear that, Tessie?” She would turn around and make a little face at Tessie, only three years old and already half asleep in the lap of a twin. “And won’t Kim Laurence be surprised when his date comes rolling toward him in a baby carriage?” Or: “I’ll tell you who I’m seeing tonight — it’s Quality Jones. Quality Jones, and he’s taking me to a New York night club and he’s such a fascinating conversationalist. All he says is, ‘What time is it, Joanne?’ and I say, ‘If morning ever comes, Quality, I’ll be happy to tell you.’ ”