“When we get there,” he said, “we’ll look for an apartment to settle down in.”
She smiled happily. “I tell you one thing,” she said. “I always have read a lot of homemaking magazines and I have picked up all kinds of advice from them. You take a piece of driftwood, for instance, and you spray it with gold-colored—”
The train started up. It gave a little jerk and then hummed slowly out of the station and into the dark, and the tiny lights of the town began flickering past the black window.
“I bought me a white dress,” Shelley was saying. “I know it’s silly but I wanted to. Do you think it’s silly?”
“No. No, I think it’s fine.”
“Even if we just go to a J.P., I wanted to wear white. And it won’t bother me about going to a J.P.…”
The Petersoll barbecue house, flashing its neon-lit, curly-tailed pig, swam across the windowpane. In its place came the drive-in movie screen, where Ava Gardner loomed so close to the camera that only her purple, smiling mouth and half-closed eyes fitted on the screen. Then she vanished too. Across from Ben Joe, in her corner between the wall and the back of her seat, Shelley yawned and closed her eyes.
“Trains always make me sleepy,” she said.
Ben Joe put his feet up on the seat beside her and leaned back, watching her face. Her skin seemed paper-thin and too white. Every now and then her blue-veined eyelids fluttered a little, not quite opening, and the corner of her mouth twitched. He watched her intently, even though his own eyes were growing heavy with the sleepy ryhthm of the train. What was she thinking, back behind the darkness of her eyelids?
Behind his own eyelids the future rolled out like a long, deep rug, as real as the past or the present ever was. He knew for a certainty the exact look of amazement on Jeremy’s face, the exact look of anxiety that would be in Shelley’s eyes when they reached New York. And the flustered wedding that would embarrass him to pieces, and the careful little apartment where Shelley would always be waiting for him, like his own little piece of Sandhill transplanted, and asking what was wrong if he acted different from the husbands in the homemaking magazines but loving him anyway, in spite of all that. And then years on top of years, with Shelley growing older and smaller, looking the way her mother had, knowing by then all his habits and all his smallest secrets and at night, when his nightmares came, waking him and crooning to him until he drifted back to sleep, away from the thin, warm arms. And they might even have a baby, a boy with round blue eyes and small, struggling feet that she would cover in the night, crooning to him too. Ben Joe would watch, as he watched tonight, keeping guard and making up for all the hurried unthinking things that he had ever done. He shifted in his seat then, frowning; what future was ever a certainty? Who knew how many other people, myriads of people that he had met and loved before, might lie beneath the surface of the single smooth-faced person he loved now?
“Ticket, please,” the conductor said.
Ben Joe handed him his ticket and then reached forward and gently took Shelley’s ticket from her purse. The conductor tore one section off each, swaying above Ben Joe.
“Won’t have to change,” he said.
Ben Joe took his suit jacket off and folded it up on the seat beside him. He put his feet back on the opposite seat and slouched down as low as he could get, with his hands across his stomach, so that he could rest without going all the way to sleep. But his eyes kept wanting to sleep; he opened them wide and shook his mind awake. Shelley turned to face the aisle, and he fastened his eyes determinedly upon her, still keeping guard. His eyes drooped shut, and his head swayed back against the seat.
In that instant before sleep, with his mind loose and spinning, he saw Shelley and his son like two white dancing figures at the far end of his mind. They were suspended a minute, still and obedient, before his watching eyes and then they danced off again and he let them go; he knew he had to let them. One part of them was faraway and closed to him, as unreachable as his own sisters, as blank-faced as the white house he was born in. Even his wife and son were that way. Even Ben Joe Hawkes.
His head tipped sideways as he slept, with the yellow of his hair fluffed against the dusty plush. The conductor walked through, whistling, and the train went rattling along its tracks.
IF MORNING EVER COMES. A Reader’s Guide ANNE TYLER
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE TYLER
Michelle Huneven lives in California and is the author of Round Rock and Jamesland.
Michelle Huneven: Was this your first book? Had you written fiction before? In 1964, creative writing was barely a college-course subject let alone a major or Ph.D. degree. That said, did you study writing in college? When did you first think of becoming a writer?
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes was the second book I wrote but the first to be published. (I’d written an earlier novel toward the end of my last year in college.) My major was Russian, oddly enough. Writing was just a sideline, something I indulged in purely for fun while I waited to see what I was going to do with my life.
MH: Where were you when you wrote If Morning Ever Comes?
AT: I was newly married, working as a Russian bibliographer at the Duke University Library, when I wrote the first few chapters. Then we moved to Montreal, and after our plane landed, I forgot to claim the suitcase I’d packed my manuscript in. I realized it about a week later, but I decided it wasn’t worth the cab ride to the airport. Some time after that my husband went to the airport to meet a friend and thought to reclaim the suitcase from lost luggage, and then because I couldn’t find work for six months, I ended up finishing the novel just to entertain myself.
MH: What were the first seeds of this novel? How did you come to write it from the stance of Ben Joe, a twenty-five-year-old male? How long did it take you to write?
AT: My husband used to talk about a friend he’d made when he first came to this country from Iran — a young hospital orderly who was the head of a household of many, many rather feckless sisters for whom he felt personally responsible. I enjoyed fantasizing about that situation.
Adopting a male point of view was an act of defiance, in a small way. One of my teachers claimed that men could write from a woman’s viewpoint because they’d been raised by women, but women couldn’t write from a man’s viewpoint because they didn’t have the same intimate association with their fathers. I thought he was wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s my recollection that the book took me nine months to write. In those days I didn’t rewrite — didn’t even seriously think, it seems to me now, and that’s why it was such a short process.
MH: There are, it seems, many themes and concerns in If Morning Ever Comes that you’ve continued to explore and build on in the fifteen other novels you’ve written in the last forty years. What, to your mind, are some of these? What are the themes and concerns you’ve left behind?