Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  The next day at work, Ruth’s image hung over him. He was doing a time-and-motion study of a power-drill factory in New Jersey, a dinosaur of a place. It would take him weeks to sort it out. Joining object K to object L: right-hand transport unloaded, search, grasp, transport loaded … He passed down the assembly line with his clipboard, attracting hostile glances. Ruth’s black hair billowed in the rafters. Unavoidable delays: 3. Avoidable delays: 9. No doubt her eyes were plum shaped, slightly tilted. No doubt her hands were heavily ringed, with long, oval fingernails painted scarlet.

  When he returned to his apartment that evening, there was a letter from Ezra. It was an invitation to his restaurant this coming Saturday night. You are cordially invited was centered on the page like something engraved—Ezra’s idea of a joke. (Or maybe not; maybe he meant it in earnest.) Oh, Lord, not another one of Ezra’s dinners. There would be toasts and a fumbling, sentimental speech leading up to some weighty announcement—in this case, his engagement. Cody thought of declining, but what good would that do? Ezra would be desolate if a single person was missing. He’d cancel the whole affair and reschedule it for later, and keep on rescheduling till Cody accepted. Cody might as well go and be done with it.

  Besides, he wouldn’t at all mind meeting this Ruth.

  Ezra was listening to a customer—or a one-time customer, from the sound of it. “Used to be,” the man was saying, “this place had class. You follow me?”

  Ezra nodded, watching him with such a sympathetic, kindly expression that Cody wondered if his mind weren’t somewhere else altogether. “Used to be there was fine French cuisine, flamed at the tables and all,” said the man. “And chandeliers. And a hat-check girl. And waiters in black tie. What happened to your waiters?”

  “They put people off,” Ezra said. “They seemed to think the customers were taking an exam of some kind, not just ordering a meal. They were uppish.”

  “I liked your waiters.”

  “Nowadays our staff is homier,” Ezra said, and he gestured toward a passing waitress—a tall, stooped, colorless girl, open mouthed with concentration, fiercely intent upon the coffee mug that she carried in both hands. She inched across the floor, breathing adenoidally. She proceeded directly between Ezra and the customer. Ezra stepped back to give her room.

  The customer said, “ ‘Nettie,’ I said, ‘you’ve just got to see Scarlatti’s. Don’t knock Baltimore,’ I tell her, ‘till you see Scarlatti’s.’ Then we come upon it and even the sign’s gone. Homesick Restaurant, you call it now. What kind of a name is that? And the decor! Why, it looks like … why, a gigantic roadside diner!”

  He was right. Cody agreed with him. Dining room walls lined with home preserves, kitchen laid open to the public, unkempt cooks milling around compiling their favorite dishes (health food, street food, foreign food, whatever popped into their heads) … Ever since Ezra had inherited this place—from a woman, wouldn’t you know—he’d been systematically wrecking it. He was fully capable of serving a single entrée all one evening, bringing it to your table himself as soon as you were seated. Other nights he’d offer more choice, four or five selections chalked up on the blackboard. But still you might not get what you asked for. “The Smithfield ham,” you’d say, and up would come the okra stew. “With that cough of yours, I know this will suit you better,” Ezra would explain. But even if he’d judged correctly, was that any way to run a restaurant? You order ham, ham is what you get. Otherwise, you might as well eat at home. “You’ll go bankrupt in a year,” Cody had promised, and Ezra almost did go bankrupt; most of the regular patrons disappeared. Some hung on, though; and others discovered it. There were several older people who ate here every night, sitting alone at their regular tables in the barnlike, plank-floored dining room. They could afford it because the prices weren’t written but recited instead by the staff, evidently according to whim, altering with the customer. (Wasn’t that illegal?) Ezra worried about what these older people did on Sundays, when he closed. Cody, on the other hand, worried about Ezra’s account books, but didn’t offer to go over them. He would find a disaster, he was sure—errors and bad debts, if not outright, naive crookery. Better not to know; better not to get involved.

  “It’s true there’ve been some changes,” Ezra was telling his ex-customer, “but if you’ll just try our food, you’ll see that we’re still a fine restaurant. Tonight it’s all one dish—pot roast.”

  “Pot roast!”

  “A really special kind—consoling.”

  “Pot roast I can get at home,” said the man. He clamped a felt hat on his head and walked out.

  “Oh, well,” Ezra told Cody. “You can’t please everybody, I guess.”

  They made their way to the far corner, where a RESERVED sign sat upon the table that Ezra always chose for family dinners. Jenny and their mother weren’t there yet. Jenny, who’d arrived on the afternoon train, had asked her mother’s help in shopping for a dress to be married in. Now Ezra worried they’d be late. “Everything’s planned for six-thirty,” he said. “What’s keeping them?”

  “Well, no problem if it’s only pot roast.”

  “It’s not only pot roast,” Ezra said. He sat in a chair. His suit had a way of waffling around him, as if purchased for a much larger man. “This is something more. I mean, pot roast is really not the right name; it’s more like … what you long for when you’re sad and everyone’s been wearing you down. See, there’s this cook, this real country cook, and pot roast is the least of what she does. There’s also pan-fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, beaten biscuits genuinely beat on a stump with the back of an ax—”

  “Here they come,” Cody said.

  Jenny and her mother were just walking across the dining room. They carried no parcels, but something made it clear they’d been shopping—perhaps the frazzled, cross look they shared. Jenny’s lipstick was chewed off. Pearl’s hat was knocked crooked and her hair was frizzier than ever. “What took you so long?” Ezra asked, jumping up. “We were starting to worry.”

  “Oh, this Jenny and her notions,” said Pearl. “Her size eight figure and no bright colors, no pastels, no gathers or puckers or trim, nothing to make her look fat, so-called … Why are there five places set?”

  The question took them all off guard. It was true, Cody saw. There were five plates and five crystal wineglasses. “How come?” Pearl asked Ezra.

  “Oh … I’ll get to that in a minute. Have a seat, Mother, over there.”

  But she kept standing. “Then at last we find just the right thing,” she said. “A nice soft gray with a crocheted collar, Jenny all the way. ‘It’s you,’ I tell her. And guess what she does. She has a tantrum in the middle of Hutzler’s department store.”

  “Not a tantrum, Mother,” Jenny told her. “I merely said—”

  “Said, ‘It isn’t a funeral, Mother; I’m not going into mourning.’ You’d think I’d chosen widow’s weeds. This was a nice pale gray, very ladylike, very suitable for a second marriage.”

  “Anthracite,” Jenny told Cody.

  “Pardon?”

  “Anthracite was what the saleslady called it. In other words: coal. Our mother thinks it suitable to marry me off in a coal-black wedding dress.”

  “Uh,” said Ezra, looking around at the other diners, “maybe we should be seated now.”

  But Pearl just stood straighter. “And then,” she told her sons, “then, without the slightest bit of thought, doing it only to spite me, she goes rushing over to the nearest rack and pulls out something white as snow.”

  “It was cream colored,” Jenny said.

  “Cream, white—what’s the difference? Both are inappropriate, if you’re marrying for the second time and the divorce hasn’t yet been granted and the man has no steady employment. ‘I’ll take this one,’ she says, and it’s not even the proper size, miles too big, had to be left at the store for alterations.”

  “I happened to like it,” Jenny said.

  “You were lost in it.”


  “It made me look thin.”

  “Maybe you could wear a shawl or something, brown,” said her mother. “That might tone it down some.”

  “I can’t wear a shawl in a wedding.”

  “Why not? Or a little jacket, say a brown linen jacket.”

  “I look fat in jackets.”

  “Not in a short one, Chanel-type.”

  “I hate Chanel.”

  “Well,” said Pearl, “I can see that nothing will satisfy you.”

  “Mother,” Jenny said, “I’m already satisfied. I’m satisfied with my cream-colored dress, just the way it is. I love it. Will you please just get off my back?”

  “Did you hear that?” Pearl asked her sons. “Well, I don’t have to stand here and take it.” And she turned and marched back across the dining room, erect as a little wind-up doll.

  Ezra said, “Huh?”

  Jenny opened a plastic compact, looked into it, and then snapped it shut, as if merely making certain that she was still there.

  “Please, Jenny, won’t you go after her?” Ezra asked.

  “Not on your life.”

  “You’re the one she fought with. I can’t persuade her.”

  “Oh, Ezra, let’s for once just drop it,” Cody said. “I don’t think I’m up to all this.”

  “What are you saying? Not have dinner at all?”

  “I could only eat lettuce leaves anyhow,” Jenny told him.

  “But this is important! It was going to be an occasion. Oh, just … wait. Wait here a minute, will you?”

  Ezra turned and rushed off to the kitchen. From the swarm of assorted cooks at the counter, he plucked a small person in overalls. It was a girl, Cody guessed—a weasel-faced little redhead. She followed Ezra jauntily, almost stiff-legged, wiping her palms on her backside. “I’d like you to meet Ruth,” Ezra said.

  Cody said, “Ruth?”

  “We’re getting married in September.”

  “Oh,” said Cody.

  Then Jenny said, “Well, congratulations,” and kissed Ruth’s bony, freckled cheek, and Cody said, “Uh, yes,” and shook her hand. There were calluses like pebbles on her palm. “How do,” she told him. He thought of the phrase banty hen, although he had never seen a banty hen. Or maybe she was more of a rooster. Her brisk, carroty hair was cut so short that it seemed too scant for her skull. Her blue eyes were round as marbles, and her skin was so thin and tight (as if, like her hair, it had been skimped on) that he could see the white cartilage across the bridge of her nose. “So,” he said. “Ruth.”

  “Are you surprised?” Ezra asked him.

  “Yes, very surprised.”

  “I wanted to do it right; I was going to announce it over drinks and then call her in to join the family dinner. But, honey,” Ezra said, turning to Ruth, “I guess Mother was overtired. It didn’t work out the way I’d planned.”

  “Shit, that’s okay,” Ruth told him.

  Cody said, “Surely. Certainly. We can always do it later.”

  Then Jenny started asking about the wedding, and Cody excused himself and said he thought he’d go see how their mother was. Outside in the dark, walking up the street toward home, he had the strangest feeling of loss. It was as if someone had died, or had left him forever—the beautiful, black-haired Ruth of his dreams.

  “I knew what that dinner was going to be, tonight,” Pearl told Cody. “I’m not so dumb. I knew. He’s got himself engaged; he’s going to marry the country cook. I knew that anyway but it all came home to me when I walked in the restaurant and saw those five plates and glasses. Well, I acted badly. Very badly. You don’t have to tell me, Cody. It was just that I saw those plates and something broke inside of me. I thought, ‘Well, all right, if that’s how it’s got to be, but not tonight, just not tonight, Lord, right on top of buying wedding dress number two for my only daughter.’ So then, why, I went and made a scene that caused the dinner to be canceled, exactly as if I’d planned it all ahead of time, which of course I hadn’t. You believe me, don’t you? I’m not blind. I know when I’m being unreasonable. Sometimes I stand outside my body and just watch it all, totally separate. ‘Now, stop,’ I say to myself, but it’s like I’m … elated; I’ve got to rush on, got to keep going. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll stop,’ I think, ‘only let me say this one more thing, just this one more thing …’

  “Cody, don’t you believe I want you three to be happy? Of course I do. Naturally. Why, I wouldn’t hold Ezra back for the world, if he’s so set on marrying that girl—though I don’t know what he sees in her, she’s so scrappy and hoydenish; I think she’s from Garrett County or some such place and hardly wears shoes—you ought to see the soles of her feet sometime—but what I want to say is, I’ve never been one of those mothers who try to keep their sons for themselves. I honestly hope Ezra marries. I truly mean that. I want somebody taking care of him, especially him. You can manage on your own but Ezra is so, I don’t know, defenseless … Of course I love you all the same amount, every bit the same, but … well, Ezra is so good. You know? Anyway, now he has this Ruth person and it’s changed his whole outlook; watch him sometime when she walks into a room, or swaggers, or whatever you want to call it. He adores her. They get all playful together, like two puppies. Yes, often they remind me of puppies, snuggling down and giggling, or bounding about the kitchen or listening to that hillbilly music that Ruth seems to be so crazy about. But, Cody. Promise not to tell this to anyone. Promise? Cody, sometimes I stand there watching them and I see they believe they’re completely special, the first, the only people ever to feel the way they’re feeling. They believe they’ll live happily ever after, that all the other marriages going on around them—those ordinary, worn-down, flattened-in arrangements—why, those are nothing like what they’ll have. They’ll never settle for so little. And it makes me mad. I can’t help it, Cody. I know it’s selfish, but I can’t help it. I want to ask them, Who do you think you are, anyhow? Do you imagine you’re unique? Do you really suppose I was always this difficult old woman?’

  “Cody, listen. I was special too, once, to someone. I could just reach out and lay a fingertip on his arm while he was talking and he would instantly fall silent and get all confused. I had hopes; I was courted; I had the most beautiful wedding. I had three lovely pregnancies, where every morning I woke up knowing something perfect would happen in nine months, eight months, seven … so it seemed I was full of light; it was light and plans that filled me. And then while you children were little, why, I was the center of your worlds! I was everything to you! It was Mother this and Mother that, and ‘Where’s Mother? Where’s she gone to?’ and the moment you came in from school, ‘Mother? Are you home?’ It’s not fair, Cody. It’s really not fair; now I’m old and I walk along unnoticed, just like anyone else. It strikes me as unjust, Cody. But don’t tell the others I said so.”

  At work that next week, charting the steps by which power drills were fitted into their housings, Cody watched the old, dark Ruth fade from the rafters and hallways, until at last she was completely gone and he forgot why she had moved him so. Now a new Ruth appeared. Skinny and boyish, overalls flapping around her shinbones, she raced giggling down the assembly line with Ezra hot on her heels. Ezra’s hair was tousled. (He was not immune at all, it appeared, but had only been waiting in his stubbornly trustful way for the proper person to arrive.) He caught her in the supervisor’s office and they scuffled like … yes, like two puppies. A cowlick bounced on the crown of Ruth’s head. Her lips were chapped and cracked. Her nails were bitten into tiny pink cushions and there were scrapes and burns across her knuckles, scars from her country cooking.

  Cody called his mother and said he’d be down for the weekend. And would Ruth be around, did she think? After all, he said, it was time he got to know his future sister-in-law.

  He arrived on Saturday morning bringing flowers, copper-colored roses. He found Ruth and Ezra playing gin on the living room floor. Ruth’s reality, after his week of dreaming, struck him like a blow. She seem
ed clearer, plainer, harder edged than anybody he’d known. She wore jeans and a shirt of some ugly brown plaid. She was so absorbed in her game that she hardly glanced up when Cody walked in. “Ruth,” he said, and he held out the flowers. “These are for you.”

  She looked at them, and then drew a card. “What are they?” she asked.

  “Well, roses.”

  “Roses? This early in the year?”

  “Greenhouse roses. I especially ordered copper, to go with your hair.”

  “You leave my hair out of this,” she said.

  “Honey, he meant it as a compliment,” Ezra told her.

  “Oh.”

  “Certainly,” said Cody. “See, it’s my way of saying welcome. Welcome to our family, Ruth.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks.”

  “Cody, that was awfully nice of you,” Ezra said.

  “Gin,” said Ruth.

  Late that afternoon, when it was time to go to the restaurant, Cody walked over with Ruth and Ezra. He’d had a long, immobile day—standing outside other people’s lives, mostly—and he needed the exercise.

  It had been raining, off and on, and there were puddles on the sidewalk. Ruth strode straight through every one of them, which was fine since her shoes were brown leather combat boots. Cody wondered if her style were deliberate. What would she do, for instance, if he gave her a pair of high-heeled evening sandals? The question began to fascinate him. He became obsessed; he developed an almost physical thirst for the sight of her blunt little feet in silver straps.

  There was no explaining his craving for the gigantic watch—black faced and intricately calibrated, capable of withstanding a deep-sea dive—whose stainless steel expansion band hung loose on her wiry wrist.

  Ezra had his pearwood recorder. He played it as he walked, serious and absorbed, with his lashes lowered on his cheeks. “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” he played. Passersby looked at him and smiled. Ruth hummed along with some notes, fell into her own thoughts at others. Then Ezra put his recorder in the pocket of his shabby lumber jacket, and he and Ruth began discussing the menu. It was good they were serving the rice dish, Ruth said; that always made the Arab family happy. She ran her fingers through her sprouty red hair. Cody, walking on the other side of her, felt her shift of weight when Ezra circled her with one arm and pulled her close.