Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  In the restaurant, she was a whirlwind. Ezra cooked in a dream, tasting and reflecting; the others (losers, all of them, in Cody’s opinion) floated around the kitchen vaguely, but Ruth spun and pounced and jabbed at food as if doing battle. She was in charge of a chicken casserole and something that looked like potato cakes. Cody watched her from a corner well out of the way, but still people seemed to keep tripping over him.

  “Where did you learn to cook?” he asked Ruth.

  “No place,” she said.

  “Is this chicken some regional thing?”

  “Taste,” she snapped, and she speared a piece and held it out to him.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I feel too full.”

  In fact, he felt full of her. He’d taken her in all day, consumed her. Every spiky movement—slamming of pot lids, toss of head—nourished him. It came to him like a gift, while he was studying her narrow back, that she actually wore an undershirt, one of those knitted singlets he remembered from his childhood. He could make out the seams of it beneath the brown plaid. He filed the information with care, to be treasured once he was alone.

  The restaurant opened and customers began to trickle in. The large, beaming hostess seated them all in one area, as if tucking them under her wing.

  “Find a table,” Ezra told Cody. “I’ll bring you some of Ruth’s cooking.”

  “I’m honestly not hungry,” Cody said.

  “He’s full,” said Ruth, spitting it out.

  “Well, what’ll you do, then? Isn’t this boring for you?”

  “No, no, I’m interested,” Cody said.

  He could look across the counter and into the dining room, where people sat chewing and swallowing and drinking, patting their mouths with napkins, breaking off chunks of bread. He wondered how Ezra could stand to spend his life at this.

  When the first real flurry was over, Ruth and Ezra settled at the scrubbed wooden table in the center of the kitchen, and Cody joined them. Ezra ate some of Ruth’s chicken casserole. Ruth lit a small brown cigarette and tipped back in her chair to watch him. The cigarette smelled as if it were burning only by accident—like something spilled on the floor of an oven, or stuck to the underside of a saucepan. Cody, seated across from her, drank it in. “Eat, Cody, eat,” Ezra urged him. Cody just shook his head, not wanting to lose his chestful of Ruth’s smoke.

  Meanwhile, the other cooks came and went, some of them sitting also to wolf various odd assortments of food while their kettles simmered untended. Ezra’s boyhood friend Josiah appeared, metamorphosed into an efficient grown man in starchy white, and he and Ruth had a talk about peeling the apples for her pie. Cody could not have cared less about her pie, but he was riveted by her offhand, slangy style of speech. She held her cigarette between thumb and index finger, with her elbow propped against her rib cage. She hunkered forward to consider some decision, and beneath her knotted brows her eyes were so pale a blue that he was startled.

  They left the restaurant before it closed. Josiah would lock up, Ezra said. They took a roundabout route home, down a quiet, one-way street, to drop Ruth off at the house where she rented a room. When Ezra accompanied her up the front steps, Cody waited on the curb. He watched Ezra kiss her good night—a bumbling, inadequate kiss, Cody judged it; and he felt some satisfaction. Then Ezra rejoined him and galumphed along beside him, big footed and blithe. “Isn’t she something?” he asked Cody. “Don’t you just love her?”

  “Mm.”

  “But there’s so much I need to find out from you! I want to take good care of her, but I don’t know how. What about life insurance? Things like that! So much is expected of husbands, Cody. Will you help me figure it out?”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Cody said. He meant it, too. Anything: any little crack that would provide him with an entrance.

  Eventually, Ezra subsided, although he continued to give the impression of inwardly bubbling and chortling. From time to time, he hummed a few bars of something underneath his breath. And then when they were almost home—passing houses totally dark, where everyone had long since gone to sleep—what should he do but pull out that damned recorder of his and start piping away. It was embarrassing. It was infuriating: “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” once again. Depend on Ezra, Cody thought, to have as his theme song a recipe for a seafood dish. He walked along in silence, hoping someone would call the police. Or at least, that they’d open a window. “You there! Quiet!” But no one did. It was so typical: Ezra the golden boy, everybody’s favorite, tootling down the streets scot-free.

  On Sunday morning, Cody presented himself at Ruth’s door—or rather, at the door of the faded, doughy lady who owned the house Ruth stayed in. This lady toyed so fearfully with the locket at her throat that Cody felt compelled to take a step backward, proving he was not a knock-and-rob man. He gave her his most gentlemanly smile. “Good morning,” he said. “Is Ruth home?”

  “Ruth?”

  He realized he didn’t know Ruth’s last name. “I’m Ezra Tull’s brother,” he said.

  “Oh, Ezra,” she said, and she stood back to let him enter.

  He followed her deep into the interior, past a tumult of overstuffed furniture and dusty wax fruit and heaps of magazines. In the kitchen, Ruth slouched at the table spooning up cornflakes and reading a newspaper propped against a cereal box. A pale, pudgy man stood gazing into an open refrigerator. Cody had an impression of inertia and frittered lives. He felt charged with energy. It ought to be so easy to win her away from all this!

  “Good morning,” he said. Ruth looked up. The pudgy man retreated behind the refrigerator door.

  “I hope you’re not too far into that cereal,” Cody said. “I came to invite you to breakfast.”

  “What for?” Ruth asked, frowning.

  “Well … not for any purpose. I’m just out walking and I thought you might want to walk with me, stop off for doughnuts and coffee someplace.”

  “Now?”

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t it raining?”

  “Only a little bit.”

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  Her eyes dropped back to her newspaper. The landlady slid her locket along its chain with a miniature zipping sound.

  “What’s going on in the world?” Cody asked.

  “What world?” said Ruth.

  “The news. What does the newspaper say?”

  Ruth raised her eyes, and Cody saw the page she had turned to. “Oh,” he said. “The comics.”

  “No, my horoscope.”

  “Your horoscope.” He looked to the landlady for help. The landlady gazed off toward a cabinet full of jelly glasses. “Well, what … um, symbol are you?” Cody asked Ruth.

  “Hmm?”

  “What astrological symbol?”

  “Sign,” she corrected him. She sighed and stood up, finally forced to recognize his presence. Snatching her paper from the table, she stalked off toward the parlor. Cody made way for her and then trailed after. Her jeans, he guessed, had been bought at a little boys’ clothing store. She had no hips whatsoever. Her sweater was transparent at the elbows.

  “I’m Taurus,” she said over her shoulder, “but all that’s rubbish, anyhow. Total garbage.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Cody said, relieved.

  She stopped in the center of the parlor and turned to him. “Look at here,” she said, and she jabbed her finger at a line of newsprint. “Powerful ally will come to your rescue. Accent today on high finance.” She lowered the paper. “I mean, who do they reckon they’re dealing with? What kind of business am I supposed to be involved in?”

  “Ridiculous,” said Cody. He was hypnotized by her eyebrows. They were the color of orange sherbet, and whenever she spoke with any heat the skin around them grew pink, darker than the eyebrows themselves.

  “Ignore innuendos from long-time foe,” she read, running a finger down the column. “Or listen to this other one: Clandestine meeting could solve my
stery. Almighty God!” she said, and she tossed the paper into an armchair. “You got to lead quite a life, to get anything out of your horoscope.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Cody said. “Maybe it’s truer than you realize.”

  “Come again?”

  “Maybe it’s saying you ought to lead such a life. Ought to be more adventurous, not just slave away in some restaurant, mope around a gloomy old boardinghouse …”

  “It’s not so gloomy,” Ruth said, lifting her chin.

  “Well, but—”

  “And anyhow, I won’t always be here. Me and Ezra, after we marry, we’re moving in above the Homesick. Then once we get us some money we plan on a house.”

  “But still,” said Cody, “you won’t have anywhere near what those horoscopes are calling for. Why, there’s all the outside world! New York, for instance. Ever been to New York?”

  She shook her head, watching him narrowly.

  “You ought to come; it’s springtime there.”

  “It’s springtime here,” she said.

  “But a different kind.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” she told him.

  “Well, all I want to say is, Ruth: why settle down so soon, when there’s so much you haven’t seen yet?”

  “Soon?” she said. “I’m pretty near twenty years old. Been rattling around on my own since my sixteenth birthday. Only thing I want is to settle down, sooner the better.”

  “Oh,” said Cody.

  “Well, have a good walk.”

  “Oh, yes, walk …”

  “Don’t drown,” she told him, callously.

  At the door, he turned. He said, “Ruth?”

  “What.”

  “I don’t know your last name.”

  “Spivey,” she said.

  He thought it was the loveliest sound he had ever heard in his life.

  The following weekend, he drove her out to see his farm. “I have seen all the farms I care to,” she said, but Ezra said, “Oh, you ought to go, Ruth. It’s pretty this time of year.” Ezra himself had to stay behind; he was supervising the installation of a new meat locker for the restaurant. Cody had known that before he invited her.

  This time he brought her jonquils. She said, “I don’t know what I want with these; there’s a whole mess in back by the walkway.”

  Cody smiled at her.

  He settled her in his Cadillac, which smelled of new leather. She looked unimpressed. Perversely, she was wearing a skirt, on the one occasion when jeans would have been more suitable. Her legs were very white, almost chalky. He had not seen short socks like hers since his schooldays, and her tattered sneakers were as small and stubby as a child’s.

  On the drive out, he talked about his plans for the farm. “It’s where I’d like to live,” he said. “Where I want to raise my family. It’s a perfect place for children.”

  “What makes you think so?” she asked. “When I was a kid, all I cared about was getting to the city.”

  “Yes, but fresh air and home-grown vegetables, and the animals … Right now, the man down the road is tending my livestock, but once I move in full-time I’m going to do it all myself.”

  “That I’d like to see,” said Ruth. “You ever slopped a hog? Shoveled out a stable?”

  “I can learn,” he told her.

  She shrugged and said no more.

  When they reached the farm he showed her around the grounds, where she stared a cow down and gave a clump of hens the evil eye. Then he led her into the house. He’d bought it lock, stock, and barrel—complete with bald plush sofa and kerosene stove in the parlor, rickety kitchen table with its drawerful of rusted flatware, 1958 calendar on the wall advertising Mallardy’s oystershell mixture for layers, extra rich in calcium. The man who’d lived here—a widower—had died upstairs in the four-poster bed. Cody had replaced the bedclothes with new ones, sheets and a quilt and down pillows, but that was his only change. “I do plan to fix things up,” he told Ruth, “but I’m waiting till I marry. I know my wife might like to have a say in it.”

  Ruth removed a window lock easily from its crumbling wooden sash. She turned it over and peered at the underside.

  “I want a wife very much,” said Cody.

  She put back the lock. “I hate to be the one to tell you,” she said, “but smell that smell? Kind of sweetish smell? You got dry rot here.”

  “Ruth,” he said, “do you dislike me for any reason?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your attitude. The way you put me off. You don’t think much of me, do you?” he said.

  She gave him an edgy, skewed look, evasive, and moved over to the stairway. “Oh,” she said, “I like you a fair amount.”

  “You do?”

  “But I know your type,” she said.

  “What type?”

  “There were plenty like you in my school,” she said. “Oh, sure! Some in every class, on every team—tall and real good-looking, stylish, athletic, witty. Smooth-mannered boys that everything always came easy to, that always knew the proper way of doing things, and never dated any but the cheerleader girls, or the homecoming queen, or her maids of honor at the lowest. Passing me in the halls not even knowing who I was, nor guessing I existed. Or making fun of me sometimes, I’m almost certain—laughing at how poor I dressed and mocking my freckly face and my old red hair—”

  “Laughing! When have I ever done such a thing?”

  “I’m not naming you in particular,” she said, “but you sure do put me in mind of a type.”

  “Ruth. I wouldn’t mock you. I think you’re perfect,” he said. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

  “See there?” she asked, and she raised her chin, spun about, and marched down the stairs. She wouldn’t answer anything else he said to her, all during the long drive home.

  It was a campaign, was what it was—a long and arduous battle campaign, extending through April and all of May. There were moments when he despaired. He’d had too late a start, was out of the running; he’d wasted his time with those unoriginal, obvious brunettes whom he’d thought he was so clever to snare while Ezra, not even trying, had somehow divined the real jewel. Lucky Ezra! His whole life rested on luck, and Cody would probably never manage to figure out how he did it.

  Often, after leaving Ruth, Cody would be muttering to himself as he strode away. He would slam a fist in his palm or kick his own car. But at the same time, he had an underlying sense of exhilaration. Yes, he would have to say that he’d never felt more alive, never more eager for each new day. Now he understood why he’d lost interest in Carol or Karen, what’s-her-name, the social worker who hadn’t found Ezra appealing. She’d made it too easy. What he liked was the competition, the hope of emerging triumphant from a neck-and-neck struggle with Ezra, his oldest enemy. He even liked biding his time, holding himself in check, hiding his feelings from Ruth till the most advantageous moment. (Was patience Ezra’s secret?) For, of course, this wasn’t an open competition. One of the contestants didn’t even know he was a contestant. “Gosh, Cody,” Ezra said, “it’s been nice to have you around so much lately.” And to Ruth, “Go, go; you’ll enjoy it,” when Cody invited her anywhere.

  Once, baiting Ezra, Cody stole one of Ruth’s brown cigarettes and smoked it in the farmhouse. (The scent of burning tar filled his bedroom. If he’d had a telephone, he would have forgotten all his strategies and called her that instant to confess he loved her.) He stubbed out the butt in a plastic ashtray beside his bed. Then later he invited Ezra to look at his new calves, took him upstairs to discuss a leak in the roof, and led him to the nightstand where the ashtray sat. But Ezra just said, “Oh, was Ruth here?” and launched into praise for an herb garden she was planting on top of the restaurant. Cody couldn’t believe that anyone would be so blind, so credulous. Also, he would have died for the privilege of having Ruth plant herbs for him. He thought of the yard out back, where he’d always envisioned his wife’s kitchen garden. R
osemary! Basil! Lemon balm!

  “Why didn’t she come to me?” he asked Ezra. “She could always grow her herbs on my farm.”

  “Oh, well, the closer to home the fresher,” said Ezra. “But you’re kind to offer, Cody.”

  Oiling his rifles that night, Cody seriously considered shooting Ezra through the heart.

  When he complimented Ruth, she bristled. When he brought her the gifts he’d so craftily chosen (gold chains and crystal flasks of perfume, music boxes, silk flowers, all intended to contrast with the ugly, mottled marble rolling pin that Ezra presented, clumsily wrapped, on her twentieth birthday), she generally lost them right away or left them wherever she happened to be. And when he invited her places, she only came along for the outing. He would take her arm and she’d say, “Jeepers, I’m not some old lady.” She would scramble over rocks and through forests in her combat boots, and Cody would follow, bemused and dazzled, literally sick with love. He had lost eight pounds, could not eat—a myth, he’d always thought that was—and hardly slept at night. When he did sleep, he willed himself to dream of Ruth but never did; she was impishly, defiantly absent, and daytimes when they next met he thought he saw something taunting in the look she gave him.

  He often found it difficult to keep their conversations going. It struck him sometimes—in the middle of the week, when he was far from Baltimore—that this whole idea was deranged. They would never be anything but strangers. What single interest, even, did they have in common? But every weekend he was staggered, all over again, by her strutting walk, her belligerent chin and endearing scowl. He was moved by her musty, little-boyish smell; he imagined how her small body could nestle into his. Oh, it was Ruth herself they had in common. He would reach out to touch the spurs of her knuckles. She would ruffle and draw back. “What are you doing?” she would ask. He didn’t answer.