Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 17

  “I know what you’re up to,” his mother told him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I see through you like a sheet of glass.”

  “Well? What am I up to, then?” he asked. He really did hope to hear; he had reached the stage where he’d angle and connive just to get someone to utter Ruth’s name.

  “You don’t fool me for an instant,” said his mother. “Why are you so contrary? You’ve got no earthly use for that girl. She’s not your type in the slightest; she belongs to your brother, Ezra, and she’s the only thing in this world he’s ever wanted. If you were to win her away, tell me what you’d do with her! You’d drop her flat. You’d say, ‘Oh, my goodness, what am I doing with this little person?’ ”

  “You don’t understand,” said Cody.

  “This may come as a shock,” his mother told him, “but I understand you perfectly. With the rest of the world I might not be so smart, but with my three children, why, not the least little thing escapes me. I know everything you’re after. I see everything in your heart, Cody Tull.”

  “Just like God,” Cody said.

  “Just like God,” she agreed.

  Ezra arranged a celebration dinner for the evening before Jenny’s wedding—a Friday. But Thursday night, Jenny phoned Cody at his apartment. It was a local call; she said she wasn’t ten blocks away, staying at a hotel with Sam Wiley. “We got married yesterday morning,” she said, “and now we’re on our honeymoon. So there won’t be any dinner after all.”

  “Well, how did all this come about?” Cody asked.

  “Mother and Sam had a little disagreement.”

  “I see.”

  “Mother said … and Sam told her … and I said, ‘Oh, Sam, why not let’s just …’ Only I do feel bad about Ezra. I know how much trouble he’s gone to.”

  “By now, he ought to be used to this,” Cody said.

  “He was going to serve a suckling pig.”

  Hadn’t Ezra noticed (Cody wondered) that the family as a whole had never yet finished one of his dinners? That they’d fight and stamp off halfway through, or sometimes not even manage to get seated in the first place? Well, of course he must have noticed, but was it clear to him as a pattern, a theme? No, perhaps he viewed each dinner as a unit in itself, unconnected to the others. Maybe he never linked them in his mind.

  Assuming he was a total idiot.

  It was true that once—to celebrate Cody’s new business—they had made it all the way to dessert; so if they hadn’t ordered dessert you could say they’d completed the meal. But the fact was, they did order dessert, which was left to sag on the plates when their mother accused Cody of deliberately setting up shop as far from home as possible. There was a stiff-backed little quarrel. Conversation fell apart. Cody walked out. So technically, even that meal could not be considered finished. Why did Ezra go on trying?

  Why did the rest of them go on showing up, was more to the point.

  In fact, they probably saw more of each other than happy families did. It was almost as if what they couldn’t get right, they had to keep returning to. (So if they ever did finish a dinner, would they rise and say goodbye forever after?)

  Once Jenny had hung up, Cody sat on the couch and leafed through the morning’s mail. Something made him feel unsettled. He wondered how Jenny could have married Sam Wiley—a scrawny little artist type, shifty eyed and cocky. He wondered if Ezra would cancel his dinner altogether or merely postpone it till after the honeymoon. He pictured Ruth in the restaurant kitchen, her wrinkled little fingers patting flour on drumsticks. He scanned an ad for life insurance and wondered why no one depended on him—not even enough to require his insurance money if he should happen to die.

  He ripped open an envelope marked AMAZING OFFER! and found three stationery samples and a glossy order blank. One sample was blue, with LMR embossed at the top. Another had a lacy PAULA, the P entwined with a morning-glory vine, and the third was one of those letters that form their own envelopes when folded. The flap was printed with butterflies and Mrs. Harold Alexander III, 219 Saint Beulah Boulevard, Dallas, Texas. He studied that for a moment. Then he took a pen from his shirt pocket, and started writing in an unaccustomed, backhand slant:

  Dear Ruth,

  Just a line to say hey from all of us. How’s the job going? What do you think of Baltimore? Harold says ask if you met a young man yet. He had the funniest dream last night, dreamed he saw you with someone tall, black hair and gray eyes and gray suit. I said well, I certainly hope it’s a dream that comes true!

  We have all been fine tho Linda was out of school one day last week. A case of “math test-itis” it looked like to me, ha ha! She says to send you lots of hugs and kisses. Drop us a line real soon, hear?

  Cody felt he had just found the proper tone toward the end; he was sorry to run out of space. He signed the letter Luv, Sue (Mrs. Harold Alexander III), and sealed, stamped, and addressed it. Then he placed it in a business envelope, and wrote a note to his old college roommate in Dallas, asking if he would please drop the enclosed in the nearest mailbox.

  That weekend he didn’t go home, and his reward was to dream about Ruth. She was waiting for a train that he was traveling on. He saw her on the platform, peering into the windows of each passenger car as it slid by. He was so eager to reach her, to watch her expression ease when she caught sight of him, that he called her name aloud and woke himself up. He heard it echoing in the dark—not her name, after all, but some meaningless sleep sound. For hours after that he tried to burrow back inside the dream, but he had lost it.

  The next morning he began another letter, on the sheet headed PAULA. In a curlicued script, he wrote:

  Dear Ruthie,

  You old thing, don’t you keep in touch with your friends any more? I told Mama the other day, Mama that Ruth Spivey has forgotten all about us I believe.

  Things here are not going too good. I guess you might have heard that me and Norman are separated. I know you liked him, but you had no idea how tiresome he could be, always so slow and quiet, he got on my nerves. Ruthie stay clear of those pale blond thoughtful kind of men, they’re a real disappointment. Go for someone dark and interesting who will take you lots of places you’ve never been. I’m serious, I know what I’m talking about.

  Mama sends you greetings and asks do you want her to sew you anything. She’s real crippled now with the arthritis in her knees and can only sit in her chair, has plenty of time for sewing.

  See ya, Paula

  That letter he mailed from Pennsylvania, when he visited a packing-crate plant the following Tuesday. And on Wednesday, from New York, he sent the blue sheet with LMR at the top.

  Dear Ruth,

  Had lunch with Donna the other day and she told me you were going with a real nice fellow. Was kind of hazy on the particulars but when she said his name was Tull and he came from Baltimore I knew it must be Cody. Everybody here knows Cody, we all just love him, he really is a good man at heart and has been misjudged for years by people who don’t understand him. Well, Ruthie, I guess you’re smarter than I gave you credit for, I always thought you’d settle for one of those dime-a-dozen blond types but now I see I was wrong.

  I’ll be waiting for the details.

  Love, Laurie May

  “You went too far with that last letter,” Ruth told him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He was sitting on a kitchen stool, watching her cube meat. He’d come directly to the restaurant this Saturday—bypassing home, bypassing the farm—hoping to find her altered somehow, mystified, perhaps tossing him a speculative glance from time to time. Instead, she seemed cross. She slammed her cleaver on the chopping board. “Do you realize,” she asked, “that I went ahead and answered that first note? Not wanting someone to worry, I sent it back and said it wasn’t mine, there must be some mistake; went out specially and bought a stamp to mail it with. And would’ve sent the second back, too, only it didn’t have a return address. Th
en the third comes; well, you went too far.”

  “I tend to do that,” Cody said regretfully.

  Ruth slung the cleaver with a thunking sound. Cody was afraid the others—only Todd Duckett and Josiah, this early—would wonder what was wrong, but they didn’t even look around. Ezra was out front, chalking up tonight’s menu.

  “Just what is your problem?” Ruth asked him. “Do you have something against me? You think I’m some Garrett County hick that you don’t want marrying your brother?”

  “Of course I don’t want you marrying him,” Cody said. “I love you.”

  “Huh?”

  This wasn’t the moment he had planned, but he rushed on anyway, as if drunk. “I mean it,” he said, “I feel driven. I feel pulled. I have to have you. You’re all I ever think about.”

  She was staring at him, astonished, with one hand cupped to scoop the meat cubes into a skillet.

  “I guess I’m not saying it right,” he told her.

  “Saying what? What are you talking about?”

  “Ruth. I really, truly love you,” he said. “I’m sick over you. I can’t even eat. Look at me! I’ve lost eleven pounds.”

  He held out his arms, demonstrating. His jacket hung loose at the sides. Lately he’d moved his belt in a notch; his suits no longer fit so smoothly but seemed rumpled, gathered, bunchy.

  “It’s true you’re kind of skinny,” Ruth said slowly.

  “Even my shoes feel too big.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “You haven’t heard a word I said!”

  “Over me, you said. You must be making fun.”

  “Ruth, I swear—” he said.

  “You’re used to New York City girls, models, actresses; you could have anyone.”

  “It’s you I’ll have.”

  She studied him a moment. It began to seem he’d finally broken through; they were having a conversation. Then she said, “We got to get that weight back on you.”

  He groaned.

  “See there?” she asked. “You never eat a thing I offer you.”

  “I can’t,” he told her.

  “I don’t believe you ever once tasted my cooking.”

  She set the skillet aside and went over to the tall black kettle that was simmering on the stove. “Country vegetable,” she said, lifting the lid.

  “Really, Ruth …”

  She filled a small crockery bowl and set it on the table. “Sit down,” she said. “Eat. When you’ve tried it, I’ll tell you the secret ingredient.”

  Steam rose from the bowl, with a smell so deep and spicy that already he felt overfed. He accepted the spoon that she held out. He dipped it in the soup reluctantly and took a sip.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “It’s very good,” he said.

  In fact, it was delicious, if you cared about such things. He’d never tasted soup so good. There were chunks of fresh vegetables, and the broth was rich and heavy. He took another mouthful. Ruth stood over him, her thumbs hooked into her blue jeans pockets. “Chicken feet,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Chicken feet is the secret ingredient.”

  He lowered the spoon and looked down into the bowl.

  “Eat up,” she told him. “Put some meat on your bones.”

  He dipped the spoon in again.

  After that, she brought him a salad made with the herbs she’d grown on the roof and a basketful of rolls she’d baked that afternoon—a recipe from home, she said. Cody ate everything. As long as he ate, she watched him. When she brought him more butter for his rolls, she leaned close over him and he felt the warmth she gave off.

  Now two more cooks had arrived and a Chinese boy was sautéing black mushrooms, and Ezra was running a mixer near the sink. Ruth sat down next to Cody, hooking her combat boots on the rung of his chair and hugging her ribs. Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food—to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people’s lives. Couldn’t you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food? Look at Cody’s mother—a nonfeeder, if ever there was one. Even back in his childhood, when they’d depended on her for nourishment … why, mention you were hungry and she’d suddenly act rushed and harassed, fretful, out of breath, distracted. He remembered her coming home from work in the evening and tearing irritably around the kitchen. Tins toppled out of the cupboards and fell all over her—pork ’n’ beans, Spam, oily tuna fish, peas canned olive-drab. She cooked in her hat, most of the time. She whimpered when she burned things. She burned things you would not imagine it possible to burn and served others half-raw, adding jarring extras of her own design such as crushed pineapple in the mashed potatoes. (Anything, as long as it was a leftover, might as well be dumped in the pan with anything else.) Her only seasonings were salt and pepper. Her only gravy was Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. And till Cody was grown, he had assumed that roast beef had to be stringy—not something you sliced, but a leathery dry object which you separated with a fork, one strand from the other, and dropped with a clunk upon your plate.

  Though during illness, he remembered, you could count on her to bring liquids. Hot tea: she was good at that. And canned consommé. Thin things, watery things. Then she’d stand in the door with her arms folded while you drank it. He remembered that her expression, when others ate or drank, conveyed a mild distaste. She ate little herself, often toyed with her food; and she implied some criticism of those who acted hungry or over-interested in what they were served. Neediness: she disapproved of neediness in people. Whenever there was a family argument, she most often chose to start it over dinner.

  Biting into Ruth’s flaky, shattering crust, Cody considered his mother’s three children—Jenny, for instance, with her lemon-water and lettuce-leaf diets, never allowing herself a sweet, skipping meals altogether, as if continually bearing in mind that disapproving expression of her mother’s. And Cody himself was not much different, when you came right down to it. It seemed that food didn’t count, with him; food was something required by others, so that for their sakes—on dates, at business luncheons—he would obligingly order a meal for himself just to keep them company. But all you’d find in his refrigerator was cream for his coffee and limes for his gin and tonics. He never ate breakfast; he often forgot lunch. Sometimes a gnawing feeling hit his stomach in the afternoon and he sent his secretary out for food. “What kind of food?” she would ask. He would say, “Anything, I don’t care.” She’d bring a Danish or an eggroll or a liverwurst on rye; it was all the same to him. Half the time, he wouldn’t even notice what it was—would take a bite, go on dictating, leave the rest to be disposed of by the cleaning lady. A woman he’d once had dinner with had claimed that this was a sign of some flaw. Watching him dissect his fish but then fail to eat it, noticing how he refused dessert and then benignly, tolerantly waited for her to finish a giant chocolate mousse, she had accused him of … what had she called it? Lack of enjoyment. Lack of ability to enjoy himself. He hadn’t understood, back then, how she could draw so many implications from a single meal. And still he didn’t agree with her.

  Yes, only Ezra, he would say, had managed to escape all this. Ezra was so impervious—so thickheaded, really; nothing ever touched him. He ate heartily, whether it was his mother’s cooking or his own. He liked anything that was offered him, especially bread—would have to watch his weight as he got older. But above all else, he was a feeder. He would set a dish before you and then stand there with his face expectant, his hands clasped tightly under his chin, his eyes following your fork. There was something tender, almost loving, about his attitude toward people who were eating what he’d cooked them.

  Like Ruth, Cody thought.

  He asked her for another slice of pie.

  Mornings, now, he called her from New York, often getting her landlady out of bed; and Ruth when she answered was still creaky voiced from sleep—or was it from bewilderment, even now? Reluctantly, eac
h time, she warmed to his questions, speaking shortly at first. Yes, she was fine. The restaurant was fine. Dinner last night had gone well. And then (letting her sentences stretch gradually longer, as if giving in to him all over again) she told him that this house was starting to wear her down—creepy boarders padding around in their slippers at all hours, no one ever going anywhere, landlady planted eternally in front of her TV. This landlady, a widow, believed that Perry Como’s eyebrows quirked upward as they did because he was by nature a bass, and singing such high notes gave him constant pain; she had heard that Arthur Godfrey, too, had been enduring constant pain for years, smiling a courageous smile and wheeling about on his stool because the slightest step would stab him like a knife. Yes, everything, to Mrs. Pauling, was a constant pain; life was a constant pain, and Ruth had started looking around her and wondering how she stood this place.

  Weekends—Friday and Saturday nights—Ruth tore through the restaurant kitchen slapping haunches of beef and whipping egg whites. Ezra worked more quietly. Cody sat at the wooden table. Now and then, Ruth would place some new dish in front of him and Cody would eat it dutifully. Every mouthful was a declaration of love. Ruth knew that. She was tense and watchful. She gave him sideways, piercing glances when he forked up one of her dumplings, and he was careful to leave nothing on his plate.

  Then on Sunday mornings, yellow summer mornings at her boardinghouse, he rang her doorbell and pulled her close to him when she answered. Anytime he kissed her, he was visited by the curious impression that some other self of hers was still moving through the house behind her, spunky and lighthearted and uncatchable even yet, checking under pot lids, slamming cupboard doors, humming and tossing her head and wiping her hands on her blue jeans.

  “I don’t understand,” Ezra told them.