Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 18

  “Let me start over,” said Cody.

  Ezra said, “Is this some kind of a joke? Is that what it is? What is it?”

  “Ruth and I—” Cody began.

  But Ruth said, “Ezra, honey. Listen.” She stepped, forward. She was wearing the navy suit that Cody had bought her to go away in, and high-heeled shoes with slender straps. Although it was a glaring day in August, her skin had a chilled, dry, powdery look, and her freckles stood out sharply. She said, “Ezra, we surely never planned on this. We never had the least intention, not me or Cody neither one.”

  Ezra waited, evidently still not comprehending. He was backed against the huge old restaurant stove, as if retreating from their news.

  “It just happened, like,” said Ruth.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” said Ezra.

  “Ezra, honey—”

  “You would never do this. It’s not true.”

  “See, I don’t know how it came about but me and Cody … and I should’ve told you sooner but I kept thinking, oh, this is just some … I mean, this is silly; he’s so sophisticated, he isn’t someone for me; this is just some … daydream, see …”

  “There’s bound to be an explanation,” Ezra said.

  “I feel real bad about it, Ezra.”

  “I’m sure I’ll understand in a minute,” he said. “Just give me time. Just wait a minute. Let me think it through.”

  They waited, but he didn’t say anything more. He pressed two fingers against his forehead, as if working out some complicated puzzle. After a while, Cody touched Ruth’s arm. She said, “Well, Ezra, goodbye, I guess.” Then she and Cody left.

  In the car, she cried a little—not making any fuss but sniffling quietly and keeping her face turned toward the side window. “Are you all right?” Cody asked.

  She nodded.

  “You’re sure you still want to go on with this.”

  She nodded again.

  They were planning to travel by train—Ruth’s idea; she had never set foot on a train—to New York City, where they would be married in a civil ceremony. Ruth’s people, she said, were mostly dead or wouldn’t much care; so there wasn’t any point having the wedding in her hometown. And it went without saying that Cody’s people … well. For the next little bit, they might as well stay in New York. By and by, things would simmer down.

  Ruth took off one of her gloves, already gray at the seams, and crumpled it into a ball and blotted both her eyes.

  Near Penn Station, Cody found a parking lot that offered weekly rates. It was a good deal of trouble, traveling by train, but worth it for Ruth’s sake. She was already perking up. She asked him if he thought there’d be a dining car—an “eating car,” she called it. Cody said he imagined so. He accepted the ticket the parking attendant gave him and slid out from behind the steering wheel, grunting a little; lately he’d put on a few pounds around the waist. He took Ruth’s suitcase from the trunk. Ruth wasn’t used to high heels and she hobbled along unsteadily, every now and then making a loud, scraping sound on the sidewalk. “I hope to get the knack of these things before long,” she told Cody.

  “You don’t have to wear them, you know.”

  “Oh, I surely do,” she said.

  Cody guided her into the station. The sudden, echoing coolness seemed to stun her into silence. She stood looking around her while Cody went to the ticket window. A lady at the head of the line was arguing about the cost of her fare. A man in a crisp white suit rolled his eyes at Cody, implying exasperation at the wait. Cody pretended not to notice. He turned away as if checking the length of the line behind him, and a plump young woman with a child smiled instantly, fully prepared, and said, “Cody Tull!”

  “Um—”

  “I’m Jane Lowry. Remember me?”

  “Oh, Jane! Jane Lowry! Well, good to see you, how nice to … and is this your little girl?”

  “Yes; say hello to Mr. Tull, Betsy. Mr. Tull and Mommy used to go to school together.”

  “So you’re married,” Cody said, moving forward in line. “Well, what a—”

  “Remember the day I came to visit you, uninvited?” she asked. She laughed, and he saw, in the tilt of her head, a flash of the young girl he had known. She had lived on Bushnell Street, he remembered now; she had had the most beautiful hair, which still showed its chips of gold light, although she wore it short now. “I had such a crush on you,” she said. “Lord, I made a total fool of myself.”

  “You played a game of checkers with Ezra,” he reminded her.

  “Ezra?”

  “My brother.”

  “You had a brother?”

  “I certainly did; do. You played checkers with him all afternoon.”

  “How funny; I thought you only had a sister. What was her name? Jenny. She was so skinny, I envied her for years. Anything she wanted, she could eat and not have it show. What’s Jenny doing now?”

  “Oh, she’s in medical school. And Ezra: he runs a restaurant.”

  “In those days,” said Jane, “my fondest wish was to wake up one morning and find I’d turned into Jenny Tull. But I’d forgotten you had a brother.”

  Cody opened his mouth to speak, but the man in white had moved away and it was Cody’s turn at the window. And by the time he’d bought his tickets, Jane had switched to the other line and was busy buying hers.

  He didn’t see her again—though he looked for her on the train—but it was odd how she’d plunged him into the past. Swaying on the seat next to Ruth, holding her small, rough hand but finding very little to say to her, he was startled by fragments of buried memories. The scent of chalk in geometry class; the balmy, laden feeling of the last day of school every spring; the crack of a baseball bat on the playground. He found himself in a summer evening at a drive-in hamburger stand, with its blinding lights surrounded by darkness, its hot, salty, greasy smell of French fries, and all his friends horsing around at the curb. He could hear an old girlfriend from years ago, her droning, dissatisfied voice: “You ask me to the movies and I say yes and then you change your mind and ask me bowling instead and I say yes to that but you say wait, let’s make it another night, as if anything you can have is something it turns out you don’t want …” He heard his mother telling Jenny not to slouch, telling Cody not to swear, asking Ezra why he wouldn’t stand up to the neighborhood bully. “I’m trying to get through life as a liquid,” Ezra had said, and Cody (trying to get through life as a rock) had laughed; he could hear himself still. “Why aren’t cucumbers prickly any more?” he heard Ezra ask. And “Cody? Don’t you want to walk to school with me?” He saw Ezra aiming a red-feathered dart, his chapped, childish wrist awkwardly angled; he saw him running for the telephone—“I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”—hopeful and joyous, years and years younger. He remembered Carol, or was it Karen, reciting Ezra’s faults—a motherly man, she’d said; what had she said?—and it occurred to him that the reason he had dropped her was, she really hadn’t understood Ezra; she hadn’t appreciated what he was all about. Then Ruth squeezed his hand and said, “I intend to ride trains forever; it’s so much better than the bus. Isn’t it, Cody? Cody? Isn’t it?” The train rounded a curve with a high, thin, whistling sound that took him by surprise. He honestly believed, for an instant, that what he’d heard was music—a tune piped, a burble of notes, a little scrap of melody floating by on the wind and breaking his heart.

  6

  Beaches on the Moon

  Twice or maybe three times a year, she goes out to the farm to make sure things are in order. She has her son Ezra drive her there, and she takes along a broom, a dustpan, rags, a grocery bag for trash and a bucket and a box of cleanser. Ezra asks why she can’t just keep these supplies in the farmhouse, but she knows they wouldn’t be safe. The trespassers would get them. Oh, the trespassers—the small boys and courting couples and the teen-aged gangs. It makes her mad to think of them. As the car turns off the main road, rattling up the rutted driveway, she already sees their litter—the beer
cans tossed among the scrubby weeds, the scraps of toilet paper dangling from the bushes. This land has been let go and the vegetation is matted and wild, bristly, scratchy, no shade at all from the blazing sun. There are little spangles of bottle tops embedded in the dirt of the road. And the yard (which is not truly mown but sickled by Jared Peers, once or twice a summer) is flocked with white paper plates and Dixie cups, napkins, sandwich bags, red-striped straws, and those peculiarly long-lived, accordioned worms of paper that the straws were wrapped in.

  Ezra parks the car beneath an oak tree. “It’s a shame. A disgrace and a shame,” Pearl says, stepping out. She wears a seersucker dress that will wash, and her oldest shoes. On her head is a broad-brimmed straw hat. It will keep the dust from her hair—from all but one faded, blondish frizz bordering each temple. “It’s a national crime,” she says, and she stands looking around her while Ezra unloads her cleaning supplies. The house has two stories. It is a ghostly, rubbed-out gray. The ridgepole sags and the front porch has buckled and many of the windowpanes are broken—more every time she comes.

  She remembers when Cody first showed her this place. “Imagine what can be done with it, Mother. Picture the possibilities,” he said. He was planning to marry and raise a family here—provide her with lots of grandchildren. He even kept the livestock on, paying Jared Peers to tend it till Cody moved in.

  That was years ago, though, and all that remains of those animals now is a couple of ragged hens gone wild, clucking in the mulberry tree out behind the barn.

  She has a key to the warped rear door but it isn’t needed. The padlock’s missing and the rusted hasp hangs open. “Not again,” she says. She turns the knob and enters, warily. (One of these days, she’ll surprise someone and get her head blown off for her trouble.) The kitchen smells stale and cold, even in the heat of the day. There’s a fly buzzing over the table, a rust spot smearing the back of the sink, a single tatter of cloudy plastic curtain trailing next to the window. The linoleum’s worn patternless near the counters.

  Ezra follows, burdened with household supplies. He sets them down and stands wiping his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. More than once he’s told her he fails to see the use of this: cleaning up only to clean again, the next time they come out. What’s the purpose, he wants to know. Why go to all this trouble, what does she have in mind? But he’s an obliging man, and when she insists, he says no more. He runs his fingers through his hair, which the sweat has turned a dark, streaked yellow. He tests the kitchen faucet. First it explodes and then it yields a coppery trickle of water.

  There are half a dozen empty bottles lying on the floor—Wild Turkey, Old Crow, Southern Comfort. “Look! And look,” says Pearl. She nudges a Marlboro pack with her toe. She scrapes at a scorch on the table. She discreetly looks away while Ezra hooks an unmentionable rubber something with the broom handle and drops it into the trash bag.

  “Cody,” she used to say, “you could hire a man to come and haul this furniture off to the dump. Surely you don’t want it for yourself. Cody, there’s a Sunday suit in the bedroom closet. There are shoes at the top of the cellar stairs—chunky, muddy old garden shoes. You ought to hire a man to come haul them for you.” But Cody paid no attention—he was hardly ever there. He was mostly in New York; and privately, Pearl had expected that that was where he would stay. Which of those girlfriends of his would agree to a life in the country? “You’d just better watch out who you marry,” she had told him. “None of your dates that I’ve met would do—those black-haired, flashy, beauty-queen types.”

  But if only he’d married one of them! If only he’d been satisfied with that! Instead, one afternoon Ezra had come into the kitchen, had stood there looking sick. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. She knew it was something. “Ezra? Why aren’t you at work?”

  “It’s Cody,” he said.

  “Cody?”

  She clutched at her chest, picturing him dead—her most difficult, most distant child, and now she would never have the answer to him.

  But Ezra said, “He’s gone off to get married.”

  “Oh, married,” she said, and she dropped her hand. “Well? Who to?”

  “To Ruth,” he said.

  “Your Ruth?”

  “My Ruth.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

  Not that she hadn’t had some inkling. She had seen it coming for weeks, she believed, though she hadn’t exactly seen marriage—more likely a fling, a flirtation, another of Cody’s teases. Should she have hinted to Ezra? He wouldn’t have listened. He was so gullible, and so much in love. Ruth was the center of his world, for some reason. And anyway, who would have thought that Cody would let it get so serious? “He’s just doing it to be mean, sweetheart,” she told Ezra. She was right, too, as she’d been right the other times she’d said it—oh, those other times! Those inconsequential spats, those childhood quarrels, arguments, practical jokes! “Cody, stop it this instant,” she used to tell him. “You think I don’t see what you’re up to? Let your poor brother alone. Ezra, pay no mind. He’s only being mean.” Back then, Ezra had listened and nodded, hoping to believe her; he had doted on his older brother. But now he said, “What does it matter why he did it? He did it, that’s all. He stole her away.”

  “If she could be stolen, honey, why, you don’t want her anyhow.”

  Ezra just looked at her—bleak faced, grim, a walking ache of a man. She knew how he felt. Hadn’t she been through it? She remembered from when her husband left—a wound, she’d been, a deep, hollow hole, surrounded by shreds of her former self.

  She sweeps all the trash to the center of the floor, collects the bottles and the cigarette packs. Meanwhile, Ezra tapes squares of cardboard to the broken windowpanes. He works steadily, doggedly. She looks up once and sees how the sweat has made an eagle-shaped stain across his back. There are other cardboard squares on other panes, broken earlier. In a few more seasons, it occurs to her, they’ll be working in the dark. It’s as if they’re sealing themselves in, windowpane by windowpane.

  When Cody came back with Ruth, after the honeymoon, he was better-looking than ever, sleek and dark and well dressed, but Ruth was her same homely self: a little muskrat of a girl with wickety red hair and freckles, her skin that tissue-thin kind subject to lip sores and pink splotches, her twiggish body awkward in a matronly brown suit that must have been bought especially for this occasion. (Though Pearl was to find, in later years, that all Ruth’s clothes struck her that way; nothing ever seemed as natural as those little-boy dungarees she used to wear with Ezra.) Pearl watched the two of them sharply, closely, anxious to come to some conclusion about their marriage, but they gave away no secrets. Ruth sat pressing her palms together; Cody kept his arm across the back of the couch, not touching her but claiming her, at least. He talked at length about the farm. They were heading out there directly, settling in that night. It was too late for sowing a garden but at least they could clean the place up, begin to make plans for next spring. Ruth was going to get started on that while Cody went back to New York. Ruth nodded at this, and cleared her throat and fumbled with the pocket of her suit jacket. Pearl thought she was reaching for one of her little cigars, but after a moment she stopped fumbling and placed her palms together again. And in fact, Pearl never saw her smoke another one of those cigars.

  Then Ezra arrived—not whistling, oddly quiet, as he’d been since Ruth had left. He stopped inside the door and looked at them. “Ezra,” Cody said easily, and Ruth stood up and held out her hand. She seemed frightened. This made Pearl like her, a little. (Ruth, at least, recognized the magnitude of what they’d done.) “How you doing, Ezra,” Ruth said, quavering. And Ezra had said … oh, something or other, he’d managed something; and stood around a while shifting from foot to foot and answering their small talk. So it looked, on the surface, as if they might eventually smooth things over. Yes, after all, this choosing of mates was such a small, brief stage in a family’s history.

  But Ezra no long
er played tunes on his recorder, and he continued to look limp and beaten, and he went to bed every night with no more than a “Good night, Mother.” She grieved for him. She longed to say, “Ezra, believe me, she’s nothing! You’re worth a dozen Ruth Spiveys! A dozen of both of them, to be frank, even if Cody is my son …” Though of course she loved Cody dearly. But from infancy, he had batted her away; and his sister had been so evasive, somehow; so whom did that leave but Ezra? Ezra was all she had. He was the only one who would let her in. Sometimes, in his childhood, she had worried that he would die young—one of life’s ironic twists, to take what you valued most. She had watched him trudging down the street to school, his duck-yellow head bowed in thought, and she would have a sudden presentiment that this was the last she would see of him. Then when he returned, full of news about friends and ball games, how solid, how commonplace—even how irritating—he seemed! And sometimes, long ago when he was small, he might climb up into her lap and place his thin little arms around her neck, and she would drink in his smell of warm biscuits and think, “Really, this is what it’s all about. This is what I’m alive for.” Then, reluctantly, she allowed him to slip away again. (They claimed she was possessive, pushy. Little did they know.) As a child, he’d had a chirpy style of talking that was so cheerful, ringing through the house like a trill of water … when had that begun to change? As an older boy he grew shy and withdrawn, gazing out of shining gray eyes and saying next to nothing. She’d worried when he didn’t date. “Wouldn’t you like to bring someone home? Ask someone to Sunday dinner?” He shook his head, tongue-tied. He blushed and lowered his long lashes. Pearl wondered, seeing the blush, whether he thought much about girls and such as that. His father had left by then and Cody was no help, three years older, off tomcatting someplace or other. Then as a man, Ezra was … well, to be honest, he was not much different from when he was a boy. In a way, he was an eternal boy, never got boastful and brash like most men but stayed gentle, somber, contentedly running that restaurant of his and coming home peaceful and tired.