Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  Nights, especially Friday nights, she lay in bed in the dark and listened to the gritty click of heels on the sidewalk. Footsteps would come close and then pass. She would let out her breath. A new set of footsteps approached. Surely this was Beck. She knew how hesitantly he would let himself in, expecting the worst—his children’s tears, his wife’s reproaches. But instead, he’d find everything unchanged. The children would greet him offhandedly. Pearl would peck his cheek and ask if he’d had a good trip. Later, he would thank her for keeping his secret. He would be so easily readmitted, since only the two of them knew he’d left; outsiders would go on believing the Tulls were a happy family. Which they were, in fact. Oh, they’d always been so happy! They’d depended only on each other, because of moving around so much. It had made them very close. He’d be back.

  Her Uncle Seward’s widow wrote to wish her a happy birthday. (Pearl had forgotten all about it.) Pearl responded immediately, thanking her. We celebrated at home, she wrote. Beck surprised me with the prettiest necklace … Say hello to the others, she added, and she pictured them all in her uncle’s parlor; she ached for them, but drew herself up and recalled how they had been so sure no man would marry her. She could never tell them what had happened.

  Her old friend Emmaline stopped by, on her way to visit a sister in Philadelphia. Pearl said Beck was out of town; the two of them were in luck; they could talk girl-talk to their hearts’ content. She put Emmaline in the double bed with her, instead of in the guest room. They stayed awake half the night gossiping and giggling. Once Pearl almost set a hand on Emmaline’s arm and said, “Emmaline. Listen. I feel so horrible, Emmaline.” But fortunately, she caught herself. The moment passed. In the morning they overslept, and Pearl had to rush to get the children off to school; so there wasn’t much said. “We should do this more often,” Emmaline told her as she left, and Pearl said Beck would be sorry he had missed her. “You know he’s always liked you,” she said. Although actually, Beck used to claim that Emmaline reminded him of a woodchuck.

  Easter came, and Jenny had a part in her school’s Easter pageant. When the day arrived and Beck was still not home, Jenny cried. Couldn’t he ever be home? It wasn’t his fault, Pearl told her. There was a war on, production speeded up; he couldn’t help it if his company needed him more now. They ought to be proud, she said. Jenny dried her tears and told everyone that her daddy had to help with the war effort. The war was so old by now, grinding on; no one was impressed. Still, it made Jenny feel better. Pearl went to the Easter pageant alone, wearing a rakish, visored hat that was patterned after the hats the WACs wore.

  When Beck had been gone a month, he sent a note from Norfolk saying he was fine and hoped that she and the kids did not lack for anything. He enclosed a check for fifty dollars. It wasn’t nearly enough. Pearl spent a morning pacing the house. First she went over his note in her mind, picking apart his words for underlying meanings. But not much could underlie right good apartment with hotplate and sales manager seems to think well of me. Then she considered the money. Around lunchtime, she put on her coat and her WACs hat and walked around the corner to Sweeney Bros. Grocery and Fine Produce, where a CASHIER WANTED sign had been yellowing in the window for weeks. They were tickled to death to hire her. The younger Sweeney brother showed her how to work the cash register and said she could start the next morning. When her children came home from school that day, she told them she was taking a job to fill in time. She needed something to keep her busy, she said, now that they were growing up and going off on their own more.

  Two months passed. Three months. Fifty dollars a month from Beck. When the second check arrived, no letter came with it. She tore the envelope apart, thinking it must have got stuck inside, but there wasn’t a word. With the third check, though, he wrote that he was moving to Cleveland, where the company planned to open a new branch. He said it was a good sign they’d decided on this transfer—or “invite,” he called it. He never called it a transfer; he called it an invite. An invite to this important expansion westward. He began the letter, Dear Pearl & kids, but Pearl didn’t show it to the children. She folded it neatly and put it with the first letter, in a hosiery box in her bureau, where even that meddlesome Cody wouldn’t think to look. In the fourth envelope, again, there was only a check. She saw that he was not in communication with her (was how she phrased it), but was merely touching base from time to time. Really, all he was doing was saying, Please find enclosed. It didn’t occur to her to answer him. Yet she went on saving his letters.

  Sometimes she had strange thoughts that surprised her. For instance: At least I have more closet space now. And more drawer space.

  At night she dreamed that Beck was new and wonderful again, someone she’d just become acquainted with. He gazed at her adoringly, overturning some unfamiliar center deep inside her. He helped her cross streets, climb steps. His hand cupped her elbow warmly or circled her waist or steadied the small of her back. She felt cherished. When she woke, her only thought was to sink back into her dream. She would keep her eyes shut. Superstitiously, she would play possum, not stirring, trying to persuade the dream that she was still asleep. But it never worked. Finally she would rise, whatever the hour, and go downstairs to make a pot of coffee. Standing at the kitchen window with her cup, watching the sky whiten over the rooftops, she would catch sight of her dark, transparent reflection—her small face and round chin that was taking on a dented look, these past few years; the worried tent of her colorless eyebrows; the pale frazzle of hair that failed to hide the crease across her forehead. That crease was not a wrinkle but a scar, the mark of a childhood accident. Oh, she was not so old! She was not so very old! But then she remembered the accident: she’d been trying to ride a cousin’s bicycle, the very first in the family. A “wheel” was what they called it. Trying to ride a wheel. And here it was 1944 and bicycles were everywhere, but so modernized they were hardly the same breed of beast. All three of her children knew how to ride and would, in fact, have had bikes of their own if not for the war. How had she come so far? She had just passed her fiftieth birthday. There was not a hope of Beck’s return. He’d found someone younger, someone glamorous and merry, still capable of bearing children. They were laughing at her—at how she’d always been an old maid, really, always an old maid at heart. How she flinched when he turned to her in the dark, still startled, after all these years, by the concreteness of him—by his scratchy whiskers, salty-smelling skin, weighty body. How she had to have things just perfect, the linens on labeled shelves in the cupboard and the shades pulled evenly in the windows. How she’d never learned to let go, to give in, to float on the current of a day, but must always fuss and pull at stray threads and straighten the corners of things; and worst of all, how she knew she did that, knew while she was doing it, but still could not stop herself.

  He was never coming back.

  It was time to tell the children. She was amazed, in fact, that she’d managed to keep it from them for so long. Had they always been this easy to fool? One good thing about telling them: they would rally around her better. She didn’t like to admit it but she was losing control of the boys. Instead of supporting her—taking out the garbage, helping her in various manly and protective ways—they seemed to be running wild; yes, even Ezra. They didn’t even do the chores they used to do, let alone take on new ones. Cody in fact was hardly ever home. Ezra was dreamy and forgetful and would like as not walk off in the middle of a task. When she told them what was what, she thought, they’d be horrified at how they’d let her down. They’d ask why she’d hidden it all this time, what she could have been thinking of.

  Only she couldn’t tell them.

  She planned how she would do it: she would gather them around her on the sofa, in the lamplight, some evening after supper. “Children. Dear ones,” she would say. “There’s something you should know.” But she wouldn’t be able to continue; she might cry. It was unthinkable to cry in front of the children. Or in front of anyone. Oh, she had
her pride! She was not a tranquil woman; she often lost her temper, snapped, slapped the nearest cheek, said things she later regretted—but thank the Lord, she didn’t expose her tears. She didn’t allow any tears. She was Pearl Cody Tull, who’d ridden out of Raleigh triumphant with her new husband and never looked back. Even now, even standing at the kitchen window, all alone, watching her tense and aging face, she didn’t cry.

  Every morning, then, she went off to Sweeney Bros. She continued to wear her hat, giving the impression that she had merely dropped in and was helping out as a favor, in a pinch. As each customer approached (generally someone she knew, at least by sight), she would give a firm nod and then squint, implying a smile. She rang up the purchases efficiently while a boy named Alexander bagged them. “Thank you, and good day,” she said at the end, with another shorthand smile. She liked to seem crisp and professional. When neighbors showed up, people she knew more closely, she felt she was dying inside but she didn’t lose her composure. With them she was even crisper. She had a little rhythm between the key stabbing and the sliding of groceries along the wooden counter; it kept her mind off things. If she allowed herself to think, she started worrying. Summer had arrived and her children were out of school all day. No telling what they might be up to.

  At five-thirty she walked home, past crowds of youngsters playing hopscotch or huddled over marble games, past babies set to air in their carriages, women perched on their stoops fanning themselves in the heat. She’d climb her steps and be met at the door with bad news: “Jenny fell down the stairs today and bit her lower lip clean through and had to go to Mrs. Simmons’s house for ice and gauze.”

  “Oh, Jenny, honey!”

  It seemed they greeted her with disaster, saved up all their accidents especially for her. She’d want to take off her hat and shoes and fall back onto the sofa; but no, it was “The toilet’s stopped up,” and “I tore my pants,” and “Cody hit Ezra with the orange juice pitcher.”

  “Can’t you just let me be?” she would ask. “Can’t you just give me a minute to myself?”

  She’d make supper from tins she’d brought home, nothing fancy. She would listen to the radio while she washed dishes. Jenny was supposed to dry but was off playing tag with the boys. Stepping out the back door to heave her dishpan of water into the yard, Pearl paused to watch them—Cody and Jenny dark and quick, high-pitched, overcome with laughter; Ezra pale, a glimmer in the twilight, slower and more wandery in his movements. Sometimes there’d be neighbor children, too, but more often just the three of them. They stuck together, mostly.

  She shampooed her hair and rinsed out a slip. Called to Cody to fetch the other two and come inside now.

  Nights, she worked on the house. To look at her—an out-of-date kind of woman, frail boned, deep bosomed, as if those pout-fronted gowns of her girlhood had somehow formed her figure—you would never guess it, but Pearl was clever with tools. She patched a crack, glazed a window, replaced two basement stair treads. She mended a lamp switch and painted the kitchen cupboards. Even in the old days, she had done such things; Beck was not very handy. “This whole, entire house is resting on my shoulders,” she would tell him, and she meant it as an accusation; but the thought was also reassuring, in a way. She knew that she was competent. From early in their marriage, from the moment she had realized how often they would be moving, she had concentrated on making each house perfect—airtight and rustproof and waterproof. She dropped the effort of continually meeting new neighbors, and she stopped returning (freshly filled) the cake tins they brought over when she arrived. All she cared about was sealing up the house, as if for a hurricane. She woke nights wondering if the basement were dry, and went down barefoot to make sure. She couldn’t enjoy their Sunday outings because the house might have burned to the ground in her absence. (How vividly she could picture their return! There’d be an open space where the house used to stand, and a tattered hole for the basement.) Here in Baltimore, she gathered, she was thought to be unfriendly, even spooky—the witch of Calvert Street. What a notion! She’d known such witches in her childhood; she was nothing like them. All she wanted was to be allowed to get on with what mattered: calk the windows; weatherstrip the door. With tools she was her true self, capable and strong. She felt an indulgent kind of scorn for her children, who had not inherited her skill. Cody lacked the patience, Ezra was inept, Jenny too flighty. It was remarkable, Pearl thought, how people displayed their characters in every little thing they undertook.

  Hammering down a loose floorboard, with a bristle of nails in her mouth, she would let time slip away from her. It would get to be ten-thirty or eleven. Her children would be standing in the doorway all sweaty and grass stained, blinking in the sudden brightness. “Heavens! Get to bed,” she told them. “I thought I called you in hours ago.” But a while after they left she’d start to feel deserted, even though they hadn’t been much company. She would lay aside her hammer and rise and walk the house, smoothing her skirt, absently touching her hair where it was falling out of its bun. Up the stairs to the hall, past the little room where Jenny slept, and into her own room, with its buckling cardboard wardrobe streaked to look like wood grain, the bare-topped bureau, the cavernous bed. Then out again and up more stairs to the boys’ room, a third-floor dormitory that smelled of heat. The trustful sound of her sons’ breathing made her envious. She turned and descended the stairs, all the way down to the kitchen. The back door stood open and the screen door fluttered with moths. Neighboring houses rang with someone’s laughter, a few cracked notes from a trumpet, an out-of-tune piano playing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” She closed the door and locked it and pulled down the paper shade. She climbed the stairs once more and took off her clothing, piece by piece, and put on her nightgown and went to bed.

  She dreamed he wore that aftershave that he’d used when they were courting. She hadn’t smelled it in years, hadn’t given it a thought, but now it came back to her distinctly—something pungent, prickled with spice. A swaggery and self-vaunting scent, she had known even then; but catching wind of it, when he arrived on Uncle Seward’s front porch to pick her up, she had felt adventurous. She had flung the door open so widely that it banged against the wall, and he had laughed and said, “Well, now. Hey, now,” as she stood there, smiling out at him.

  She had heard you could not dream a smell, or recall a smell in its absence; so when she woke she was convinced, for a moment, that Beck had let himself into the house and was seated on the edge of the bed, watching while she slept. But there was no one there.

  Dance? Oh, I don’t think so, she said inside her head. I’m in charge of this whole affair, you see, and all I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces. Whoever it was drew away. Ezra turned a page of his magazine. “Ezra,” she said. She felt him grow still. He had this habit—he had always had it—of becoming totally motionless when people spoke to him. It was endearing, but also in some ways a strain, for then whatever she said to him (“I feel a draft,” or “The paper boy is late again”) was bound to disappoint him, wasn’t it? How could she live up to Ezra’s expectations? She plucked at her quilt. “If I could just have some water,” she told him.

  He poured it from the pitcher on the bureau. She heard no ice cubes clinking; they must have melted. Yet it seemed just minutes ago that he’d brought in a whole new supply. He raised her head, rested it on his shoulder, and tipped the glass to her lips. Yes, lukewarm—not that she minded. She drank gratefully, keeping her eyes closed. His shoulder felt steady and comforting. He laid her back down on the pillow.

  “Dr. Vincent’s coming at ten,” he told her.

  “What time is it now?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Eight-thirty in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been here all night?” she asked.

  “I slept a little.”

  “Sleep now. I won’t be needing you.”

  “Well, maybe
after the doctor comes.”

  It was important to Pearl that she deceive the doctor. She didn’t want to go to the hospital. Her illness was pneumonia, she was almost certain; she guessed it from a past experience. She recognized the way it settled into her back. If Dr. Vincent found out he would send her off to Union Memorial, tent her over with plastic. “Maybe you should cancel the doctor altogether,” she told Ezra. “I’m very much improved, I believe.”

  “Let him decide that.”

  “Well, I know how my own self feels, Ezra.”

  “We won’t argue about it just now,” he said.

  He could surprise you, Ezra could. He’d let a person walk all over him but then display, at odd moments, a deep and rock-hard stubbornness. She sighed and smoothed her quilt. It seemed he’d spilled some water on it.

  She remembered when Ezra was a child, still in elementary school. “Mother,” he had said, “if it turned out that money grew on trees, just for one day and never again, would you let me stay home from school and pick it?”

  “No,” she told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Your education is more important.”

  “Other kids’ mothers would let them, I bet.”

  “Other mothers don’t have plans for their children to amount to something.”

  “But just for one day?”

  “Pick it after school. Or before. Wake up extra early; set your alarm clock ahead an hour.”

  “An hour!” he said. “One little hour, for something that happens only once in all the world.”

  “Ezra, will you let it be? Must you keep at me this way? Why are you so obstinate?” Pearl had asked him.

  It only now occurred to her, under her damp quilt, to wonder why she hadn’t said yes, he could stay home. If money decided to grow on trees one day, let him pick all he liked! she should have said. What difference would it have made?

  Oh, she’d been an angry sort of mother. She’d been continually on edge; she’d felt too burdened, too much alone. And after Beck left, she’d been so preoccupied with paying the rent and juggling the budget and keeping those great, clod-footed children in new shoes. It was she who called the doctor at two a.m. when Jenny got appendicitis; it was she who marched downstairs with a baseball bat the night they heard that scary noise. She’d kept the furnace stoked with coal, confronted the neighborhood bully when Ezra got beaten up, hosed the roof during Mrs. Simmons’s chimney fire. And when Cody came home drunk from some girl’s birthday party, who had to deal with that? Pearl Tull, who’d never taken anything stronger than a glass of wine at Christmas. She sat him smartly in a kitchen chair, ignored his groans, leaned across the table to him—and couldn’t think of a thing to say.