Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

He wouldn’t say. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded tight across his chest. He gazed off to one side, scowling. Jenny was puzzled. Were they quarreling, or what? When the silence stretched on, she gradually, imperceptibly returned to slicing the cucumbers for supper. She brought the knife down as quietly as possible, and without a sound scooped the disks of cucumber into a bowl. (When she and Joe had first met, he’d said, “Do you put cucumber on your skin?” “Cucumbers?” she’d asked, astonished. “You look so cool,” he told her, “I thought of this bottle of cucumber milk my aunt used to keep on her vanity table.”)

  Two of the children, Jacob and Peter, were playing with the Ouija board in front of the refrigerator. Jenny had to step over them when she went to get the tomatoes. “Excuse me,” she told them. “You’re in my way.” But they ignored her; they were intent on the board. “What will I be when I grow up?” Jacob asked, and he set his fingertips delicately upon the pointer. “Upper middle class, middle middle class, or lower middle class: which?”

  Jenny laughed, and Joe glared at her and wheeled and stamped out of the kitchen.

  On the evening news, a helicopter crewman who’d been killed in Laos was buried with full military honors. An American flag, folded into a cushiony triangle, was handed to the parents—a gray-haired, square-chinned gentleman and his fragile wife. The wife wore a trim beige raincoat and little white gloves. It was she who accepted the flag. The husband had turned away and was weeping, would not even say a few words to the microphone somebody offered him. “Sir? Sir?” a reporter asked.

  One white glove reached out and took the microphone. “What my husband means to say, I believe,” the wife declared in a feathery, Southern voice, “is we thank all those who’ve gathered here, and we know we’re just going to be fine. We’re strong, and we’re going to be fine.”

  “Hogwash,” Slevin said.

  “Why, Slevin,” said Jenny. “I didn’t know you were political.”

  “I’m not; it’s just a bunch of hogwash,” he told her. “She ought to say, ‘Take your old flag! I object! I give up!’ ”

  “My goodness,” Jenny said mildly. She was sorting Ezra’s photos; she held one out to distract him. “Look,” she said. “Your Uncle Cody, at age fifteen.”

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “He’s not my real uncle.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew him. You’d like him,” Jenny said. “I wish he’d come for a visit. He’s so … un-brotherly or something; I don’t know. And look!” she said, alighting on another photo. “Isn’t my mother pretty?”

  “I think she looks like a lizard,” Slevin said.

  “Oh, but when she was a girl, I mean … isn’t it sad how carefree she was.”

  “Half the time, she forgets my name,” Slevin said.

  “Well, she’s old,” Jenny told him.

  “Not that old. What she’s saying is, I’m not worth her bother. Old biddy. Sits at the head of the table with a piece of bread on her plate and sets both hands down flat and just stares around at us, stares around, face like one of those rotating fans, waiting for the butter but never asking, never saying a word. Till finally you or Dad says, ‘Mother? Could we pass you the butter?’ and she says, ‘Why, thank you,’ like she was wondering when you’d realize.”

  “She hasn’t had an easy life,” Jenny said.

  “I wish just once we’d get all through the meal and nobody offer her the butter.”

  “She raised us on her own, you know,” Jenny told him. “Don’t you think it must have been hard? My father walked out and left her when I was nine years old.”

  “He did?” Slevin asked. He stared at her.

  “He left her, absolutely. We never set eyes on him again.”

  “Bastard,” Slevin said.

  “Oh, well,” said Jenny. She leafed through some more photos.

  “Jesus! These people! They try to do you in.”

  “You’re overreacting,” Jenny told him. “I can’t even remember the man, if you want to know the truth. Wouldn’t know him if I saw him. And my mother managed fine. It all worked out. Look at this, Slevin: see Ezra’s old-fashioned haircut?”

  Slevin shrugged and switched the TV channel.

  “And see what I was like at your age?” She handed him the picture with the tam-o’-shanter.

  He glanced over. He frowned. He said, “Who did you say that was?”

  “Me.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. Me at thirteen. Mother wrote the date on the back.”

  “It’s not!” he said. His voice was unusually high; he sounded like a much younger child. “It isn’t! Look at it! Why, it’s like a … concentration camp person, a victim, Anne Frank! It’s terrible! It’s so sad!”

  Surprised, she turned the photo around and looked again. True, the picture wasn’t particularly happy—it showed a dark little girl with a thin, watchful face—but it wasn’t as bad as all that. “So what?” she asked, and she held it out to him once more. He drew back sharply.

  “It’s somebody else,” he told her. “Not you; you’re always laughing and having fun. It’s not you.”

  “Oh, fine, it’s not me, then,” she said, and she returned to the rest of the photos.

  “I want to talk to you about that oldest boy,” her mother said on the phone. “What’s his name? Kevin?”

  “Slevin, Mother. Honestly.”

  “Well, he stole my vacuum cleaner.”

  “He did what?”

  “Sunday afternoon, when you all came to visit, he slipped into my pantry and made off with my Hoover upright.”

  Jenny sat down on her bed. She said, “Let me get this straight.”

  “It’s been missing all week,” her mother said, “and I couldn’t understand it. I knew we hadn’t been burglarized, and even if we had, what would anyone want with my old Hoover?”

  “But why accuse Slevin?”

  “My neighbor told me, just this afternoon. Mrs. Arthur. Said, Was that your grandson I saw Sunday? Kind of hefty boy? Loading your Hoover upright into your daughter’s car trunk?’ ”

  “That’s impossible,” Jenny said.

  “Now, how do you know that? How do you know what is or is not possible? He’s hardly more than a stranger, Jenny. I mean, you got those children the way other people get weekend guests.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Jenny told her.

  “Well, all I ask is for you to go check Slevin’s bedroom. Just check.”

  “What, this minute?”

  “There’s lint specks all over my carpet.”

  “Oh, all right,” Jenny said.

  She laid the receiver on her pillow and climbed from the second floor to the third. Slevin’s door was open and he wasn’t in his room, although his radio rocked with the Jefferson Airplane. She stepped stealthily over Slevin’s knapsack, avoided a teetering pile of Popular Science magazines, opened his closet door, and found herself staring at her mother’s vacuum cleaner. She would know it anywhere: an elderly machine with a gray cloth dust bag. Its cord was coiled neatly and it seemed unharmed. If he’d taken it apart to learn how it worked, she might have understood. Or if he’d smashed it, out of some rage toward her mother. But there it sat, entire. She stood puzzling over it for several seconds. Then she wheeled it out of the closet and lugged it down the stairs, to where her mother’s voice was twanging impatiently from the receiver. “Jenny? Jenny?”

  “Well, you’re right,” Jenny said. “I found it in his room.”

  There was a pause in which Pearl could have said, “I told you so,” but kindly did not. Then she said, “I wonder if he might be calling for help in some way.”

  “By stealing a vacuum cleaner?”

  “He’s really a very sweet boy,” Pearl said. “I can see that. Maybe he’s asking for a psychologist or some such.”

  “More likely he’s asking for a neater house,” Jenny said. “The dust balls on his closet
floor have started raising a family.”

  She pictured Slevin, in desperation, stealing an arsenal of cleaning supplies—this neighbor’s broom, that neighbor’s Ajax, gathered with the same feverish zeal he showed in collecting Indian head pennies. She was attacked by a sudden sputter of laughter.

  “Oh, Jenny,” her mother said sadly. “Do you have to see everything as a joke?”

  “It’s not my fault if funny things happen,” Jenny said.

  “It most certainly is,” said her mother, but instead of explaining herself, she all at once grew brisk and requested the return of her vacuum cleaner by tomorrow morning.

  Jenny and Joe and every child except the baby were watching television. It was long past bedtime for most of them, but this was a special occasion: the Late, Late Show was A Taste of Honey. Everyone in the house had heard of A Taste of Honey. It was Jenny’s all-time favorite movie. She had seen it once, back in 1963, and never forgotten it. Nothing else had ever measured up to it, she was fond of saying, and after returning from some other movie she was sure to announce, “Well, it was all right, I guess, but it wasn’t A Taste of Honey.” By now, any one of the children could finish that sentence before she got it halfway out. They’d ask as soon as she walked in the door, “Was it A Taste of Honey, Jenny? Was it?” and Phoebe was once heard telling Peter, “I like the new teacher okay, I guess, but she isn’t A Taste of Honey.”

  When they learned it was coming to television, they had all begged to stay up and watch. The older ones made cocoa and the younger ones set out potato chips. Becky and Slevin arranged a ring of chairs around the TV set in the living room.

  “You know what’s going to happen,” Joe told Jenny. “After all this time, even A Taste of Honey won’t be A Taste of Honey.”

  In a way, he was right. Not that she didn’t still love it—yes, yes, she assured the children, it was just as she’d remembered—but after all, she was a different person watching it. The movie wrenched her with pity, now, when before it had made her feel hopeful. And wasn’t it odd, wasn’t it downright queer, that she’d never identified the story with her own? In 1963, she was a resident in pediatrics, struggling to care for a two-year-old born six weeks after her marriage dissolved. Yet she’d watched a movie about an unwed, unsupported pregnant girl with the most detached enjoyment, dreamily making her way through a box of pretzels. (And what had she been doing in a movie theater, anyway? How had she found the time, during such a frantic schedule?)

  When it was over, she switched off the TV and shooed the children up the stairs. Quinn, the youngest, who had not been all that impressed with A Taste of Honey, was sound asleep and had to be carried by Joe. Even the older ones were groggy and blinking. “Wake up,” she told them. “Come on, now,” and she tugged at Jacob, who had dropped in a bundle on the topmost step. One by one she guided them to their beds and kissed them good night. How noisy their rooms seemed, even in silence!— that riotous clamor of toys and flung-off clothes, their vibrant, clashing rock star posters and antiwar bumper stickers and Orioles banners. Three of the children wouldn’t use sheets but slept in sleeping bags instead—garishly patterned, zippered cocoons sprawled on top of the blankets; and Phoebe didn’t like beds at all but curled in a quilt on the floor, most often out in the hall in front of her parents’ room. She lay across the doorway like a bodyguard, and you had to watch your step in the dark so as not to trip on her.

  “I want that radio down,” Jenny said, and she kissed the top of Becky’s head. Then she peeked into Slevin’s room, knocked on the frame of his open door, and entered. He wore his daytime clothes to bed, as always—even his wide tooled belt with the trucker’s buckle—and he lay on top of the covers. She had been kissing him good night every night since she’d married Joe, but still he acted bashful. All she really did was brush her cheek against his, allowing him his dignity. “Sleep well,” she told him.

  He said, “I see you found the vacuum cleaner.”

  “Vacuum cleaner,” she said, stalling for time.

  “I’m sorry I took it,” he said. “I guess your mom is pretty mad, huh? But it wasn’t stealing; honest. I just needed to borrow it for a spell.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “Needed to borrow it for what?” she asked.

  He said, “Well, for … I don’t know. Just for … See, there it was in the pantry. It was exactly like my mother’s. Just exactly. You know how you never think about a thing, or realize you remember it, and then all at once something will bring it all back? I forgot how it had that rubber strip around the edge so it wouldn’t scuff the furniture, and that tall, puffy bag I used to be scared of when I was a kid. It even smelled the same. It had that same clothy smell, just like my mother’s. You know? So I wanted to take it home. But once I got it here, well, it didn’t work out. It’s like I had lost the connection. It wasn’t the same after all.”

  “That’s all right, Slevin,” she said. “Heavens, honey, that’s all right.” Then she worried her voice had shown too much, would make him bashful again, so she laughed a little and said, “Shall we get you a Hoover of your own for your birthday?”

  He turned over on his side.

  “Or we could have it made up in calico,” she told him, giggling. “A tiny stuffed calico vacuum cleaner to take to bed with you.”

  But Slevin just closed his eyes, so after a while she wished him good night and left.

  She dreamed she was back with Sam Wiley, her second husband and the one she’d loved the best. She’d made a fool of herself over Sam. She dreamed he was twirling on that high wooden stool they used to have in their kitchen in Paulham. He was preening the scrolls of his handlebar mustache and singing “Let It Be.” Which hadn’t even existed, at the time.

  She opened her eyes and heard “Let It Be” on one of the children’s radios, sailing out across the dark hall. How often had she told them? She got up and made her way to Peter’s room—barefoot, stepping over Phoebe. Radios late at night sounded so different, she thought—so far away and crackling with static, almost gritty, as if the music had had to travel above miles of railroad tracks and deserted superhighways, past coal yards and auto dumps, oil derricks and factory smokestacks and electrical transformers. She switched off the radio and pulled Peter’s sleeping bag up around his shoulders. She checked on the baby in her crib. Then she returned to bed, shivering slightly, and huddled against Joe’s hulking back for warmth.

  “Mack the Knife,” Sam used to sing, and “Greenfields”—yes, that had been around. She remembered how operatic he’d get, rolling his eyes, pounding his chest, trying to make her laugh. (She’d been an earnest young medical student, in those days.) Then she remembered the tender, aching line that the examining table had pressed across the mound of the baby, when Jenny was an intern bending over a patient. Six months pregnant, seven months … By her eighth month the marriage was finished, and Jenny was walking around in a daze. She saw that she had always been doomed to fail, had been unlovable, had lacked some singular quality that would keep a husband. She had never known this consciously, before, but the pain she felt was eerily familiar—like a suspicion, long held, at last confirmed.

  She wore uniforms designed for male physicians with forty-inch waists; there were no maternity lab coats. On rounds, professors would give her doubtful glances and ask if she were sure she was up to this. Sympathetic nurses brought her so many cups of coffee that she thought she would float away. One of those nurses stayed with her through most of her labor. Other women had their husbands, but Jenny had Rosa Perez, who let her squeeze her fingers as hard as needed and never said a word of complaint.

  And what was the name of that neighbor who used to watch the baby? Mary something—Mary Lee, Mary Lou—some fellow intern’s wife, as poor as Jenny and the mother of two children under two. She baby-sat for a pittance, but even that was more than Jenny could afford. And the schedule! Months of nights on duty, thirty-six hours on call and twelve off, emergency room, obstetrics, trauma surgery … and her resi
dency was not much better. Meanwhile, Becky changed from an infant to a little girl, an outsider really, a lively child with Sam Wiley’s snapping black eyes, unrelated to Jenny. Though it was a shock, sometimes, to see her give that level, considering stare so typical of the Tulls. Was it possible, after all, that this small stranger might constitute a family? She learned to walk; she learned to talk. “No!” she would say, in her firm, spunky voice; and Jenny, trying to stay awake at three in the morning or three in the afternoon, whatever bit of time they had together, dropped her head in her hands. “No!” said Becky, and Jenny hauled off and slapped her hard across the mouth, then shook her till her head lolled, then flung her aside and ran out of the apartment to … where? (A movie, perhaps?) In those days, objects wobbled and grew extra edges. She was so exhausted that the sight of her patients’ white pillows could mesmerize her. Sounds were thick, as if underwater. Words on a chart were meaningless—so many k’s and g’s, such a choppy language English was, short syllables, clumps of consonants, she’d never noticed; like Icelandic, maybe, or Eskimo. She slammed Becky’s face into her Peter Rabbit dinner plate and gave her a bloody nose. She yanked a handful of her hair. All of her childhood returned to her: her mother’s blows and slaps and curses, her mother’s pointed fingernails digging into Jenny’s arm, her mother shrieking, “Guttersnipe! Ugly little rodent!” and some scrap of memory—she couldn’t quite place it—Cody catching hold of Pearl’s wrist and fending her off while Jenny shrank against the wall.

  Was this what it came to—that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? She failed to see a curb and sprained her ankle, hobbled to work in agony. She misdiagnosed a case of viral pneumonia. She let a greenstick fracture slip right past her. She brought Becky a drink of water in the middle of the night and then suddenly, without the slightest intention, screamed, “Take it! Take it!” and threw the cup into Becky’s face. Becky shivered and caught her breath for hours afterward, even in her sleep, though Jenny held her tightly on her lap.