Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 25

  He didn’t answer.

  Luke went out to the yard and kicked at the grass a while as if he were hunting for something. Next door, a cluster of toddlers in their wading pool stared at him. He wanted to shout, “Turn away! Stop looking at me; you have no business.” But instead it was he who turned, wandering out of the yard and down the street. More wading pools; more round-eyed, judging stares. A Welsh corgi, squat and dignified, bustled down the sidewalk, followed by a lady in a flowing caftan. “Toulouse! Toulouse!” she called. The heat was throbbing; it almost breathed. Luke’s face became filmed with sweat and his T-shirt stuck to his back. He kept wiping his upper lip. He passed rows of colonial houses similar to his, each with some object featured like a museum piece in the living-room window: a bulbous lamp, a china horse, a vase of stiff-necked marigolds. (And what did his own window have? He couldn’t recall. He wanted to say a weeping fig tree, but that was from an apartment they’d rented, three or four towns back.) Sprinklers spun lazily. It was a satisfaction to stop, from time to time, and watch a lawn soak up the spangled water drops.

  Now here came some busy lady with her baby in a stroller, small children all around her. He crossed the street to avoid them, took a right turn, and arrived on Willow Bough Avenue with its whizzing traffic, discount drugstores, real estate offices and billboards and service stations. He waited at an intersection, pondering where to go next. One of the things about moving so often was, he never really knew where he was. He believed his sense of direction had been blunted. He couldn’t understand how some people seemed to carry a kind of detailed, internal map of the town they lived in.

  A Trailways bus zipped past him reading BALTIMORE. Imagine hailing it. (Could you hail a Trailways bus?) Imagine boarding it—assuming he had the money, which he didn’t—and riding off to Baltimore, arriving at Ezra’s restaurant and strolling in. “Here I am.” “There you are,” Ezra would say. Oh, if only he’d brought his money! Another bus passed, but that was a local. Then a gigantic truck drew up, braking for an amber light. Luke, as if obeying orders, stuck out a thumb. The driver leaned across the seat and opened the door on the passenger side. “Hop on in,” he told Luke.

  No RIDERS, a label on the window read. None of this was happening. Slowly, like someone being pushed from behind, Luke climbed into the cab. It was filled with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smell that made him feel instantly comfortable. He slammed the door and settled back. The driver—a knife-faced man, unshaven—squinted up at the traffic light and asked, “Whereabouts you headed, son?”

  Luke said, “Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “Folks know you’re going?”

  “Sure,” said Luke.

  The driver shot him a glance.

  “Why, my folks … live in Baltimore,” Luke told him.

  “Oh, then.”

  The truck started up again. They rumbled past the shopping mall where Luke’s mother went for groceries. A green sign swung overhead, listing points north. “Well,” said the driver, adjusting his mirror, “I tell you: I can carry you as far as Richmond. That’s where I have to veer west.”

  “Okay,” said Luke.

  Even Richmond, after all, was farther than he’d ever meant to go.

  On the radio, Billy Swan was singing “I Can Help.” The driver hummed along in a creaky voice that never quite hit the right note. His thin gray hair, Luke saw, had recently been combed; it lay close to his skull in damp parallel lines. He held a cigarette between his fingers but he didn’t light it. His fingernails were so thick and ridged, they might have been cut from yellow corduroy.

  “In the summer of fifty-six,” he said, “I was passing along this very road with my wife in a Safeway grocery truck when she commences to go into labor. Not but eight months gone and she proceeds directly into labor. Lord God! I recall to this day. She says, ‘Clement, I think it’s my time.’ Well, I was young then. Inexperienced. I thought a baby came one-two-three. I thought we didn’t have a moment to spare. And also, you know what they say: a seven-month baby will turn out good but an eight-month baby won’t make it. I can’t figure why that should be. So anyhow, I put on the brakes. I’m shaking all over. My brake foot is so shaky we’re just wobbling down the highway. You see that sign over there? Leading off to the right? See that hospital sign? Well, that is where I taken her. Straight up that there road. I never come by here but what I recall it.”

  Luke looked politely at the hospital sign, and then swiveled his neck to go on looking after they had passed. It was the only response he could think of.

  “Labor lasted thirty-two hours,” the driver said. “Safeway thought I’d hijacked their rig.”

  “Well,” said Luke, “but the baby got born okay.”

  “Sure,” the driver told him. “Five-pound girl. Lisa Michelle.” He thought a moment. Then he said, “She died later on, though.”

  Luke cleared his throat.

  “Crib death is what they call it nowadays,” said the driver. He swerved around a trailer. “Ever hear of it?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t.”

  “Sudden crib death. Six months old. Light of my life. Bright as a button, too—loved me to bits. I’d come home and she would just rev right up—wheel her arms and legs like a windmill soon as she set eyes on me. Then she went and died.”

  “Well, gosh,” said Luke.

  “Now I got others,” the driver said. “Want to see them? Turn down that sun visor over your head.”

  Luke turned down the visor. A color photo, held in place by a pink plastic clothespin, showed three plain girls in dresses so new and starchy that it must have been Easter Sunday.

  “The youngest is near about your age,” the driver said. “What are you: thirteen, fourteen?” He honked at a station wagon that had cut too close in front. “They’re nice girls,” he said, “but I don’t know. It’s not the same, somehow. Seems like I lost the … attachment. Lost the knack of getting attached. I mean, I like them; shoot, I love them, but I just don’t have the … seems to me I can’t get up the energy no more.”

  A lady on the radio was advertising Chevrolets. The driver switched stations and Barbra Streisand came on, showing off as usual. “But you ought to see my wife!” the driver said. “Isn’t it amazing? She loves those kids like the very first one. She just started in all over. I don’t know what to make of her. I look at her and I can’t believe it. ‘Dotty,’ I say, ‘really it all comes down to nothing. It’s not for anything,’ I say. ‘Dotty, how come you can go on like this?’ See, me, I never bounced back so good. I pass that hospital road and you know? I halfway believe if I made the turnoff, things would be just like before. Dotty’d be holding my hand, and Lisa Michelle would be waiting to be born.”

  Luke rubbed his palms on his jeans. The driver said, “Well, now. Listen to me! Just gabbing along; I guess you think I talk too much.” And for the rest of the trip he was quiet, only whistling through his teeth when the radio played a familiar song.

  He said goodbye near Richmond, going out of his way to leave Luke at a ramp just past a rest center. “You wait right here and you’ll get a ride in no time,” he said. “Here they’re traveling slow anyhow, and won’t mind stopping.” Then he raised his hand stiffly and drove off. From a distance, his truck looked as bright and chunky as a toy.

  But it seemed he took some purpose with him, some atmosphere of speed and assurance. All at once … what was Luke doing here? What could he be thinking of? He saw himself, alone in the fierce white glare of the sun, cocking his thumb at an amateurish angle on a road in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even visualize how far he had to go. (He’d never done well in geography.) Although it was hot—the peak of the afternoon, by now—he wished for a windbreaker: protection. He wished for his billfold, not so much for the small amount of money it held as for the i.d. card that had come with it when he bought it. If he were killed on this road, how would they know whom to notify? He wondered if—homeless, parentless—he would have to wear these braces on h
is teeth for the rest of his life. He pictured himself as an old man, still hiding a mouthful of metal whenever he smiled.

  Then an out-of-date, fin-tailed car stopped next to him and the door swung open. “Need a lift?” the driver asked. In the back, a little tow-headed boy bounced up and down, calling, “Come on! Come on! Get in and have a ride. Come on in and ride with us!”

  Luke got in. He found the driver smiling at him—a suntanned man in blue jeans, with deep lines around his eyes. “My name’s Dan Smollett,” he said. “That’s Sammy in the back seat.”

  “I’m Luke.”

  “We’re heading toward D.C. That do you any good?”

  “It’s fine,” said Luke. “I guess,” he added, still unsure of his geography. “I’m on my way to Baltimore.”

  “Baltimore!” said Sammy, still bouncing. “Daddy, can we go to Baltimore?”

  “We have to go to Washington, Sammy.”

  “Don’t we know someone in Baltimore too? Kitty? Susie? Betsy?”

  “Now, Sammy, settle down, please.”

  “We’re looking up Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy told Luke.

  “Oh,” said Luke.

  “We just came from Raleigh and saw Carla.”

  “No, no, Carla was in Durham,” his father told him. “It was DeeDee you saw in Raleigh.”

  “Carla was nice,” said Sammy. “She was the best of the bunch. You would’ve liked her, Luke.”

  “I would?”

  “It’s too bad she was married.”

  “Sammy, Luke doesn’t want to hear about our private lives.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Luke. He wasn’t sure what he was hearing, anyhow.

  They were back on the freeway by now, staying in the slow lane—perhaps because of the grinding noise that came whenever Dan accelerated. Luke had never been in a car as old as this one. Its interior was a dusty gray felt, the floors awash in paper cups and Frito bags. The glove compartment—doorless—spilled out maps that were splitting at the seams, along with loose change, Lifesavers, and miniature tractors and dump trucks. In the rear, Sammy bounced among blankets and grayish pillows. “Settle down,” his father kept saying, but it didn’t do any good. “He gets a little restless, along about afternoon,” Dan told Luke.

  “How long have you been traveling?” Luke asked.

  “Oh, three weeks or so.”

  “Three weeks!”

  “We left just after summer school. I’m a high school English teacher; I had to teach this grammar course first.”

  “Lookit here,” Sammy said, and on his next bounce upward he thrust a wad of paper into Luke’s face. Evidently, someone had been chewing on it. It was four sheets, mangled together, bearing typed columns of names and addresses. “Daddy’s old girlfriends,” Sammy said.

  Luke stared.

  “They are not,” said his father. “Really, Sammy.” He told Luke, “That’s my graduating class in high school. Boys and girls. Last year they had a reunion; I didn’t go but they sent us this address list.”

  “Now we’re looking up the girls,” Sammy said.

  “Not all the girls, Sammy.”

  “The girls that you went out with.”

  “My wife is divorcing me,” Dan told Luke. He seemed to think this explained everything. He faced forward again, and Luke said, “Oh.” Another rest center floated by, a distant forest of Texaco and Amoco signs. A moving van honked obligingly when Sammy gave the signal out the window. Sammy squealed and bounced all the harder—a spiky mass of bones and striped T-shirt, flapping shorts, torn sneakers.

  “What year are you in school?” Dan asked Luke.

  “I’m going into ninth grade.”

  “Read any Hemingway? Catcher in the Rye? What are they giving you to read?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m new,” said Luke.

  He could easily picture Dan as a teacher. He would wear his jeans in the classroom. He’d be one of those casual, comradely types that Luke had never quite trusted. Better to have him in suit and tie; at least then you knew where you stood.

  “In Washington,” Sammy said, “there’s two girls, Patty and Lena.”

  “Don’t say girls, say women,” Dan told him.

  “Patty Sears and Lena Sparrow.”

  “I’m better on the S’s,” Dan said to Luke. “They were in my homeroom.”

  “Lena we hear is separated,” Sammy said.

  Luke said, “But what do you do when you visit? What is there to do?”

  “Oh, sit around,” Sammy said. “Stay a few days if they ask us. Play with their dogs and their cats and their kids. Most of them do have kids. And husbands.”

  “Well, then,” said Luke. “If they’ve got husbands …”

  “But we don’t know that till we get there. Do we,” Sammy said.

  “Sammy’s a little mixed up,” Dan said. “It’s not as though we’re hunting replacements. We’re just traveling. This divorce has come as a shock and I’m just, oh, traveling back. I’m visiting old friends.”

  “But only girl friends,” Sammy pointed out.

  “They’re girls I used to get along fine with. Not sweethearts, necessarily. But they liked me; they thought I was fine. Or at least, they seemed to. I assumed they did. I don’t know). Maybe they were just acting polite. Maybe I was a mess all along.”

  Luke couldn’t think what to say.

  “So listen!” Dan told him. “You read The Great Gatsby yet?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How about Lord of the Flies? You get to Lord of the Flies?”

  “I haven’t read anything,” said Luke. “I’ve been moved around a lot; anyplace I go they’re doing Silas Marner.”

  This seemed to throw Dan into some kind of depression. His shoulders sagged and he said no more.

  Sammy finally stopped bouncing and sat back with a Jack and Jill. Pages turned, rattling in the hot wind that blew through the car. On the seat between Dan and Luke, Dan’s address list fluttered. It didn’t seem very long. Four or five sheets of paper, two columns to a sheet; it would be used up in no time. Luke said, “Um …”

  Dan looked over at him.

  “You must have gone to college,” Luke said.

  “Yes.”

  “Or even graduate school.”

  “Just college.”

  “Don’t you have some addresses from there?”

  “College isn’t the same,” said Dan. “I wouldn’t be going far enough back. Why,” he said, struck by a thought, “college is where I met my wife!”

  “Oh, I see,” Luke said.

  Outside Washington, Dan stopped the car to let him off. On the horizon was a haze of buildings that Dan said was Alexandria. “Alexandria, Virginia?” Luke asked. He didn’t understand what that had to do with Washington. But Dan, who seemed in a hurry, was already glancing in his side-view mirror. Sammy hung out the window calling, “Bye, Luke! When will I see you again? Will you come and visit when we find a place? Write me a letter, Luke!”

  “Sure,” said Luke, waving. The car rolled off.

  By now it must be four o’clock, at least, but it didn’t seem to Luke that he felt any cooler. His eyes ached from squinting in the sunlight. His hair had grown stringy and stiff. Something about this road, though—the foreign smells of tar and diesel fuel, or the roar of traffic—made him believe for the first time that he really was getting somewhere. He was confident he’d be picked up sooner or later. He thumbed a while, walked a few yards, stopped to thumb again. He had turned to begin another walk when a car slammed on its brakes, veering to the shoulder in front of him. “For God’s sake,” a woman called. “Get in this instant, you hear?”

  He opened the door and got in. It was a Dodge, not nearly as old as Dan’s car but almost as worn-looking, as if it had been used a great deal. The woman inside was plump and fortyish. Her eyes were swollen and tears had streaked her cheeks, but he trusted her anyhow; you’d think she was his mother, the way she scolded him. “Are you out of yo
ur mind? Do you want to get killed? Do you know the kind of perverts in this world? Make sure your door’s shut. Lock it, dammit; we’re not in downtown Sleepy Hollow. Fasten your seat belt. Hook up your shoulder harness.”

  He was happy to obey. He adjusted some complicated kind of buckle while the woman, sniffling, ground the gears and shot back into traffic. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Luke.”

  “Well, Luke, are you a total idiot? Does your mother know you’re hitching rides? Where are your parents in all of this?”

  “Oh, ah, Baltimore,” he said. “I don’t guess you would be going there.”

  “God, no, what would I want with Baltimore?”

  “Well, where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him.

  “You don’t know?”

  He looked at her. The tears were streaming down her cheeks again. “Um, maybe—” he said.

  “Oh, relax. Never mind, I’ll take you on to Baltimore.”

  “You will?”

  “It’s better than circling the Beltway forever.”

  “Golly, thanks,” he said.

  “They’re letting infants out on their own these days.”

  “I’m not an infant.”

  “Don’t you read the papers? Sex crimes! Muggings! Murders! Things that make no sense.”

  “So what? I’ve been traveling on my own a long time. Years,” he said. “Ever since I was born, almost.”

  “For all you know,” she told him, “I could be holding you for ransom.”

  This startled a laugh out of him. She glanced over and gave a sad smile. There was something reassuring about the comfortable mound of her stomach, the denim skirt riding up her stocky legs, the grayish-white tennis shoes. Periodically, she swabbed at the tip of her nose with her knuckles. He noticed that she wore a wedding ring, and had worn it for so long it looked embedded in her finger.

  “Just two or three miles ahead, not a month ago,” she said, “a boy in a sports car stopped to pick up a girl and she smashed in his skull with a flashlight, rolled him down an embankment, and drove away in his sports car.”