Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Page 26

  “That proves it’s you doing something dangerous, not me,” he pointed out. (How easy it was to fall into the bantering, argumentative tone reserved for mothers!) “What did you pick me up for? I could be planning to kill you.”

  “Oh, indeed,” she said, sniffling again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex on you, by any chance?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “I’d never stop for just anyone,” she told him. “Only if they’re in danger—I mean young girls alone, or infants like you.”

  “I am not an—”

  “Yesterday it was a girl in short shorts, can you believe it? I told her; I said, ‘Honey, you’re inviting trouble, dressed like that.’ Day before, it was a twelve-year-old boy. He said he’d been robbed of his bus fare and had to get home as best he could. Day before that—”

  “What, you drive here every day?”

  “Most days.”

  He looked out the window at the vans and oil tankers, interstate buses, cars with their overloaded luggage racks. “I had sort of thought this was a long-range highway,” he said.

  “Oh, no. Heavens, no. No, I live right nearby,” she told him.

  “Then what are you driving around for?”

  Her chin crumpled in. “None of your business,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “What it is, you see, I generally do this from two or three in the afternoon till suppertime. Sometimes I go to Annapolis, sometimes off in Virginia someplace. Sometimes just round and round the Beltway. It all depends,” she said. She tossed him a look, as if expecting him to ask what it all depended on, but he had been insulted and said nothing. She sighed. “Two or three o’clock is when my daughter wakes up. My daughter is fourteen years old. Just about your age, right? How old are you?”

  He drummed his fingers and looked out the window.

  “In the summer, she sleeps forever. My husband says, ‘Jeepers, Mag.’ He says, ‘Why do you let her sleep so late?’ Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because she’s impossible. Truly impossible. I mean, it isn’t believable that she could be so awful. She comes downstairs in her bathrobe, yawning. Finds me in the kitchen. Says, ‘Well, Ma, I see you’re wearing your insecticide perfume again. DDT Number Five.’ Then she floats away. Leaving me sniffing my wrists and wondering. I say, ‘Liddie, are you going to clean your room today?’ and she says, ‘Listen to you, sniping and griping; you sound exactly like your mother.’ I make a little joke; she says, ‘Very funny, Ma. Ha ha. The big comedian.’ I find she’s stolen my best lace bra that I only wear on my anniversary and she flings it back all grimy at the seams: ‘Take it, who wants it, it’s too flat-chested anyhow.’ To my face, she calls me a bitch, says I’m fat and homely, says she hates me, and I say, ‘Listen here, young lady, it’s time we got a few things straight,’ but all she does is yawn and start chewing one of those plastic price-tag strings off the sleeve of her blouse. I tell my husband, ‘Speak to her,’ so he says, ‘Liddie, you know how your mother gets. Why do you upset her?’ I say, ‘How I get? What do you mean, how I get?’ and before you know, it’s him and me fighting, which may have been her plan all along. Division. Disruption. Chaos. That’s what she enjoys. She’s got this boyfriend, treats him terribly. Finally he broke up with her, and she cried all night and asked a hundred times, ‘Why did I act like I did? What can I do to change his mind?’ I told her to be honest, just phone him and say she didn’t know what had got into her; so next morning she phoned, and they made up, and everything was wonderful and she came and thanked me for my good advice. Her life was back in order, it looked like. So she sat at the table a while, calm as I’ve seen her. Then she started swinging her foot. Then she started picking her fingernails. Then she went and phoned her boyfriend again. Said, ‘Roger, I didn’t want to tell you this but I thought it’s time you knew. The doctor says I’m dying of leukemia.’ ”

  Luke laughed. She looked over at him innocently, but he noticed a wry, proud twist at the corners of her mouth. “Around two or three o’clock,” she said, “I get in my car and start driving. At first, I’m talking out loud. You ought to see me. ‘I’m never coming back,’ I say. I’m cursing through my teeth; I’m honking at crippled old ladies. ‘That little wretch, that pest, that spoiled brat,’ I say. ‘She’ll be sorry!’ I speed along—oh, you ought to see my traffic record! One more point on my license and I’ll have to take that Saturday course on the evils of reckless driving; have to watch that movie where the lady ends up decapitated. Well, at least it’ll get me out of the house. I sling the car around and don’t let other cars ahead of me and I picture how my husband will come home and say, ‘Liddie? Where is your mother? What did you do to her, Liddie?’ and Liddie will feel just awful … but then I think of my husband. I have a really nice husband. It’s not him I want to leave. And I wonder if I could sneak back home at night and tell him, ‘Psst! Let’s both leave. Let’s elope,’ I’ll say. But I know he wouldn’t do it. He’s not as much involved. She annoys him but he’s not around enough to make any serious mistakes with her. That’s what kills me: making mistakes. Overreacting, letting her get to me … oh, I can think of so many! You could say that what I’m leaving behind is my own poor view of me, right? So then I start driving slower. I start remembering things. I think of Liddie when she was small: she always stood so straight. You could pick her out of a crowd by her straight little back. And for one whole year she would only eat with chopsticks. Click-click against her plate … you ought to have seen the mess! But I didn’t mind. In those days, she liked me a lot. I was a really good mother, and she liked me.”

  “Maybe she still likes you,” Luke said doubtfully.

  “No,” said the woman. “She doesn’t.”

  They passed a sign for Baltimore. The countryside seemed endlessly the same—fields of high grass, then the backsides of housing developments with clotheslines and motorcycles and aboveground, circular swimming pools, then fields of high grass again, as if the scenery came around regularly on a giant conveyor belt.

  “What it is,” said the woman, “it’s like I’m driving till I find her past self. You know? And my past self. Then mile by mile, I simmer down. I let up on the gas a bit more. So by suppertime, I’m ready to come home again.”

  Luke checked the clock on her dashboard. It was four thirty-five.

  “Tonight I’ll just fix a tuna salad,” she said.

  “Well, I appreciate your doing this.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, and she gave a final swipe to her nose.

  By five o’clock, they had reached the outskirts of Baltimore. It was something like entering a piece of machinery, Luke thought—all sooty and cluttered and churning. The woman seemed used to it; she drove without comment. “Now, tell me what to do after Russell Street,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “How do I find your house?”

  “Oh,” he said, “why don’t you just drop me off downtown.”

  “Where downtown?”

  “Anyplace will do.” She looked over at him.

  He said, “I live so near, I mean …”

  “Near to where?”

  “Why, to anywhere.”

  “Now, listen, Luke,” she said. “I’m getting a very odd feeling here. I want to know exactly where your parents are.”

  He wondered what she would do if he told her he had to look them up in the telephone book. He’d been away so long, he would say, at summer camp or someplace, the address had just slipped his … no. But the fact was, he had never known Ezra’s street address. It was just a house they arrived at, Cody driving, Luke sitting in back.

  “The thing of it is,” he said, “they’re both at work. They own this restaurant, the Homesick Restaurant. Maybe you could drop me off at the restaurant.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Ah …”

  “There is no such place, is there,” she said. “I knew it! Homesick Restaurant, indeed.”

  “There is! Believe me,” he said. “But it’s n
ew. They just did buy it, and I haven’t been there yet.”

  “Look it up,” she told him.

  She stopped so suddenly, he was glad he’d fastened his seat belt. A telephone booth stood beside them. “Go on! Look it up,” she told him. She must have thought she was calling his bluff.

  Luke said, “All right, I will.”

  Then in the phone booth—the old, fully enclosed kind, a glass and aluminum boxful of heat—he ran a finger past Homeland Racquet Club, Homeseekers Realty, and found himself so surprised by Homesick Restaurant that it might have been a bluff after all. “It’s on St. Paul Street,” he said when he came back to the car. “You can drop me off anywhere; I’ll find the number.”

  But no, she had to take him to the doorstep, though it meant a good deal of doubling back because St. Paul, it turned out, was one-way and she kept miscalculating the cross streets. When she parked in front of the restaurant, she said, “Well, I’ll be! It exists.”

  “Thank you for the ride,” Luke said.

  She peered at him. “Are you going to be all right, Luke?” she asked.

  “Of course I am.”

  “And you’re certain your parents are here.”

  “Of course they are.”

  But she waited, anyhow. (It reminded him of the grade-school parties given by his classmates—his mother making sure he got in before she drove away.) He tried the restaurant’s door and found it locked. He would have to go around to the rear. The woman leaned out her window and called, “What’s the trouble, Luke?”

  “I forgot, I have to use the kitchen entrance.”

  “What if that’s locked, too?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “You listen, Luke,” she called to him. “Everything is changing; things aren’t safe like in the old days. Every alley in this city is full of muggers, are you hearing what I say? Every doorway and vacant building, Luke, every street in Baltimore.”

  He waved and disappeared. A moment later he heard her car take off again—but reluctantly, without its usual verve, as if she were still absorbed in her catalogue of dangers.

  He knew the restaurant so well, he must have carried its image constantly within him: its clatter of pans and crash of china, smell of cut celery simmering in butter, broom-shaped bundles of herbs dangling from the rafters, gallon jars of wrinkly Greek olives, bushel baskets of parsley, steaming black kettles watched devotedly by a boy no older than Luke. Beyond the kitchen, hardly separate from it, stretched the dining room with its white-draped tables and dusty sunbeams. There were so many decorations in the dining room—gifts and mementos, accumulated over the years—that Luke was always reminded of someone’s home, one of those teeming family houses where kindergarten drawings are taped above the mantel and then forgotten. He recognized the six-foot collage of Ezra’s hearts-of-palm salad, presented by an artist who often ate here, and he saw the colored paper chain that he and his cousins had festooned around a light fixture for some long-ago Christmas dinner. (Ezra had never taken it down, though the dinner had broken off in a quarrel and the chain was now brittle and faded.) Luke knew that in one corner, out of his line of vision, sat a heavy antique bicycle that Ezra had bought in a Timonium flea market. MERCURIO’S CULINARY DELICACIES was lettered importantly across its wooden basket, which was filled with frosty glass pears and bananas contributed by a customer. Astride the bicycle stood a cardboard Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up—the prank of unknown persons, but no one had ever removed her and Marilyn rode on, her neck creased nearly to the breaking point, her smile growing paler season by season and her accordion-pleated skirt curling at the edges.

  Hot, flushed workers darted around the kitchen, intent on their private tasks, weaving between the others like those Model T’s in silent comedies—zip!, just missing, never once colliding, their paths crisscrossing but miraculously slipping past disaster. Luke stood in the doorway unnoticed. His trip had been such a process in itself; he had almost lost sight of his purpose. What was he doing here, anyhow? But then he saw Ezra. Ezra was piling biscuits in a crude rush basket. He wore not the blue plaid shirt that Luke remembered—which was flannel, after all, unsuitable for summer—but a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He thoughtfully set each biscuit in its place, his large, blunt hands deliberate. Luke made his way across the kitchen. He was surprised by a flash of shyness. His heart was beating too fast. He arrived in front of Ezra and said, “Hi.”

  Ezra looked up, still thoughtful. “Hi,” he said.

  He didn’t know who this was.

  Luke was stricken, at first. Then he began to feel pleased. Why, he must have changed immeasurably! He’d shot up a foot; his voice was getting croaky; he was practically a man. And there was some safety, a kind of shield, in Ezra’s flat gaze. Luke rearranged his plans. He squared his shoulders. “I’d like a job,” he said firmly.

  Ezra grew still. “Luke?” he said.

  “If that boy over there can tend the kettles—” Luke was saying. He stopped. “Pardon?”

  “It’s Cody’s Luke. Isn’t it.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I could tell when you did your shoulders that way, just like your dad, just exactly like your dad. How funny! And something about the tone of your voice, all set to do battle … well, Luke!” He shook Luke’s hand very hard. His fingers had a sandy feel from the biscuits. “Where are your parents? Back at the house?”

  “I’m here on my own.”

  “On your own?” Ezra said. He was smiling genially, uncertainly, like someone hoping to understand a joke. “You mean, with nobody else?”

  “I wanted to ask if I could stay with you.”

  Ezra stopped smiling. “It’s Cody,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Something’s happened to him.”

  “Nothing’s happened.”

  “I should have gone down; I knew I should. I shouldn’t have let him stop me. The accident was worse than they let on.”

  “No! He’s fine.”

  Ezra surveyed him for a long, silent moment.

  “He’s already got his walking cast,” Luke told him.

  “Yes, but his other wounds, his head?”

  “Everything’s okay.”

  “You swear it?”

  “Yes! Gosh.”

  “See, I don’t have any other brothers,” Ezra said.

  “I swear. I cross my heart,” said Luke.

  “Then where is he?”

  “He’s in Virginia,” said Luke. “I left him there. I ran away.”

  Ezra thought this over. A waitress sidled past him with a tray of delicately clinking, trembling glasses.

  “I didn’t plan to,” Luke told him. “But he said to me … see, he said …”

  Oh, there was no point in telling Ezra what Cody had said. It was nonsense, one of those remarks that pop up out of nowhere. And here was Luke, much too far from home, faltering under his uncle’s kindly gaze. “I can’t explain,” he said.

  But just as if he had explained, Ezra said, gently, “You mustn’t take it to heart. He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”

  “I know that,” Luke said.

  On the telephone with Ruth, Ezra was jocular and brotherly, elaborately casual, playing down what had happened. “Now, Ruth, I’m sitting here looking straight at him and he’s perfectly all right … police? What for? Well, call them back, tell them he’s safe and sound. A lot of fuss over nothing, tell them.”

  Luke listened, smiling anxiously as if his mother could see him. He laced the spirals of the telephone cord between his fingers. They were in Ezra’s little office behind the kitchen. Ezra sat at a desk piled with cookbooks, bills, magazines, a pot of chives, a copper pan with a cracked enamel lining, and a framed news photo of two men in aprons holding an entire long fish on a platter.

  Then evidently, Cody took over the phone. Ezra sounded more serious now. “We could maybe keep him a while,” he said. “We’d like to have him visit.
I hope you’ll let him.” In the directness and soberness of his tone, even in his short sentences, Luke read a kind of caution. He worried that Cody was shouting on the other end of the line; he dropped the cord and wandered away, pretending to be interested in the books in Ezra’s bookcase. He felt embarrassed for his father. But there must not have been any shouting after all; for Ezra said serenely, “All right, Cody. Yes, I can understand that.”

  When he’d hung up, he told Luke, “They’ll be here as soon as possible. He’d rather come get you now, he said.”

  Luke felt a little notch of dread beginning in his stomach. He wondered how angry his father was. He wondered how he could have thought of doing this—coming all this distance! So alone! It seemed like something he had floated through in a dream.

  His grandmother’s house still had its burned-toast smell, its dusky corners, its atmosphere of secrecy. If you moved in here, Luke thought, wouldn’t you go on finding unexpected cubbyholes and closets for weeks or even months afterward? (Yes, imagine moving in. Imagine sharing the cozy living room, Grandma’s peaceful kitchen.) His grandmother skittered around him, adding tiny dishes of food to what was already on the table. Ezra kept telling her, “Mother, take it easy. Don’t fuss so.” But Luke enjoyed the fuss. He liked the way she would stop in the midst of preparing something to come running over and cup his face. “Look at you! Just look!” She was shorter than he was, now. And she had aged a great deal, or else he’d been too young before to notice. There was something scratchy and flyaway about her little screwed-tight topknot, once blond but now colorless, and her face sectioned deeply by pockets of lines and her wrinkled, spotted hands. He saw how much she loved him, purely from her hungry touch on his cheeks, and he wondered how his father could have misjudged her so.

  “It’s not right that your parents just come and take you back,” she told him. “We’ll make them stay. We’ll just make them. I’ll change the sheets in Jenny’s old room. You can have the guest room. Oh, Luke! I wouldn’t have known you. I wouldn’t have dreamed it was you if I’d seen you on the street; it’s been that long. Though I would have said … yes, I would have thought to myself as I passed, ‘My, that child reminds me of my Cody years ago; doesn’t he? Just fairer haired, is all.’ I would have had this little pang and then forgotten, and then later maybe, making tea at home, I’d think, ‘Wait now, something was disturbing me back there …’ ”