Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  Pneumonia.

  There was a watery, roaring sound in her ears that made it hard to hear her own voice. She had to wait for it to subside before she spoke. “Dr. Vincent,” she said.

  “I’m here.”

  His hand was still on hers. It was no longer icy. He had warmed himself on her skin as if she were a stove. She gathered her voice and said, “Tell Ezra I’m staying.”

  “But—” he said.

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  He was silent.

  “Tell him,” she said forcefully, “that this is nothing. You understand? I don’t want any hospitals. It would kill me, just kill me to hear those loudspeakers paging doctors I have never heard of. This is just a cold. Tell him.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Vincent. He cleared his throat. He removed his hand from hers. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  He seemed to be thinking. He turned away and said to Ezra, “You hear what she says?”

  “Yes,” said Ezra, closer than Pearl had expected.

  “I suggest we call your brother and sister, though.”

  Pearl felt a stirring of interest.

  “But if it’s that serious …” Ezra said.

  “Let’s just see what happens,” the doctor told him. He laid a palm on Pearl’s forehead.

  After that, he must have left. The roar came back to her ears and she didn’t quite hear him go. She was dwelling on thoughts of Cody and Jenny; it would be lovely to have all her children together. Then suddenly a heavy chill spread across her chest. Why, she thought. Dr. Vincent is going to allow this! Yes, he’s really going to allow it. This is it, then!

  Surely not.

  She’d been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don’t get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such? All these years, it emerged, she’d been expecting to run into Beck again. How odd; she hadn’t realized. She had also supposed that there would be some turning point, a flash of light in which she’d suddenly find out the secret; one day she’d wake up wiser and more contented and accepting. But it hadn’t happened. Now it never would. She’d supposed that on her deathbed … deathbed! Why, that was this everyday, ordinary Posturepedic, not the ornate brass affair that she had always envisioned. She had supposed that on her deathbed, she would have something final to tell her children when they gathered round. But nothing was final. She didn’t have anything to tell them. She felt a kind of shyness; she felt inadequate. She stirred her feet fretfully and searched for a cooler place on the pillow.

  “Children,” she had said. This was just before Cody left for college, the day she’d burned Beck’s letters. She said, “Children, there’s something I want to discuss with you.”

  Cody was talking about a job. He had to find one in order to help with the tuition fees. “I could work in the cafeteria,” he was saying, “or maybe off-campus. I don’t know which.” Then he heard his mother and looked over at her.

  “It’s about your father,” Pearl said.

  Jenny said, “I’d choose the cafeteria.”

  “You know, my darlings,” Pearl told them, “how I always say your father’s away on business.”

  “But off-campus they might pay more,” said Cody, “and every penny counts.”

  “At the cafeteria you’d be with your classmates, though,” Ezra said.

  “Yes, I thought of that.”

  “All those coeds,” Jenny said. “Cheerleaders. Girls in their little white bobby sox.”

  “Sweater girls,” Cody said.

  “There’s something I want to explain about your father,” Pearl told them.

  “Choose the cafeteria,” Ezra said.

  “Children?”

  “The cafeteria,” they said.

  And all three gazed at her coolly, out of gray, unblinking, level eyes exactly like her own.

  She dreamed it was her nineteenth birthday and that devilish John Dupree had brought her a tin of chocolates and a burnt-leather ornament for her hair. “Why, John, how cunning! Have a sweet,” she told him. In the dream, it puzzled her to know that John Dupree had been dead for sixty-one years. He was killed in the Argonne Forest by the Huns. She remembered paying a visit of condolence to his mother, who, however, was not receiving guests. “It’s all been a mistake, apparently,” Pearl told John Dupree. And she fastened up her hair with the burnt-leather ornament.

  “There’s no question,” Jenny said. “We have to call an ambulance. What’s got into Dr. Vincent? Is he senile?”

  “He does all right, for his age,” Ezra said. As usual, he seemed to have missed some central point; even Pearl could see that. Jenny sighed, or perhaps just made some impatient rustling sound with her clothes.

  “It’s lucky you called me,” she said. “I come and find everything falling apart.”

  “Nothing’s falling apart.”

  “And why is she lying flat? She’s obviously having trouble breathing. Where’s that big green cushion Becky made her?”

  Pearl had been skidding through time, for a moment—preparing to go by ambulance to have her arrow wound treated. She was braced for the precarious, tilting trip down the stairs on a stretcher. It was mention of Becky that set her straight. Becky was her grandchild, Jenny’s oldest daughter. “Jenny?” she said.

  “How are you feeling?” Jenny asked.

  “Is Cody here too?”

  Apparently not. Jenny leaned over the bed to give her a kiss. Pearl patted Jenny’s hair and found it badly cut, choppy to the touch, but for once she didn’t scold. (Jenny had lovely thick hair that she tended to ignore, to mistreat, as if looks didn’t really matter.) “It was nice of you to come,” Pearl told her.

  “Well goodness, I was worried,” said Jenny. “You’re the only mother we have.”

  Pearl felt she had come full circle. “You should have got an extra,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  She didn’t repeat it. She turned her face on the pillow and was overtaken by a sudden jolt of anger. Why hadn’t they arranged for an extra? All those years when she was the only one, the sole support, the lone tall tree in the pasture just waiting for the lightning to strike … well. She seemed to be losing track of her thoughts. “Did you bring the children?” she said.

  “Not this time. I left them with Joe.”

  Joe? Oh, yes, her husband. “Why isn’t Cody here?” Pearl asked.

  “Well, you know,” said Ezra, “it’s always so hard to locate him …”

  “We think you should go to the hospital,” Jenny told Pearl.

  “Oh, thank you, dear, but I don’t believe I care to.”

  “You’re not breathing right. Where’s that cushion Becky made when she was little? The one with the uplifting motto,” Jenny said. “Sleep, o faithful warrior, upon thy carven pillow.” She gave a little snort of laughter, and Pearl smiled, picturing Jenny’s habit of covering her mouth with her hand as if overcome, as if struck absolutely helpless by life’s silliness. “Anyhow,” Jenny said, pulling herself together. “Ezra, you agree with me, don’t you?”

  “Agree?”

  “About the hospital.”

  “Ah …” said Ezra.

  There was a pause. You could pluck this single moment out of all time, Pearl thought, and still discover so much about her children—even about Cody, for his very absence was a characteristic, perhaps his main one. And Jenny was so brisk and breezy but … oh, you might say somewhat opaque, a reflecting surface flashing your own self back at you, giving no hint of her self. And Ezra, mild Ezra: no doubt confusedly tugging at the shock of fair hair that hung over his forehead, considering and reconsidering … “Well,” he said, “I don’t know … I mean, maybe if we waited a while …”

  “But how long? How long can we afford to wait?”


  “Oh, maybe just till tonight, or tomorrow …”

  “Tomorrow! What if it’s, say, pneumonia?”

  “Or it could be only a cold, you see.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And we wouldn’t want her to go if it makes her unhappy.”

  “No, but—”

  Pearl listened, smiling. She knew the outcome now. They would deliberate for hours, echoing each other’s answers, repeating and rephrasing questions, evading, retreating, arguing for argument’s sake, ultimately going nowhere. “You never did face up to things,” she said kindly.

  “Mother?”

  “You always were duckers and dodgers.”

  “Dodgers?”

  She smiled again, and closed her eyes.

  It was such a relief to drift, finally. Why had she spent so long learning how? The traffic sounds—horns and bells and rags of music—flowed around the voices in her room. She kept mislaying her place in time, but it made no difference; all she remembered was equally pleasant. She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights—how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella. She remembered a country auction she’d attended forty years ago, where they’d offered up an antique brass bed complete with all its bedclothes—sheets and blankets, pillow in a linen case embroidered with forget-me-nots. Two men wheeled it onto the platform, and its ruffled coverlet stirred like a young girl’s petticoats. Behind her eyelids, Pearl Tull climbed in and laid her head on the pillow and was borne away to the beach, where three small children ran toward her, laughing, across the sunlit sand.

  2

  Teaching the Cat to Yawn

  While Cody’s father nailed the target to the tree trunk, Cody tested the bow. He drew the string back, laid his cheek against it, and narrowed his eyes at the target. His father was pounding in tacks with his shoe; he hadn’t thought to bring a hammer. He looked like a fool, Cody thought. He owned no weekend clothes, as other fathers did, but had driven to this field in his strained-looking brown striped salesman suit, white starched shirt, and navy tie with multicolored squares and circles scattered randomly across it. The only way you could tell this was a Sunday was when he turned, having pounded in the final tack; he didn’t have his tie pulled up close to his collar. It hung loose and slightly crooked, like a drunkard’s tie. A cockscomb of hair, as black as Cody’s but wavy, stood up on his forehead.

  “There!” he said, plodding back. He still carried the shoe. He walked lopsided, either smiling at Cody or squinting in the sunlight. It was nowhere near spring yet, but the air felt unseasonably warm and a pale sun poured heat like a liquid over Cody’s shoulders. Cody bent and pulled an arrow from a cardboard tube. He laid it against the string. “Wait, now, son,” his father said. “You want to do things right, now.”

  Naturally, this would have to be an educational experience. There were bound to be lectures and criticisms attached. Cody sighed and lowered the bow. His father stooped to put his shoe on, squirming his foot in without undoing the laces, the way Cody’s mother hated. The heel of his black rayon sock was worn so thin it was translucent. Cody looked off in another direction. He was fourteen years old—too big to be dragged on family outings any more and definitely too big for bows and arrows, unless of course you’d just leave the equipment to him and his friends, alone, and let them horse around or have themselves a contest or shatter windowpanes and streetlights for the hell of it. How did his father come up with these ideas? This was turning out to be even less successful than most. Cody’s mother, who was not the slightest bit athletic, picked dried flowers beside a fence. His little sister buttoned her sweater with chapped and bluish hands. His brother, Ezra, eleven years old, chewed a straw and hummed. He was missing his whistle, no doubt—a bamboo pipe, with six finger holes, on which he played tunes almost ceaselessly. He’d smuggled it along but their father had made him leave it in the car.

  At this moment, Cody’s two best friends were attending a movie: Air Force, with John Garfield and Faye Emerson. Cody would have given anything to be with them.

  “Now, your left arm goes like this,” his father said, positioning him. “You want to keep your wrist from getting stung, you see. And stand up straight. It was archery gave us our notions of proper posture; says so in the instruction book. Used to be that people slouched around any old how, all except the archers. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

  No, he didn’t know that. He stood like something made of clay while his father poked him here and prodded him there, molding him into shape. “In the olden days …” his father said.

  Cody let go of the bowstring. Thwack. The arrow hit the edge of the target, more sidewise than endwise, bounced off harmlessly and fell among the tree roots. “Now! What’d you go and do that for?” his father asked him. “Did I tell you to shoot yet? Did I?”

  “It slipped,” said Cody.

  “Slipped!”

  “And anyhow, it couldn’t have stuck in the target. Not with that hard fat tree trunk behind it.”

  “It most certainly could have,” his father said. “Like always, you just had to jump on in. Impulsive. Had to have it your way. When are you going to start keeping a better rein on yourself?”

  Cody’s father (who never kept any sort of rein on himself whatsoever, as Cody’s mother constantly reminded him) lunged off toward the target, muttering and grabbing fistfuls of weed heads which he then threw away. Seeds and dry hulls spangled the air around him. “Willful boy; never listens. Don’t know why I bother.”

  Cody’s mother shaded her eyes and called, “Did he hit it?”

  “No, he didn’t hit it. How could he; I wasn’t even through explaining.”

  “People have been known to hit a target without a person explaining it beforehand,” Cody muttered.

  “What say?”

  “Let Ezra try,” Cody’s mother suggested.

  His father picked up the arrow and jammed it into the bull’s-eye, dead center. “Want to tell me it can’t stick?” he asked Cody. He pointed to the arrow, which stayed firm. “Look at that: steel-tipped. Of course it sticks. And spongy bark on the tree. I chose that tree. Of course it sticks. You could have lodged it in easy.”

  “Ha,” said Cody, kicking a clod of earth.

  “What say, son?”

  “Let Ezra try,” Pearl called again. “Beck? Let Ezra try.”

  Ezra was her favorite, her pet. The entire family knew it. Ezra looked embarrassed and switched the straw to the other side of his mouth. Beck waded back to them. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes,” he said.

  “Ezra? See if you can hit it, honey,” Pearl called.

  Beck’s glance at Cody might have been sympathy, or else disgust. He pulled another arrow from the cardboard tube. “All right, Ezra, come on and try,” he said. “Just don’t get carried away like Cody here did.”

  Ezra came over, still nibbling his straw, and accepted the bow from Cody. Well, this would be a laugh. There was no one as clumsy as Ezra. When he took his stance he did it all wrong, he just looked all wrong, in some way you couldn’t put your finger on. His elbows jutted out, winglike; his floppy yellow hair feathered in his eyes. “Now, wait, now,” Beck kept saying. “What’s the trouble here?” He moved around realigning Ezra’s shoulders, adjusting his grip on the bow. Ezra stayed patient. In fact, he might have had his mind on something else altogether; it seemed his attention had been caught by a cloud formation over to the south. “Oh, well,” Beck said finally, giving up. “Let her fly, I guess, Ezra. Ezra?”

  Ezra’s fingers loosened on the string. The arrow sped in a straight, swift path, no arc to it at all. As if guided by an invisible thread—or worse, by the purest and most natural luck—it split the length of the arrow that Beck had already jammed in and it landed at the center of the bull’s-eye, quivering. There was
a sharp, caught silence. Then Beck said, “Will you look at that.”

  “Why, Ezra,” Pearl said.

  “Ezra,” their sister Jenny cried. “Ezra, look what you did! What you went and did to that arrow!”

  Ezra took the straw from his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he told Beck. (He was so used to breaking things.)

  “Sorry?” said Beck.

  He seemed to be hunting the proper tone of voice. Then he found it. “Well, son,” he said, “this just goes to show that it pays to follow instructions. See there, Cody? See what happens? A bull’s-eye. I’ll be damned. If you’d listened close like Ezra did, and not gone off half-cocked …”

  He was moving toward the target as he spoke, oaring through the weeds, and Jenny was running to get there first. Cody couldn’t take his turn at shooting, therefore, although he was itching to. He was absolutely obligated to split that second arrow as Ezra had split the first. It was unthinkable not to. What were the odds against it? He felt a springy twanging inside, as if he himself were the bowstring. He bent down and pulled a new arrow from the tube and fitted it to the bow. He drew and aimed at a clump of shrubbery, then at his father’s dusty blue Nash, and then at Ezra, who was already wandering off again dreamy as ever. Longingly, Cody focused on Ezra’s fair, ruffled head. “Zing. Wham. Aagh, you got me!” he said. Imagine the satisfaction. Ezra turned slowly and caught sight of him. “No!” he cried.

  “Huh?”

  Ezra ran toward him, flapping his arms like an idiot and stammering, “Stop, stop, stop! No! Stop!” Did he really think Cody would shoot him? Cody stared, keeping the bow drawn. Ezra took a flying leap with his arms outstretched like a lover. He caught Cody in a kind of bear hug and slammed him flat on his back. It knocked the wind out of Cody; all he could do was gasp beneath Ezra’s warm, bony weight. And meanwhile, what had happened to the arrow? It was minutes before he could struggle to a sitting position, elbowing Ezra off of him. He looked across the field and found his mother leaning on his father’s arm, hobbling in his direction with a perfect circle of blood gleaming on the shoulder of her blouse. “Pearl, my God. Oh, Pearl,” his father was saying. Cody turned and looked at Ezra, whose face was pale and shocked. “See there?” Cody asked him. “See what you’ve gone and done?”