Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Read online

  “Oh, well …”

  “I wish you’d just have supper with us.”

  She paused. Then she said, “I’d be happy to.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. (Jenny was astonished, herself.) He grunted and continued to tear along. His whisks of black hair stood out around his head. He led her down a side street, then through an alley that Jenny wasn’t familiar with.

  From the front, his house must have been very much like hers—a brick row house set in a tiny yard. But they approached it from the rear, where a tacked-on, gray frame addition gave it a ramshackle look. The addition turned out to be an unheated pantry with a cracked linoleum floor. Josiah stopped there to work himself free of his jacket, and then he reached for Jenny’s coat and hung them both on hooks beside the door. “Mama?” he called. He showed Jenny into the kitchen. “Got company for supper, Mama.”

  Mrs. Payson stood at the stove—a small, chubby woman dressed in earth tones. She reminded Jenny of some modest brown bird. Her face was round and smooth and shining. She looked up and smiled, and since Josiah failed to make the introduction Jenny said, “I’m Jenny Tull.”

  “Oh, any kin to Ezra?”

  “I’m his sister.”

  “My, I’m just so fond of that boy,” Mrs. Payson said. She lifted the pot from the stove and set it on the table. “When he was called up I cried, did Josiah tell you? I sat right down and cried. Why, he has been like a son to me, always in and out of the house …” She laid three place settings while Josiah poured the milk. “I’ll never forget,” she said, “back when Josiah’s daddy died, Ezra came and sat with us, and fixed us meals, and made us cocoa. I said, ‘Ezra, I feel selfish, taking you from your family,’ but he said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Payson.’ ”

  Jenny wondered when that could have been. Ezra had never mentioned Mr. Payson’s dying.

  Supper was spaghetti and a salad, with chocolate cake for dessert. Jenny ate sparingly, planning to eat again when she got home so her mother wouldn’t guess; but Josiah had several helpings of everything. Mrs. Payson kept refilling his plate. “To look at him,” she said, “you’d never know he eats so much, would you? Skinny as a fence post. I reckon he’s still a growing boy.” She laughed, and Josiah grinned bashfully with his eyes cast down—a skeletal, stooped, hunkering man. Jenny had never thought about the fact that Josiah was somebody’s son, some woman’s greatest treasure. His stubby black lashes were lowered; his prickly head was bent over his plate. He was so certain of being loved, here if no place else. She looked away.

  After supper she helped with the dishes, placing each clean plate and glass on open wooden shelves whose edges had grown soft from too many coats of paint. Her mother would be frantic by now, but Jenny lingered over the wiping of each fork. Then Josiah walked her home. “Come back and see us!” Mrs. Payson called from the doorway. “Make sure you’re buttoned up!” Jenny thought of … was it “Jack and the Beanstalk”? … or perhaps some other fairy tale, where the humble widow, honest and warmhearted, lives in a cottage with her son. Everything else—the cold dark of the streets, the picture of her own bustling mother—seemed brittle by comparison, lacking the smoothly rounded completeness of Josiah’s life.

  They walked up Calvert Street without talking, puffing clouds of steam. They crossed to Jenny’s house and climbed the porch steps. “Well,” said Jenny, “thank you for inviting me, Josiah.”

  Josiah made some awkward, jerky motion that she assumed was an effort toward speech. He stumbled closer, enveloped her in a circle of rough plaid, and kissed her on the lips. She had trouble, at first, understanding what was happening. Then she felt a terrible dismay, not so much for herself as for Josiah. Oh, it was sad, he had misread everything; he would be so embarrassed! But how could he have made such an error? Thinking it over (pressed willy-nilly against his whiskery chin, against the knobbiness of his mouth), she saw things suddenly from his viewpoint: their gentle little “romance” (was what he must call it), as seamless as the Widow Payson’s fairy tale existence. She longed for it; she wished it were true. She ached, with something like nostalgia, for a contented life with his mother in her snug house, for an innocent, protective marriage. She kissed him back, feeling even through all those layers of wool how he tensed and trembled.

  Then light burst out, the front door slammed open, and her mother’s voice broke over them. “What? What! What is the meaning of this?”

  They leapt apart.

  “You piece of trash,” Pearl said to Jenny. “You tramp. You trashy thing. So this is what you’ve been up to! Not so much as notifying me where you are, supper not started, I’m losing my mind with worry—then here I find you! Necking! Necking with a, with a—”

  For lack of a word, it seemed, she struck out. She slapped Jenny hard across the cheek. Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. Josiah, as if it were he who’d been struck, averted his face sharply and stared away at some distant point. His mouth was working but no sound came forth.

  “With a crazy! A dummy! A retarded person. You did it to spite me, didn’t you,” Pearl told Jenny. “It’s your way of making mock of me. All these afternoons that I’ve been slaving in the grocery store, you were off in some alleyway, weren’t you, off with this animal, this gorilla, letting him take his pleasure, just to shame me.”

  Josiah said, “But-but-but—”

  “Just to show me up when I had such great plans for you. Cutting school, no doubt, lying with him in bushes and back seats of cars and maybe this very house, for all I know, while I’m off slaving at Sweeney Brothers—”

  “But! But! Aagh!” Josiah shouted, and he sputtered so that Jenny saw white flecks flying in the lamplight. Then he flung out his scarecrow arms and plunged down the steps and disappeared.

  She didn’t see him again, of course. She chose her routes carefully and never again came near him, never approached any place that he was likely to be found; and she assumed he did the same. It was as if, by mutual agreement, they had split the city between them.

  And besides, she had no reason to see him: Ezra’s letters stopped. Ezra appeared in person. One Sunday morning, there he was, sitting in the kitchen when Jenny came down to breakfast. He wore his old civilian clothes that had been packed away in mothballs—jeans and a scruffy blue sweater. They hung on him like something borrowed. It was alarming how much weight he had lost. His hair was unbecomingly short and his face was paler, older, shadowed beneath the eyes. He sat slumped, clamping his hands between his knees, while Pearl scraped a piece of scorched toast into the sink. “Jam or honey, which?” she was asking. “Jenny, look who’s here! It’s Ezra, safe and sound! Let me pour you more coffee, Ezra.” Ezra didn’t speak, but he gave Jenny a tired smile.

  He’d been discharged, as it turned out. For sleepwalking. He had no memory of sleepwalking, but every night he dreamed the same dream: he was marching through an unchanging terrain of cracked mud flats without a tree or a sprig of grass, with a blank blue bowl of sky overhead. He would set one foot in front of the other and march and march and march. In the morning, his muscles would ache. He’d thought it was from his waking marches, till they told him differently. All night, they told him, he roamed the camp, plodding between the rows of cots. Soldiers would stir and sit up and say, “Tull? That you?” and he would leave. He wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t wake, but simply went someplace else. To some of the soldiers, the youngest ones, his silence was frightening. There were complaints. He was sent to a doctor, who gave him a box of yellow pills. With the pills he still walked, but he would fall down from time to time and just lie where he fell until morning. Once he must have landed on his face; when they roused him, his nose was bloody and they thought it might be broken. It wasn’t, but for several days he had purple circles under his eyes. Then they sent him to a chaplain, who asked if Ezra had anything particular on his mind. Was there some trouble back home, perhaps? Woman trouble? Illness in his family? Ezra said no. He told the chaplain things were fine; he couldn’t for the life of
him think what this was all about. The chaplain asked if he liked the army and Ezra said, well, it wasn’t something you would like or dislike; it was something you had to get through, was more to the point. He said the army wasn’t his style, exactly—what with the shouting, the noise—but still, he was coming along. He guessed he was doing all right. The chaplain said just to try not to sleepwalk again, in that case; but the very next night Ezra walked directly into town, four and a half miles in his olive-drab underwear with his eyes wide open but flat as windows, and a waitress in a diner had to wake him up and get her brother-in-law to drive him back to camp. The next day they called another doctor in, and the doctor asked him a series of questions and signed some papers and sent him home. “So here I am,” Ezra said in a toneless voice. “Discharged.”

  “But honorably,” said his mother.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “The thought! All the while this was going on, you never said a word.”

  “Well, how could you have helped?” he asked.

  The question seemed to age her. She sagged.

  After breakfast he went upstairs and fell on his bed and slept through the day, and Jenny had to wake him for supper. Even then he could barely keep his eyes open. He sat groggily swaying, eating almost nothing, nodding off in the middle of a mouthful. Then he went back to bed. Jenny wandered through the house and fidgeted with the cords of window shades. Was this how he was going to be, now? Had he changed forever?

  But Monday morning, he was Ezra again. She heard his little pearwood recorder playing “Greensleeves” before she was even dressed. When she came downstairs he was scrambling eggs the way she liked, with cheese and bits of green pepper, while Pearl read the paper. And at breakfast he said, “I guess I’ll go get my old job back.” Pearl glanced over at him but said nothing. “How come you didn’t call on Mrs. Scarlatti?” Ezra asked Jenny. “She wrote and said you never came.”

  Jenny said, “Oh, well, I meant to …”

  She lowered her eyes and held her breath, waiting. Now was when he would mention Josiah. But he didn’t. She looked up and found him buttering a piece of toast, and she let out her breath. She was never going to be certain of what Ezra knew, or didn’t know.

  II

  By the time Jenny reached college, she’d grown to be the beauty that everyone predicted. Or was it only that she’d come into fashion? Her mirror showed the same face, so far as she could tell, but most of her dormitory’s phone calls seemed to be for her, and if she hadn’t been working her way through school (waiting tables, folding laundry, shelving books in the library stacks), she could have gone out every night. Away from Baltimore, her looks lost a little of their primness. She let her hair grow and she developed a breathless, flyaway air. But she never forgot about medical school. Her future was always clear to her: a straightforward path to a pediatric practice in a medium-sized city, preferably not too far from a coast. (She liked knowing she could get out anytime. Wouldn’t mid-westerners feel claustrophobic?) Friends teased her about her single-mindedness. Her roommate objected to Jenny’s study light, was exasperated by the finicky way she aligned her materials on her desk. In this respect, at least, Jenny hadn’t changed.

  Meanwhile, her brother Cody had become a success—shot ahead through several different firms, mainly because of his ideas for using the workers’ time better; and then branched out on his own to become an efficiency expert. And Ezra still worked for Mrs. Scarlatti, but he had advanced as well. He really ran the kitchen now, while Mrs. Scarlatti played hostess out front. Jenny’s mother wrote to say it was a shame, a crime and a shame. I tell him the longer he piddles about in that woman’s restaurant the harder he’ll find it to get back on track, you know he always intended to go to college …

  Pearl still clerked at the grocery store but was better dressed, looking less careworn, since Jenny’s scholarship and part-time jobs had relieved the last financial strain. Jenny saw her twice a year—at Christmas and just before the start of school each September. She made excuses for the other holidays, and during the summers she worked at a clothing shop in a small town near her college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see her mother. She often thought of her wiry energy, the strength she had shown in raising her children single-handed, and her unfailing interest in their progress. But whenever Jenny returned, she was dampened almost instantly by the atmosphere of the house—by its lack of light, the cramped feeling of its papered rooms, a certain grim spareness. She almost wondered if she had some kind of allergy. It was like a respiratory ailment; on occasion, she believed she might be smothering. Her head grew stuffy, as it did when she had studied too long without a break. She snapped at people. Even Ezra irritated her, with his calm and his docility.

  So she kept her distance, and after missing her family a while began to discard the very thought of them. She grew brisker, busier, more hurried. Ezra’s letters—as ponderous as his conversation, just this side of dull—would turn up on the edge of the bathroom sink or crumpled among the bedclothes, where Jenny had laid them aside in midsentence. Her mind just drifted, that was all. And twice, during her first two years in college, Cody stopped to see her while traveling through Pennsylvania on business, and both times she was happy at the prospect (he was so dashing and good-looking, she was proud to show him off), but she felt muffled, gradually, once he’d arrived. It wasn’t her fault; it was his. It seemed that everything she said carried, for him, the echo of their mother. She saw him stiffen. She knew exactly what he was thinking. “How are you fixed for money?” he would ask her. “You need a few new dresses?” She would say, “No, thanks, Cody, I’m fine”—really meaning it, needing nothing; but she saw, from his expression, what he had understood her to say: “No, no,” in Pearl’s thin voice, “never mind me …” She could not straighten his tie, or compliment his suit, or inquire about his present life without setting up that guarded look in his face. It made her feel unjustly accused. Did he really imagine she would be so domineering, or reproachful, or meddlesome? “Look,” she tried once. “Let’s start over. I didn’t intend what you think I intended.” But his wary, sidelong glance told her that he suspected even this. There was no way to cut themselves out of the tangle. She let him leave. Back in her dorm room she studied her reflection, her swing of dark hair and her narrow-waisted figure. Then she acted gayer than usual, for a while, and had a sense of having clapped her hands to free them of some thick and clinging dust.

  Late in her senior year, she fell in love. She had been in love before, of course—once with an English major who’d grown too possessive, bit by bit; and once with a barrel-necked football star who seemed now, when she looked back, to be a symptom of some temporary insanity. But this was different. This was Harley Baines, a genius, a boy of such intelligence that even his smudged tortoiseshell glasses, pure white skin, and adenoidal voice struck awe in his classmates. He was not outside Jenny’s group so much as above it, beyond it—a group in himself. It was rumored that he could have had a Ph.D. at twelve but was kept from it by his parents, who wanted him to enjoy a normal childhood. Next year he’d be at Paulham University, outside Philadelphia, doing advanced research in the field of genetics. Jenny was going to Paulham too; she had just been accepted by its medical school. That was what made her notice Harley Baines. Secure in the center of her own noisy group (which would not be hers much longer, which would soon be scattered by graduation, leaving her defenseless), she looked across the campus and saw Harley Baines passing with his stork-like gait, wearing unstylish, pleated flannel trousers and a bulky pullover obviously knitted by his mother. His hair, which could have used a shampoo, was a particularly dense shade of black. She wondered if he knew she was entering Paulham. She wondered if he would care, if he found girls beneath his notice. Was he impervious? Unobtainable? Her friends had to call her name several times, laughing at her bemused expression.

  It was the spring of 1957—an unusually late and gradual spring. Professors opened the classroom windows with long, hooke
d poles, and the smell of lilacs floated in. Jenny wore sleeveless blouses and full skirts and ballerina flats. Harley Baines laid aside his home-knit sweater. Bared, his arms were muscular, thick with black hair. Around his neck he wore a gold or brass disk of some kind. She was dying to know what it was. One day in German class, she asked. He said it was a medal he’d won in a high school science fair, for setting up an experiment on the metabolic rate of white rats. She thought it was a funny thing to go on wearing all this time, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she touched the medal lightly with her fingertips. It hung just inside his shirt, and it was almost hot.

  She asked him at other times (catching up with him in a corridor, arranging to stand behind him in the cafeteria line) whether he was looking forward to Paulham University, and what sort of housing he would have there, and what he’d heard about Paulham’s public transportation system. Offering these questions in an even, noncommittal voice, she felt like one of those circus trainers who take care to present to an animal only the curled-in backs of their hands, showing they pose no threat. She didn’t want to alarm him. But Harley didn’t act alarmed at all, and answered her courteously, matter-of-factly. (Was that good or bad?) When exams began, she came to him with her genetics notes and asked if he could help her study. They sat outdoors in the grass, in front of the Student Union, on a blue chenille bedspread she’d brought from her room. Their classmates lounged on other bedspreads all around them—including some of Jenny’s friends, who cast her startled, doubtful looks and then glanced quickly past her. She’d been hoping they would stroll over, make Harley a part of the group. But on second thought, she could see that would never happen.

  While she framed her queries (acting not so slow-witted as to put him off, but still in need of his assistance), Harley listened and stripped a grass blade. He wore heavy, dressy shoes that seemed out of place on the bedspread. In his probing hands, the grass blade took on the look of a scientific experiment. He answered her levelly, with no question marks after his sentences; he took it for granted that she would understand him. Which she did, in fact, and would have even if she hadn’t known her subject ahead of time. His logic proceeded steadily from A to B to C. In his slowness and his thoroughness, he reminded her of Ezra—though otherwise, how different they were! When he finished, he asked if everything was clear now. “Yes, thank you,” she said, and he nodded and rose to go. Was that it? She rose too, and felt suddenly dizzy—not from standing, she believed, but from love. He had actually managed to bowl her over. She wondered what he would do if she threw her arms around him and collapsed against him, laid her face on his white, white chest, burned her cheek on his scientific medal. Instead she asked, “Will you help me fold the bedspread, please?” He bent to lift one end, and she lifted the other. They advanced. He gave his end to her and then soberly brushed off every wisp of grass, every flower petal and grain of pollen, from his side of the spread. After that he took the spread back again, evidently assuming that she would brush off her side. She looked up into his face. He stepped forward, flipped the spread around him like a hooded cloak, and wrapped her inside its darkness and kissed her. His glasses knocked against her nose. It was an unskillful kiss anyhow, too abrupt, and she couldn’t help imagining the picture they made—a blue chenille pillar in the middle of the campus, a twin-sized mummy. She laughed. He dropped the spread and turned on his heel and walked off very fast. A plume of hair bobbed on the back of his head like a rooster’s tail.