Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (35 page)

“Tel Jenny we wish—was “And drive defensively, hear?” They pul ed away from the curb, waving through the window. Pearl and Ezra fel behind. Luke, sitting in back, faced forward and found his father at the wheel. Ruth was in the passenger seat. “Mom?”

Luke said. “Don’t you think you ought to drive?”

“He insisted,” Ruth said. “He drove al the way here, too.” She turned and looked at Luke meaningful y, over the back of the seat. “He said he wanted it to be him that drove to get you.”

“Oh,” said Luke.

What was she waiting for? She went on looking at him for some time, but then gave up and turned away again. Trying his best, Luke sat forward to observe how Cody managed.

“Wel , I guess it wouldn’t be al that hard,” he said, “except for shifting the gears.”

“Shifting’s easy,” Cody told him.

“Oh.”

“And luckily there’s no clutch.”

“No.”

They passed rows and rows of houses, many with their porches ful of people rocking in the dark. They turned down a block where there were stoops instead of porches, white stoops set close to the street. On one of these a whole family perched, with a beer cooler and an oscil ating fan and a baby in a mesh crib on the sidewalk. A TV sat on a car hood at the curb so if you happened by on foot, you’d have to cross between TV and audience, muttering,

“Excuse me, please,” just as if you’d walked through someone’s living room. Luke gazed back at that family as long as they were in sight. They were replaced by a strip of bars and cafes, and then by an unlit al ey.

“Isn’t it funny,” Luke told his father, “no one’s ever asked you to reorganize anything in Baltimore.”

“Very funny,” Cody said.

“We could live with Grandma then, couldn’t we?” Cody said nothing.

They left the city for the expressway, entering a world of high, cold lights and a blue-black sky.

Ruth slid slowly against the window. Her smal head bobbed with every dip in the road.

“Mom’s asleep,” Luke said.

“She’s tired,” said Cody.

Perhaps he meant it as a reproach. Was this where the scolding started? Luke kept very quiet for a while.

But what Cody said next was, “It wears her out, that house. Your grandma’s so difficult to deal with.”

“Grandma’s not difficult.”

“Not for you, maybe. For other people she is. For your mother. Grandma believes your mother is “scrappy.” She told me that, once. Cal ed her “scrappy and hoydenish.”

” He laughed, recal ing something, so that Luke started smiling expectantly. “One time,” Cody said, was—I bet you don’t remember this—your mother and I had this sil y little spat and she packed you up and ran off to Ezra.

Then as soon as she got to the station, she started thinking what life would be like with your grandma and she cal ed and asked me to come drive her home.” Luke’s smile faded. “Ran off to where?” he asked.

“To Ezra. But never mind, it was only one of those —his

“She didn’t run to Ezra. She was planning to go to her folks,” Luke said.

“What folks?” Cody asked him.

Luke didn’t know.

“She’s an orphan,” Cody said. “What folks?”

“Wel , maybe—his “She was planning to go to Ezra,” Cody said.

“I can see it now! I can picture how they’d take up their marriage, right where ours left off.

Oh, I believe I’ve always had the feeling it wasn’t my marriage, anyhow. It was someone else’s. It was theirs.

Sometimes I seemed to enjoy it better when I imagined I was seeing it through someone else’s eyes.”

“Why are you tel ing me this?” Luke asked him.

“Al I meant was—his “What are you, crazy? How come you go on hanging on to these things, year after year after year?”

“Now, wait a minute, now…”

“Mom?” Luke shook her shoulder. “Mom!

Wake up!”

Ruth’s head sagged over to the other side.

“Let her rest,” Cody said. “Goddammit, Luke—his “Wake up, Mom!”

“Hmm,” said Ruth, not waking.

“Mom? I want to ask you. Mom? Remember when you packed me up and left Dad?”

“Mm.”

“Remember?”

“Yes,” she murmured, curling tighter.

“Where were we going to go, Mom?”

She raised her head, with her hair al frowsy, and gave him a blurry, dazed stare. “What?” she said. “Garrett County, where my uncle lives.

Who wants to know?”

“Nobody. Go back to sleep,” Cody told her.

She went back to sleep. Cody rubbed his chin thoughtful y.

They sped through a corridor of light that was bounded on both sides by the deepest darkness. They met and passed solitary cars that disappeared in an instant.

Luke’s eyelids drooped.

“What I mean to say,” Cody said. “What I drove al this way to say…”

But then he trailed off. And when he started speaking again, it was on a whole different subject: time. How time was underestimated. How time was so important and al .

Luke felt re-lived. He listened comfortably, lul ed by his father’s words. “Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end—to the passing of time, to changing.

Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it al based on minutes going by?

Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again?

Even big things—even mourning a death: aren’t you real y just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos—ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel?

Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced…

Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could rol the minutes the other way, for once.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer, which was lucky.

Luke was too sleepy to manage one.

He felt heavy, weighted with other people’s stories.

He imagined he was slipping or fal ing. He believed he was gliding away, streaming down a great, wide, light-fil ed river of time along with al the people he had met today. He let his head nod over, and he closed his eyes and slept.

Apple

One morning Ezra Tul got up and shaved, brushed his teeth, stepped into his trousers, and encountered a lump in the bend of his right thigh. His fingers glanced over it accidental y and faltered and returned. In the bedroom mirror, his broad, fair face had a frozen look. The word cancer came on its own, as if someone had whispered it into his ear, but what caused his shocked expression was the thought that flew in after it: Al right. Let it happen. I’l go ahead and die.

He shook that away, of course. He was forty-six years old, a calm and sensible man, and later he would make an appointment with Dr.

Vincent. Meanwhile he put on a shirt, and buttoned it, and unrol ed a pair of socks.

Twice, without planning to, he tested the lump again with his fingertips. It was nearly the size of an acorn, sensitive but not painful. It rol ed beneath his skin as smoothly as an eyebal .

It wasn’t that he real y wanted to die.

Natural y not. He was only giving in to a passing mood, he decided as he went downstairs; this summer hadn’t been going wel . His mother, whose vision had been failing since 1975, was now (in 1979) almost total y blind, but stil did not ful y admit it, which made it al the harder to care for her; and his brother was too far away and his sister too busy to offer him much help. His restaurant was floundering even more than usual; his finest cook had quit because her horoscope advised it; and a heat wave seemed to be stupefying the entire city of Baltimore. Things were so bad that the most inconsequential sights served to confirm his despair—the neighbor’s dog panting on the sidewalk, or his mother’s one puny hydrangea bush wilting and sagging by two o’clock every afternoon. Even the postman signified catastrophe; his wife had been murdered in a burglary last spring, and now he lugged his leather pouch through the neighborhood as if it were heavy beyond endurance, as if it would eventual y drag him to a halt. His feet went slower and slower; his shoulders bent closer to the ground. Every day the mail arrived later.

Ezra stood with his coffee at the window and watched the postman moping past and wondered if there were any point to life.

Then his mother came downstairs, planting her feet just so. “Oh, look,” she said, “what a sunny morning!” She could feel it, he supposed— warming her skin in squares when she stood next to him at the window. Or perhaps she could even see it, since evidently she stil distinguished light from dark. But her dress was done up wrong. She had drawn her wispy gray-blond hair into its customary bun, and deftly applied a single spark of pink to the center of her dry, pursed lips, but one side of her col ar stuck up at an angle and the flowered material pouched outward, showing her slip in the gap between two buttons.

“It’s going to be another scorcher,” Ezra told her.

“Oh, poor Ezra, I hate to see you go to work in this.” Al she said carried references to sight. He couldn’t tel if she planned it that way.

She let him bring her a cup of coffee but she turned down breakfast, and instead sat beside him in the living room while he read the paper. This was their only time together—

morning and noon, after which he left for the restaurant and did not return til very late at night, long past her bedtime.

He had trouble imagining what she did in his absence.

Sometimes he telephoned from work and she always sounded so brisk —”Just fixing myself some iced tea,” she would say, or “Sorting through my stockings.” But in the background he would hear the ominous, syrupy strains of organ music from some television soap opera, and he suspected that she simply sat before the TV much of the day, with a cardigan draped graciously over her shoulders even in this heat and her chil ed hands folded in her lap.

Certainly she saw no friends; she had none.

As near as he could recal , she had never had friends.

She had lived through her children; the gossip they brought was al she knew of the outside world, and their activities provided her only sense of motion.

Even back when she worked at the grocery store, she had not consorted with the customers or the other cashiers.

And now that she had retired, none of her fel ow workers came to visit her.

No, this was the high point of her day, no doubt: these slow midmorning hours, the rustling of Ezra’s paper, his spotty news reports. “Another taxi driver mugged, it says here.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“Another shoot-out down on the Block.”

“Where wil it al end?” his mother wondered.

“Terrorist bomb in Madrid.”

Newspapers, letters, photos, magazines— those he could help her with. With those she let herself gaze straight ahead, blank eyed, while he acted as interpreter. But in al other situations, she was fiercely independent. What, exactly, was the nature of their understanding? She admitted only that her sight was not what it had once been

—that it was impaired enough to make reading a nuisance.

“She’s blind,” her doctor said, and she reported, “He thinks I’m blind,” not arguing but managing to imply, somehow, that this was a matter of opinion—or of wil , of what you’re wil ing to al ow and what you’re not.

Ezra had learned to offer clues in the casual, slantwise style that she would accept. If he were to say, for instance,

“It’s raining, Mother,” when they were setting out for somewhere, she would bridle and tel him, “Wel , I know that.” He learned to say, “Weatherman claims this wil keep up. Better bring your umbrel a.” Then her face would alter and smooth, adjusting to the information. “Frankly, I don’t believe him,” she would say, although it was one of those misty rains that fal s without a sound, and he knew she hadn’t detected it. She concealed her surprise so wel that only her children, accustomed to her stubborn denial of anything that might weaken her, could have seen what lay behind that chal enging gray stare.

Last month, Ezra’s sister had reported that their mother had cal ed to ask a strange question. “She wanted to know if it were true,” she said, “that lying on her back a long time would give her pneumonia.

“What for?”’ I asked her. “Why do you care?”’

“I was only curious,” she said.”

Ezra lowered his paper, and he cautiously placed two fingertips at the bend of his thigh.

After they’d finished their coffee, he washed out the cups and straightened the kitchen, which nowadays had an unclean look no matter what he did to it. There were problems he didn’t know how to handle—the curtains graying beside the stove, and the lace doily growing stiff with dust beneath the condiment set on the table.

Did you actual y launder such things? Just throw them in the machine? He could have asked his mother, but didn’t.

It would only upset her. She would wonder, then, what else she’d missed.

She came out to him, testing her way so careful y that her smal black pumps seemed like quivering, delicate, ultrasensitive organs. “Ezra,” she said, “what are your plans for this morning?”

“No plans, Mother.”

“You’re certain, now.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“I was thinking we could sort through my desk drawers, but if you’re busy—his “I’m not busy.”

“You just say so if you are.”

“I’l be glad to help.”

“When you were little,” she said, “it made you angry to see me sick or in need of aid.”

“Wel , that was when I was little.”

“Isn’t it funny? It was you that was the kindest, the closest, the sweetest child; the others were always up to something, off with their own affairs. But when I fel sick, you would turn so coldhearted! “Does this mean we don’t get to go to the movies?”’ you’d ask. It was your brother who’d take over then—the one I’d least expect it of. I would say, “Ezra, could you just fetch me an afghan, please?”’ and you would turn stony and pretend not to hear. You seemed to think I’d done something to you— got a headache out of malice.”