Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (37 page)

Ezra began to see that for his mother (or for the young girl she had been), there was a plot, after al .

She had imagined a perfectly wonderful plot— a significance to every chance meeting, the possibility of whirlwind courtships, grand white weddings, flawless bliss forever after. James Wrayson came to cal most shockingly late, she wrote.

Stole my picture off the piano and put it in his pocket.

Acted too comical for words. I’m sure I don’t know what wil come of this.

Wel , nothing had come of it. Nothing came of anything.

She married a salesman for the Tanner Corporation and he left her and never came back. “Ezra? Why aren’t you reading to me?” his mother asked. “I’m tired,” he said.

He took her to an afternoon bal game. In her old age, she had become a great Orioles fan.

She would listen on the radio if she couldn’t attend in person, even staying up past her bedtime if the game went into extra innings. Basebal was the only sport that made sense, she said: clear as Parcheesi, clever as chess. She looked pleased with herself for thinking of this, but Ezra suspected that it had something in common too with those soap operas she enjoyed. Certainly she viewed each game as a drama, and fretted over the gossip that Ezra cul ed for her from the sports pages—players’ injuries, rivalries, slumps, mournful tales of young rookies so nervous they flubbed their only chances. She liked to think of the Orioles as poverty-stricken and virtuous, unable to simply buy their talent as richer teams did. Players’ looks mattered to her as deeply as if they were movie stars: Ken Singleton’s high, shining cheekbones, as described by one of her granddaughters, sent her into a little trance of admiration.

She liked to hear how Also Bumbry wiggled his bat so jauntily before a hit; how Stanhouse drove people crazy delaying on the mound.

She wished Doug DeCinces would shave off his mustache and Kiko Garcia would get himself a haircut. She thought Earl Weaver was not fatherly enough to be a proper manager and often, when he replaced some poor sad pitcher who’d barely had a chance, she would speak severely into the radio, cal ing him “Merle Beaver” for spite and spitting out her words.

“Just because he grows his own tomatoes,” she said,

“doesn’t necessarily mean a person has a heart.” Sometimes Ezra would quote her to his friends at the restaurant, and halfway through a sentence he would think, Why, I’m making her out to be a… character; and al he’d said would feel like a lie, although of course it had happened. The fact was that she was a very strong woman (even a frightening one, in his childhood), and she may have shrunk and aged but her true, interior self was stil enormous, larger than life, powerful. Overwhelming.

They got to the stadium early so his mother could walk at her own pace, which was so slow and halting that by the time they were settled, the lineup was already being announced.

Their seats were good ones, close to home plate. His mother sank down grateful y but then had to stand, almost at once, for the national anthem. For two national anthems; the other team was Toronto. Halfway through the second song, Ezra noticed that his mother’s knees were trembling.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asked her. She shook her head. It was a very hot day but her arm, when he took hold of it, was cool and almost unnatural y dry, as if filmed with powder.

How clear a green the grass was! He could see his mother’s point: precise and level and brightly colored, the playing field did have the look of a board game. Players stood about idly swinging their arms. Toronto’s batter hit a high fly bal and the center fielder plucked it from the sky with ease, almost absentmindedly. “Wel !” said Ezra. “That was quick. First out in no time.”

There was a knack to his commentary. He informed her without appearing to, as if he were making smal talk.

“Gosh. Look at that change-up.” And “Cal that a bal ?

Skimmed right past his knees.

Cal that a bal ?” His mother listened, face uplifted and receptive, like someone at a concert.

What did she get out of this? She’d have fol owed more closely, he thought, if she had stayed at home beside her radio. (and she’d never bring a radio; she worried people might think it was a hearing aid.)

He supposed she liked the atmosphere, the cheering and excitement and the smel of popcorn. She even let him buy her a Styrofoam cup of beer, which was al owed to grow warm after one sip; and when the bugle sounded she cal ed, “Charge,” very softly, with an embarrassed little half-smile curling her lips.

Three men were getting drunk behind her—booing and whistling and shouting insults to passing girls—but Ezra’s mother stayed untroubled, facing forward. “When you come in person,” she told Ezra, “you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don’t have any choice but to accept it.” A batter swung at a low bal and connected, and Ezra (eyes in every direction) saw how the field came instantaneously alive, with each man fol owing his appointed course. The shortstop, as if strung on rubber bands, sprang upward without a second’s preparation and caught the bal ; the outfield closed in like a kaleidoscope; the second-base runner pivoted and the shortstop tagged him out. “Yo, Garcia!” a drunk yel ed behind them, in that gravel y, raucous voice that some men adopt in bal parks; and he sloshed cold beer down the back of Ezra’s neck.

“Wel …”

Ezra said to his mother. But he couldn’t think how to encompass al that had happened, so final y he said,

“We’re up, it looks like.”

She didn’t answer. He turned to her and found her caving in on herself, her head fal ing forward, the Styrofoam cup slipping from her fingers. “Mother?

Mother!” Everyone around him rose and mil ed and fussed. “Give her air,” they told him, and then somehow they had her stretched out on her back, lying where their feet had been. Her face was paper white, immobile, like a crumpled rock. One of the drunks stepped forward to smooth her skirt decorously over her knees, and another stroked her hair off her forehead. “She’l be al right,” he told Ezra. “Don’t worry. It’s only the heat. Folks, make room! Let her breathe!”

Ezra’s mother opened her eyes. The air was bright as knife blades, shimmering with a brassy, hard light, but she didn’t even squint; and for the first time Ezra ful y understood that she was blind. It seemed that before, he hadn’t taken it in. He reeled back, squatting at the feet of strangers, and imagined having to stay here forever: the two of them, helpless, flattened beneath the glaring summer sky.

That night he dreamed he was walking among the tables in his restaurant. A long-time customer, Mr. Rosen, was dithering over the menu. “What do you recommend?” he asked Ezra. “I see you’ve got your stroganoff, but I don’t know, that’s a little heavy.

I mean I’m not so very hungry, just peckish, got a little weight on my stomach right here beneath my rib cage, know what I mean? What do you think might be good for that? What had I ought to eat?”

This was how Mr. Rosen behaved in real life, as wel , and Ezra expected it and always responded kindly and solicitously. But in the dream, he was overtaken by a most untypical panic. “I have nothing! Nothing!” he cried. “I don’t know what you want! I don’t have anything! Stop asking!” And he wrung his hands at the thought of his empty, gleaming refrigerator and idle stove.

He woke sweating, tangled in damp sheets.

There was a certain white quality to the darkness that made him believe it was close to dawn. He climbed out of bed, hitching up his pajama bottoms, and went downstairs and poured a glass of milk. Then he wandered into the living room for a magazine, but the only ones he found were months old. Final y he settled on the rug beside his mother’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.

A recipe for marmalade cake: From the kitchen of… with no name fil ed in. Someone’s diploma, rol ed and secured with a draggled blue ribbon. A clipping from a newspaper: Bristle-cone pines, in times of stress, hoard al their life in a single streak and al ow the rest to die. A photo of his sister in an evening dress with gardenias looped around her wrist. A diary for 1909, with a violet pressed between its pages. Washed my yel ow gown, made salt-rising bread, played Basket Bal , he read. Bought a hat shape at Warner’s and trimmed it with green grosgrain.

Preserved tomatoes. Went to Marching Dril .

Learned progressive jackstraws.

Her vitality hummed in the room around him. She was forever doing something to her “waists,” which Ezra assumed to be blouses. Embroidering waists or mending waists or buying goods for a waist or sewing fresh braid on a waist, putting insertion on a waist, ripping insertion off a waist, tucking her red plaid waist until the tucker got out of fix, attaching new sleeves to a waist—even, for one entire week, attending a course cal ed “Fashioning the Shirtwaist.” She pressed a bodice, sewed a corset cover, darned her stockings, altered a girdle, stitched a comforter, monogrammed a handkerchief, cut outing flannel for skirts.

(yet in al the time he’d known her, Ezra had never seen her so much as hem a dish towel.) She went to hear a lecture entitled “Thunder Tones from the Guil otine.” She pestered the vet about Prince’s ailment—an injured stifle, whatever that was. She sold tickets to socials, amateur theatricals, and Mission Society picnics. She paid a cal on her uncle but found his door double-locked and only a parlor window open.

In Ezra’s slumbering, motionless household, the loudest sound came from fifteen-year-old Pearl, hitching up her underskirts to clamber through that long-ago window.

Daily, in various bookstores, he proceeded from the Merck Manual to other books, simpler to use, intended for laymen. Several were indexed by symptoms, including lump. He found that his lump could indeed be a lymph node

—a temporary swel ing in reaction to some minor infection.

Or it could also be a hernia. Or it could be something worse.

Consult your doctor, he read. But he didn’t.

Every morning, stil in his pajamas, he tested the lump with his fingers and resolved to cal Dr. Vincent, but later he would change his mind. Suppose it did turn out to be cancer: why would he want to endure those treatments—the radiation and the toxic drugs?

Better just to die.

He noticed that he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn’t yet experienced.

Like an unusual vacation trip.

His sister, Jenny, stopped by with her children. It was a Wednesday, her morning off. She took over the house with no trouble at al . “Where’s your ironing?

Give me your ironing,” she said, and “What do you need in the way of shopping?” and “Quinn, get down from there.” She had so much energy; she spent herself with such recklessness. In her worn-looking clothes, run-down shoes, with her dark hair lifting behind her, she flew around the living room. “I think you should buy an air-conditioner, Mother. Have you heard the latest pol ution count? For someone in your state of health…”

Her mother, bleakly speechless, withstood this storm of words and then lifted one white hand. “Come closer so I can see your hair,” she said.

Jenny came closer and submitted to her touch.

Her mother stroked her hair with a dissatisfied expression on her face. “I don’t know why you can’t take better care of your looks,” she said.

“How long since you’ve been to a beauty parlor?”

“I’m a busy woman, Mother.”

“How much time would you need for a haircut? And you’re not wearing makeup, are you. Are you? In this light, it’s hard to tel . Oh, Jenny. What must your husband think? He’l think you’re not trying.

You’ve let yourself go. I expect I could pass you on the street and not know you.”

Her favorite expression, it seemed to Ezra: I wouldn’t know you if I saw you on the street.

She used it when referring to Jenny’s poor grooming, to Cody’s sparse visits, to Ezra’s tendency to put on weight.

Ezra caught a sudden glimpse of a wide, vacant sidewalk and his various family members strol ing down it, their faces averted from one another.

Jenny’s children ambled through the house, looking bored and disgusted. The baby chewed on a curtain pul .

Jane, the nine-year-old, perched on Ezra’s knee as casual y as if he were a piece of furniture. She smel ed of crayons and peanut butter—homely smel s that warmed his heart.

“What are you fixing in your restaurant tonight?” she asked.

“Cold things. Salads. Soups.”

“Soups are hot,” she said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh.”

She paused, perhaps to store this information in some tidy filing cabinet inside her head. Ezra was touched by her wil ingness to adjust—by her amiable adaptability. Was it possible, he sometimes wondered, that children humored grownups? If grownups insisted on toilet training, on please and thank you—wel , al right, since it seemed to mean so much to them. It wasn’t important enough to argue about.

This is a transitive verb, some grownup would say, and the children would go along with it; though to them it was immaterial, frankly. Transitive, intransitive, who cared?

What difference did it make? It was al a foreign language anyhow.

“Maybe you could invite me to your restaurant for supper,” Jane told Ezra.

“I’d be delighted to invite you for supper.”

“Maybe I could bring a friend.”

“Certainly.”

“I’l bring Barbie.”

“That would be wonderful,” Ezra said.

“You bring a friend, too.”

“Al my friends work in the restaurant.”

“Don’t you ever date?”

“Of course I date.”

“I don’t mean just some one of those lady cooks you pal around with.”

“Oh, I’ve dated in my time.”

She filed that away also.

Jenny was criticizing their mother’s doctor. She said he was too old, too old-fashioned—too general, she said. “You need a good internist. I happen to know a man on—his “I’ve been going to Dr. Vincent as long as I’ve lived in Baltimore,” her mother said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“We don’t al just change for change’s sake.” Jenny rol ed her eyes at Ezra.