Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (7 page)

“Oh, one of those,” Lorena said.

“Tight little bun on the back of her head. Mouth like it’s holding straight pins. Anybody dawdles, tries to pass the time of day, she’ll say, ‘Move along, please. Please move along.’ ”

He was smiling at Lorena as he spoke, but inside he felt a
sudden pang. He pictured his mother at the register, with that anxious line like a strand of hair or a faint, fragile dressmaker’s seam running across her forehead.

Cody took every blanket and sheet from Ezra’s bed and removed the pillow and the mattress. Underneath were four wooden slats, laid across the frame. He lifted them out and stored them in the wardrobe. With great care, he set the mattress back on the frame. He drew a breath and waited. The mattress held. He replaced the bedclothes and he puffed the pillow and laid it delicately at the head. He lugged a pile of magazines from their hiding place in his bureau, opened them, and scattered them on the floor. Then he turned off the light and went to his own bed, across the room.

Ezra padded in barefoot, eating a sandwich. He wore pajama bottoms with a trailing drawstring. “Oh, me,” he said, and he sank into bed. There was a crash. The floor shook, and their mother shrieked and came pounding up the stairs. When she turned on the light, Cody raised his head and stared at her with a sleepy, befuddled expression. She had a hand pressed to her heart. She was taking in gulps of air. Jenny shivered behind her, hugging a worn stuffed rabbit. “Good Lord preserve us,” their mother said.

Ezra looked like someone in a bathtub full of cloth. He was having trouble disentangling himself from his sheets. One hand, upraised, still clutched the half-eaten sandwich. “Ezra, honey,” Pearl said, but then she said, “Why, Ezra.” She was looking at the magazines. They were opened to pictures of women in nightgowns, in bathing suits, in garter belts and black lace brassieres, in bath towels, in useless wisps of transparent drapery, or in nothing whatsoever. “Ezra Tull!” she said.

Ezra worked his way up to peer over the edge of his bed frame.

“Truly, Ezra, I never suspected that you would be such a person,” she told him. Then she turned and left the room, taking Jenny with her.

Ezra emerged from his bed, flew through the air, and landed on Cody. He grabbed a handful of hair and started shaking Cody’s head. All Cody could say was, “Mmf! Mmf!” because he didn’t want their mother to hear. Finally he managed to bite Ezra’s knee and Ezra rolled off, panting and sobbing. He must have knocked into something at some earlier point, because his left eye was swelling. It made him look sad. Cody got up and showed him where he’d stashed the slats. They fitted them into place, heaved the mattress back on the frame, and attempted to smooth the blankets. Then Cody turned out the light, and they climbed into their beds and went to sleep.

Sometimes Cody dreamed about his father. He would be stepping through the doorway, wearing one of his salesman suits, bringing the afternoon paper as he always did on Friday. His ordinariness was astounding—his thick strings of hair and the tired, yellowish puffs beneath his eyes. (In waking memories, lately, he was not so real, but had blurred and leveled and lost his details.) “How was your week?” he asked, tediously. Cody’s mother answered, “Oh, all right.”

In these dreams, Cody was not his present self. He had somehow slid backward and become a toddler again, rushing around on tiny, fat legs, feverishly showing off. “See this? And this? See me somersault? See me pull my wagon?” His smallness colored every act; he was conscious of a desperate need to learn to
manage
, to take charge of his surroundings. Waking in the dark, the first thing he did was stretch his long legs and lift his arms, which were becoming veiny and roped with muscle. He thought of how it would be if his father returned some time in the future, when Cody was a man. “Look at what I’ve accomplished,” Cody would tell him. “Notice where I’ve got to, how far I’ve come without you.”

Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I didn’t do, that made you go away?

* * *

School started, and Cody entered ninth grade. He and his two best friends landed in the same homeroom. Sometimes Pete and Boyd came home with him; they all walked the long way, avoiding the grocery store where Cody’s mother worked. Cody had to keep things separate—his friends in one half of his life and his family in the other half. His mother hated for Cody to mix with outsiders. “Why don’t you ever have someone over?” she would ask, but she didn’t deceive him for a moment. He’d say, “Nah, I don’t need anybody,” and she would look pleased. “I guess your family’s enough for you, isn’t it?” she would ask. “Aren’t we lucky to have each other?”

He only allowed his friends in the house when his mother was at work, and sometimes for no reason he could name he would lead them through her belongings. He would open her smallest top bureau drawer and show them the real gold brooch that his father had given her when they were courting. “He thinks a lot of her,” he would say. “He’s given her heaps of stuff. Heaps. There’s heaps of other stuff that I just don’t happen to have on hand.” His friends looked bored. Switching tactics, Cody would show them her ironed handkerchiefs stacked so exactly that they seemed encased by an invisible square box. “I mean,” he said, “
your
mothers don’t do that, do they? Do they? Women!” he said, and then, musing over some mysterious metal clasp or something that was evidently used to hold up stockings, “Who can understand them? Really: can you figure them out? She likes Ezra best, my dumb brother Ezra. Sissy old Ezra. I mean, if it were Jenny, I could see it—Jenny being a girl and all. But Ezra! Who could like Ezra? Can you give me a single reason why?”

His friends shrugged, idly gazing around the room and jingling the loose change in their pockets.

He hid Ezra’s left sneaker, his arithmetic homework, his baseball mitt, his fountain pen, and his favorite sweater. He shut Ezra’s cat in the linen cupboard. He took Ezra’s bamboo whistle to school and put it in the jacket of Josiah Payson, Ezra’s best
friend—a wild-eyed boy, the size of a full-grown man, who was thought by some to be feebleminded. It was typical of Ezra that he loved Josiah with all his heart, and would even have had him to the house if their mother weren’t scared of him. Cody stopped by when Ezra’s class was at lunch, and he slipped behind the cloakroom partition and stuck the whistle in the pocket of Josiah’s enormous black peacoat. After that there was a stretch of Indian summer and Josiah evidently left his jacket where it hung, so the whistle stayed lost for days. Ezra was very upset about it. “Have you seen my whistle?” he asked everybody. For once, Cody didn’t have to listen to “Greensleeves” and “The Ash Grove,” played on that breathy little pipe, whose range was so limited that for high notes, Ezra had to blow extra hard and split people’s eardrums. “You took it,” Ezra told Cody. “Didn’t you? I know you did.”

“What would I want with a stupid toy whistle?” Cody asked.

He was hoping that when it turned up in Josiah Payson’s pocket, Ezra would blame Josiah. But it didn’t happen that way. Whatever passed between them was settled without any fuss, and the two of them continued to be friends. Once again, a cracked, foggy “Ash Grove” burbled in every corner of the house.

Their mother went on one of her rampages. “Pearl has hit the warpath,” Cody told his brother and sister. He always called her Pearl at such times. “Better look out,” he said. “She’s dumped all Jenny’s bureau drawers.”

“Oh-oh,” Ezra said.

“She’s slamming things around and talking to herself.”

“
Oh
, boy,” Jenny said.

Cody had met the other two on the porch; they’d stayed late at school. He silently opened the door for them, and they crept up the stairs. Each took a great, lunging stride over the step that creaked—although surely their mother would not have heard them. She was making too much noise in the kitchen. Throwing pots through windowpanes, was what it sounded like.

They tiptoed across the hall to Jenny’s room. “What a mess!” Ezra breathed. Heaps of clothing covered the floor. Empty drawers had been hurled everywhere. The wardrobe stood open, its hangers stripped, and Jenny’s puff-sleeved dresses lay in a heap. Jenny stared from the doorway. “Jen?” Cody asked her. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Jenny said in a quavery voice.

“Think! Some little thing, something you’ve forgotten about …”

“Nothing. I promise.”

“Well, help me get these drawers back in,” he said to Ezra.

It was a two-man job. The drawers were oak, cumbersome and inclined to stick. Cody and Ezra grunted as they fitted them into the bureau. Jenny traveled around the room collecting her clothes. Tears had filled her eyes, and she kept dabbing at her nose with one or another rolled pair of socks. “Stop that,” Cody told her. “She’ll do it all again, if she finds snot on your socks.”

He and Ezra gathered slips and hair ribbons, shook out blouses, tried to get the dresses back on their hangers the way they’d been before. Some were hopelessly wrinkled, and those they smoothed as best they could and hid at the rear of the wardrobe. Meanwhile Jenny knelt on the floor, sniffling and folding undershirts.

“I wish we could just go off,” Ezra said, “and not come back till it’s over.”

“It won’t be over till she’s had her scene,” Cody told him. “You know that. There’s no way we can get around it.”

“I wish Daddy were here.”

“Well, he’s not, so shut up.”

Ezra straightened a sash.

After they’d put everything in order, the three of them sat in a row on Jenny’s bed. The sounds from the kitchen were different now—cutlery rattling, glassware clinking. Their mother must be setting the table. Pretty soon she’d serve supper. Cody had such a loaded feeling in his throat, he never wanted to eat again. No doubt the others felt the same; Ezra kept swallowing. Jenny said, “Let’s run away from home.”

“We don’t have anyplace to run to,” Cody said.

Their mother came to the foot of the stairs and called them. Her voice was thin, like the sound of a gnat. “Children.”

They filed down, dragging their feet. They stopped at the first-floor bathroom and meticulously scrubbed their hands, taking extra pains with the backs. Each one waited for the others. Then they went into the kitchen. Their mother was slicing a brick of Spam. She didn’t look at them, but she started speaking the instant they were seated. “It’s not enough that I should have to work till five p.m., no; then I come home and find nothing seen to, no chores done, you children off till all hours with disreputable characters in the alleys or wasting your time with school chorus, club meetings; table not set, breakfast dishes not washed, supper not cooked, floors not swept, mail in a heap on the mat … and not a sign of any of you. Oh, I know what’s going on! I know what you three are up to! Neighborhood savages, that’s what you are, mingling with each and all. How am I supposed to deal with this? How am I expected to cope? Useless daughter, great unruly bruising boys … I know what people are saying. You think my customers aren’t glad to tell me? Coming in simpering, Well, Mrs. Tull, that oldest boy of yours is certainly growing up. I saw him with a pack of Camels in the street in front of the Barlow girl’s house.’ And I have to smile and take it. Have to stand there on exhibit while they’re all thinking, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, I don’t know how she can hold her head up. It’s clear she doesn’t have the least ability to handle those children; look at how they’re disgracing her.’ Sticking potatoes on people’s exhaust pipes and letting the air out of tires and shooting at streetlights with BB guns and stealing hubcaps and making off with traffic signs and moving Mrs. Correlli’s madonna to Sonny Boy Brown’s kitchen stoop and hanging around the hydrants with girls no better than tramps, girls in tight sweaters and ankle chains, oh, I hear about it everywhere …”

“But not me, Mama,” Jenny said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t do those things.”

Well, of course she didn’t (only Cody did), but she shouldn’t have pointed that out. Now she’d drawn attention to herself. Pearl turned, gathered force, and plunged. “You! I know about you. I couldn’t believe my ears. What should I be doing but coming down the church steps Sunday when I see you with that Melanie Miller from your Bible class. ‘Oh, Melanie …’ ” She made her voice shrill and prissy, nothing like Jenny’s, really. “ ‘Melanie, I just love your dress. I wish I had a dress like that.’ Understand,” she said, turning to the boys, “this was a cheap little number from Sears. The plaid wasn’t matched; there was a ruffle at the hem like a … square dance outfit and a bunch of artificial flowers pinned to the waist. A totally inappropriate dress for a nine-year-old, or for anyone. But ‘Oh, I wish I had that,’ your sister says, so everyone thinks, ‘Poor Mrs. Tull, she can’t even afford a Sears and Roebuck dress with artificial flowers; I don’t know how she manages, slaving away at that grocery all day and struggling over her budget at night, cutting here and cutting there, wondering will she scrape by, hoping nobody runs up a doctor bill, praying her children’s feet will stop growing …’

“And Melanie’s mother, well, it’s just like opening the door to such a person. First thing you know she’ll be walking in here big as life: ‘Mrs. Tull, I happen to have the catalogue we ordered Melanie’s dress from, if you would care for one for Jenny.’ As if I’d want to dress my daughter like an orphan! As if I’d like for her to duplicate some other child! ‘No, thank you, Mrs. Miller,’ I’ll say. ‘I may not be able to afford so very much but at least when I do buy, I buy with finished seams. No, Mrs. Miller, you keep your so-called wish book, your quarter-inch hem allowances, smashed felt flowers …’ What’s wrong with us, I’d like to know? Aren’t we good enough for my own blood daughter? Doesn’t she feel I’m doing my best, my level best, to provide? Does she have to pick up riffraff? Does she have to bring home scum? We’re a family! We used to be so close! What happened to us? Why would she act so disloyal?”

She sat down serenely, as if finished with the subject forever, and reached for a bowl of peas. Jenny’s face was streaming
with tears, but she wasn’t making a sound and Pearl seemed unaware of her. Cody cleared his throat.