Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (12 page)

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 al ergy. 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 dul —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 al . And twice, during her first two years in col ege, 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, gradual y, 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”—real y 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 real y 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 fel 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 footbal 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 intel igence that even his smudged tortoiseshel 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 pul over 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 cal her name several times, laughing at her bemused expression.

It was the spring of 1957—an unusual y late and gradual spring. Professors opened the classroom windows with long, hooked poles, and the smel of lilacs floated in. Jenny wore sleeveless blouses and ful skirts and bal erina 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 al 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 al , 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 chenil e bedspread she’d brought from her room. Their classmates lounged on other bedspreads al 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 strol 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 stil 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 level y, 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 actual y managed to bowl her over. She wondered what he would do if she threw her arms around him and col apsed against him, laid her face on his white, white chest, burned her cheek on his scientific medal.

Instead she asked, “Wil 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 pol en, 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 unskil ful kiss anyhow, too abrupt, and she couldn’t help imagining the picture they made—a blue chenil e pil ar 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.

Jenny returned to her room and took a bath and changed to a ruffled dress. She leaned out her open window, humming. Harley didn’t come. Eventual y she went to supper, but he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. The next day, after her last exam, she phoned his dormitory. Some sleepy-sounding, gruff boy answered. “Baines has left for home,” he said.

“Home? But we haven’t had graduation yet.”

“He’s not planning to go through with that.”

“Oh,” said Jenny. She hadn’t thought of graduation as

“going through” with anything, although it was true you could simply have your diploma mailed out. To people like Harley Baines, she supposed, a degree was unimportant. (while Jenny’s family was coming al the way to Summerfield for this event.) She said, “Wel , thank you anyhow,” and hung up, hoping her voice didn’t sound as forlorn to Harley’s roommate as it did to her.

That summer, after graduation, she worked again at Mol y’s Togs in the little town near the col ege.

It had always seemed a pleasant job, but this year she was depressed by the studied casualness of married women’s clothes—their Bermuda shorts for golfing and their wide-hipped khaki skirts. She gazed away unhelpful y when her customers asked, “Does it suit me? Do you think it’s too youthful?” Next year at this time, she would be at Paulham. She wondered how soon she could start wearing a starched white coat.

In July, a letter arrived from Harley Baines, forwarded from home by her mother. When Jenny returned to her boardinghouse after work, she found it on the hal table.

She stood looking at it a moment. Then she slipped it into her straw purse and climbed the stairs. She let herself into her room, threw her purse on the bed, and opened the window. She took a square tin from a drawer and fed the two goldfish in the bowl on the bureau. Al before opening Harley’s letter.

Did she guess, ahead of time, what it would say?

Later, she imagined that she must have.

His handwriting was as smal and separate as typing.

She would have imagined something more headlong from a genius.

He used a colon after the greeting, as if it were a business letter.

I unreasonably took offense at what was, in fact, a natural reaction on your part. I must have seemed ridiculous.

What I had intended, before our misunderstanding, was that we might become better acquainted over the summer and then marry in the fal . I stil find marriage a viable option.

I know this must seem sudden—we haven’t exactly had a normal American courtship—but after al , we are neither of us frivolous people.

Bear in mind that we wil both be at Paulham next year and could share a single apartment, buy groceries in economy lots,
etc.
Also, I sense that your finances have been something of a problem, and I would be glad to assume that responsibility.

The above sounds more pragmatic than Yd intended.

Actual y, I find I love you, and am awaiting your earliest reply.

Sincerely,

Harley Baines

PS.
I know that you’re intel igent. You didn’t have to make up al those questions about genetics.

The postscript, she thought, was the most affecting part of the letter. It was written in a looser hand, as if impulsively, while the rest seemed copied and perhaps recopied from a rough draft. She read the letter again, and then folded it and set it on her bed. She went over to study her goldfish, who had left too much food floating on the surface of the water.

She would have to cut down on their rations. Dear Harley, she practiced. It was such a surprise to…

No. He wouldn’t care for gushiness. Dear Harley: I have considered your terms and… What she was trying to say was “Yes.” She was pul ed only very slightly by the feelings she’d had for him earlier (which now seemed faded and shal ow, a schoolgirl crush brought on by senior panic).

What appealed to her more was the angularity of the situation—the mighty leap into space with someone she hardly knew. Wasn’t that what a marriage ought to be? Like one of those movie-style disasters—shipwrecks or earthquakes or enemy prisons—where strangers, trapped in close quarters by circumstance, show their real strengths and weaknesses.

Lately, her life had seemed to be narrowing.

She could predict so easily the successive stages of medical school, internship, and residency. She had looked in a mirror, not so long ago, and realized al at once that the clear, fragile skin around her eyes would someday develop lines. She was going to grow old like anyone else.

She took paper from a bureau drawer, sat down on her bed, and uncapped her fountain pen. Dear Harley: she wrote. She plucked a microscopic hair from the pen point.

She thought a while. Then she wrote, Al right, and signed her name—the ultimate in no-nonsense communication.

Even Harley couldn’t find it excessive.

The fol owing evening, just before supper, Jenny arrived in Baltimore. She had burned al her bridges: quit her job, given away her goldfish, and packed everything in her room. It was the most reckless behavior she had ever shown. On the Greyhound bus she sat grandly upright, periodical y shrugging off the snoring soldier who drooped against her. When she reached the terminal she hailed a cab, instead of waiting for a city bus, and rode home in style.

No one had been told she was coming, so she was puzzled by the fact that while she was paying off the driver, the front door of her house opened wide and her mother proceeded across the porch and down the steps in a flowing, flowered dress, high-heeled pumps, and a hat whose black net veil was dotted with what looked like beauty spots. Behind her came Ezra in un-pressed clothes that were a little too ful cut, and last was Cody, dark and handsome and New Yorkish in a fine-textured, fitted gray suit and striped silk tie. For a second, Jenny fancied they were headed for her funeral. This was how they would look

—formal y dressed and refraining from battle—if Jenny were no longer among them. Then she shook the thought away, and smiled and climbed out of the taxi.

Her mother halted on the sidewalk. “My stars!” she said.

“Ezra, when you say family dinner, you mean family dinner!” She raised her veil to kiss Jenny’s cheek. “Why didn’t you tel us you were coming? Ezra, did you plan it this way?”