Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (2 page)

He would change his mind in the morning. “We’l sleep on it,” she told him.

But he said, “It’s tonight I’m going.” He went to the bedroom for his suitcase, and he took his other suit from the wardrobe. Meanwhile Pearl, desperate for time, asked couldn’t they talk this over? Think it through?

No need to be hasty, was there? He crossed from bureau to bed, from wardrobe to bed, packing his belongings.

There weren’t that many. He was done in twenty minutes.

He drew in his breath and she thought, Now he’l tel me.

But al he said was, “I’m not an irresponsible person. I do plan to send you money.”

“And the children,” she said, clutching new hope.

“You’l want to visit the children.”

(he would come with presents for them and she’d be the one to open the door—perfumed, in her Sunday dress, maybe wearing a bit of rouge. She’d always thought false color looked cheap, but she could have been wrong.) Beck said, “No.”

“What?”

“I won’t be visiting the children.”

She sat down on the bed.

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

There ought to be a whole separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words—for perfect, absolute truth. It was the purest fact of her life: she did not understand him, and she never would.

At the time, they were living in Baltimore, in a row house on Calvert Street. The children were fourteen, eleven, and nine. They were old enough to suspect something wrong, if she didn’t take care. She took infinite care. The morning after Beck left she rose and dressed, piled her hair on her head the same as always, and cooked oatmeal for the children’s breakfast. Cody and Jenny ate without speaking; Ezra told a long, rambling dream. (he was the only one cheerful in the mornings.) There was some disappointment that the oatmeal lacked raisins. Nobody asked where Beck was.

After al , he often left before they woke on a Monday. And there’d been times—many times—when he’d stayed away the whole week. It wasn’t so unusual.

When Friday night rol ed around, she said he’d been delayed. He’d promised to take them to the Midget Circus, and she told them she would do it instead. Another week passed. She had no close friends, but if she met a chance acquaintance in the grocery store, she remarked that luckily, she wouldn’t have to use any meat points today. Her husband was away on business, she said. People nodded, showing no interest. He was almost always away on business.

Few had ever met him.

Nights, especial y Friday nights, she lay in bed in the dark and listened to the gritty click of heels on the sidewalk.

Footsteps would come close and then pass. She would let out her breath.

A new set of footsteps approached. Surely this was Beck.

She knew how hesitantly he would let himself in, expecting the worst—his children’s tears, his wife’s reproaches. But instead, he’d find everything unchanged. The children would greet him offhandedly. Pearl would peck his cheek and ask if he’d had a good trip. Later, he would thank her for keeping his secret. He would be so easily readmitted, since only the two of them knew he’d left; outsiders would go on believing the Tul s were a happy family. Which they were, in fact. Oh, they’d always been so happy! They’d depended only on each other, because of moving around so much. It had made them very close. He’d be back.

Her Uncle Seward’s widow wrote to wish her a happy birthday. (pearl had forgotten al about it.) Pearl responded immediately, thanking her. We celebrated at home, she wrote. Beck surprised me with the prettiest necklace…

Say hel o to the others, she added, and she pictured them al in her uncle’s parlor; she ached for them, but drew herself up and recal ed how they had been so sure no man would marry her. She could never tel them what had happened.

Her old friend Emmaline stopped by, on her way to visit a sister in Philadelphia. Pearl said Beck was out of town; the two of them were in luck; they could talk girl-talk to their hearts’ content.

She put Emmaline in the double bed with her, instead of in the guest room. They stayed awake half the night gossiping and giggling. Once Pearl almost set a hand on Emmaline’s arm and said, “Emmaline. Listen. I feel so horrible, Emmaline.” But fortunately, she caught herself.

The moment passed. In the morning they overslept, and Pearl had to rush to get the children off to school; so there wasn’t much said. “We should do this more often,” Emmaline told her as she left, and Pearl said Beck would be sorry he had missed her. “You know he’s always liked you,” she said. Although actual y, Beck used to claim that Emmaline reminded him of a woodchuck.

Easter came, and Jenny had a part in her school’s Easter pageant. When the day arrived and Beck was stil not home, Jenny cried. Couldn’t he ever be home? It wasn’t his fault, Pearl told her. There was a war on, production speeded up; he couldn’t help it if his company needed him more now.

They ought to be proud, she said. Jenny dried her tears and told everyone that her daddy had to help with the war effort. The war was so old by now, grinding on; no one was impressed.

Stil , it made Jenny feel better. Pearl went to the Easter pageant alone, wearing a rakish, visored hat that was patterned after the hats the WAC’S wore.

When Beck had been gone a month, he sent a note from Norfolk saying he was fine and hoped that she and the kids did not lack for anything. He enclosed a check for fifty dol ars. It wasn’t nearly enough. Pearl spent a morning pacing the house. First she went over his note in her mind, picking apart his words for underlying meanings. But not much could underlie right good apartment with hotplate and sales manager seems to think wel of me. Then she considered the money. Around lunchtime, she put on her coat and her WAC’S hat and walked around the corner to Sweeney Bros. Grocery and Fine Produce, where a cashier wanted sign had been yel owing in the window for weeks. They were tickled to death to hire her. The younger Sweeney brother showed her how to work the cash register and said she could start the next morning. When her children came home from school that day, she told them she was taking a job to fil in time. She needed something to keep her busy, she said, now that they were growing up and going off on their own more.

Two months passed. Three months. Fifty dol ars a month from Beck. When the second check arrived, no letter came with it. She tore the envelope apart, thinking it must have got stuck inside, but there wasn’t a word. With the third check, though, he wrote that he was moving to Cleveland, where the company planned to open a new branch. He said it was a good sign they’d decided on this transfer—or

“invite,” he cal ed it. He never cal ed it a transfer; he cal ed it an invite. An invite to this important expansion westward.

He began the letter, Dear Pearl and kids, but Pearl didn’t show it to the children. She folded it neatly and put it with the first letter, in a hosiery box in her bureau, where even that meddlesome Cody wouldn’t think to look. In the fourth envelope, again, there was only a check. She saw that he was not in communication with her (was how she phrased it), but was merely touching base from time to time.

Real y, al he was doing was saying, Please find enclosed. It didn’t occur to her to answer him.

Yet she went on saving his letters.

Sometimes she had strange thoughts that surprised her.

For instance: At least I have more closet space now. And more drawer space.

At night she dreamed that Beck was new and wonderful again, someone she’d just become acquainted with. He gazed at her adoringly, overturning some unfamiliar center deep inside her. He helped her cross streets, climb steps.

His hand cupped her elbow warmly or circled her waist or steadied the smal of her back. She felt cherished. When she woke, her only thought was to sink back into her dream.

She would keep her eyes shut.

Superstitiously, she would play possum, not stirring, trying to persuade the dream that she was stil asleep. But it never worked. Final y she would rise, whatever the hour, and go downstairs to make a pot of coffee. Standing at the kitchen window with her cup, watching the sky whiten over the rooftops, she would catch sight of her dark, transparent reflection —her smal face and round chin that was taking on a dented look, these past few years; the worried tent of her colorless eyebrows; the pale frazzle of hair that failed to hide the crease across her forehead.

That crease was not a wrinkle but a scar, the mark of a childhood accident. Oh, she was not so old! She was not so very old! But then she remembered the accident: she’d been trying to ride a cousin’s bicycle, the very first in the family. A “wheel” was what they cal ed it. Trying to ride a wheel. And here it was 1944 and bicycles were everywhere, but so modernized they were hardly the same breed of beast. Al three of her children knew how to ride and would, in fact, have had bikes of their own if not for the war. How had she come so far? She had just passed her fiftieth birthday.

There was not a hope of Beck’s return. He’d found someone younger, someone glamorous and merry, stil capable of bearing children. They were laughing at her—at how she’d always been an old maid, real y, always an old maid at heart. How she flinched when he turned to her in the dark, stil startled, after al these years, by the concreteness of him—by his scratchy whiskers, salty-smel ing skin, weighty body. How she had to have things just perfect, the linens on labeled shelves in the cupboard and the shades pul ed evenly in the windows. How she’d never learned to let go, to give in, to float on the current of a day, but must always fuss and pul at stray threads and straighten the corners of things; and worst of al , how she knew she did that, knew while she was doing it, but stil could not stop herself.

He was never coming back.

It was time to tel the children. She was amazed, in fact, that she’d managed to keep it from them for so long. Had they always been this easy to fool? One good thing about tel ing them: they would ral y around her better.

She didn’t like to admit it but she was losing control of the boys. Instead of supporting her—taking out the garbage, helping her in various manly and protective ways—they seemed to be running wild; yes, even Ezra. They didn’t even do the chores they used to do, let alone take on new ones. Cody in fact was hardly ever home. Ezra was dreamy and forgetful and would like as not walk off in the middle of a task. When she told them what was what, she thought, they’d be horrified at how they’d let her down. They’d ask why she’d hidden it al this time, what she could have been thinking of.

Only she couldn’t tel them.

She planned how she would do it: she would gather them around her on the sofa, in the lamplight, some evening after supper. “Children. Dear ones,” she would say.

“There’s something you should know.” But she wouldn’t be able to continue; she might cry. It was unthinkable to cry in front of the children. Or in front of anyone. Oh, she had her pride! She was not a tranquil woman; she often lost her temper, snapped, slapped the nearest cheek, said things she later regretted—but thank the Lord, she didn’t expose her tears. She didn’t al ow any tears. She was Pearl Cody Tul , who’d ridden out of Raleigh triumphant with her new husband and never looked back. Even now, even standing at the kitchen window, al alone, watching her tense and aging face, she didn’t cry.

Every morning, then, she went off to Sweeney Bros. She continued to wear her hat, giving the impression that she had merely dropped in and was helping out as a favor, in a pinch. As each customer approached (general y someone she knew, at least by sight), she would give a firm nod and then squint, implying a smile. She rang up the purchases efficiently while a boy named Alexander bagged them.

“Thank you, and good day,” she said at the end, with another shorthand smile. She liked to seem crisp and professional. When neighbors showed up, people she knew more closely, she felt she was dying inside but she didn’t lose her composure. With them she was even crisper. She had a little rhythm between the key stabbing and the sliding of groceries along the wooden counter; it kept her mind off things. If she al owed herself to think, she started worrying. Summer had arrived and her children were out of school al day. No tel ing what they might be up to.

At five-thirty she walked home, past crowds of youngsters playing hopscotch or huddled over marble games, past babies set to air in their carriages, women perched on their stoops fanning themselves in the heat. She’d climb her steps and be met at the door with bad news: “Jenny fel down the stairs today and bit her lower lip clean through and had to go to Mrs. Simmons’s house for ice and gauze.”

“Oh, Jenny, honey!”

It seemed they greeted her with disaster, saved up al their accidents especial y for her. She’d want to take off her hat and shoes and fal back onto the sofa; but no, it was

“The toilet’s stopped up,” and “I tore my pants,” and “Cody hit Ezra with the orange juice pitcher.”

“Can’t you just let me be?” she would ask. “Can’t you just give me a minute to myself?”

She’d make supper from tins she’d brought home, nothing fancy. She would listen to the radio while she washed dishes. Jenny was supposed to dry but was off playing tag with the boys. Stepping out the back door to heave her dishpan of water into the yard, Pearl paused to watch them—Cody and Jenny dark and quick, high-pitched, overcome with laughter; Ezra pale, a glimmer in the twilight, slower and more wandery in his movements. Sometimes there’d be neighbor children, too, but more often just the three of them. They stuck together, mostly.

She shampooed her hair and rinsed out a slip.

Cal ed to Cody to fetch the other two and come inside now.

Nights, she worked on the house. To look at her —an out-of-date kind of woman, frail boned, deep bosomed, as if those pout-fronted gowns of her girlhood had somehow formed her figure—you would never guess it, but Pearl was clever with tools.

She patched a crack, glazed a window, replaced two basement stair treads. She mended a lamp switch and painted the kitchen cupboards. Even in the old days, she had done such things; Beck was not very handy. “This whole, entire house is resting on my shoulders,” she would tel him, and she meant it as an accusation; but the thought was also reassuring, in a way.