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Authors: Anne Tyler

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (3 page)

BOOK: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
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She knew that she was competent. From early in their marriage, from the moment she had realized how often they would be moving, she had concentrated on making each house perfect—airtight and rustproof and waterproof. She dropped the effort of continual y meeting new neighbors, and she stopped returning (freshly fil ed) the cake tins they brought over when she arrived. Al she cared about was sealing up the house, as if for a hurricane. She woke nights wondering if the basement were dry, and went down barefoot to make sure. She couldn’t enjoy their Sunday outings because the house might have burned to the ground in her absence. (how vividly she could picture their return! There’d be an open space where the house used to stand, and a tattered hole for the basement.) Here in Baltimore, she gathered, she was thought to be unfriendly, even spooky—the witch of Calvert Street. What a notion!

She’d known such witches in her childhood; she was nothing like them.

Al she wanted was to be al owed to get on with what mattered: calk the windows; weatherstrip the door.

With tools she was her true self, capable and strong. She felt an indulgent kind of scorn for her children, who had not inherited her skil . Cody lacked the patience, Ezra was inept, Jenny too flighty. It was remarkable, Pearl thought, how people displayed their characters in every little thing they undertook.

Hammering down a loose floorboard, with a bristle of nails in her mouth, she would let time slip away from her. It would get to be ten-thirty or eleven. Her children would be standing in the doorway al sweaty and grass stained, blinking in the sudden brightness. “Heavens! Get to bed,” she told them.

“I thought I cal ed you in hours ago.” But a while after they left she’d start to feel deserted, even though they hadn’t been much company. She would lay aside her hammer and rise and walk the house, smoothing her skirt, absently touching her hair where it was fal ing out of its bun. Up the stairs to the hal , past the little room where Jenny slept, and into her own room, with its buckling cardboard wardrobe streaked to look like wood grain, the bare-topped bureau, the cavernous bed. Then out again and up more stairs to the boys’ room, a third-floor dormitory that smel ed of heat.

The trustful sound of her sons’ breathing made her envious.

She turned and descended the stairs, al the way down to the kitchen. The back door stood open and the screen door fluttered with moths. Neighboring houses rang with someone’s laughter, a few cracked notes from a trumpet, an out-of-tune piano playing “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” She closed the door and locked it and pul ed down the paper shade.

She climbed the stairs once more and took off her clothing, piece by piece, and put on her nightgown and went to bed.

She dreamed he wore that aftershave that he’d used when they were courting. She hadn’t smel ed it in years, hadn’t given it a thought, but now it came back to her distinctly—something pungent, prickled with spice. A swaggery and self-vaunting scent, she had known even then; but catching wind of it, when he arrived on Uncle Seward’s front porch to pick her up, she had felt adventurous. She had flung the door open so widely that it banged against the wal , and he had laughed and said,

“Wel , now. Hey, now,” as she stood there, smiling out at him.

She had heard you could not dream a smel , or recal a smel in its absence; so when she woke she was convinced, for a moment, that Beck had let himself into the house and was seated on the edge of the bed, watching while she slept. But there was no one there.

Dance? Oh, I don’t think so, she said inside her head. I’m in charge of this whole affair, you see, and al I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fal into little pieces. Whoever it was drew away. Ezra turned a page of his magazine. “Ezra,” she said. She felt him grow stil . He had this habit—he had always had it—of becoming total y motionless when people spoke to him. It was endearing, but also in some ways a strain, for then whatever she said to him (“I feel a draft,” or “The paper boy is late again”) was bound to disappoint him, wasn’t it? How could she live up to Ezra’s expectations? She plucked at her quilt. “If I could just have some water,” she told him.

He poured it from the pitcher on the bureau. She heard no ice cubes clinking; they must have melted.

Yet it seemed just minutes ago that he’d brought in a whole new supply. He raised her head, rested it on his shoulder, and tipped the glass to her lips. Yes, lukewarm—

not that she minded. She drank grateful y, keeping her eyes closed. His shoulder felt steady and comforting. He laid her back down on the pil ow.

“Dr. Vincent’s coming at ten,” he told her.

“What time is it now?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“Eight-thirty in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been here al night?” she asked.

“I slept a little.”

“Sleep now. I won’t be needing you.”

“Wel , maybe after the doctor comes.” It was important to Pearl that she deceive the doctor. She didn’t want to go to the hospital.

Her il ness was pneumonia, she was almost certain; she guessed it from a past experience.

She recognized the way it settled into her back. If Dr.

Vincent found out he would send her off to Union Memorial, tent her over with plastic. “Maybe you should cancel the doctor altogether,” she told Ezra. “I’m very much improved, I believe.”

“Let him decide that.”

“Wel , I know how my own self feels, Ezra.”

“We won’t argue about it just now,” he said.

He could surprise you, Ezra could. He’d let a person walk al over him but then display, at odd moments, a deep and rock-hard stubbornness.

She sighed and smoothed her quilt. It seemed he’d spil ed some water on it.

She remembered when Ezra was a child, stil in elementary school. “Mother,” he had said, “if it turned out that money grew on trees, just for one day and never again, would you let me stay home from school and pick it?”

“No,” she told him.

“Why not?”

“Your education is more important.”

“Other kids’ mothers would let them, I bet.”

“Other mothers don’t have plans for their children to amount to something.”

“But just for one day?”

“Pick it after school. Or before. Wake up extra early; set your alarm clock ahead an hour.”

“An hour!” he said. “One little hour, for something that happens only once in al the world.”

“Ezra, wil you let it be? Must you keep at me this way?

Why are you so obstinate?” Pearl had asked him.

It only now occurred to her, under her damp quilt, to wonder why she hadn’t said yes, he could stay home. If money decided to grow on trees one day, let him pick al he liked! she should have said. What difference would it have made?

Oh, she’d been an angry sort of mother.

She’d been continual y on edge; she’d felt too burdened, too much alone. And after Beck left, she’d been so preoccupied with paying the rent and juggling the budget and keeping those great, clod-footed children in new shoes. It was she who cal ed the doctor at two a. m. when Jenny got appendicitis; it was she who marched downstairs with a basebal bat the night they heard that scary noise.

She’d kept the furnace stoked with coal, confronted the neighborhood bul y when Ezra got beaten up, hosed the roof during Mrs.

Simmons’s chimney fire. And when Cody came home drunk from some girl’s birthday party, who had to deal with that? Pearl Tul , who’d never taken anything stronger than a glass of wine at Christmas. She sat him smartly in a kitchen chair, ignored his groans, leaned across the table to him—

and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Then Cody graduated from high school, and Ezra was a sophomore, and Jenny was a tal young lady in eighth grade. Beck would not have known them.

And they, perhaps, would not have known Beck. They never asked about him. Didn’t that show how little importance a father has? The invisible man. The absent presence. Pearl felt a twinge of angry joy.

Apparently she had carried this off—made the transition so smoothly that not a single person guessed. It was the greatest triumph of her life.

My one true accomplishment, she thought. (what a pity there was no one to whom she could boast of it.) Without noticing, even, she had gradual y stopped attending the Baptist church. She stopped referring to Beck in conversation—although stil , writing her Christmas cards to relatives in Raleigh, she remarked that Beck was doing wel and sent them his regards.

One night, she threw away his letters. It wasn’t a planned decision. She was just cleaning her bureau, was al , and couldn’t think of any good reason to save them. She sat by her bedroom wastebasket and dropped in looks like I wil be moving up the ladder and little place convenient to the railway station and told me I was doing mighty wel . There weren’t very many —three or so in the past year. When had she quit ripping open the envelopes with shaking hands and rapidly, greedily scanning the lines? It occurred to her that the man she stil mourned, late on sleepless nights, bore no relation whatsoever to the man who sent these tiresome messages. Ed Bal is retiring in June, she read with infinite boredom, and I step into his territory which has the highest per capita income in Delaware. It was a great satisfaction to her that he had misspel ed capita.

Her children grew up and embarked on lives of their own.

Her sons started helping out financial y, and Pearl was glad to accept. (she had never been ashamed about taking money—from Uncle Seward in the olden days, or from Beck, or now from the boys.

Where she came from, a woman expected the men to provide.) And when Cody became so successful, he bought the row house she’d been renting al these years and presented her with the deed one Christmas morning. She could have retired from the grocery store right then, but she put it off til her sight began failing. What else would she do with her time?

“Empty nest,” they cal ed it. Nowadays, that was the term they used. It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had not been empty.

Relatively speaking, it was nothing—empty far longer than ful . So much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they’d been with her?

When she thought of them in their various stages—first clinging to her, then separating and drifting off—she thought of the hal lamp she used to leave on so they wouldn’t be scared in the dark. Then later she’d left just the bathroom light on, further down the hal of whatever house they’d been living in; and later stil just the downstairs light if one of them was out for the evening.

Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her.

She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought.

She should have made a few friends or joined a club.

But she wasn’t the type. It wouldn’t have consoled her.

Last summer, she’d been half-awakened by a hymn on her clock radio—”In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” mournful y sung by some popular singer just before Norman Vincent Peale’s sermonette. We shal meet on that beautiful shore

… She’d slipped into a dream in which a stranger told her that the beautiful shore was Wrightsvil e Beach, North Carolina, where she and Beck and the children had once spent a summer vacation. They were meeting on the shore after changing into swimsuits, for the very first swim of their very first day.

Beck was handsome and Pearl felt graceful and the children were stil very smal ; they had round, excited, joyous faces and chubby little bodies. She was astounded by their innocence—by her own and Beck’s as wel . She stretched her arms toward the children, but woke. Later, speaking to Cody on the phone, she happened to mention the dream. Wouldn’t it be nice, she said, if heaven were Wrightsvil e Beach? If, after dying, they’d open their eyes and find themselves back on that warm, sunny sand, everyone young and happy again, those long-ago waves rol ing in to shore? But Cody hadn’t entered into the spirit of the thing. Nice? he had asked. He asked, was that al she thought of heaven? Wrightsvil e Beach, where as he recal ed she had fretted for two solid weeks that she might have left the oven on at home? And had she taken into account, he asked, his own wishes in the matter? Did she suppose that he wanted to spend eternity as a child? “Why, Cody, al I meant was—was she said.

Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with al of her children. They were so frustrating—attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

And she sensed a kind of trademark flaw in each of their lives. Cody was prone to unreasonable rages; Jenny was so flippant; Ezra hadn’t real y lived up to his potential. (he ran a restaurant on St. Paul Street—not at al what she had planned for him.) She wondered if her children blamed her for something. Sitting close at family gatherings (with the spouses and offspring slightly apart, nonmembers forever), they tended to recal only poverty and loneliness—toys she couldn’t afford for them, parties where they weren’t invited.

Cody, in particular, referred continual y to Pearl’s short temper, displaying it against a background of stunned, childish faces so sad and bewildered that Pearl herself hardly recognized them.

Honestly, she thought, wasn’t there some statute of limitations here? When was he going to absolve her? He was middle-aged.

He had no business holding her responsible any more.

And Beck: wel , he was stil alive, if it mattered. By now he’d be old. She would bet he’d aged poorly. She would bet he wore a toupee, or false teeth too white and regular, or some flowing, youthful hairdo that made him look ridiculous. His ties would be too colorful and his suits too bold a plaid. What had she ever seen in him? She chewed the insides of her lips.

Her one mistake: a simple error in judgment.

It should not have had such far-reaching effects. You would think that life could be a little more forgiving.

Once or twice a year, even now, his letters arrived.

BOOK: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
7.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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