Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (10 page)

So they lived in the house alone. Jenny felt even slighter than usual, overwhelmed by so much empty space. In the afternoons when she came home from school, her mother would still be at work, and Jenny would open the door and hesitantly step inside. Sometimes it seemed there was a startled motion, or a stopping of motion, somewhere deep in the house just as she crossed the threshold. She’d pause then, heart thumping, alert as a deer, but it never turned out to be anything real. She’d close the door behind her and go upstairs to her room, turn on her study lamp, change out of her school clothes. She was an orderly, conscientious girl who always hung things up and took good care of her belongings. She would set her books out neatly on her desk, align her pencils, and adjust the lamp so it shone at the proper angle. Then she’d work her way systematically through her assignments. Her greatest dream was to be a doctor, which meant she’d have to win a scholarship. In three years of high school, she had never received a grade below an A.

At five o’clock she would go downstairs to scrub the potatoes or start the chicken frying—whatever was instructed in her mother’s note on the kitchen table. Soon afterward her mother would arrive. “Well! I tell you that old Pendle woman is a trial and a nuisance, just a nuisance, lets me ring up all her groceries and then says, ‘Wait now, let me see, why, I don’t have near enough money for such a bill as this.’ Goes fumbling through her ratty cloth change purse while everyone behind her shifts from foot to foot …” She would tie an apron over her dress and take Jenny’s place at the stove. “Honey, hand me the salt, will you? I see there’s no mail from the boys. They’ve forgotten all about us, it seems. It’s only you and me now.”

It was only the two of them, yes, but there were echoes of the others all around—wicked, funny Cody, peaceful Ezra, setting up a loaded silence as Jenny and her mother seated themselves at the table. “Pour the milk, will you, dear? Help yourself to some beans.” Sometimes Jenny imagined that even her father made his absence felt, though she couldn’t picture his face and had little recollection of the time before he’d left them. Of course she never mentioned this to her mother. Their talk was
small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath. “How is that poor Carroll girl, Jenny? Has she lost any weight that you’ve noticed?”

Jenny knew that, in reality, her mother was a dangerous person—hot breathed and full of rage and unpredictable. The dry, straw texture of her lashes could seem the result of some conflagration, and her pale hair could crackle electrically from its bun and her eyes could get small as hatpins. Which of her children had not felt her stinging slap, with the claw-encased pearl in her engagement ring that could bloody a lip at one flick? Jenny had seen her hurl Cody down a flight of stairs. She’d seen Ezra ducking, elbows raised, warding off an attack. She herself, more than once, had been slammed against a wall, been called “serpent,” “cockroach,” “hideous little sniveling guttersnipe.” But here Pearl sat, decorously inquiring about Julia Carroll’s weight problem. Jenny had a faint, tremulous hope that times had changed. Perhaps it was the boys’ fault. Maybe she and her mother—intelligent women, after all—could live without such scenes forever. But she never felt entirely secure, and at night, when Pearl had placed a kiss on the center of Jenny’s forehead, Jenny went off to bed and dreamed what she had always dreamed: her mother laughed a witch’s shrieking laugh; dragged Jenny out of hiding as the Nazis tramped up the stairs; accused her of sins and crimes that had never crossed Jenny’s mind. Her mother told her, in an informative and considerate tone of voice, that she was raising Jenny to eat her.

Cody wrote almost never, and what letters he did write were curt and factual.
I won’t be coming home for spring vacation. All my grades are fine except French. This new job pays better than the old one did
. Ezra sent a postcard the moment he arrived in camp, and followed that three days later with a letter describing his surroundings. It was longer than several of Cody’s put together, but still it didn’t tell Jenny what she wanted to know.
There’s somebody two blocks down who’s from Maryland too I hear but I haven’t had a chance to talk to him and I don’t think
he’s from Baltimore anyway but some other place I wouldn’t know about so I doubt we’d have much to …
What was he saying, exactly? Had he, or had he not, made any friends? If people lived so close together, you’d think they would have talked. Jenny pictured the others ignoring him, or worse: tormenting him and making fun of his incompetence. He simply was not a soldier. But
I have learned right much about my rifle
, he wrote.
Cody would be surprised
. She tried to imagine his long, sensitive fingers cleaning and oiling a gun. She understood that he must be surviving, more or less, but she couldn’t figure out how. She thought of him on his belly, in the dust of the rifle range, squeezing a trigger. His gaze was so reflective, how would he hit a target?
They say the whole bunch of us will be joining the Korean Conflict as soon as we are
 … Why, they’d pick him off like a fly! He’d never do more to defend himself than dodge and shield his head.

I think a lot about Scarlatti’s Restaurant and how nice the lettuce smelled when I tore it into the bowl
, he wrote—his only mention of homesickness, if that was what it was. Pearl gave a jealous sniff. “As if lettuce had a smell!” Jenny was jealous too; he could have remembered, instead, how he and she used to lie on the floor in front of the Philco on Monday nights, listening to the Cities Service Band of America. What did he see in that restaurant, anyhow? Then a little knob of discomfort started nudging inside her chest. There was something she hadn’t done, something unpleasant that she didn’t want to do … Check on Mrs. Scarlatti. She wondered if Ezra had really meant for her to keep her promise. He couldn’t actually expect that of her, could he? But she supposed he could. He was a literal-minded kind of person.

So she folded Ezra’s letter and put it in her pocket. Then she slipped her coat on and walked to St. Paul Street, to a narrow brick building set in a strip of shops and businesses.

Scarlatti’s was the neighborhood’s one formal elegant eating place. It served only supper, mostly to people from better parts of the city. At this hour—five-thirty or so—it wouldn’t even be open. She went to the rear, where she’d been a couple of times
with Ezra. She circled two garbage cans overflowing with wilted greens, and she climbed the steps and knocked on the door. Then she cupped a hand to the windowpane and peered in.

Men in dirty aprons were rushing around the kitchen, which was a mass of steam and stainless steel, pot lids clattering, bowls as big as birdbaths heaped with sliced vegetables. No wonder they hadn’t heard her. She turned the knob, but the door was locked. And before she could knock any harder, she caught sight of Mrs. Scarlatti. She was slouched in the dining room entranceway, holding a lit cigarette—a white-faced woman in a stark black knife of a dress. Whatever she was saying, Jenny couldn’t catch it, but she heard the gravelly, careless sound of her voice. And she saw how Mrs. Scarlatti’s black hair was swept completely to the right, like one of those extreme Vogue magazine model’s, and how she leaned her head to the right as well so that she seemed to be burdened, cruelly misused, bearing up under an exhausting weight that had something to do with men and experience. Imagine Ezra knowing such a person! Imagine him at ease with her, close enough to worry about her. Jenny backed away. She understood, all at once, that her brothers had grown up and gone. Her mental pictures of them were outdated—Ezra playing the bamboo whistle he used to have in grade school, Cody triumphantly rattling his dice over their old Monopoly board. She thought of a faded flannel shirt that Ezra had worn so often, it was like a second skin. She thought of how he would rock back and forth with his hands in his rear pockets when he was lost for something to say, or dig a hole in the ground with his sneaker. And how when Jenny was shattered by one of their mother’s rages, he would slip downstairs to the kitchen and fix her a mug of hot milk laced with honey, sprinkled over with cinnamon. He was always so quick to catch his family’s moods, and to offer food and drink and unspoken support.

She traveled down the alley and, instead of heading home, took Bushnell Street and then Putnam. It was getting colder; she had to button her coat. Three blocks down Putnam stood a building so weathered and dismal, you’d think it was an
abandoned warehouse till you saw the sign:
TOM ’N’ EDDIE’S BODY SHOP
. She had often come here to fetch Ezra home, but she’d only called his name at the drive-in doorway; she had never been inside. Now she stepped into the gloom and looked around her. Tom and Eddie (she assumed) were talking to a man in a business suit; one of them held a clipboard. In the background, Josiah Payson swung a gigantic rubber mallet against the fender of a pickup. Jenny was hit by a piece of memory, a mystifying fragment: Josiah in the school yard, long ago, violently flailing a pipe or a metal bar of some sort, cutting a desperate, whizzing circle in the air and shouting something unintelligible while Ezra stood guard between him and a mob of children. “Everything will be fine; just go away,” Ezra was telling the others. But what had happened next? How had it ended? How had it started? She felt confused. Meanwhile Josiah swung his mallet. He was grotesquely tall, as gaunt as the armature for some statue never completed. His cropped black hair bristled all over his head, his skull of a face glistened, and he clenched a set of teeth so ragged and white and crowded, so jumbled together and overlapping, that it seemed he had chewed them up and was preparing to spit them out.

“Josiah,” she called timidly.

He stopped to look at her. Or was he looking someplace else? His eyes were dead black—lidless and almost Oriental. It was impossible to tell where they were directed. He heaved the hammer onto a stack of burlap bags and lunged toward her, his face alight with happiness. “Ezra’s sister!” he said. “Ezra!”

She smiled and hugged her elbows.

Directly in front of her, he came to a halt and smoothed his stubble of hair. His arms seemed longer than they should have been. “Is Ezra okay?” he asked her.

“He’s fine.”

“Not wounded or—”

“No.”

Ezra was right: Josiah spoke as distinctly as anyone, in a grown man’s rumbling voice. But he had trouble finding something to do with his hands, and ended up scraping them together
as if trying to rid his palms of dirt or grease, or even of a layer of skin. She was aware of Tom and Eddie glancing over at her curiously, losing track of their conversation. “Come outside,” she told Josiah. “I’ll let you see his letter.”

Outside it was twilight, almost too dark to read, but Josiah took the letter anyway and scanned the lines. There was a crease between his eyebrows as deep as if someone had pressed an ax blade there. She noticed that his coveralls, pathetically well washed, were so short for him that his fallen white socks and hairy shinbones showed. His lips could barely close over that chaos of teeth; his mouth had a bunchy look and his chin was elongated from the effort.

He handed the letter back to her. She had no way of knowing what he had got out of it. “If they’d let me,” he said, “I’d have gone with him. Oh, I wouldn’t mind going. But they claimed I was too tall.”

“Too tall?”

She’d never heard of such a thing.

“So I had to stay behind,” he said, “but I didn’t want to. I don’t want to work in a body shop all my life; I plan to do something different.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Find something with Ezra, I guess, once he gets out of the army. Ezra, he would always come to visit me here and look around and say, ‘How can you stand it? All the noise,’ he’d say. ‘We got to find you something different.’ But I didn’t know where to start hunting, and now Ezra’s gone away. It’s not the noise that’s so bad, but it’s hot in summer and cold in winter. My feet get bothered by the cold, get these itchy things all over the toes.”

“Chilblains, maybe,” Jenny suggested. She felt pleasantly bored; it seemed she had known Josiah forever. She ran a thumbnail down the crease of Ezra’s letter. Josiah gazed either at her or straight through her (it was hard to tell which) and cracked his knuckles.

“Probably what I’ll do is work for Ezra,” he said, “once Ezra opens his restaurant.”

“What are you talking about? Ezra’s not opening a restaurant.”

“Sure he is.”

“Why would he want to do that? As soon as he pulls himself together he’s going off to college, studying to be a teacher.”

“Who says so?” Josiah asked.

“Well, my mother does. He’s got the patience for it, she says. Maybe he’ll be a professor, even,” Jenny told him. But she wasn’t so certain now. “I mean, it’s not a lifework, restaurants.”

“Why isn’t it?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Ezra’s going to have him a place where people come just like to a family dinner,” Josiah said. “He’ll cook them one thing special each day and dish it out on their plates and everything will be solid and wholesome, really homelike.”

“Ezra told you that?”

“Really just like home.”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe people go to restaurants to get
away
from home.”

“It’s going to be famous,” Josiah said.

“You have the wrong idea entirely,” Jenny told him. “How did you come up with such a crazy notion?”

Then without warning, Josiah went back to being his old self—or her old picture of him. He dropped his head, like a marionette whose strings had snapped. “I got to go,” he told her.

“Josiah?”

“Don’t want those people yelling at me.”

He loped away without saying goodbye. Jenny watched after him as regretfully as if he were Ezra himself. He didn’t look back.

Cody wrote that he was being interviewed by several corporations. He wanted a job in business after he finished school. Ezra wrote that he could march twenty miles at a go now without much tiring. It began to seem less incongruous, even perfectly natural, that Ezra should be a soldier. After all, wasn’t he an enduring sort, uncomplaining, cheerful in performing his duties?
Jenny had worried needlessly. Her mother too seemed to relax somewhat. “Really it’s for the best, when you think about it,” she said. “A stint in the service is often just the ticket; gives a boy time to get hold of himself. I bet when he comes back, he’ll want to go to college. I bet he’ll want to teach someplace.”