Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (23 page)

Ezra parks the car beneath an oak tree. “It’s a shame. A disgrace and a shame,” Pearl says, stepping out. She wears a seersucker dress that will wash, and her oldest shoes. On her head is a broad-brimmed straw hat. It will keep the dust from her
hair—from all but one faded, blondish frizz bordering each temple. “It’s a national crime,” she says, and she stands looking around her while Ezra unloads her cleaning supplies. The house has two stories. It is a ghostly, rubbed-out gray. The ridgepole sags and the front porch has buckled and many of the windowpanes are broken—more every time she comes.

She remembers when Cody first showed her this place. “Imagine what can be done with it, Mother. Picture the possibilities,” he said. He was planning to marry and raise a family here—provide her with lots of grandchildren. He even kept the livestock on, paying Jared Peers to tend it till Cody moved in.

That was years ago, though, and all that remains of those animals now is a couple of ragged hens gone wild, clucking in the mulberry tree out behind the barn.

She has a key to the warped rear door but it isn’t needed. The padlock’s missing and the rusted hasp hangs open. “Not again,” she says. She turns the knob and enters, warily. (One of these days, she’ll surprise someone and get her head blown off for her trouble.) The kitchen smells stale and cold, even in the heat of the day. There’s a fly buzzing over the table, a rust spot smearing the back of the sink, a single tatter of cloudy plastic curtain trailing next to the window. The linoleum’s worn patternless near the counters.

Ezra follows, burdened with household supplies. He sets them down and stands wiping his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. More than once he’s told her he fails to see the use of this: cleaning up only to clean again, the next time they come out. What’s the purpose, he wants to know. Why go to all this trouble, what does she have in mind? But he’s an obliging man, and when she insists, he says no more. He runs his fingers through his hair, which the sweat has turned a dark, streaked yellow. He tests the kitchen faucet. First it explodes and then it yields a coppery trickle of water.

There are half a dozen empty bottles lying on the floor—Wild Turkey, Old Crow, Southern Comfort. “Look! And look,” says Pearl. She nudges a Marlboro pack with her toe. She scrapes at a scorch on the table. She discreetly looks away while Ezra
hooks an unmentionable rubber something with the broom handle and drops it into the trash bag.

“Cody,” she used to say, “you could hire a man to come and haul this furniture off to the dump. Surely you don’t want it for yourself. Cody, there’s a Sunday suit in the bedroom closet. There are shoes at the top of the cellar stairs—chunky, muddy old garden shoes. You ought to hire a man to come haul them for you.” But Cody paid no attention—he was hardly ever there. He was mostly in New York; and privately, Pearl had expected that that was where he would stay. Which of those girlfriends of his would agree to a life in the country? “You’d just better watch out who you marry,” she had told him. “None of your dates that
I’ve
met would do—those black-haired, flashy, beauty-queen types.”

But if only he’d married one of them! If only he’d been satisfied with that! Instead, one afternoon Ezra had come into the kitchen, had stood there looking sick. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked. She knew it was something. “Ezra? Why aren’t you at work?”

“It’s Cody,” he said.

“Cody?”

She clutched at her chest, picturing him dead—her most difficult, most distant child, and now she would never have the answer to him.

But Ezra said, “He’s gone off to get married.”

“Oh, married,” she said, and she dropped her hand. “Well? Who to?”

“To Ruth,” he said.

“
Your
Ruth?”

“My Ruth.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

Not that she hadn’t had some inkling. She had seen it coming for weeks, she believed, though she hadn’t exactly seen marriage—more likely a fling, a flirtation, another of Cody’s teases. Should she have hinted to Ezra? He wouldn’t have listened. He was so gullible, and so much in love. Ruth was the center of his world, for some reason. And anyway, who would have thought
that Cody would let it get so serious? “He’s just doing it to be mean, sweetheart,” she told Ezra. She was right, too, as she’d been right the other times she’d said it—oh, those other times! Those inconsequential spats, those childhood quarrels, arguments, practical jokes! “Cody, stop it this instant,” she used to tell him. “You think I don’t see what you’re up to? Let your poor brother alone. Ezra, pay no mind. He’s only being mean.” Back then, Ezra had listened and nodded, hoping to believe her; he had doted on his older brother. But now he said, “What does it matter why he did it? He did it, that’s all. He stole her away.”

“If she could be stolen, honey, why, you don’t want her anyhow.”

Ezra just looked at her—bleak faced, grim, a walking ache of a man. She knew how he felt. Hadn’t she been through it? She remembered from when her husband left—a wound, she’d been, a deep, hollow hole, surrounded by shreds of her former self.

She sweeps all the trash to the center of the floor, collects the bottles and the cigarette packs. Meanwhile, Ezra tapes squares of cardboard to the broken windowpanes. He works steadily, doggedly. She looks up once and sees how the sweat has made an eagle-shaped stain across his back. There are other cardboard squares on other panes, broken earlier. In a few more seasons, it occurs to her, they’ll be working in the dark. It’s as if they’re sealing themselves in, windowpane by windowpane.

When Cody came back with Ruth, after the honeymoon, he was better-looking than ever, sleek and dark and well dressed, but Ruth was her same homely self: a little muskrat of a girl with wickety red hair and freckles, her skin that tissue-thin kind subject to lip sores and pink splotches, her twiggish body awkward in a matronly brown suit that must have been bought especially for this occasion. (Though Pearl was to find, in later years, that all Ruth’s clothes struck her that way; nothing ever seemed as natural as those little-boy dungarees she used to wear with Ezra.) Pearl watched the two of them sharply, closely, anxious to come to some conclusion about their marriage, but they gave away no secrets. Ruth sat pressing her palms together; Cody kept his arm across the back of the couch, not touching
her but claiming her, at least. He talked at length about the farm. They were heading out there directly, settling in that night. It was too late for sowing a garden but at least they could clean the place up, begin to make plans for next spring. Ruth was going to get started on that while Cody went back to New York. Ruth nodded at this, and cleared her throat and fumbled with the pocket of her suit jacket. Pearl thought she was reaching for one of her little cigars, but after a moment she stopped fumbling and placed her palms together again. And in fact, Pearl never saw her smoke another one of those cigars.

Then Ezra arrived—not whistling, oddly quiet, as he’d been since Ruth had left. He stopped inside the door and looked at them. “Ezra,” Cody said easily, and Ruth stood up and held out her hand. She seemed frightened. This made Pearl like her, a little. (Ruth, at least, recognized the magnitude of what they’d done.) “How you doing, Ezra,” Ruth said, quavering. And Ezra had said … oh, something or other, he’d managed something; and stood around a while shifting from foot to foot and answering their small talk. So it looked, on the surface, as if they might eventually smooth things over. Yes, after all, this choosing of mates was such a small, brief stage in a family’s history.

But Ezra no longer played tunes on his recorder, and he continued to look limp and beaten, and he went to bed every night with no more than a “Good night, Mother.” She grieved for him. She longed to say, “Ezra, believe me, she’s nothing! You’re worth a dozen Ruth Spiveys! A dozen of both of them, to be frank, even if Cody
is
my son …” Though of course she loved Cody dearly. But from infancy, he had batted her away; and his sister had been so evasive, somehow; so whom did that leave but Ezra? Ezra was all she had. He was the only one who would let her in. Sometimes, in his childhood, she had worried that he would die young—one of life’s ironic twists, to take what you valued most. She had watched him trudging down the street to school, his duck-yellow head bowed in thought, and she would have a sudden presentiment that this was the last she would see of him. Then when he returned, full of news about friends and
ball games, how solid, how commonplace—even how irritating—he seemed! And sometimes, long ago when he was small, he might climb up into her lap and place his thin little arms around her neck, and she would drink in his smell of warm biscuits and think, “Really, this is what it’s all about. This is what I’m alive for.” Then, reluctantly, she allowed him to slip away again. (They claimed she was possessive, pushy. Little did they know.) As a child, he’d had a chirpy style of talking that was so cheerful, ringing through the house like a trill of water … when had that begun to change? As an older boy he grew shy and withdrawn, gazing out of shining gray eyes and saying next to nothing. She’d worried when he didn’t date. “Wouldn’t you like to bring someone home? Ask someone to Sunday dinner?” He shook his head, tongue-tied. He blushed and lowered his long lashes. Pearl wondered, seeing the blush, whether he thought much about girls and such as that. His father had left by then and Cody was no help, three years older, off tomcatting someplace or other. Then as a man, Ezra was … well, to be honest, he was not much different from when he was a boy. In a way, he was an
eternal
boy, never got boastful and brash like most men but stayed gentle, somber, contentedly running that restaurant of his and coming home peaceful and tired.

It was a shock when he introduced her to Ruth. What an urchin she was! But plainly, Ezra adored her. “Mother, I’d like you to meet my—meet Ruth.” Pearl had stalled a little, at first. Maybe she had failed to act properly welcoming. Well, who could blame her? And now, seeing how things had turned out, who could say she’d been wrong? But she can’t help wondering, anyhow … If she’d been a little more encouraging, they might have married sooner. They might have married before Cody could work his mischief. Or if she had let herself
realize
 … Yes, she wonders over and over again: if she’d mentioned Cody’s plot to Ezra, stopped that situation that was not so much a courtship as a landslide, a kind of gathering and falling of events …

Ridiculous, of course, to imagine that anything she did could have mattered. What happens, happens. It’s no one’s fault. (Or
it’s only Cody’s fault, for he has always been striving and competitive, a natural-born player of games, has had to win absolutely everything, even something he doesn’t want like a runty little redhead far below his usual standards.)

She opens the farmhouse parlor to air it. It smells like skunk. She leaves the front door ajar, taking care not to step onto the porch, which could very well give way beneath her. She remembers how, toward the end of that first week after the honeymoon, she asked Ezra to bring out to Ruth a few odds and ends for the farm—some extra pans, some linens, a carpet sweeper she had no use for. Was there an ulterior motive in her suggestion? If not, why didn’t she accompany him, visit the bride like any good mother-in-law? “Please, I don’t want to,” Ezra said, but she said, “Honey. Go.” She hadn’t had any conscious design—truly, none at all—but it was a fact that later that morning, dawdling over the dishes, she’d allowed herself a little daydream: Ezra coming up behind Ruth, setting his arms around her, Ruth protesting only briefly before collapsing against him … Oh, shouldn’t it be possible to undo what was done? What all of them had done?

But Ezra when he returned was as subdued as ever, and only said that Ruth thanked Pearl for the pans and linens but was sending back the carpet sweeper as the farmhouse had no carpets.

Then Saturday, Cody came storming in with everything Ezra had taken to Ruth. “What’s all this?” he asked Pearl.

“Why, Cody, pots and sheets, as you can surely see.”

“How come Ezra brought them out?”

“I asked him to,” she said.

“I won’t have it! Won’t have him hanging around the farm.”

“Cody. It was at my request. Believe me,” she told him.

“I do,” he said.

She tried to get Ezra to go again the following week—taking the rug from the dining room and the carpet sweeper, once more—but he wouldn’t. “I’m not comfortable there,” he said. “There’s no point. What’s the point?” She supposed he was right. Yes, she thought, let Ruth wonder where he’d got to! People who leave us will be sorry in the end. She imagined
Ruth alone in the farmhouse, roaming from room to room and peering sadly through the bare windows.

The next weekend, Pearl asked Ezra to drive her out. He couldn’t very well refuse; he was her only means of transportation. They both, without discussing it, wore Sunday clothing—formal, guestlike clothing. They found the house looking sealed and abandoned. A lone hound nudged at a bone in the yard, but he surely didn’t belong there.

Back home, Pearl placed a call to Cody in New York. “Aren’t you coming to the farm any more?”

“Things are kind of busy.”

“Won’t Ruth be there during the week?”

“I want her here with me,” he said. “After all, we just did get married.”

“Well, when will we see you?”

“Pretty soon, not too long, I’m sure we’ll be down in a while …”

But they weren’t; or if they were, they didn’t tell Pearl, and she was too proud to ask again. The summer ended and the leaves turned all colors, but Ezra dragged himself along with no change. “Sweetheart,” Pearl told him, as in his boyhood, “isn’t there someone you’d like to have home? Some friend to dinner? Anyone,” she said. Ezra said no.

From time to time, Pearl called Cody in New York again. He was courteous and noncommittal. Ruth, if she spoke, gave flustered replies and didn’t seem to have her wits about her. Then in October, two full weeks went by when no one answered the phone at all. Pearl wondered if they’d gone to the farm, and she begged Ezra to investigate. But when he finally agreed to, he found nobody there. “Someone’s shattered four windowpanes,” he reported. “Threw rocks at them, or shot them out.” This made Pearl feel frightened. The world was closing in on them; even here on her own familiar streets, she no longer felt safe. And who knew what might have become of Ruth and Cody? They could be lying dead in their apartment, victims of a burglary or some bizarre, New York-type accident, their bodies undiscovered for weeks. Oh, this was what happened
when you broke off all ties with your family! It wasn’t right; with your family, if with no one else, you have to keep on trying.