Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (3 page)

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 fell 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 all their accidents especially for her. She’d want to take off her hat and shoes and fall 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. Called 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 To look at her—an out-of-date kind of woman, frail boned, deep bosomed, as if those pout-fronted gowns of her girlhood had somehow formed her figure—you would never guess it, but Pearl was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 tell him, and she meant it as an accusation; but the thought was also reassuring, in a way. 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 continually meeting new neighbors, and she stopped returning (freshly filled) the cake tins they brought over when she arrived. All 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. All she wanted was to be allowed 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 skill. 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 all sweaty and grass stained, blinking in the sudden brightness. “Heavens! Get to bed,” she told them. “I thought I called 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 falling out of its bun. Up the stairs to the hall, 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 smelled of heat. The trustful sound of her sons’ breathing made her envious. She turned and descended the stairs, all 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 pulled 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 smelled 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 wall, and he had laughed and said, “Well, now. Hey, now,” as she stood there, smiling out at him.

She had heard you could not dream a smell, or recall a smell 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 all I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces. Whoever it was drew away. Ezra turned a page of his magazine. “Ezra,” she said. She felt him grow still. He had this habit—he had always had it—of becoming totally 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 gratefully, keeping her eyes closed. His shoulder felt steady and comforting. He laid her back down on the pillow.

“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 all night?” she asked.

“I slept a little.”

“Sleep now. I won’t be needing you.”

“Well, 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 illness 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.”

“Well, 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 all over him but then display, at odd moments, a deep and rock-hard stubbornness. She sighed and smoothed her quilt. It seemed he’d spilled some water on it.

She remembered when Ezra was a child, still 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 all the world.”

“Ezra, will 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 all he liked! she should have said. What difference would it have made?

Oh, she’d been an angry sort of mother. She’d been continually 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 called the doctor at two a.m. when Jenny got appendicitis; it was she who marched downstairs with a baseball bat the night they heard that scary noise. She’d kept the furnace stoked with coal, confronted the neighborhood bully 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 Tull, 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 tall 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 gradually stopped attending the Baptist church. She stopped referring to Beck in conversation—although still, writing her Christmas cards to relatives in Raleigh, she remarked that Beck was doing well 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 all, and couldn’t think of any good reason to save them. She sat by her bedroom wastebasket and dropped in
looks like I will be moving up the ladder
and
litle place convenient to the railway station
and
told me I was doing mighty well
. 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 still mourned, late on sleepless nights, bore no relation whatsoever to the pan who sent these tiresome messages.
Ed Ball is retiring in June
, she read with infinite boredom,
and I step into his territory which has
the highest per capitta income in Delaware
. It was a great satisfaction to her that he had misspelled
capita
.

Her children grew up and embarked on lives of their own. Her sons started helping out financially, 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 all 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 till her sight began failing. What else would she do with her time? “Empty nest,” they called 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 full. 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 hall 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 hall of whatever house they’d been living in; and later still 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,” mournfully sung by some popular singer just before Norman Vincent Peale’s sermonette.
We shall meet on that beautiful shore …
She’d slipped into a dream in which a stranger told her that the beautiful shore
was Wrightsville 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 still very small; they had round, excited, joyous faces and chubby little bodies. She was astounded by their innocence—by her own and Beck’s as well. 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 Wrightsville 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 rolling in to shore? But Cody hadn’t entered into the spirit of the thing.
Nice?
he had asked. He asked, was that all she thought of heaven? Wrightsville Beach, where as he recalled 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, all I meant was—” she said.