Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (36 page)

“Murphy’s the name. J. R. Murphy,” said the salesman. “I sell soy sauce, private brand. I sell it by the case.”

“We could never manage a case,” said Ezra. “We hardly ever use it.”

“You will, though,” the salesman told him. “Soy sauce is the coming thing; better get it while you can. This here is the antidote for radiation.”

“For what?”

“Nucular accidents! Atom bums! Just take a look at the facts: those folks in Hiroshima didn’t get near as many side
effects as expected. Want to know why? It was all that Japanese food with soy sauce. Plain old soy sauce. Keep a case of this around and you’ll have no more worries over Three Mile Island.”

“But I don’t even like soy sauce.”

“Who says you’ve got to like it?”

“Well, maybe just a few bottles …” Ezra said.

He wondered if there were some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he’d have trouble saying no.

He went to check on the dining room. Two waitresses were shaking out tablecloths and spreading them with a crisp, ripping sound. Josiah was lugging in bales of laundered napkins. There was always a moment, this early in the day, when Ezra found his restaurant disheartening. He was chilled by the empty tables, the looming, uncurtained windows, the bitter smell of last night’s cigarettes. What kind of occupation was this? People gulped down his food without a thought, too busy courting or arguing or negotiating to notice what they ate; then they went home and forgot it. Nothing amounted to anything. And Ezra was a middle-aged man with his hair growing transparent at the back of his head; but here he was, where he’d been at twenty, living with his mother in a Calvert Street row house and reading himself to sleep with cookbooks. He had never married, never fathered children, and lost the one girl he had loved out of sheer fatalism, lack of force, a willing assumption of defeat. (
Let it be
was the theme that ran through his life. He was ruled by a dreamy mood of acceptance that was partly the source of all his happiness and partly his undoing.)

Josiah came to stand before him. “See my boots?” he asked.

Ezra surfaced and looked down at Josiah’s boots. They poked from beneath the white uniform—gigantic, rubber-coated canvas boots that could weather a flood, a snowstorm, an avalanche.

“L. L. Bean,” Josiah said.

“Ah.”

L. L. Bean was where Josiah got his mystery gifts. Once or twice a year they arrived: a one-man tent; a goose-down sleeping
bag; hunting shoes in his unwieldy, hard-to-find size; an olive-drab poncho that could see him through a monsoon; a pocket survival kit containing compass, flint, signal mirror, and metallic blanket. All this for a man who’d been born and reared in the city and seemed inclined to stay there. There was never any card or note of explanation. Josiah had written the company, but L. L. Bean replied that the donor preferred to stay anonymous. Ezra had spent hours helping Josiah think of possibilities. “Remember that old lady whose walk you used to shovel? Maybe it’s her.”

“She’d be dead by now, Ezra.”

“Remember Molly Kane, with her wheelchair? You used to wheel her to Algebra One.”

“But she said, ‘Let go my chair, you big ree-tard!’ ”

“Maybe now she regrets it.”

“Oh, no. Not her. Not Molly Kane.”

“Maybe just someone you changed a tire for and never gave it another thought. Someone you opened a door for. Maybe … I don’t know …”

Ordinarily he enjoyed these speculations, but now, looking down at Josiah’s mammoth boots, he was struck by the fact that even Josiah—lanky, buck-toothed, stammering Josiah—had a human being all his own that he was linked to, whether or not he knew that person’s name, and lived in a nest of gifts and secrets and special care that Ezra was excluded from.

“
New Year’s Day, nineteen-fourteen,
” Ezra read aloud. “
I hope this little diary will not get lost as last year’s did. I hope I will not put anything foolish in it as I have been known to do before.
”

His mother hid a smile, unsuccessfully. What foolishness could she have been up to so long ago? Ezra’s eyes slipped down the page to a line that had been crossed out. “There’s something here I can’t read,” he said.

“I never was known for my penmanship.”

“No, I mean you scribbled over it with so many loops and things—”

“Apple apple,” his mother said.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what we wrote over words that we wanted kept secret.
Appleappleapple
all joined together, so no one could guess what was written underneath.”

“Well, it certainly worked,” Ezra said.

“Move on,” his mother told him.

“Oh. Um … 
put a flaxseed poultice on my finger … started some gartlets of pale pink ribbon … popped some popcorn and buttered half, made cracker-jack of the rest …
”

His mother sighed. Ezra skimmed several pages in silence.

How plotless real life was! In novels, events led up to something. In his mother’s diaries, they flitted past with no apparent direction. Frank brought her perfumed blotters and a box of “cocoa-nut” candy; Roy paid quite a call and couldn’t seem to tear himself away; Burt Tansy took her to the comic opera and afterward presented her with a folio of the songs; but none of these people was ever mentioned again. Someone named Arthur wrote her a letter that was
the softest thing
, she said.
I didn’t know he could be so silly. It was all in form though and I am not very mad
. A certain Clark Allensby promised to visit and did not;
I suppose it is all for the best
, she said,
but I can’t understand his actions as to-morrow he is leaving
. And while she was stretching the curtains, she said,
the darkie announced a young man come to visit. I looked like a freak but went in anyhow and there sat Hugh McKinley. He was heading for the seed store so just HAPPENED to stop by, and staid some while …

Ezra began to see that for his mother (or for the young girl she had been), there was a plot, after all. She had imagined a perfectly wonderful plot—a significance to every chance meeting, the possibility of whirlwind courtships, grand white weddings, flawless bliss forever after.
James Wrayson came to call most shockingly late
, she wrote.
Stole my picture off the piano and put it in his pocket. Acted too comical for words. I’m sure I don’t know what will come of this
.

Well, nothing had come of it. Nothing came of anything. She married a salesman for the Tanner Corporation and he left
her and never came back. “Ezra? Why aren’t you reading to me?” his mother asked.

“I’m tired,” he said.

He took her to an afternoon ball game. In her old age, she had become a great Orioles fan. She would listen on the radio if she couldn’t attend in person, even staying up past her bedtime if the game went into extra innings. Baseball was the only sport that made sense, she said: clear as Parcheesi, clever as chess. She looked pleased with herself for thinking of this, but Ezra suspected that it had something in common too with those soap operas she enjoyed. Certainly she viewed each game as a drama, and fretted over the gossip that Ezra culled for her from the sports pages—players’ injuries, rivalries, slumps, mournful tales of young rookies so nervous they flubbed their only chances. She liked to think of the Orioles as poverty-stricken and virtuous, unable to simply
buy
their talent as richer teams did. Players’ looks mattered to her as deeply as if they were movie stars: Ken Singleton’s high, shining cheekbones, as described by one of her granddaughters, sent her into a little trance of admiration. She liked to hear how Al Bumbry wiggled his bat so jauntily before a hit; how Stanhouse drove people crazy delaying on the mound. She wished Doug DeCinces would shave off his mustache and Kiko Garcia would get himself a haircut. She thought Earl Weaver was not fatherly enough to be a proper manager and often, when he replaced some poor sad pitcher who’d barely had a chance, she would speak severely into the radio, calling him “Merle Beaver” for spite and spitting out her words. “Just because he grows his own tomatoes,” she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean a person has a heart.”

Sometimes Ezra would quote her to his friends at the restaurant, and halfway through a sentence he would think, Why, I’m making her out to be a … character; and all he’d said would feel like a lie, although of course it had happened. The fact was that she was a very strong woman (even a frightening one, in his childhood), and she may have shrunk and aged but
her true, interior self was still enormous, larger than life, powerful. Overwhelming.

They got to the stadium early so his mother could walk at her own pace, which was so slow and halting that by the time they were settled, the lineup was already being announced. Their seats were good ones, close to home plate. His mother sank down gratefully but then had to stand, almost at once, for the national anthem. For
two
national anthems; the other team was Toronto. Halfway through the second song, Ezra noticed that his mother’s knees were trembling. “Do you want to sit down?” he asked her. She shook her head. It was a very hot day but her arm, when he took hold of it, was cool and almost unnaturally dry, as if filmed with powder.

How clear a green the grass was! He could see his mother’s point: precise and level and brightly colored, the playing field did have the look of a board game. Players stood about idly swinging their arms. Toronto’s batter hit a high fly ball and the center fielder plucked it from the sky with ease, almost absentmindedly. “Well!” said Ezra. “That was quick. First out in no time.”

There was a knack to his commentary. He informed her without appearing to, as if he were making small talk. “Gosh. Look at that change-up.” And “Call that a ball? Skimmed right past his knees. Call that a ball?” His mother listened, face uplifted and receptive, like someone at a concert.

What did she get out of this? She’d have followed more closely, he thought, if she had stayed at home beside her radio. (And she’d never
bring
a radio; she worried people might think it was a hearing aid.) He supposed she liked the atmosphere, the cheering and excitement and the smell of popcorn. She even let him buy her a Styrofoam cup of beer, which was allowed to grow warm after one sip; and when the bugle sounded she called, “Charge,” very softly, with an embarrassed little half-smile curling her lips. Three men were getting drunk behind her—booing and whistling and shouting insults to passing girls—but Ezra’s mother stayed untroubled, facing forward. “When you come in person,” she told Ezra, “you direct your own focus,
you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don’t have any choice but to accept it.”

A batter swung at a low ball and connected, and Ezra (eyes in every direction) saw how the field came instantaneously alive, with each man following his appointed course. The shortstop, as if strung on rubber bands, sprang upward without a second’s preparation and caught the ball; the outfield closed in like a kaleidoscope; the second-base runner pivoted and the shortstop tagged him out. “Yo, Garcia!” a drunk yelled behind them, in that gravelly, raucous voice that some men adopt in ball parks; and he sloshed cold beer down the back of Ezra’s neck. “Well …” Ezra said to his mother. But he couldn’t think how to encompass all that had happened, so finally he said, “We’re up, it looks like.”

She didn’t answer. He turned to her and found her caving in on herself, her head falling forward, the Styrofoam cup slipping from her fingers. “Mother? Mother!” Everyone around him rose and milled and fussed. “Give her air,” they told him, and then somehow they had her stretched out on her back, lying where their feet had been. Her face was paper white, immobile, like a crumpled rock. One of the drunks stepped forward to smooth her skirt decorously over her knees, and another stroked her hair off her forehead. “She’ll be all right,” he told Ezra. “Don’t worry. It’s only the heat. Folks, make room! Let her breathe!”

Ezra’s mother opened her eyes. The air was bright as knife blades, shimmering with a brassy, hard light, but she didn’t even squint; and for the first time Ezra fully understood that she was blind. It seemed that before, he hadn’t taken it in. He reeled back, squatting at the feet of strangers, and imagined having to stay here forever: the two of them, helpless, flattened beneath the glaring summer sky.

That night he dreamed he was walking among the tables in his restaurant. A long-time customer, Mr. Rosen, was dithering
over the menu. “What do you recommend?” he asked Ezra. “I see you’ve got your stroganoff, but I don’t know, that’s a little heavy. I mean I’m not so very hungry, just peckish, got a little weight on my stomach right here beneath my rib cage, know what I mean? What do you think might be good for that? What had I ought to eat?”

This was how Mr. Rosen behaved in real life, as well, and Ezra expected it and always responded kindly and solicitously. But in the dream, he was overtaken by a most untypical panic. “I have nothing! Nothing!” he cried. “I don’t know what you want! I don’t have anything! Stop asking!” And he wrung his hands at the thought of his empty, gleaming refrigerator and idle stove.

He woke sweating, tangled in damp sheets. There was a certain white quality to the darkness that made him believe it was close to dawn. He climbed out of bed, hitching up his pajama bottoms, and went downstairs and poured a glass of milk. Then he wandered into the living room for a magazine, but the only ones he found were months old. Finally he settled on the rug beside his mother’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.

A recipe for marmalade cake:
From the kitchen of
 … with no name filled in. Someone’s diploma, rolled and secured with a draggled blue ribbon. A clipping from a newspaper:
Bristle-cone pines, in times of stress, hoard all their life in a single streak and allow the rest to die
. A photo of his sister in an evening dress with gardenias looped around her wrist. A diary for 1909, with a violet pressed between its pages.
Washed my yellow gown, made salt-rising bread, played Basket Ball
, he read.
Bought a hat shape at Warner’s and trimmed it with green grosgrain. Preserved tomatoes. Went to Marching Drill. Learned progressive jackstraws
.