Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (8 page)

“But that was Sunday,” he said.

Pearl’s serving spoon paused, midway between the bowl and her plate. She looked politely interested. “Yes?” she said.

“This is Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

“It’s Wednesday, dammit; it’s three days later. So why bring up something from Sunday?”

Pearl threw the spoon in his face. “You upstart,” she said. She rose and slapped him across the cheek. “You wretch, you ugly horror.” She grabbed one of Jenny’s braids and yanked it so Jenny was pulled off her chair. “Stupid clod,” she said to Ezra, and she took the bowl of peas and brought it down on his head. It didn’t break, but peas flew everywhere. Ezra cowered, shielding his head with his arms. “Parasites,” she told them. “I wish you’d all die, and let me go free. I wish I’d find you dead in your beds.”

After that, she went upstairs. The three of them washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away in the cupboards. They wiped the table and countertops and swept the kitchen floor. The sight of any crumb or stain was a relief, a pleasure; they attacked it with Bon Ami. They pulled the shades in the windows and locked the back door. Outside, the neighborhood children were organizing a game of hide-and-seek, but their voices were so faint that they seemed removed in time as well as in space. They were like people from long ago, laughing and calling only in memory, or in one of those eerily lifelike dreams that begin on the edge of sleep.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, a girl named Edith Taber transferred to their school. Cody had been new to so many schools himself, he recognized that defiant tilt of her head when she stepped into his homeroom. She carried a zippered notebook that wasn’t the right kind at all, and over her skirt she wore what appeared to be a grown man’s shirt, which no one had
ever heard of doing. But she had thick black hair and the kind of gypsy look that Cody liked; and he was also drawn by the proud and scornful way she walked alone to her classes—as friendless as Cody was, he thought, or at least, as friendless as he felt inside. So that afternoon he walked a short distance behind her (it turned out she lived just one block north of him), and the next afternoon he caught up and walked beside her. She seemed to welcome his company and talked to him nearly nonstop, every now and then clutching her coat collar tight against her throat in a gesture that struck him as sophisticated. Her brother was in the navy, she said, and had promised to bring her a silk kimono if he made it through the war. And she didn’t find that Baltimore was very cosmopolitan, and she thought Miss Saunders, the English teacher, resembled Lana Turner. She said she felt it was really attractive when boys didn’t slick their hair back but let it fall over their foreheads, straight, the way Cody did. Cody raked his fingers through his hair and said, well, he didn’t know about that; he’d always sort of supposed that girls preferred a little wave or curl or something. She said she just despised for a boy to have curls. They walked the rest of the way without speaking, although from time to time Cody whistled parts of the only tune that came to his mind, which happened to be “The Ash Grove.”

He couldn’t walk her home on Wednesday because he had to stay late for detention, and the following day was Thanksgiving. There wouldn’t be any more school till Monday. All Thursday morning, he hung around the front porch in the damp November chill, gazing northward to Edith’s street and then wheeling away and taking midair punches at a cushion from the glider. Finally his mother emerged, rosy from the kitchen, and coaxed him inside. “Cody, honey, you’ll freeze to death. Come and shell me some pecans.” They were having a meager meal—no turkey—but she’d promised to make a pie for dessert. Already the house smelled different: spicier, more festive. Cody would have stayed on the porch forever, though, if he’d thought there was a chance of seeing Edith.

After dinner they all played Monopoly. Generally, Cody’s
family didn’t allow him in their games; he had this problem with winning. He absolutely insisted on winning any game he played. And he did win too—by sheer fierceness, by caring the most. (Also, he’d been known to cheat.) Sometimes, he would even win when no one else suspected it was a contest. He would eat more peanuts, get his corn shucked the fastest, or finish his page of the comics first. “Go away,” his family would say when he approached (nonchalantly shuffling cards or tossing a pair of dice). “You know what we said. Never again!” But this afternoon, they let him play. He tried to hold back, but once he’d bought a hotel on the Boardwalk, things got out of hand. “Oh, my, I should have remembered,” his mother said. “What’s he doing in this game?” But she was smiling. She wore her blue wool dress and her hair was coming out of its bun, which made her look relaxed. Her token was the flatiron. She skipped right over the Boardwalk, but Ezra was next and he hit it. He didn’t have anywhere near enough money. Cody tried to lend him some; he hated it when people just gave up. He liked to get everybody thousands of dollars in debt, struggling to the bitter end. But Ezra said, “No, no, I quit,” and backed off, holding up one palm in that old-mannish way he had. So Cody had to go on with just Jenny and his mother, and eventually with just his mother. They played right down to the line, when she landed on the Boardwalk with three dollar bills to her name. As a matter of fact, Cody had a pretty good time.

Then the younger two talked Cody and Pearl into putting on their old skit: “The Mortgage Overdue.” “Oh, come on! Please! It wouldn’t feel like a holiday without it.” Cody and Pearl ended up agreeing to it, even though they were rusty and Cody couldn’t remember the dance step that came at the finish. This was something salvaged from his mother’s girlhood, the kind of piece performed at amateur recital contests or campfire circles. Pearl played Ivy, the maiden in distress, and Cody was the villain twirling his waxed mustache. “
Ivy, sweet sweet Ivy, lean upon my arm,
” he cajoled her with an evil leer, while Pearl rolled her eyes and shrank into a corner. She could have been an actress, her children thought; she had it letter-perfect, the
blushing gaze and the old-fashioned singsong of her responses. At the end the hero came and rescued her. Ezra and Jenny always claimed to be too shy, so Cody had to take the hero’s part as well. “I
will pay the money for the mortgage on the farm,
” he told the maiden, and he danced her into the dining room. The dance step came back to him after all, but his mother’s tongue got twisted and instead of
wedded life
she said
leaded wife
and collapsed in a heap of giggles. Jenny and Ezra gave them three curtain calls.

That evening, Cody went out to the porch and looked northward some more in the twilight. Ezra came too and sat in the glider, pushing back and forth with the heel of one sneaker. “Want to walk toward Sloop Street?” Cody asked him.

“What’s on Sloop Street?”

“Nothing much. This girl I know, Edith Taber.”

“Oh, yes. Edith,” Ezra said.

“You know who she is?”

“She’s got this whistle,” Ezra said, “that plays sharps and flats with hardly any extra trouble.”

“Edith
Taber?
”

“A recorder.”

“You’re thinking of someone else,” Cody told him.

“Well, maybe so.”

Cody was silent a moment, leaning on the porch railing. Ezra creaked companionably in the glider. Then Cody said, “A black-haired girl. Ninth-grader.”

“New in town,” Ezra agreed.

“When’d you see her?”

“Just yesterday,” Ezra said. “I was walking home from school, playing my whistle, and she caught up with me and said she liked it and asked if I wanted to see her recorder. So I went to her house and I saw it.”

“To her
house?
Did she know you were my brother?”

“Well, no, I don’t think so,” Ezra said. “She has a parakeet that burps and says, ‘Forgive me.’ Her mother served us cookies.”

“You met her mother?”

“It would be nice to have a recorder, someday.”

“She’s too old for you,” Cody said.

Ezra looked surprised. “Well, of course,” he said. “She’s fourteen and a half.”

“What would she want with a little sixth-grader?”

“She wanted to show me her whistle,” Ezra said.

“Shoot,” said Cody.

“Cody? Are we going to walk toward Sloop Street?”

“Nah,” said Cody. He kicked a pillar.

“If I asked Mother,” Ezra said, “do you think she would get me one of those recorders for Christmas?”

“You dunce,” said Cody. “You raving idiot. Do you think she’s got money to spare for goddamn
whistles?
”

“Well, no, I guess not,” Ezra said.

Then Cody went into the house and locked the door, and when Ezra started pounding on it Cody told their mother it was only Mr. Milledge, having one of his crazy spells.

Monday morning, he looked for Edith on the way to school but he didn’t see her. As it turned out, she was tardy. She arrived in homeroom just after the bell. He tried to catch her eye but she didn’t glance his way; only gazed fixedly at the teacher all during announcements. And when the first bell rang she walked to class with Sue Meeks and Harriet Smith. Evidently, she was no longer friendless.

By third period, it was clear she was avoiding him. He couldn’t even get near her; she had a constant bodyguard. But what had he done wrong? He cornered Barbara Pace—a plump, cheerful redhead who served as a kind of central switchboard for ninth-grade couples. “What’s the matter with Edith?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Edith Taber. We were getting along just fine and now she won’t speak.”

“Oh,” she said. She shifted her books. She was wearing a
man-sized shirt with the tails out. Come to think of it, so were half the other girls. “Well,” she said, “I guess she likes somebody else now.”

“Is it my brother?” Cody asked.

“Who’s your brother?”

“Ezra. My brother, Ezra.”

“
I
didn’t know you had a brother,” she said, peering at him.

“Well, she liked me well enough last week. What happened?”

“See,” she told him patiently, “now she’s been to a couple of parties and naturally she’s developed new interests. She’s got a sort of … broader view, and also she didn’t realize about your reputation.”

“What reputation?”

“Well, you do drink, Cody. And you hung around with that cheap Lorena Schmidt all summer; you smell like a walking cigarette; and you almost got arrested over Halloween.”

“Did my brother tell her that?”

“What’s this about your brother? Everybody told her. It’s not exactly a secret.”

“Well, I never claimed to be a saint,” Cody said.

“She says you’re real good-looking and all but she wants a boy she can respect,” said Barbara. “She thinks she might like Francis Elburn now.”

“Francis Elburn! That fairy.”

“He’s really more her type,” said Barbara.

“His hair is curly.”

“So?”

“Francis Elburn; Jesus Christ.”

“There’s no need to use profanity,” Barbara told him.

Cody walked home alone, long after the others had left, choosing streets where he’d be certain not to run into Edith or her friends. Once he turned down the wrong alley and it struck him that he was still an outsider, unfamiliar with the neighborhood. His classmates had been born and raised here, most of
them, and were more comfortable with each other than he could ever hope to be. Look at his two best friends: their parents went to the movies together; their mothers talked on the telephone.
His
mother … He kicked a signpost. What he wouldn’t give to have a mother who acted like other mothers! He longed to see her gossiping with a little gang of women in the kitchen, letting them roll her hair up in pincurls, trading beauty secrets, playing cards, losing track of time—“Oh, goodness, look at the clock! And supper not even started; my husband will kill me. Run along, girls.” He wished she had some outside connection, something beyond that suffocating house.

And his father: he had uprooted the family continually, tearing them away as soon as they were settled and plunking them someplace new. But where was he now that Cody
wanted
to be uprooted, now that he was saddled with a reputation and desperate to leave and start over? His father had ruined their lives, Cody thought—first in one way and then in another. He thought of tracking him down and arriving on his doorstep: “I’m in trouble; it’s all your fault. I’ve got a bad name, I need to leave town, you’ll have to take me in.” But that would only be another unknown city, another new school to walk into alone. And there too, probably, his grades would begin to slip and the neighbors would complain and the teachers would start to suspect him first when any little thing went wrong; and then Ezra would follow shortly in his dogged, earnest, devoted way and everybody would say to Cody, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”

He let himself into the house, which smelled of last night’s cabbage. It was almost dark and the air seemed thick; he felt he had to labor to move through it. He climbed the stairs wearily. He passed Jenny’s room, where she sat doing her homework in a tiny dull circle of yellow from the lamp. Her face was thin and shadowed and she didn’t bother greeting him. He climbed on up to his own room and flicked on the light switch. He had set his books on the bureau before he realized Ezra was there. Asleep, as usual—curled on his bed with a sheaf of homework
papers. Oh, Ezra was so slow and dazed; he could sleep anytime. His lips were parted. His cat, Alicia, lay in the crook of his arm, purring and looking self-satisfied.

Cody knelt beside his bed and pulled from beneath it a half-filled bottle of bourbon, an empty gin bottle, five empty beer bottles, a crumpled pack of Camels, and a box of pretzels. He strewed them around Ezra, arranging them just right. He went to the hall storage closet and took out his father’s Six-20 Brownie camera. In the doorway of his room, he aimed and paused and clicked the shutter. Ezra didn’t wake, amazingly enough. (The light from the flashgun was so powerful, you’d see swimming blue globes for minutes after being photographed.) But the cat seemed mildly disturbed. She got to her feet and yawned. What a yawn!—huge and disdainful. It would have made a wonderful picture: deadbeat Ezra and his no-account cat, both with gaping mouths. Cody wondered if she’d do it again. “Yawn,” he told her, and he advanced the film for another photo. “Alicia? Yawn.” She only smirked and settled down again. He yawned himself, demonstrating, but apparently cats didn’t find such things contagious. He lowered the camera and came closer to pat her head, scratch beneath her chin, stroke her throat. Nothing worked. “Yawn, dammit,” he said, and he tried to pry her teeth apart by force. She drew up sharply, eyes wide and glaring. Ezra woke.