Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (27 page)

“I cal ed you in for a purpose,” said the teacher, opening the file that lay before her. She was a tiny thing, surely not out of her twenties, perky and freckled with horn-rimmed glasses dwarfing her pointed nose. Jenny wondered how she’d learned to be so intimidating so quickly. “I know you’re a busy woman, Dr. Tul , but I’m genuinely anxious about Slevin’s school performance and I thought you ought to be informed.”

“Oh, real y?” Jenny said. She decided she would feel better if she too wore glasses, though hers were only needed for reading. She dug through her purse and a pink plastic pacifier fel out.

She pretended it hadn’t happened.

“Slevin is very, very intel igent,” the teacher said.

She glared at Jenny accusingly. “He goes straight off the top of the charts.”

“Yes, I figured that.”

“But his English average…” the teacher said, flipping through papers. “It’s F. Wel , maybe D minus.” Jenny clicked her tongue.

“Math: C. History: D. And science… and gym… He’s had so many absences, I final y asked if he’d been cutting school. “Yes, ma’am,” he said—came right out with it.

“What did you cut?”’ I asked him. “February,” he said.” Jenny laughed. The teacher looked at her.

Jenny straightened her glasses and said, “Do you think it might be puberty?”

“Al these children are going through puberty,” the teacher told her.

“Or… I don’t know; boredom. You said yourself he’s intel igent. Why, you ought to see him at home! Monkeying around with machinery, wiring stereos … He’s got a tape recorder of his own, he worked for it and bought it himself, some super duper model, offhand I can’t think of the name.

I’m such a dunce about these things, when he talked about head cleaners I thought he meant shampoo; but Slevin knows al about it and—his “Mr. Davies suggests,” said the teacher, was— that’s our assistant principal—he suggests that Slevin may be experiencing emotional problems due to the adjustments at home.”

“What adjustments?”

“He says Slevin’s mother abandoned him and Slevin was moved to your household almost immediately thereafter and had to get used to a brand-new mother and sister.”

“Oh, that,” said Jenny, waving her hand.

“Mr. Davies suggests that Slevin might need professional counseling.”

“Nonsense,” Jenny said. “What’s a little adjustment? And anyhow, that happened a good six months ago. It’s not as if… why, look at my daughter! She’s had to get used to seven new people and she’s never said a word of complaint. Oh, we’re al coping! In fact my husband was saying, just the other day, we should think about having more children now. We ought to have at least one joint child, he says, but I’m not so sure myself. After al , I’m thirty-six years old. It probably wouldn’t be wise.”

“Mr. Davies suggests—his “Though I suppose if it means so much to him, it’s al the same to me.”

“The same!” said the teacher. “What about the population explosion?”

“The what? You’re getting me off the subject, here… My point is,” Jenny said, “I don’t see the need to blame adjustment, broken homes, bad parents, that sort of thing.

We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks. You can’t take them too much to heart. I’l explain al that to Slevin. I’l tel him this evening.

I’m certain his grades wil improve.” Then she bent to pick up the pacifier, and shook hands with the teacher and left.

On the wal in Jenny’s office was a varnished wooden plaque: DR. TULL IS NOT A TOY. Joe had made it for her in his workshop.

He was incensed by the scrapes and bruises that Jenny gathered daily in her raucous games with her patients.

“Make them show some respect,” he told her. “Maintain a little dignity.” But the sign was al but lost among her patients’ snapshots (on beaches, on seesaws, on photographers’ blanketed tables, or behind lit birthday cakes) and the crayoned self-portraits they’d brought her.

Anyhow, most of them were too young to read. She scooped up Bil y Burnham and carried him, squawking and giggling, to the nurse for his tetanus shot. “Now, it’s possible,” she cal ed back to Mrs. Burnham, “that tonight he’l experience a little soreness in his left —was Bil y squirmed, and a button popped off Jenny’s white coat.

The Albright baby was due for a DPT shot. The Carrol baby had to have her formula switched.

Lucy Brandon’s constant sniffle looked like an al ergy; Jenny told Mrs. Brandon where she could take her for testing. Both the Morris twins’ tonsils were swol en.

She asked the receptionist to order her a sandwich, but the receptionist said, “Aren’t you eating out? Your brother’s here; he’s been waiting half an hour, at least.”

“Oh, my Lord, I forgot al about him,” Jenny said. She went into the waiting room. Ezra was seated on the vinyl couch, surrounded by pul toys and building blocks and oilcloth picture books.

A family of Spanish-speaking children, probably patients of Dr. Ramirez, played at his feet, but you’d never mistake Ezra for a parent.

His shaggy yel ow hair was soft as a child’s; he wore faded work clothes, and his face was wide and expectant.

“Ezra, honey,” Jenny told him, “I clean forgot. My next appointment’s in twenty minutes; do you suppose we could just grab a hamburger?”

“Oh, surely,” Ezra said.

He waited while she took off her white coat and put on a raincoat. Then they rode the elevator down to the marble-paved lobby, and pushed through the revolving door onto a spattery, overcast street. There was a smel like wet coal.

Huddled people hurried by and buses wheezed and cathedral bel s rang far away.

“I feel dumb,” Jenny said, “taking you of al people to a humburger joint.”

She was thinking of his restaurant, which always intimidated her a little. Recently, Ezra had remodeled the living quarters above it into a series of tiny, elegant private dining rooms like those in old movies—the velvet-hung compartments where the vil ain attempts to seduce the heroine. They’d be perfect for anniversary couples, Ezra said. (like most unmarried men, he was comical y, annoyingly sentimental about marriage.) But so far, only business groups and heavily jeweled Baltimore politicians had asked to use the rooms.

Now he said, “A hamburger’s fine; I’m crazy about hamburgers.” And when they walked through the plate glass doorway, into a slick, tiled area lined with glaring photos of onion rings and milkshakes, he looked around him happily.

Secretaries clustered at some tables, construction workers at others. “It’s getting like a col ective farm,” Ezra said. “Al these chain places that everyone comes to for breakfast, lunch, sometimes supper … like a commune or a kibbutz or something.

Pretty soon we won’t have private kitchens at al ; you just drop by your local Gino’s or McDonald’s. I kind of like it.” Jenny wondered if there were any eating place he wouldn’t like. At a soup kitchen, no doubt, he’d be pleased by the obvious hunger of the customers. At a urine-smel ing tavern he’d discover some wonderful pickled eggs that he’d never seen anywhere else. Oh, if it had to do with food, he was endlessly appreciative.

While he ordered for them, she settled herself at a table.

She took off her raincoat, smoothed her hair, and scraped at a Pablum spot on her blouse. It felt strange to be sitting alone.

Always there was someone—children, patients, col eagues. The empty space on either side of her gave her an echoing, weightless feeling, as if she lacked bal ast and might at any moment float upward.

Ezra returned with their hamburgers. “How’s Joe?” he asked, sitting down.

“Oh, fine. How’s Mother?”

“Doing wel , sends her love… I brought you something,” he said. He set aside his burger to rummage through his windbreaker pockets.

Eventual y, he came up with a worn white envelope.

“Pictures,” he said.

“Pictures?”

“Photos. Mother’s got al these photos; I just discovered them. I thought maybe you’d be interested in having a few.” Jenny sighed. Poor Ezra: he was turning into the family custodian, tending their mother and guarding their past and faithful y phoning his sister for lunch. “Why don’t you keep them,” she said. “You know I’d just lose them.”

“But a lot of these are of you,” he said. He spil ed the envelope onto the table. “I figured the children might like them. For instance, somewhere here…”

He shuffled various versions of a younger, sterner Jenny.

“Here,” he said. “Don’t you see Becky in this?” It was Jenny in a plaid tam-o’-shanter, unsmiling. “Ugh,” she said, stirring her coffee.

“You were a real y nice little girl,” said Ezra.

He returned to his burger but kept the photo before him.

On the back of it, Jenny saw, something had been written in pencil. She tried to make it out.

Ezra noticed and said, “Fal , 1947. I got Mother to write the dates down. And I’m going to send Cody some, too.” Jenny could just imagine Cody’s face when he got them.

“Ezra,” she said, “to tel the truth, I wouldn’t waste the postage.”

“Don’t you think he’d like to compare these with how Luke looks, growing up?”

“Believe me,” she said, “he’d burn them. You know Cody.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” Ezra said.

“He hasn’t,” said Jenny, “and I doubt he ever wil . Just mention something—one little harmless memory from our childhood—and his mouth turns down. You know how his mouth does. I said to him once, I said, “Cody, you’re no better than the Lawsons.”

Remember the Lawsons? They moved into our neighborhood from Nashvil e, Tennessee, and the very first week al four children got mumps. Mrs.

Lawson said, “This city is unlucky, I believe.” The next week a pipe in their basement burst and she said, “Wel , that’s Baltimore.” Then their daughter broke her wrist…

When they moved back to Tennessee, I went over to say goodbye. They were loading up their car trunk and they happened to slam the lid down smack on the fingers of their youngest boy. When they drove off he was screaming, and Mrs. Lawson cal ed out, “Isn’t this a fitting way to leave? I always did say Baltimore was unlucky.” his “Wel , now, I’m trying to fol ow you, here,”

Ezra said.

“It’s whether you add up the list or not,” Jenny said. “I mean, if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad. And Cody certainly catalogues; he’s ruining his life with his catalogues. But after al , I told him, we made it, didn’t we?

We did grow up. Why, the three of us turned out fine, just fine!”

“It’s true,” said Ezra, his forehead smoothing.

“You especial y, Jenny. Look at you: a doctor.”

“Oh, shoo, I’m nothing but a baby weighed,” Jenny said. But she was pleased, and when they rose to go she took along the photographs to make him happy.

Joe said if they did have a baby, he’d like it to be a girl.

He’d looked around and noticed they were a little short on girls. “How can you say that?”

Jenny asked. She ticked the girls off on her fingers:

“Phoebe, Becky, Jane…”

When her voice trailed away, he stood watching her. She was expecting him to speak, but he didn’t. “Wel ?” she asked.

“That’s only three.”

She felt a little rush of confusion. “Have I left one out?”

“No, you haven’t left one out. Has she left one out,” he told the wal . He snorted. “Has she left one out, she asks. What a question! No, you haven’t left one out. Three is al we have.

Three girls.”

“Wel , there’s no need to act so cross about it.”

“I’m not cross, I’m frustrated,” he said.

“I’m trying to have a conversation here.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“Yes, yes…”

“Then where’s the problem?”

He wouldn’t say. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded tight across his chest.

He gazed off to one side, scowling. Jenny was puzzled.

were they quarreling, or what? When the silence stretched on, she gradual y, imperceptibly returned to slicing the cucumbers for supper. She brought the knife down as quietly as possible, and without a sound scooped the disks of cucumber into a bowl.

(when she and Joe had first met, he’d said, “Do you put cucumber on your skin?”

“Cucumbers?” she’d asked, astonished. “You look so cool,” he told her, “I thought of this bottle of cucumber milk my aunt used to keep on her vanity table.”) Two of the children, Jacob and Peter, were playing with the Ouija board in front of the refrigerator. Jenny had to step over them when she went to get the tomatoes. “Excuse me,” she told them.

“You’re in my way.” But they ignored her; they were intent on the board. “What wil I be when I grow up?” Jacob asked, and he set his fingertips delicately upon the pointer. “Upper middle class, middle middle class, or lower middle class: which?”

Jenny laughed, and Joe glared at her and wheeled and stamped out of the kitchen.

On the evening news, a helicopter crewman who’d been kil ed in Laos was buried with ful military honors. An American flag, folded into a cushiony triangle, was handed to the parents— a gray-haired, square-chinned gentleman and his fragile wife. The wife wore a trim beige raincoat and little white gloves. It was she who accepted the flag.

The husband had turned away and was weeping, would not even say a few words to the microphone somebody offered him. “Sir? Sir?” a reporter asked.

One white glove reached out and took the microphone.

“What my husband means to say, I believe,” the wife declared in a feathery, Southern voice, “is we thank al those who’ve gathered here, and we know we’re just going to be fine. We’re strong, and we’re going to be fine.”

“Hogwash,” Slevin said.

“Why, Slevin,” said Jenny. “I didn’t know you were political.”

“I’m not; it’s just a bunch of hogwash,” he told her. “She ought to say, “Take your old flag! I object! I give up!”

“My goodness,” Jenny said mildly. She was sorting Ezra’s photos; she held one out to distract him. “Look,” she said.

“Your Uncle Cody, at age fifteen.”

“He’s not my uncle.”

“Of course he is.”

“He’s not my real uncle.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew him. You’d like him,” Jenny said. “I wish he’d come for a visit.

He’s so… un-brotherly or something; I don’t know. And look!” she said, alighting on another photo. “Isn’t my mother pretty?”