Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (29 page)

white pil ows could mesmerize her. Sounds were thick, as if underwater.

Words on a chart were meaningless—so many k’s and g’s, such a choppy language English was, short syl ables, clumps of consonants, she’d never noticed; like Icelandic, maybe, or Eskimo. She slammed Becky’s face into her Peter Rabbit dinner plate and gave her a bloody nose. She yanked a handful of her hair.

Al of her childhood returned to her: her mother’s blows and slaps and curses, her mother’s pointed fingernails digging into Jenny’s arm, her mother shrieking,

“Guttersnipe! Ugly little rodent!” and some scrap of memory

—she couldn’t quite place it —Cody catching hold of Pearl’s wrist and fending her off while Jenny shrank against the wal .

Was this what it came to—that you never could escape?

That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? She failed to see a curb and sprained her ankle, hobbled to work in agony. She misdiagnosed a case of viral pneumonia. She let a greenstick fracture slip right past her. She brought Becky a drink of water in the middle of the night and then suddenly, without the slightest intention, screamed, “Take it! Take it!” and threw the cup into Becky’s face. Becky shivered and caught her breath for hours afterward, even in her sleep, though Jenny held her tightly on her lap.

Then her mother cal ed from Baltimore and said, “Jenny?

Don’t you write your family any more?”

“Wel , I’ve been so busy,” Jenny meant to say. Or: “Leave me alone, I remember al about you. It’s al come back.

Write? Why should I write? You’ve damaged me; you’ve injured me. Why would I want to write?” Instead, she started… not crying, exactly, but something worse. She was torn by dry, ragged sobs; she ran out of air; there was a grating sound in her chest. Her mother said, calmly, “Jenny, hang up.

You know that couch in your living room? Go lie down on it. I’l be there just as soon as Ezra can drive me.” Pearl stayed two weeks, using al of her vacation time.

The first thing she did was cal Jenny’s hospital and arrange for sick leave. Then she set about putting the world in order again. She smoothed clean sheets on Jenny’s bed, brought her tea and bracing broths, shampooed her hair, placed flowers on her bureau. Becky, who had hardly seen her grandmother til now, fel in love with her.

Pearl cal ed Becky “Rebecca” and treated her formal y, respectful y, as if she were not quite sure how much she was al owed. Every morning she walked Becky to the playground and swung her on the swings. In the afternoon they went shopping together. She bought Becky an old-fashioned dress that made her look solemn and reasonable. She bought picture books— nursery rhymes and fairy tales and The Little House. Jenny had forgotten about The Little House.

Why, she had loved that book! She’d requested it every evening, she remembered now. She’d sat on that homely old sofa and listened while her mother, with endless patience, read it three times, four times, five… Now Becky said, “Read it again,” and Pearl returned to page one, and Jenny listened just as closely as Becky did.

Sundays, when his restaurant closed, Ezra drove up from Baltimore. He was not, in spite of his innocent face, an open sort of person, and rather than speak outright of Jenny’s new breakability he kept smiling serenely at some point just beyond her.

She took comfort from this. There was already too much openness in the world, she felt—everyone raging and weeping and rejoicing. She imagined that Ezra was not subject to the ups and downs that jolted other people. She liked to have him read the papers to her (trouble in Honduras, trouble in Saigon, natural disasters in Haiti and Cuba and Italy) while she listened from a nest of deep blue blankets and a nightgown stil warm from her mother’s iron.

On the second weekend, Cody blew in from wherever he’d vanished to most recently. He traveled on a breeze of energy and money; Jenny was impressed. He used her telephone for two hours like the wheeler-dealer he always was and arranged to pay for a ful -time sitter, a slim young woman named Delilah Greening who turned out to be better help than Jenny would ever have again. Then he slung his suit coat over one shoulder, gave her a little salute, and was gone.

She slept, sometimes, for twelve and fourteen hours straight. She woke dislocated, frightened by the sunlit, tickling silence of the apartment. She mixed up dreams and real life. “How did it happen— ?” she might ask her mother, before she remembered that it hadn’t happened (the Shriners’ parade through her bedroom, the elderly gentleman hanging by his heels from her curtain rod like a piece of fruit). Sometimes at night, voices came vividly out of the dark. “Dr. Tul . Dr.

Tul ,” they’d say, urgently, official y. Or, “Six hundred fifty mil igrams of quinine sulfate…” Her own pulse thudded in her eardrums. She held her hand toward the light from the streetlamp and marveled at how white and bloodless she had become.

When her mother left and Delilah arrived, Jenny got up and returned to work. For a while, she carried herself as gently as a cup of liquid. She kept level and steady, careful not to spil over. But she was fine, she saw; she real y was fine. Weekends, her mother and Ezra paid brief visits, or Jenny took Becky down to Baltimore on the train. They both dressed up for these trips and sat very stil so as not to muss their clothes. Jenny felt purified, like someone who had been drained by a dangerous fever.

And the fol owing summer, when she could have accepted more lucrative offers in Philadelphia or Newark, she chose Baltimore instead. She joined two older pediatricians, entered Becky in nursery school, and shortly thereafter purchased her Bolton Hil row house. She continued to feel fragile, though. She went on guarding a trembly, fluid center. Sometimes, loud noises made her heart race—her mother speaking her name without warning, or the telephone jangling late at night. Then she would take herself in hand. She would remind herself to draw back, to loosen hold. It seemed to her that the people she admired (one of her partners, who was a wry, funny man named Dan Charles; and her brother Ezra; and her neighbor Leah Hume) had this in common: they gazed at the world from a distance. There was something sheeted about them—some obliqueness that made them difficult to grasp.

Dan, for instance, kept up such a steady, easy banter that you never could ask him about his wife, who was forever in and out of mental institutions. And Leah: she could laugh off the repeated failures of her crazy business ventures like so many pratfal s. How untouched she looked, and how untouchable, chuckling to herself and covering her mouth with a shapely, badly kept hand! Jenny studied her; you could almost say she took notes. She was learning how to make it through life on a slant. She was trying to lose her intensity.

“You’ve changed,” her mother said (al intensity herself).

“You’ve grown so different, Jenny. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong, but something is.” She wanted Jenny to remarry; she hoped for a dozen grandchildren, at least; she was always after Jenny to get out and mingle, socialize, make herself more attractive, meet some nice young man.

What Jenny didn’t tel her was, she simply couldn’t be bothered with al that. She felt textureless, so that events just slid right off her with no friction whatsoever; and the thought of the heartfelt conversations required by a courtship fil ed her with impatience.

Then she met Joe with his flanks of children—his padding, his moat, his barricade of children, al in urgent need of her brisk and competent attention.

No conversation there—she and Joe had hardly found a moment to speak to each other seriously. They were always trying to be heard above the sound of toy trucks and xylophones. She didn’t even have time for thinking any more.

“Of course, the material object is nothing,” said the priest.

He winced at a squeal from the waiting room. “That’s unimportant, the least of my concerns. Though it did have some historical value. It was donated, I believe, by the missionary brother of one of our parishioners.” Jenny leaned back against the receptionist’s window and touched a hand to her forehead. “Wel , I don’t …” she said.

“What did you say this was?”

“A rhinoceros foot,” said the priest, “in the shape of an umbrel a stand. Or an umbrel a stand in the shape of a rhinoceros foot. It was an actual rhinoceros foot from…

wherever rhinoceri come from.”

A naked toddler shot out a door like a stray piece of popcorn, pursued by a nurse with a hypodermic needle.

The priest stood back to give them room. “We know it was there in the morning,” he said. “But at four o’clock, it was gone.

And Slevin was in just previously; I’d asked him to come for a chat. Only I was on the phone when he arrived. By the time I’d hung up he was gone, and so was the rhinoceros foot.”

Jenny said, “I wonder if his mother had a rhinoceros foot.”

“Pardon?” said the priest.

She realized how this must have sounded, and she laughed.

“No,” she said, “I don’t mean she had rhinoceros feet…

oh, Lord…”

The priest said, “Dr. Tul , don’t you see this is serious?

We have a child in trouble here, don’t you see that? Don’t you think something ought to be done? Where do you stand, Dr.

Tul ?”

Jenny’s smile faded and she looked into his face. “I don’t know,” she said, after a pause.

She felt suddenly bereft, as if something were missing, as if she’d given something up. She hadn’t always been like this! she wanted to tel him. But aloud she said, “I only meant, you see… I believe he steals what reminds him of his mother.

Hoovers and umbrel a stands. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Ah,” said the priest.

“What’s next, I wonder,” Jenny said. She mused for a moment. “Picture it! Grand pianos.

Kitchen sinks. Why, we’l have his mother’s whole household,” she said, “her photo albums and her grade-school yearbooks, her col ege roommate asleep on our bed and her high school boyfriends in our living room.” She pictured a row of dressed-up boys from the fifties, their hair slicked down wetly, their shirts ironed crisply, perched on her couch like mannequins with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates on their knees.

She laughed. The priest groaned. A little blue plastic helicopter buzzed across the waiting room and landed in Jenny’s hair.

This Real y Happened

The summer before Luke Tul turned fourteen, his father had a serious accident at the factory he was inspecting. A girder swung around on its cable, hit Luke’s father and the foreman standing next to him, and swept them both off the walkway and down to the lower level of the factory. The foreman was kil ed.

Cody lived, by some miracle, but he was badly hurt. For two days he lay in a coma. There was a question of brain damage, til he woke and, in his normal, crusty way, asked who the hel was in charge around here.

Three weeks later, he came home by ambulance. His thick black hair had been shaved off one side of his head, where a gauze patch covered the worst of his wounds. His face— ordinarily lean and tanned—was swol en across one cheekbone and turning different shades of yel ow from slowly fading bruises. His ribs were taped and an arm and a leg were in casts—the right arm and the left leg, so he couldn’t use crutches. He was forced to lie in bed, cursing the game shows on TV.

“Fools. Jackasses. Who do they think would be watching this crap?”

Luke’s mother, who had always been so spirited, lost something important to the accident. First, in the terrible coma days, she drifted around in a wash of tears— a smal , wan, pink-eyed woman. Her red hair seemed drained of color. Luke would say, “Mom?” and she wouldn’t hear, would sometimes snatch up her car keys as if mistaking who had cal ed and go tearing off to the hospital again, leaving Luke alone. Even after the coma ended, it didn’t seem she came back completely. When Cody was brought home, she sat by his bed for hours saying nothing, lightly stroking one thick vein that ran down the inside of his wrist.

She watched the game shows with a tremulous smile.

“Jesus, look at them squawk,” Cody said disgustedly, and Ruth bent down and laid her cheek against his hand as if he’d uttered something wonderful.

Luke, who had once been the center of her world, now hung around the fringes. It was July and he had nothing to do. They’d only been living here—in a suburb of Petersburg, Virginia—since the end of the school year, and he didn’t know any boys his own age. The children on his block were al younger, thin voiced and excitable. It annoyed him to hear their shrieking games of rol -a-bat and the sputtery ksh! ksheiv! of their imaginary rifles. Toddlers were packed into flowered vinyl wading pools which they spent their mornings emptying, measuring cup by measuring cup, til every yard was a sea of mud. Luke could not remember ever being that young. Floating through the icy, white and gold elegance of the rented colonial-style house, he surfaced in various gilt-framed mirrors: someone awkward and unwanted, lurching on legs grown too long to manage, his face past cuteness but not yet solidified into anything better —an oval, fragile face, a sweep of streaky blond hair, a mouthful of braces that made his lips appear irregular and vulnerable. His jeans were getting too short but he had no idea how to go about buying new ones. He was accustomed to relying on his mother for such things. In the old days, his mother had done everything for him. She had got on his nerves, as a matter of fact.

Now he made his own breakfast—Cheerios or shredded wheat—and a sandwich for lunch. His mother cooked supper, but it was something slapped together, not her usual style at al ; and mostly she would let Luke eat alone in the kitchen while she and Cody shared a tray in the bedroom. Or if she stayed with Luke, her talk was stil of Cody. She never asked Luke about himself, no; it was “your daddy” this and “your daddy” that, never a thing but “your daddy.” How wel he was bearing up, how he’d always borne up, always been so dependable from the earliest time she had known him. “I was not but nineteen when I met him,” she said, “and he was thirty years old. I was a homely chit of a girl and he was the handsomest thing you ever saw, so fine mannered and wearing this perfect gray suit.