Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant Part 11

"It's not only only pot roast," Ezra said. He sat in a chair. His suit had a way of waffling around him, as if purchased for a much larger man. "This is something more. I mean, pot roast is really not the right name; it's more like...what you long for when you're sad and everyone's been wearing you down. See, there's this cook, this real country cook, and pot roast is the least of what she does. There's also pan-fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, beaten biscuits genuinely beat on a stump with the back of an ax-" pot roast," Ezra said. He sat in a chair. His suit had a way of waffling around him, as if purchased for a much larger man. "This is something more. I mean, pot roast is really not the right name; it's more like...what you long for when you're sad and everyone's been wearing you down. See, there's this cook, this real country cook, and pot roast is the least of what she does. There's also pan-fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, beaten biscuits genuinely beat on a stump with the back of an ax-"

"Here they come," Cody said.

Jenny and her mother were just walking across the dining room. They carried no parcels, but something made it clear they'd been shopping-perhaps the frazzled, cross look they shared. Jenny's lipstick was chewed off. Pearl's hat was knocked crooked and her hair was frizzier than ever. "What took you so long?" Ezra asked, jumping up. "We were starting to worry."

"Oh, this Jenny and her notions," said Pearl. "Her size eight figure and no bright colors, no pastels, no gathers or puckers or trim, nothing to make her look fat, so-called...Why are there five places set?"

The question took them all off guard. It was true, Cody saw. There were five plates and five crystal winegla.s.ses. "How come?" Pearl asked Ezra.

"Oh...I'll get to that in a minute. Have a seat, Mother, over there."

But she kept standing. "Then at last we find just the right thing," she said. "A nice soft gray with a crocheted collar, Jenny all the way. 'It's you,' I tell her. And guess what she does. She has a tantrum in the middle of Hutzler's department store."

"Not a tantrum tantrum, Mother," Jenny told her. "I merely said-"

"Said, 'It isn't a funeral, Mother; I'm not going into mourning.' You'd think I'd chosen widow's weeds. This was a nice pale gray, very ladylike, very suitable for a second marriage."

"Anthracite," Jenny told Cody.

"Pardon?"

"Anthracite was what the saleslady called it. In other words: coal. Our mother thinks it suitable to marry me off in a coal-black wedding dress."

"Uh," said Ezra, looking around at the other diners, "maybe we should be seated now."

But Pearl just stood straighter. "And then, then," she told her sons, "then, without the slightest bit of thought, doing it only to spite me, she goes rushing over to the nearest rack and pulls out something white as snow."

"It was cream colored," Jenny said.

"Cream, white-what's the difference? Both are inappropriate, if you're marrying for the second time and the divorce hasn't yet been granted and the man has no steady employment. 'I'll take this one,' she says, and it's not even the proper size, miles too big, had to be left at the store for alterations."

"I happened to like it," Jenny said.

"You were lost in it."

"It made me look thin."

"Maybe you could wear a shawl or something, brown," said her mother. "That might tone it down some."

"I can't wear a shawl in a wedding."

"Why not? Or a little jacket, say a brown linen jacket."

"I look fat in jackets."

"Not in a short one, Chanel-type."

"I hate Chanel."

"Well," said Pearl, "I can see that nothing will satisfy you."

"Mother," Jenny said, "I'm already satisfied. I'm satisfied with my cream-colored dress, just the way it is. I love it. Will you please just get off my back?"

"Did you hear that?" Pearl asked her sons. "Well, I don't have to stand here and take it." And she turned and marched back across the dining room, erect as a little wind-up doll.

Ezra said, "Huh?"

Jenny opened a plastic compact, looked into it, and then snapped it shut, as if merely making certain that she was still there.

"Please, Jenny, won't you go after her?" Ezra asked.

"Not on your life."

"You're the one she fought with. I can't persuade her." the one she fought with. I can't persuade her."

"Oh, Ezra, let's for once just drop it," Cody said. "I don't think I'm up to all this."

"What are you saying? Not have dinner at all?"

"I could only eat lettuce leaves anyhow," Jenny told him.

"But this is important! It was going to be an occasion. Oh, just...wait. Wait here a minute, will you?"

Ezra turned and rushed off to the kitchen. From the swarm of a.s.sorted cooks at the counter, he plucked a small person in overalls. It was a girl, Cody guessed-a weasel-faced little redhead. She followed Ezra jauntily, almost stiff-legged, wiping her palms on her backside. "I'd like you to meet Ruth," Ezra said.

Cody said, "Ruth?"

"We're getting married in September."

"Oh," said Cody.

Then Jenny said, "Well, congratulations," and kissed Ruth's bony, freckled cheek, and Cody said, "Uh, yes," and shook her hand. There were calluses like pebbles on her palm. "How do," she told him. He thought of the phrase banty hen banty hen, although he had never seen a banty hen. Or maybe she was more of a rooster. Her brisk, carroty hair was cut so short that it seemed too scant for her skull. Her blue eyes were round as marbles, and her skin was so thin and tight (as if, like her hair, it had been skimped on) that he could see the white cartilage across the bridge of her nose. "So," he said. "Ruth."

"Are you surprised?" Ezra asked him.

"Yes, very surprised."

"I wanted to do it right; I was going to announce it over drinks and then call her in to join the family dinner. But, honey," Ezra said, turning to Ruth, "I guess Mother was overtired. It didn't work out the way I'd planned."

"s.h.i.t, that's okay," Ruth told him.

Cody said, "Surely. Certainly. We can always do it later."

Then Jenny started asking about the wedding, and Cody excused himself and said he thought he'd go see how their mother was. Outside in the dark, walking up the street toward home, he had the strangest feeling of loss. It was as if someone had died, or had left him forever-the beautiful, black-haired Ruth of his dreams.

"I knew what that dinner was going to be, tonight," Pearl told Cody. "I'm not so dumb. I knew. He's got himself engaged; he's going to marry the country cook. I knew that anyway but it all came home to me when I walked in the restaurant and saw those five plates and gla.s.ses. Well, I acted badly. Very badly. You don't have to tell me, Cody. It was just that I saw those plates and something broke inside of me. I thought, 'Well, all right, if that's how it's got to be, but not tonight, just not tonight, Lord, right on top of buying wedding dress number two for my only daughter.' So then, why, I went and made a scene that caused the dinner to be canceled, exactly as if I'd planned it all ahead of time, which of course I hadn't. You believe me, don't you? I'm not blind. I know when I'm being unreasonable. Sometimes I stand outside my body and just watch it all, totally separate. 'Now, stop,' I say to myself, but it's like I'm...elated; I've got to rush on, got to keep going. 'Yes, yes, I'll stop,' I think, 'only let me say this one more thing, just this one more thing ...'

"Cody, don't you believe I want you three to be happy? Of course I do. Naturally. Why, I wouldn't hold Ezra back for the world, if he's so set on marrying that girl-though I don't know what he sees in her, she's so sc.r.a.ppy and hoydenish; I think she's from Garrett County or some such place and hardly wears shoes-you ought to see the soles of her feet sometime-but what I want to say is, I've never been one of those mothers who try to keep their sons for themselves. I honestly hope Ezra marries. I truly mean that. I want somebody taking care of him, especially especially him. You can manage on your own but Ezra is so, I don't know, defenseless...Of course I love you all the same amount, every bit the same, but...well, Ezra is so him. You can manage on your own but Ezra is so, I don't know, defenseless...Of course I love you all the same amount, every bit the same, but...well, Ezra is so good good. You know? Anyway, now he has this Ruth person and it's changed his whole outlook; watch him sometime when she walks into a room, or swaggers, or whatever you want to call it. He adores her. They get all playful together, like two puppies. Yes, often they remind me of puppies, snuggling down and giggling, or bounding about the kitchen or listening to that hillbilly music that Ruth seems to be so crazy about. But, Cody. Promise not to tell this to anyone. Promise? Cody, sometimes I stand there watching them and I see they believe they're completely special, the first, the only people ever to feel the way they're feeling. They believe they'll live happily ever after, that all the other marriages going on around them-those ordinary, worn-down, flattened-in arrangements-why, those are nothing like what they'll they'll have. They'll never settle for so little. And it makes me mad. I can't help it, Cody. I know it's selfish, but I can't help it. I want to ask them, Who do you think you are, anyhow? Do you imagine you're unique? Do you really suppose I was always this difficult old woman?' have. They'll never settle for so little. And it makes me mad. I can't help it, Cody. I know it's selfish, but I can't help it. I want to ask them, Who do you think you are, anyhow? Do you imagine you're unique? Do you really suppose I was always this difficult old woman?'

"Cody, listen. I was special too, once, to someone. I could just reach out and lay a fingertip on his arm while he was talking and he would instantly fall silent and get all confused. I had hopes; I was courted; I had the most beautiful wedding. I had three lovely pregnancies, where every morning I woke up knowing something perfect would happen in nine months, eight months, seven...so it seemed I was full of light; it was light and plans that filled me. And then while you children were little, why, I was the center of your worlds! I was everything to you! It was Mother this and Mother that, and 'Where's Mother? Where's she gone to?' and the moment you came in from school, 'Mother? Are you home?' It's not fair, Cody. It's really not fair; now I'm old and I walk along unnoticed, just like anyone else. It strikes me as unjust, Cody. But don't tell the others I said so."

At work that next week, charting the steps by which power drills were fitted into their housings, Cody watched the old, dark Ruth fade from the rafters and hallways, until at last she was completely gone and he forgot why she had moved him so. Now a new Ruth appeared. Skinny and boyish, overalls flapping around her shinbones, she raced giggling down the a.s.sembly line with Ezra hot on her heels. Ezra's hair was tousled. (He was not immune at all, it appeared, but had only been waiting in his stubbornly trustful way for the proper person to arrive.) He caught her in the supervisor's office and they scuffled like...yes, like two puppies. A cowlick bounced on the crown of Ruth's head. Her lips were chapped and cracked. Her nails were bitten into tiny pink cushions and there were sc.r.a.pes and burns across her knuckles, scars from her country cooking.

Cody called his mother and said he'd be down for the weekend. And would Ruth be around, did she think? After all, he said, it was time he got to know his future sister-in-law.

He arrived on Sat.u.r.day morning bringing flowers, copper-colored roses. He found Ruth and Ezra playing gin on the living room floor. Ruth's reality, after his week of dreaming, struck him like a blow. She seemed clearer, plainer, harder edged than anybody he'd known. She wore jeans and a shirt of some ugly brown plaid. She was so absorbed in her game that she hardly glanced up when Cody walked in. "Ruth," he said, and he held out the flowers. "These are for you."

She looked at them, and then drew a card. "What are they?" she asked.

"Well, roses."

"Roses? This early in the year?"

"Greenhouse roses. I especially ordered copper, to go with your hair."

"You leave my hair out of this," she said.

"Honey, he meant it as a compliment," Ezra told her.

"Oh."

"Certainly," said Cody. "See, it's my way of saying welcome. Welcome to our family, Ruth."

"Oh. Well, thanks."

"Cody, that was awfully nice of you," Ezra said.

"Gin," said Ruth.

Late that afternoon, when it was time to go to the restaurant, Cody walked over with Ruth and Ezra. He'd had a long, immobile day-standing outside other people's lives, mostly-and he needed the exercise.

It had been raining, off and on, and there were puddles on the sidewalk. Ruth strode straight through every one of them, which was fine since her shoes were brown leather combat boots. Cody wondered if her style were deliberate. What would she do, for instance, if he gave her a pair of high-heeled evening sandals? The question began to fascinate him. He became obsessed; he developed an almost physical thirst for the sight of her blunt little feet in silver straps.

There was no explaining his craving for the gigantic watch-black faced and intricately calibrated, capable of withstanding a deep-sea dive-whose stainless steel expansion band hung loose on her wiry wrist.

Ezra had his pearwood recorder. He played it as he walked, serious and absorbed, with his lashes lowered on his cheeks. "Le G.o.diveau de Poisson," he played. Pa.s.sersby looked at him and smiled. Ruth hummed along with some notes, fell into her own thoughts at others. Then Ezra put his recorder in the pocket of his shabby lumber jacket, and he and Ruth began discussing the menu. It was good they were serving the rice dish, Ruth said; that always made the Arab family happy. She ran her fingers through her sprouty red hair. Cody, walking on the other side of her, felt her shift of weight when Ezra circled her with one arm and pulled her close.

In the restaurant, she was a whirlwind. Ezra cooked in a dream, tasting and reflecting; the others (losers, all of them, in Cody's opinion) floated around the kitchen vaguely, but Ruth spun and pounced and jabbed at food as if doing battle. She was in charge of a chicken ca.s.serole and something that looked like potato cakes. Cody watched her from a corner well out of the way, but still people seemed to keep tripping over him.

"Where did you learn to cook?" he asked Ruth.

"No place," she said.

"Is this chicken some regional thing?"

"Taste," she snapped, and she speared a piece and held it out to him.

"I can't," he said.

"Why not?"

"I feel too full."

In fact, he felt full of her her. He'd taken her in all day, consumed her. Every spiky movement-slamming of pot lids, toss of head-nourished him. It came to him like a gift, while he was studying her narrow back, that she actually wore an undershirt, one of those knitted singlets he remembered from his childhood. He could make out the seams of it beneath the brown plaid. He filed the information with care, to be treasured once he was alone.

The restaurant opened and customers began to trickle in. The large, beaming hostess seated them all in one area, as if tucking them under her wing.

"Find a table," Ezra told Cody. "I'll bring you some of Ruth's cooking."

"I'm honestly not hungry," Cody said.

"He's full, full," said Ruth, spitting it out.

"Well, what'll you do, then? Isn't this boring for you?"

"No, no, I'm interested," Cody said.

He could look across the counter and into the dining room, where people sat chewing and swallowing and drinking, patting their mouths with napkins, breaking off chunks of bread. He wondered how Ezra could stand to spend his life at this.

When the first real flurry was over, Ruth and Ezra settled at the scrubbed wooden table in the center of the kitchen, and Cody joined them. Ezra ate some of Ruth's chicken ca.s.serole. Ruth lit a small brown cigarette and tipped back in her chair to watch him. The cigarette smelled as if it were burning only by accident-like something spilled on the floor of an oven, or stuck to the underside of a saucepan. Cody, seated across from her, drank it in. "Eat, Cody, eat," Ezra urged him. Cody just shook his head, not wanting to lose his chestful of Ruth's smoke.

Meanwhile, the other cooks came and went, some of them sitting also to wolf various odd a.s.sortments of food while their kettles simmered untended. Ezra's boyhood friend Josiah appeared, metamorphosed into an efficient grown man in starchy white, and he and Ruth had a talk about peeling the apples for her pie. Cody could not have cared less about her pie, but he was riveted by her offhand, slangy style of speech. She held her cigarette between thumb and index finger, with her elbow propped against her rib cage. She hunkered forward to consider some decision, and beneath her knotted brows her eyes were so pale a blue that he was startled.

They left the restaurant before it closed. Josiah would lock up, Ezra said. They took a roundabout route home, down a quiet, one-way street, to drop Ruth off at the house where she rented a room. When Ezra accompanied her up the front steps, Cody waited on the curb. He watched Ezra kiss her good night-a b.u.mbling, inadequate kiss, Cody judged it; and he felt some satisfaction. Then Ezra rejoined him and galumphed along beside him, big footed and blithe. "Isn't she something?" he asked Cody. "Don't you just love her?"

"Mm."

"But there's so much I need to find out from you! I want to take good care of her, but I don't know how. What about life insurance? Things like that! So much is expected of husbands, Cody. Will you help me figure it out?"

"I'll be glad to," Cody said. He meant it, too. Anything: any little crack that would provide him with an entrance.

Eventually, Ezra subsided, although he continued to give the impression of inwardly bubbling and chortling. From time to time, he hummed a few bars of something underneath his breath. And then when they were almost home-pa.s.sing houses totally dark, where everyone had long since gone to sleep-what should he do but pull out that d.a.m.ned recorder of his and start piping away. It was embarra.s.sing. It was infuriating: "Le G.o.diveau de Poisson," once again. Depend on Ezra, Cody thought, to have as his theme song a recipe for a seafood dish. He walked along in silence, hoping someone would call the police. Or at least, that they'd open a window. "You there! Quiet!" But no one did. It was so typical: Ezra the golden boy, everybody's favorite, tootling down the streets scot-free.

On Sunday morning, Cody presented himself at Ruth's door-or rather, at the door of the faded, doughy lady who owned the house Ruth stayed in. This lady toyed so fearfully with the locket at her throat that Cody felt compelled to take a step backward, proving he was not a knock-and-rob man. He gave her his most gentlemanly smile. "Good morning," he said. "Is Ruth home?"

"Ruth?"

He realized he didn't know Ruth's last name. "I'm Ezra Tull's brother," he said.

"Oh, Ezra, Ezra," she said, and she stood back to let him enter.

He followed her deep into the interior, past a tumult of overstuffed furniture and dusty wax fruit and heaps of magazines. In the kitchen, Ruth slouched at the table spooning up cornflakes and reading a newspaper propped against a cereal box. A pale, pudgy man stood gazing into an open refrigerator. Cody had an impression of inertia and frittered lives. He felt charged with energy. It ought to be so easy to win her away from all this!

"Good morning," he said. Ruth looked up. The pudgy man retreated behind the refrigerator door.

"I hope you're not too far into that cereal," Cody said. "I came to invite you to breakfast."

"What for?" Ruth asked, frowning.