Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

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.

“Your cat is retarded,” Cody told him.

“Huh?”

“I can’t get her to yawn.”

Ezra reached over, matter-of-factly, and circled the cat with his arm. She gave a luxurious yawn and nestled down against him, and Ezra went back to sleep. Cody didn’t try for another picture, though. He’d never seen anyone take the fun out of things the way Ezra could.

Cody and Ezra and Jenny went shopping for a Christmas present for their mother. Each of them had saved four weeks’ allowance, which meant forty cents apiece, and Cody had a dollar extra that he’d taken from Miss Saunders’s center desk drawer. That made two dollars and twenty cents — enough for some winter gloves, Cody suggested. Jenny said gloves were boring and she wanted to buy a diamond ring. “That’s really stupid,” Cody told her. “Even you ought to know you can’t buy a diamond ring for two-twenty.”

“I don’t mean a real one, I mean glass. Or anything, just so it’s pretty and not useful.”

They were forced to shop in the stores near home, since they didn’t want to spend money on carfare. It was mid-December and crowds of other people were shopping too — plowing past with their arms full of packages, breathing white clouds in the frosty air. Further downtown the department store windows would be as rich and bright as the insides of jewel boxes, and there’d be carols and clanging brass bells and festoons of tinsel on the traffic lights, but in this neighborhood the shops were smaller, darker, decorated with a single wreath on the door or a cardboard Santa Claus carrying a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. Soldiers on leave straggled by in clumps, looking lost. The shoppers had something grim and determined about them — even those with the gaudiest packages. They seemed likely to mow down anyone in their path. Cody took a pinch of Jenny’s coat sleeve so as not to lose her.

“I’m serious,” she was saying. “I don’t want to get her anything warm. Anything necessary. Anything—”

“Serviceable,” Ezra said.

They all grimaced.

“If we bought her a ring, though,” Ezra said, “she might feel bad about the wastefulness. She might not really enjoy it.”

Cody hated the radiant, grave expression that Ezra wore sometimes; it showed that he realized full well how