glanced at. Then she sat back and fanned herself some more, gazing at the ceiling.
“Married,” she said finally. “Well, I tell you. You could, or you could not. If you don’t, you
“What, get married?”
“If you don’t, see,” Mrs. Parkins said, “you’ll run into a lot of heartbreak. Lot of trouble in your romantic life. From various different people. What I mean to say,” she said, “if you don’t go on and get married, you’ll be destroyed by love.”
“Oh,” Jenny said.
“That’ll be two dollars, please.”
Searching through her purse, Jenny had an interesting thought. By Ezra’s rate of exchange, she could have bought a couple of restaurants for the same amount of money.
She married Harley late in August, in the little Baptist church that the Tulls had attended off and on. Cody gave Jenny away and Ezra was the usher. The guests he ushered in were: Pearl, Mr. and Mrs. Baines, and an aunt on Harley’s mother’s side. Jenny wore a white eyelet dress and sandals. Harley wore a black suit, white button- down shirt, and snub-nosed, dull black shoes. Jenny looked down at those shoes all during the ceremony. They reminded her of licorice jellybeans.
Pearl did not shed a tear, because, she said, she was so glad things had worked out this way, even though certain people might have informed her sooner. It was a relief to see your daughter handed over safely, she said — a burden off. Mrs. Baines cried steadily, but that was the kind of woman she was. She told Jenny after the wedding that it certainly didn’t mean she had anything against the marriage.
Then Harley and Jenny took a train to Paulham University, where they’d rented a small apartment. They had no furniture yet and spent their wedding night on the floor. Jenny was worried about Harley’s inexperience. She was certain he’d always been above such things as sex; he wouldn’t know what to do, and neither would she, and they would end up failing at something the rest of the world managed without a thought. But actually, Harley knew very well what to do. She suspected he’d researched it. She had an image of Harley at a library desk, comparing the theories of experts, industriously making notes in the proper outline form.
“On old Olympus’s torrid top,” Jenny told the scenery rushing past her window, “a Finn and German picked some hops.”
This was supposed to remind her of the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor … She frowned and checked her textbook. It was 1958—the start of the first weekend in May, but not a weekend she could spare. She was paying a visit to Baltimore when she should have been holed up in Paulham, studying. She had telephoned her mother long-distance. “Could you ask Ezra to meet my train?”
“I thought you had so much work to do.”
“I can work down there just as well.”
“Are you bringing Harley?”
“No.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t like the sound of this, young lady.”
On the telephone, Pearl’s voice was dim and staticky, easily dealt with. Jenny had said, “Oh, Mother, really.” But now the train was drawing into Baltimore, and the sight of factory smokestacks, soot-blackened bricks, and billboards peeling in the rain — a landscape she associated with home — made her feel less sure of herself. She hoped that Ezra would meet her alone. She rubbed a clean spot on the window and stared out at acres of railroad track, then at the first metal posts flying by, then at slower posts, better defined, and a dark flight of stairs. The train shrieked and jerked to a stop. Jenny closed her book. She stood up, edged past a sleeping woman, and took a small suitcase from the rack overhead.
This station always seemed to be under some kind of construction, she thought. When she arrived at the top of the stairs, she heard the whine of a power tool — an electric drill or saw. The sound was almost lost beneath the high ceiling. Ezra stood waiting, smiling at her, with his hands in his windbreaker pockets. “How was your trip?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He took her suitcase. “Harley all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
They threaded through a sparse crowd of people in raincoats. “Mother’s still at work,” Ezra said, “but she ought to be home by the time we get there. And I’ve put in a call to Cody. I thought we might all have dinner at the restaurant tomorrow night; he’s supposed to be passing through.”
“How
Ezra looked unhappy. He guided Jenny through the door, into a dripping mist that felt cool on her skin. “She’s not at all well,” he said.
Jenny wondered why he called the restaurant “she,” as if it were a ship. But then he said, “The treatments are making her worse. She can’t keep anything down,” and she understood that he must mean Mrs. Scarlatti. Last fall, Mrs. Scarlatti had been hospitalized for a cancer operation — her second, though up until then no one had known of the first. Ezra had taken it very hard. Mournfully trudging down a row of taxis, he said, “She hardly ever complains, but I know she’s suffering.”
“Are you running the restaurant alone, then?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been doing that since November. Everything: the hiring and the firing, bringing in new help as people quit. A restaurant is not all food, you know. Sometimes it seems that food is the least of it. I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I’m beginning to think she’s right.”
They had reached his car, a dented gray Chevy. He opened the door for her and heaved her suitcase into the rear, which was already a chaos of
“Yes, Harley taught me. Now I drive him everywhere; he likes to be free to think.”
They were on Charles Street. The rain was so fine that Ezra hadn’t bothered to turn on his windshield wipers, and the glass began to film over. Jenny peered ahead. “Can you see?” she asked Ezra.
He nodded.
“First he wants me to drive,” she said, “and then he criticizes every last little thing about how I do it. He’s so clever; you don’t know how far his cleverness can extend. I mean, it’s not just math or genetics he knows all about but the most efficient temperature for cooking pot roast, the best way to organize my kitchen — everything, all charted out in his mind. When I’m driving he says, ‘Now, Jennifer, you know full well that three blocks from here is that transit stop where you have to veer left, so what are you doing in the right-hand lane? You ought to plan ahead more,’ he says. ‘Three blocks!’ I say. ‘Good grief! I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ and he says, ‘That’s exactly what your trouble is, Jenny.’ ‘Between here and that transit stop,’ I tell him, ‘anything might happen,’ and he says, ‘Not really. No, not really. In all three intersections there’s a left-turn lane, as you’ll recall, so you wouldn’t have to wait for …’ Nothing is unplanned, for Harley. You can see the numbered pages leafing over inside his head. There’s never a single mistake.”
“Well,” Ezra said, “I guess it’s like a whole different outlook, being a genius.”
“It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned,” said Jenny, “but I didn’t realize it was a warning. I was too young to read the signals. I thought he was only like me, you know — a
