Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

happy! They’d depended only on each other, because of moving around so much. It had made them very close. He’d be back.

Her Uncle Seward’s widow wrote to wish her a happy birthday. (Pearl had forgotten all about it.) Pearl responded immediately, thanking her. We celebrated at home, she wrote. Beck surprised me with the prettiest necklace … Say hello to the others, she added, and she pictured them all in her uncle’s parlor; she ached for them, but drew herself up and recalled how they had been so sure no man would marry her. She could never tell them what had happened.

Her old friend Emmaline stopped by, on her way to visit a sister in Philadelphia. Pearl said Beck was out of town; the two of them were in luck; they could talk girl-talk to their hearts’ content. She put Emmaline in the double bed with her, instead of in the guest room. They stayed awake half the night gossiping and giggling. Once Pearl almost set a hand on Emmaline’s arm and said, “Emmaline. Listen. I feel so horrible, Emmaline.” But fortunately, she caught herself. The moment passed. In the morning they overslept, and Pearl had to rush to get the children off to school; so there wasn’t much said. “We should do this more often,” Emmaline told her as she left, and Pearl said Beck would be sorry he had missed her. “You know he’s always liked you,” she said. Although actually, Beck used to claim that Emmaline reminded him of a woodchuck.

Easter came, and Jenny had a part in her school’s Easter pageant. When the day arrived and Beck was still not home, Jenny cried. Couldn’t he ever be home? It wasn’t his fault, Pearl told her. There was a war on, production speeded up; he couldn’t help it if his company needed him more now. They ought to be proud, she said. Jenny dried her tears and told everyone that her daddy had to help with the war effort. The war was so old by now, grinding on; no one was impressed. Still, it made Jenny feel better. Pearl went to the Easter pageant alone, wearing a rakish, visored hat that was patterned after the hats the WACs wore.

When Beck had been gone a month, he sent a note from Norfolk saying he was fine and hoped that she and the kids did not lack for anything. He enclosed a check for fifty dollars. It wasn’t nearly enough. Pearl spent a morning pacing the house. First she went over his note in her mind, picking apart his words for underlying meanings. But not much could underlie right good apartment with hotplate and sales manager seems to think well of me. Then she considered the money. Around lunchtime, she put on her coat and her WACs hat and walked around the corner to Sweeney Bros. Grocery and Fine Produce, where a CASHIER WANTED sign had been yellowing in the window for weeks. They were tickled to death to hire her. The younger Sweeney brother showed her how to work the cash register and said she could start the next morning. When her children came home from school that day, she told them she was taking a job to fill in time. She needed something to keep her busy, she said, now that they were growing up and going off on their own more.

Two months passed. Three months. Fifty dollars a month from Beck. When the second check arrived, no letter came with it. She tore the envelope apart, thinking it must have got stuck inside, but there wasn’t a word. With the third check, though, he wrote that he was moving to Cleveland, where the company planned to open a new branch. He said it was a good sign they’d decided on this transfer — or “invite,” he called it. He never called it a transfer; he called it an invite. An invite to this important expansion westward. He began the letter, Dear Pearl & kids, but Pearl didn’t show it to the children. She folded it neatly and put it with the first letter, in a hosiery box in her bureau, where even that meddlesome Cody wouldn’t think to look. In the fourth envelope, again, there was only a check. She saw that he was not in communication with her (was how she phrased it), but was merely touching base from time to time. Really, all he was doing was saying, Please find enclosed. It didn’t occur to her to answer him. Yet she went on saving his letters.

Sometimes she had strange thoughts that surprised her. For instance: At least I have more closet space now. And more drawer space.

At night she dreamed that Beck was new and wonderful again, someone she’d just become acquainted with. He gazed at her adoringly, overturning some unfamiliar center deep inside her. He helped her cross streets, climb steps. His hand cupped her elbow warmly or circled her waist or steadied the small of her back. She felt cherished. When she woke, her only thought was to sink back into her dream. She would keep her eyes shut. Superstitiously, she would play possum, not stirring, trying to persuade the dream that she was still asleep. But it never worked. Finally she would rise, whatever the hour, and go downstairs to make a pot of coffee. Standing at the kitchen window with her cup, watching the sky whiten over the rooftops, she would catch sight of her dark, transparent reflection — her small face and round chin that was taking on a dented look, these past few years; the worried tent of her colorless eyebrows; the pale frazzle of hair that failed to hide the crease across her forehead. That crease was not a wrinkle but a scar, the mark of a childhood accident. Oh, she was not so old! She was not so very old! But then she remembered the accident: she’d been trying to ride a cousin’s bicycle, the very first in the family. A “wheel” was what they called it. Trying to ride a wheel. And here it was 1944 and bicycles were everywhere, but so modernized they were hardly the same breed of beast. All three of her children knew how to ride and would, in fact, have had bikes of their own if not for the war. How had she come so far? She had just passed her fiftieth birthday. There was not a hope of Beck’s return. He’d found someone younger, someone glamorous and merry, still capable of bearing children. They were laughing at her — at how she’d always been an old maid, really, always an old maid at heart. How she flinched when he turned to her in the dark, still startled, after all these years, by the concreteness of him — by his scratchy whiskers, salty-smelling skin, weighty body. How she had to have things just perfect, the linens on labeled shelves in the cupboard and the shades pulled evenly in the windows. How she’d never learned to let go, to give in, to float on the current of a day, but must always fuss and pull at stray threads and straighten the corners of things; and worst of all, how she knew she did that, knew while she was doing it, but still could not stop herself.

He was never coming back.

It was time to tell the children. She was amazed, in fact, that she’d managed to keep it from them for so long. Had they always been this easy to fool? One good thing about telling them: they would rally around her better. She didn’t like to admit it but she was losing control of the boys. Instead of supporting her — taking out the garbage, helping her in various manly and protective ways — they seemed to be running wild; yes, even Ezra. They didn’t even do the chores they used to do, let alone take on new ones. Cody in fact was hardly ever home. Ezra was dreamy and forgetful and would like as not walk off in the middle of a task. When she told them what was what, she thought, they’d be horrified at how they’d let her down. They’d ask why she’d hidden it all this time, what she could have been thinking of.

Only she couldn’t tell them.

She planned how she would do it: she would gather them around her on the sofa, in the lamplight, some evening after supper. “Children. Dear ones,” she would say. “There’s something you should know.” But she wouldn’t be able to continue; she might cry. It was unthinkable to cry in front of the children. Or in front of anyone. Oh, she had her pride! She was not a tranquil woman; she often lost her temper, snapped, slapped the nearest cheek, said things she later regretted — but thank the Lord, she didn’t expose her tears. She didn’t allow any tears. She was Pearl Cody Tull, who’d ridden out of Raleigh triumphant with her new husband and never looked back. Even now, even standing at the kitchen window, all alone, watching her tense and aging face, she didn’t cry.

Every morning, then, she went off to Sweeney Bros. She continued to wear her hat, giving the impression that she had merely dropped in and was helping out as a favor, in a pinch. As each customer approached (generally someone she knew, at least by sight), she would give a firm nod and then squint, implying a smile. She rang up the purchases efficiently while a boy named Alexander bagged them. “Thank you, and good day,” she said at the end, with another shorthand smile. She liked to seem crisp and professional. When neighbors showed up, people she knew more closely, she felt she was dying inside but she didn’t lose her composure. With them she was even crisper. She had a little rhythm between the key stabbing and the sliding of groceries along the wooden counter; it kept her mind off things. If she allowed herself to think, she started worrying. Summer had arrived and her children were out of school all day. No telling what they might be up to.

At five-thirty she walked home, past crowds of youngsters playing hopscotch or huddled over marble games, past babies set to air in their carriages, women perched on their stoops fanning themselves in the heat. She’d climb her steps and be met at the door with bad news: “Jenny fell down the stairs today and bit her lower lip clean through and had to go to Mrs. Simmons’s house for ice and gauze.”

“Oh, Jenny, honey!”