Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

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 glasses. 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 scrappy 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 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. 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 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 assembly 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 scrapes 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 Saturday 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 Godiveau de Poisson,” he played. Passersby 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 casserole 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. 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.