Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“He’s 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 casserole. 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 assortments 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 bumbling, 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 — passing houses totally dark, where everyone had long since gone to sleep — what should he do but pull out that damned recorder of his and start piping away. It was embarrassing. It was infuriating: “Le Godiveau 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,” 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.

“Well … not for any purpose. I’m just out walking and I thought you might want to walk with me, stop off for doughnuts and coffee someplace.”

“Now?”

“Of course.”

“Isn’t it raining?”

“Only a little bit.”

“No, thanks,” she said.

Her eyes dropped back to her newspaper. The landlady slid her locket along its chain with a miniature zipping sound.

“What’s going on in the world?” Cody asked.

“What world?” said Ruth.

“The news. What does the newspaper say?”

Ruth raised her eyes, and Cody saw the page she had turned to. “Oh,” he said. “The comics.”

“No, my horoscope.”

“Your horoscope.” He looked to the landlady for help. The landlady gazed off toward a cabinet full of jelly glasses. “Well, what … um, symbol are you?” Cody asked Ruth.

“Hmm?”

“What astrological symbol?”

“Sign,” she corrected him. She sighed and stood up, finally forced to recognize his presence. Snatching her paper from the table, she stalked off toward the parlor. Cody made way for her and then trailed after. Her jeans, he guessed, had been bought at a little boys’ clothing store. She had no hips whatsoever. Her sweater was transparent at the elbows.

“I’m Taurus,” she said over her shoulder, “but all that’s rubbish, anyhow. Total garbage.”

“Oh, I agree,” Cody said, relieved.

She stopped in the center of the parlor and turned to him. “Look at here,” she said, and she jabbed her finger at a line of newsprint. “Powerful ally will come to your rescue. Accent today on high finance.” She lowered the paper. “I mean, who do they reckon they’re dealing with? What kind of business am I supposed to be involved in?”

“Ridiculous,” said Cody. He was hypnotized by her eyebrows. They were the color of orange sherbet, and whenever she spoke with any heat the skin around them grew pink, darker than the eyebrows themselves.

“Ignore innuendos from long-time foe,” she read, running a finger down the column. “Or listen to this other one: Clandestine meeting could solve mystery. Almighty God!” she said, and she tossed the paper into an armchair. “You got to lead quite a life, to get anything out of your horoscope.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Cody said. “Maybe it’s truer than you realize.”

“Come again?”

“Maybe it’s saying you ought to lead such a life. Ought to be more adventurous, not just slave away in some restaurant, mope around a gloomy old boardinghouse …”

“It’s not so gloomy,” Ruth said, lifting her chin.

“Well, but—”

“And anyhow, I won’t always be here. Me and Ezra, after we marry, we’re moving in above the Homesick. Then once we get us some money we plan on a house.”

“But still,” said Cody, “you won’t have anywhere near what those horoscopes are calling for. Why, there’s all the outside world! New York, for instance. Ever been to New York?”

She shook her head, watching him narrowly.

“You ought to come; it’s springtime there.”

“It’s springtime here,” she said.

“But a different kind.”