Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” she told him.

“Well, all I want to say is, Ruth: why settle down so soon, when there’s so much you haven’t seen yet?”

“Soon?” she said. “I’m pretty near twenty years old. Been rattling around on my own since my sixteenth birthday. Only thing I want is to settle down, sooner the better.”

“Oh,” said Cody.

“Well, have a good walk.”

“Oh, yes, walk …”

“Don’t drown,” she told him, callously.

At the door, he turned. He said, “Ruth?”

“What.”

“I don’t know your last name.”

“Spivey,” she said.

He thought it was the loveliest sound he had ever heard in his life.

The following weekend, he drove her out to see his farm. “I have seen all the farms I care to,” she said, but Ezra said, “Oh, you ought to go, Ruth. It’s pretty this time of year.” Ezra himself had to stay behind; he was supervising the installation of a new meat locker for the restaurant. Cody had known that before he invited her.

This time he brought her jonquils. She said, “I don’t know what I want with these; there’s a whole mess in back by the walkway.”

Cody smiled at her.

He settled her in his Cadillac, which smelled of new leather. She looked unimpressed. Perversely, she was wearing a skirt, on the one occasion when jeans would have been more suitable. Her legs were very white, almost chalky. He had not seen short socks like hers since his schooldays, and her tattered sneakers were as small and stubby as a child’s.

On the drive out, he talked about his plans for the farm. “It’s where I’d like to live,” he said. “Where I want to raise my family. It’s a perfect place for children.”

“What makes you think so?” she asked. “When I was a kid, all I cared about was getting to the city.”

“Yes, but fresh air and home-grown vegetables, and the animals … Right now, the man down the road is tending my livestock, but once I move in full-time I’m going to do it all myself.”

“That I’d like to see,” said Ruth. “You ever slopped a hog? Shoveled out a stable?”

“I can learn,” he told her.

She shrugged and said no more.

When they reached the farm he showed her around the grounds, where she stared a cow down and gave a clump of hens the evil eye. Then he led her into the house. He’d bought it lock, stock, and barrel — complete with bald plush sofa and kerosene stove in the parlor, rickety kitchen table with its drawerful of rusted flatware, 1958 calendar on the wall advertising Mallardy’s oystershell mixture for layers, extra rich in calcium. The man who’d lived here — a widower — had died upstairs in the four-poster bed. Cody had replaced the bedclothes with new ones, sheets and a quilt and down pillows, but that was his only change. “I do plan to fix things up,” he told Ruth, “but I’m waiting till I marry. I know my wife might like to have a say in it.”

Ruth removed a window lock easily from its crumbling wooden sash. She turned it over and peered at the underside.

“I want a wife very much,” said Cody.

She put back the lock. “I hate to be the one to tell you,” she said, “but smell that smell? Kind of sweetish smell? You got dry rot here.”

“Ruth,” he said, “do you dislike me for any reason?”

“Huh?”

“Your attitude. The way you put me off. You don’t think much of me, do you?” he said.

She gave him an edgy, skewed look, evasive, and moved over to the stairway. “Oh,” she said, “I like you a fair amount.”

“You do?”

“But I know your type,” she said.

“What type?”

“There were plenty like you in my school,” she said. “Oh, sure! Some in every class, on every team — tall and real good-looking, stylish, athletic, witty. Smooth-mannered boys that everything always came easy to, that always knew the proper way of doing things, and never dated any but the cheerleader girls, or the homecoming queen, or her maids of honor at the lowest. Passing me in the halls not even knowing who I was, nor guessing I existed. Or making fun of me sometimes, I’m almost certain — laughing at how poor I dressed and mocking my freckly face and my old red hair—”

“Laughing! When have I ever done such a thing?”

“I’m not naming you in particular,” she said, “but you sure do put me in mind of a type.”

“Ruth. I wouldn’t mock you. I think you’re perfect,” he said. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“See there?” she asked, and she raised her chin, spun about, and marched down the stairs. She wouldn’t answer anything else he said to her, all during the long drive home.

It was a campaign, was what it was — a long and arduous battle campaign, extending through April and all of May. There were moments when he despaired. He’d had too late a start, was out of the running; he’d wasted his time with those unoriginal, obvious brunettes whom he’d thought he was so clever to snare while Ezra, not even trying, had somehow divined the real jewel. Lucky Ezra! His whole life rested on luck, and Cody would probably never manage to figure out how he did it.

Often, after leaving Ruth, Cody would be muttering to himself as he strode away. He would slam a fist in his palm or kick his own car. But at the same time, he had an underlying sense of exhilaration. Yes, he would have to say that he’d never felt more alive, never more eager for each new day. Now he understood why he’d lost interest in Carol or Karen, what’s-her-name, the social worker who hadn’t found Ezra appealing. She’d made it too easy. What he liked was the competition, the hope of emerging triumphant from a neck-and-neck struggle with Ezra, his oldest enemy. He even liked biding his time, holding himself in check, hiding his feelings from Ruth till the most advantageous moment. (Was patience Ezra’s secret?) For, of course, this wasn’t an open competition. One of the contestants didn’t even know he was a contestant. “Gosh, Cody,” Ezra said, “it’s been nice to have you around so much lately.” And to Ruth, “Go, go; you’ll enjoy it,” when Cody invited her anywhere.

Once, baiting Ezra, Cody stole one of Ruth’s brown cigarettes and smoked it in the farmhouse. (The scent of burning tar filled his bedroom. If he’d had a telephone, he would have forgotten all his strategies and called her that instant to confess he loved her.) He stubbed out the butt in a plastic ashtray beside his bed. Then later he invited Ezra to look at his new calves, took him upstairs to discuss a leak in the roof, and led him to the nightstand where the ashtray sat. But Ezra just said, “Oh, was Ruth here?” and launched into praise for an herb garden she was planting on top of the restaurant. Cody couldn’t believe that anyone would be so blind, so credulous. Also, he would have died for the privilege of having Ruth plant herbs for him. He thought of the yard out back, where he’d always envisioned his wife’s kitchen garden. Rosemary! Basil! Lemon balm!

“Why didn’t she come to me?” he asked Ezra. “She could always grow her herbs on my farm.”

“Oh, well, the closer to home the fresher,” said Ezra. “But you’re kind to offer, Cody.”

Oiling his rifles that night, Cody seriously considered shooting Ezra through the heart.

When he complimented Ruth, she bristled. When he brought her the gifts he’d so craftily chosen (gold chains and crystal flasks of perfume, music boxes, silk flowers, all intended to contrast with the ugly, mottled marble rolling pin that Ezra presented, clumsily wrapped, on her twentieth birthday), she generally lost them right away or left them wherever she happened to be. And when he invited her places, she only came along for the outing. He would take her arm and she’d say, “Jeepers, I’m not some old lady.” She would scramble over rocks and through forests in her combat boots, and Cody would follow, bemused and dazzled, literally sick with love. He had lost eight