Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

That letter he mailed from Pennsylvania, when he visited a packing-crate plant the following Tuesday. And on Wednesday, from New York, he sent the blue sheet with LMR at the top.

Dear Ruth,

Had lunch with Donna the other day and she told me you were going with a real nice fellow. Was kind of hazy on the particulars but when she said his name was Tull and he came from Baltimore I knew it must be Cody. Everybody here knows Cody, we all just love him, he really is a good man at heart and has been misjudged for years by people who don’t understand him. Well, Ruthie, I guess you’re smarter than I gave you credit for, I always thought you’d settle for one of those dime-a-dozen blond types but now I see I was wrong.

I’ll be waiting for the details.

Love, Laurie May

“You went too far with that last letter,” Ruth told him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He was sitting on a kitchen stool, watching her cube meat. He’d come directly to the restaurant this Saturday — bypassing home, bypassing the farm — hoping to find her altered somehow, mystified, perhaps tossing him a speculative glance from time to time. Instead, she seemed cross. She slammed her cleaver on the chopping board. “Do you realize,” she asked, “that I went ahead and answered that first note? Not wanting someone to worry, I sent it back and said it wasn’t mine, there must be some mistake; went out specially and bought a stamp to mail it with. And would’ve sent the second back, too, only it didn’t have a return address. Then the third comes; well, you went too far.”

“I tend to do that,” Cody said regretfully.

Ruth slung the cleaver with a thunking sound. Cody was afraid the others — only Todd Duckett and Josiah, this early — would wonder what was wrong, but they didn’t even look around. Ezra was out front, chalking up tonight’s menu.

“Just what is your problem?” Ruth asked him. “Do you have something against me? You think I’m some Garrett County hick that you don’t want marrying your brother?”

“Of course I don’t want you marrying him,” Cody said. “I love you.”

“Huh?”

This wasn’t the moment he had planned, but he rushed on anyway, as if drunk. “I mean it,” he said, “I feel driven. I feel pulled. I have to have you. You’re all I ever think about.”

She was staring at him, astonished, with one hand cupped to scoop the meat cubes into a skillet.

“I guess I’m not saying it right,” he told her.

“Saying what? What are you talking about?”

“Ruth. I really, truly love you,” he said. “I’m sick over you. I can’t even eat. Look at me! I’ve lost eleven pounds.”

He held out his arms, demonstrating. His jacket hung loose at the sides. Lately he’d moved his belt in a notch; his suits no longer fit so smoothly but seemed rumpled, gathered, bunchy.

“It’s true you’re kind of skinny,” Ruth said slowly.

“Even my shoes feel too big.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“You haven’t heard a word I said!”

“Over me, you said. You must be making fun.”

“Ruth, I swear—” he said.

“You’re used to New York City girls, models, actresses; you could have anyone.”

“It’s you I’ll have.”

She studied him a moment. It began to seem he’d finally broken through; they were having a conversation. Then she said, “We got to get that weight back on you.”

He groaned.

“See there?” she asked. “You never eat a thing I offer you.”

“I can’t,” he told her.

“I don’t believe you ever once tasted my cooking.”

She set the skillet aside and went over to the tall black kettle that was simmering on the stove. “Country vegetable,” she said, lifting the lid.

“Really, Ruth …”

She filled a small crockery bowl and set it on the table. “Sit down,” she said. “Eat. When you’ve tried it, I’ll tell you the secret ingredient.”

Steam rose from the bowl, with a smell so deep and spicy that already he felt overfed. He accepted the spoon that she held out. He dipped it in the soup reluctantly and took a sip.

“Well?” she asked.

“It’s very good,” he said.

In fact, it was delicious, if you cared about such things. He’d never tasted soup so good. There were chunks of fresh vegetables, and the broth was rich and heavy. He took another mouthful. Ruth stood over him, her thumbs hooked into her blue jeans pockets. “Chicken feet,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Chicken feet is the secret ingredient.”

He lowered the spoon and looked down into the bowl.

“Eat up,” she told him. “Put some meat on your bones.”

He dipped the spoon in again.

After that, she brought him a salad made with the herbs she’d grown on the roof and a basketful of rolls she’d baked that afternoon — a recipe from home, she said. Cody ate everything. As long as he ate, she watched him. When she brought him more butter for his rolls, she leaned close over him and he felt the warmth she gave off.

Now two more cooks had arrived and a Chinese boy was sauteing black mushrooms, and Ezra was running a mixer near the sink. Ruth sat down next to Cody, hooking her combat boots on the rung of his chair and hugging her ribs. Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food — to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people’s lives. Couldn’t you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food? Look at Cody’s mother — a nonfeeder, if ever there was one. Even back in his childhood, when they’d depended on her for nourishment … why, mention you were hungry and she’d suddenly act rushed and harassed, fretful, out of breath, distracted. He remembered her coming home from work in the evening and tearing irritably around the kitchen. Tins toppled out of the cupboards and fell all over her — pork ’n’ beans, Spam, oily tuna fish, peas canned olive-drab. She cooked in her hat, most of the time. She whimpered when she burned things. She burned things you would not imagine it possible to burn and served others half-raw, adding jarring extras of her own design such as crushed pineapple in the mashed potatoes. (Anything, as long as it was a leftover, might as well be dumped in the pan with anything else.) Her only seasonings were salt and pepper. Her only gravy was Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. And till Cody was grown, he had assumed that roast beef had to be stringy — not something you sliced, but a leathery dry object which you separated with a fork, one strand from the other, and dropped with a clunk upon your plate.

Though during illness, he remembered, you could count on her to bring liquids. Hot tea: she was good at that. And canned consomme. Thin things, watery things. Then she’d stand in the door with her arms folded while you drank it. He remembered that her expression, when others ate or drank, conveyed a mild distaste. She ate little herself, often toyed with her food; and she implied some criticism of those who acted hungry or over-interested in what they were served. Neediness: she disapproved of neediness in people. Whenever there was a family argument, she most often chose to start it over dinner.

Biting into Ruth’s flaky, shattering crust, Cody considered his mother’s three children — Jenny, for instance, with her lemon-water and lettuce-leaf diets, never allowing herself a sweet, skipping meals altogether, as if continually bearing in mind that disapproving expression of her mother’s. And Cody himself was not much different, when you came right down to it. It seemed that food didn’t count, with him; food was something required by