Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

dead bird lies beneath one window. Pearl calls down the stairwell. “Ezra? Ezra, come here this instant. Bring the broom and trash bag.”

He mounts the stairs obediently. She looks down and sees, with a pang, that his lovely fair hair is thinning on the back of his head. He is thirty-seven years old, will be thirty-eight in December. He will probably never marry. He will never do anything but run that peculiar restaurant of his, with its hodgepodge of food, its unskilled waitresses, its foreign cooks with questionable papers. You could say, in a way, that Ezra has suffered a tragedy, although it’s a very small tragedy in the eyes of the world. You could say that he and Ruth, together, have suffered a tragedy. Something has been done to them; something has been taken away from them. They have lost it. They are lost. It doesn’t help at all that Cody in fact is a very nice man — that he’s bright and funny and genuinely kind, to everyone but Ezra.

You could almost say that Cody, too, has suffered a tragedy.

In 1964, when she went out to Illinois to visit them, she felt in their house the thin, tight atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. Not a really terrible marriage — no sign of hatred, spitefulness, violence. Just a sense of something missing. A certain failure to connect, between the two of them. Everything seemed so tenuous. Or was it her imagination? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was the house itself — a ranch house in a development, rented for the four months or so that Cody would need to reorganize a plastics plant in Chicago. Plainly the place was expensive, with wall-to-wall carpeting and long, low, modern furniture; but there were no trees anywhere nearby, not even a bush or a shrub — just that raw brick cube rising starkly from the flatness. And outside it was so white- hot, so insufferably hot, that they were confined to the house with its artificial, refrigerated air. They were imprisoned by the house, dependent upon it like spacemen in a spaceship, and when they went out it was only to dash through a crushing weight of heat to Cody’s air-conditioned Mercedes. Ruth, going about her chores every day, had the clenched expression of someone determined to survive no matter what. Cody came home in the evening gasping for oxygen — barely crawling over the doorsill, Pearl fantasized — but did not seem all that relieved to have arrived. When he greeted Ruth, they touched cheeks and moved apart again.

It was the first time Pearl had ever visited them, the first and only time, and this was after years of very little contact at all. They seldom came to Baltimore. They never returned to the farm. And Cody wrote almost no letters, though he would telephone on birthdays and holidays. He was more like an acquaintance, Pearl thought. A not very cordial acquaintance.

Once she and Ezra were driving down a road in West Virginia, on an outing to Harper’s Ferry, when they chanced to come up behind a man in jogging shorts. He was running along the edge of the highway, a tall man, dark, with a certain confident, easy swing to his shoulders … Cody! Out here in the middle of nowhere, by sheer coincidence, Cody Tull! Ezra slammed on his brakes, and Pearl said, “Well, did you ever.” But then the jogger, hearing their car, had turned his face and he wasn’t Cody after all. He was someone entirely different, beefy jawed, nowhere near as handsome. Ezra sped up again. Pearl said, “How silly of me, I know full well that Cody’s in, ah …”

“Indiana,” said Ezra.

“Indiana; I don’t know why I thought …”

They were both quiet for several minutes after that, and in those minutes Pearl imagined the scene if it really had been Cody — if he had turned, astonished, as they sailed past. Oddly enough, she didn’t envision stopping. She thought of how his mouth would fall open as he recognized their faces behind the glass; and how they would gaze out at him, and smile and wave, and skim on by.

Whenever he phoned he was cheerful and hearty. “How’ve you been, Mother?”

“Why, Cody!”

“Everything all right? How’s Ezra?”

Oh, on the phone he was so nice about Ezra, interested and affectionate like any other brother. And on the rare occasions when he and Ruth came through Baltimore — heading somewhere else, just briefly dropping in — he seemed so pleased to shake hands with Ezra and clap him on the back and ask what he’d been up to. At first.

Only at first.

Then: “Ruth! What are you and Ezra talking about, over there?” Or: “Ezra? Do you mind not standing so close to my wife?” When Ezra and Ruth were hardly speaking, really. They were so cautious with each other, it hurt to watch.

“Cody. Please. What are you imagining?” Pearl would ask him, and then he would turn on her: “Naturally, you wouldn’t see it. Naturally, he can do no wrong, can he, Mother. Your precious boy. Can he.”

She had given up, finally, on ever being asked to visit. When Cody called and told her Ruth was pregnant, some two or three years into the marriage, Pearl said, “Oh, Cody, if she’d like it at all, I mean when the baby arrives … if she’d like me to come take care of things …” But evidently, she wasn’t needed. And when he called to say that Luke was born — nine pounds, three ounces; everything fine — she said, “I can’t wait to see him. I honestly can’t wait.” But Cody let that pass.

They sent her photos: Luke in an infant seat, blond and stern. Luke creeping bear-style across the carpet, on hands and feet instead of knees. (Cody had crept that way too.) Luke uncertainly walking, with a clothespin in each fat fist. He had to have the clothespins, Ruth wrote, because then he thought he was holding on to something. Otherwise, he fell. Now that photos were arriving, letters came too, generally written by Ruth. Her grammar was shocking and she couldn’t spell. She said, Me and Cody wrecken Luke’s eyes are going to stay blue, but what did Pearl care about grammar? She saved every letter and put Luke’s pictures on her desk in little gilt frames she bought at Kresge’s.

I think I ought to come see Luke before he’s grown, she wrote. No one answered. She wrote again. Would June be all right? Then Cody wrote that they were moving to Illinois in June, but if she really wanted then maybe she could come in July.

So she went to Illinois in July, traveling with a trainload of fresh-faced boy soldiers on their way to Vietnam, and she spent a week in that treeless house barricaded against the elements. It was a shock, even to her, how instantly and how deeply she loved her grandson. He was not quite two years old by then, a beautiful baby with a head that seemed adult in its shape — sharply defined, the golden hair trimmed close and neat. His firm, straight lips seemed adult as well, and he had an unchildlike way of walking. There was a bit of slump in his posture, a little droop to his shoulders, nothing physically wrong but an air of resignation that was almost comical in someone so small. Pearl sat on the floor with him for hours, playing with his trucks and cars. “Vroom. Vroom. Roll it back to Granny, now.” She was touched by his stillness. He had a sizable vocabulary but he used it only when necessary; he was not a spendthrift. He was careful. He lacked gaiety. Was he happy? Was this a fit life for a child?

She saw that Cody had a sprinkling of gray in his sideburns, a more leathery look to his cheeks; but that Ruth was still a scrappy little thing in too-short hair and unbecoming dresses. She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening. In the evenings, when Cody came home from work, Ruth clattered around the kitchen cooking great quantities of country food that Cody would hardly touch; and Cody had a gin and tonic and watched the news. The two of them asked each other, “How was your day?” and “Everything fine?” but they didn’t seem to listen to the answers. Pearl could believe that in the morning, waking in their king-sized bed, they asked politely, “Did you sleep all right?” She felt oppressed and uncomfortable, but instead of averting her gaze she was for some reason compelled to delve deeper into their lives; she sent them out one night to a movie, promising to watch Luke, and then ransacked all the desk drawers but found only tax receipts, and bank statements, and a photo album belonging to the people who really lived here. Anyway, she couldn’t have said what it was she was looking for.

Coming home, jouncing on the train amid another group of soldiers, she felt weary and hopeless. She arrived in Baltimore seven hours late, with a racking headache. Then as she entered the station, she saw Ezra walking toward her in his plodding way and she felt such a stab of … well, recognition. It was Luke’s walk, solemn little Luke. Life was so sad, she thought, that she almost couldn’t bear it. But kissing Ezra, she felt her sorrow overtaken by something very like annoyance. She wondered why he put up with this, why he let things go on this way. Could it be that he took some satisfaction in his grief? (As if he were paying for something, she thought. But what would he be paying for?) In the car, he asked, “How’d you like Luke?” and she said, “Don’t you ever think of just going there and trying to get her back?”

“I couldn’t,” he said, unsurprised, and he maneuvered the car laboriously from its parking slot.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” she told him.