Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Jenny straightened her glasses and said, “Do you think it might be puberty?”

“All these children are going through puberty,” the teacher told her.

“Or … I don’t know; boredom. You said yourself he’s intelligent. Why, you ought to see him at home! Monkeying around with machinery, wiring stereos … He’s got a tape recorder of his own, he worked for it and bought it himself, some superduper model, offhand I can’t think of the name. I’m such a dunce about these things, when he talked about head cleaners I thought he meant shampoo; but Slevin knows all about it and—”

“Mr. Davies suggests,” said the teacher, “—that’s our assistant principal — he suggests that Slevin may be experiencing emotional problems due to the adjustments at home.”

“What adjustments?”

“He says Slevin’s mother abandoned him and Slevin was moved to your household almost immediately thereafter and had to get used to a brand-new mother and sister.”

“Oh, that,” said Jenny, waving her hand.

“Mr. Davies suggests that Slevin might need professional counseling.”

“Nonsense,” Jenny said. “What’s a little adjustment? And anyhow, that happened a good six months ago. It’s not as if … why, look at my daughter! She’s had to get used to seven new people and she’s never said a word of complaint. Oh, we’re all coping! In fact my husband was saying, just the other day, we should think about having more children now. We ought to have at least one joint child, he says, but I’m not so sure myself. After all, I’m thirty-six years old. It probably wouldn’t be wise.”

“Mr. Davies suggests—”

“Though I suppose if it means so much to him, it’s all the same to me.”

“The same!” said the teacher. “What about the population explosion?”

“The what? You’re getting me off the subject, here … My point is,” Jenny said, “I don’t see the need to blame adjustment, broken homes, bad parents, that sort of thing. We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks. You can’t take them too much to heart. I’ll explain all that to Slevin. I’ll tell him this evening. I’m certain his grades will improve.”

Then she bent to pick up the pacifier, and shook hands with the teacher and left.

On the wall in Jenny’s office was a varnished wooden plaque: DR. TULL IS NOT A TOY. Joe had made it for her in his workshop. He was incensed by the scrapes and bruises that Jenny gathered daily in her raucous games with her patients. “Make them show some respect,” he told her. “Maintain a little dignity.” But the sign was all but lost among her patients’ snapshots (on beaches, on seesaws, on photographers’ blanketed tables, or behind lit birthday cakes) and the crayoned self-portraits they’d brought her. Anyhow, most of them were too young to read. She scooped up Billy Burnham and carried him, squawking and giggling, to the nurse for his tetanus shot. “Now, it’s possible,” she called back to Mrs. Burnham, “that tonight he’ll experience a little soreness in his left—” Billy squirmed, and a button popped off Jenny’s white coat.

The Albright baby was due for a DPT shot. The Carroll baby had to have her formula switched. Lucy Brandon’s constant sniffle looked like an allergy; Jenny told Mrs. Brandon where she could take her for testing. Both the Morris twins’ tonsils were swollen.

She asked the receptionist to order her a sandwich, but the receptionist said, “Aren’t you eating out? Your brother’s here; he’s been waiting half an hour, at least.”

“Oh, my Lord, I forgot all about him,” Jenny said. She went into the waiting room. Ezra was seated on the vinyl couch, surrounded by pull toys and building blocks and oilcloth picture books. A family of Spanish-speaking children, probably patients of Dr. Ramirez, played at his feet, but you’d never mistake Ezra for a parent. His shaggy yellow hair was soft as a child’s; he wore faded work clothes, and his face was wide and expectant.

“Ezra, honey,” Jenny told him, “I clean forgot. My next appointment’s in twenty minutes; do you suppose we could just grab a hamburger?”

“Oh, surely,” Ezra said.

He waited while she took off her white coat and put on a raincoat. Then they rode the elevator down to the marble-paved lobby, and pushed through the revolving door onto a spattery, overcast street. There was a smell like wet coal. Huddled people hurried by and buses wheezed and cathedral bells rang far away.

“I feel dumb,” Jenny said, “taking you of all people to a humburger joint.”

She was thinking of his restaurant, which always intimidated her a little. Recently, Ezra had remodeled the living quarters above it into a series of tiny, elegant private dining rooms like those in old movies — the velvet-hung compartments where the villain attempts to seduce the heroine. They’d be perfect for anniversary couples, Ezra said. (Like most unmarried men, he was comically, annoyingly sentimental about marriage.) But so far, only business groups and heavily jeweled Baltimore politicians had asked to use the rooms.

Now he said, “A hamburger’s fine; I’m crazy about hamburgers.” And when they walked through the plate glass doorway, into a slick, tiled area lined with glaring photos of onion rings and milkshakes, he looked around him happily. Secretaries clustered at some tables, construction workers at others. “It’s getting like a collective farm,” Ezra said. “All these chain places that everyone comes to for breakfast, lunch, sometimes supper … like a commune or a kibbutz or something. Pretty soon we won’t have private kitchens at all; you just drop by your local Gino’s or McDonald’s. I kind of like it.”

Jenny wondered if there were any eating place he wouldn’t like. At a soup kitchen, no doubt, he’d be pleased by the obvious hunger of the customers. At a urine-smelling tavern he’d discover some wonderful pickled eggs that he’d never seen anywhere else. Oh, if it had to do with food, he was endlessly appreciative.

While he ordered for them, she settled herself at a table. She took off her raincoat, smoothed her hair, and scraped at a Pablum spot on her blouse. It felt strange to be sitting alone. Always there was someone — children, patients, colleagues. The empty space on either side of her gave her an echoing, weightless feeling, as if she lacked ballast and might at any moment float upward.

Ezra returned with their hamburgers. “How’s Joe?” he asked, sitting down.

“Oh, fine. How’s Mother?”

“Doing well, sends her love … I brought you something,” he said. He set aside his burger to rummage through his windbreaker pockets. Eventually, he came up with a worn white envelope. “Pictures,” he said.

“Pictures?”

“Photos. Mother’s got all these photos; I just discovered them. I thought maybe you’d be interested in having a few.”

Jenny sighed. Poor Ezra: he was turning into the family custodian, tending their mother and guarding their past and faithfully phoning his sister for lunch. “Why don’t you keep them,” she said. “You know I’d just lose them.”

“But a lot of these are of you,” he said. He spilled the envelope onto the table. “I figured the children might like them. For instance, somewhere here …” He shuffled various versions of a younger, sterner Jenny. “Here,” he said. “Don’t you see Becky in this?”

It was Jenny in a plaid tam-o’-shanter, unsmiling. “Ugh,” she said, stirring her coffee.

“You were a really nice little girl,” said Ezra. He returned to his burger but kept the photo before him. On the back of it, Jenny saw, something had been written in pencil. She tried to make it out. Ezra noticed and said, “Fall, 1947. I got Mother to write the dates down. And I’m going to send Cody some, too.”

Jenny could just imagine Cody’s face when he got them. “Ezra,” she said, “to tell the truth, I wouldn’t waste the postage.”

“Don’t you think he’d like to compare these with how Luke looks, growing up?”

“Believe me,” she said, “he’d burn them. You know Cody.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” Ezra said.

“He hasn’t,” said Jenny, “and I doubt he ever will. Just mention something — one little harmless memory from our childhood — and his mouth turns down. You know how his mouth does. I said to him once, I said, ‘Cody, you’re no better than the Lawsons.’ Remember the Lawsons? They moved into our neighborhood from Nashville, Tennessee, and the very first week all four childlren got mumps. Mrs. Lawson said, ‘This city is unlucky, I believe.’ The next week a pipe in their basement burst and she said, ‘Well, that’s Baltimore.’ Then their daughter broke her wrist … When they moved back to Tennessee, I went over to say goodbye. They were loading up their car trunk and they happened to slam the lid down smack on the fingers of their youngest boy. When they drove off he was screaming, and Mrs. Lawson called out, ‘Isn’t this a fitting way to leave? I always did