Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“It’s been missing all week,” her mother said, “and I couldn’t understand it. I knew we hadn’t been burglarized, and even if we had, what would anyone want with my old Hoover?”

“But why accuse Slevin?”

“My neighbor told me, just this afternoon. Mrs. Arthur. Said, Was that your grandson I saw Sunday? Kind of hefty boy? Loading your Hoover upright into your daughter’s car trunk?’ ”

“That’s impossible,” Jenny said.

“Now, how do you know that? How do you know what is or is not possible? He’s hardly more than a stranger, Jenny. I mean, you got those children the way other people get weekend guests.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Jenny told her.

“Well, all I ask is for you to go check Slevin’s bedroom. Just check.”

“What, this minute?”

“There’s lint specks all over my carpet.”

“Oh, all right,” Jenny said.

She laid the receiver on her pillow and climbed from the second floor to the third. Slevin’s door was open and he wasn’t in his room, although his radio rocked with the Jefferson Airplane. She stepped stealthily over Slevin’s knapsack, avoided a teetering pile of Popular Science magazines, opened his closet door, and found herself staring at her mother’s vacuum cleaner. She would know it anywhere: an elderly machine with a gray cloth dust bag. Its cord was coiled neatly and it seemed unharmed. If he’d taken it apart to learn how it worked, she might have understood. Or if he’d smashed it, out of some rage toward her mother. But there it sat, entire. She stood puzzling over it for several seconds. Then she wheeled it out of the closet and lugged it down the stairs, to where her mother’s voice was twanging impatiently from the receiver. “Jenny? Jenny?”

“Well, you’re right,” Jenny said. “I found it in his room.”

There was a pause in which Pearl could have said, “I told you so,” but kindly did not. Then she said, “I wonder if he might be calling for help in some way.”

“By stealing a vacuum cleaner?”

“He’s really a very sweet boy,” Pearl said. “I can see that. Maybe he’s asking for a psychologist or some such.”

“More likely he’s asking for a neater house,” Jenny said. “The dust balls on his closet floor have started raising a family.”

She pictured Slevin, in desperation, stealing an arsenal of cleaning supplies — this neighbor’s broom, that neighbor’s Ajax, gathered with the same feverish zeal he showed in collecting Indian head pennies. She was attacked by a sudden sputter of laughter.

“Oh, Jenny,” her mother said sadly. “Do you have to see everything as a joke?”

“It’s not my fault if funny things happen,” Jenny said.

“It most certainly is,” said her mother, but instead of explaining herself, she all at once grew brisk and requested the return of her vacuum cleaner by tomorrow morning.

Jenny and Joe and every child except the baby were watching television. It was long past bedtime for most of them, but this was a special occasion: the Late, Late Show was A Taste of Honey. Everyone in the house had heard of A Taste of Honey. It was Jenny’s all-time favorite movie. She had seen it once, back in 1963, and never forgotten it. Nothing else had ever measured up to it, she was fond of saying, and after returning from some other movie she was sure to announce, “Well, it was all right, I guess, but it wasn’t A Taste of Honey.” By now, any one of the children could finish that sentence before she got it halfway out. They’d ask as soon as she walked in the door, “Was it A Taste of Honey, Jenny? Was it?” and Phoebe was once heard telling Peter, “I like the new teacher okay, I guess, but she isn’t A Taste of Honey.”

When they learned it was coming to television, they had all begged to stay up and watch. The older ones made cocoa and the younger ones set out potato chips. Becky and Slevin arranged a ring of chairs around the TV set in the living room.

“You know what’s going to happen,” Joe told Jenny. “After all this time, even A Taste of Honey won’t be A Taste of Honey.”

In a way, he was right. Not that she didn’t still love it — yes, yes, she assured the children, it was just as she’d remembered — but after all, she was a different person watching it. The movie wrenched her with pity, now, when before it had made her feel hopeful. And wasn’t it odd, wasn’t it downright queer, that she’d never identified the story with her own? In 1963, she was a resident in pediatrics, struggling to care for a two-year-old born six weeks after her marriage dissolved. Yet she’d watched a movie about an unwed, unsupported pregnant girl with the most detached enjoyment, dreamily making her way through a box of pretzels. (And what had she been doing in a movie theater, anyway? How had she found the time, during such a frantic schedule?)

When it was over, she switched off the TV and shooed the children up the stairs. Quinn, the youngest, who had not been all that impressed with A Taste of Honey, was sound asleep and had to be carried by Joe. Even the older ones were groggy and blinking. “Wake up,” she told them. “Come on, now,” and she tugged at Jacob, who had dropped in a bundle on the topmost step. One by one she guided them to their beds and kissed them good night. How noisy their rooms seemed, even in silence! — that riotous clamor of toys and flung-off clothes, their vibrant, clashing rock star posters and antiwar bumper stickers and Orioles banners. Three of the children wouldn’t use sheets but slept in sleeping bags instead — garishly patterned, zippered cocoons sprawled on top of the blankets; and Phoebe didn’t like beds at all but curled in a quilt on the floor, most often out in the hall in front of her parents’ room. She lay across the doorway like a bodyguard, and you had to watch your step in the dark so as not to trip on her.

“I want that radio down,” Jenny said, and she kissed the top of Becky’s head. Then she peeked into Slevin’s room, knocked on the frame of his open door, and entered. He wore his daytime clothes to bed, as always — even his wide tooled belt with the trucker’s buckle — and he lay on top of the covers. She had been kissing him good night every night since she’d married Joe, but still he acted bashful. All she really did was brush her cheek against his, allowing him his dignity. “Sleep well,” she told him.

He said, “I see you found the vacuum cleaner.”

“Vacuum cleaner,” she said, stalling for time.

“I’m sorry I took it,” he said. “I guess your mom is pretty mad, huh? But it wasn’t stealing; honest. I just needed to borrow it for a spell.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. “Needed to borrow it for what?” she asked.

He said, “Well, for … I don’t know. Just for … See, there it was in the pantry. It was exactly like my mother’s. Just exactly. You know how you never think about a thing, or realize you remember it, and then all at once something will bring it all back? I forgot how it had that rubber strip around the edge so it wouldn’t scuff the furniture, and that tall, puffy bag I used to be scared of when I was a kid. It even smelled the same. It had that same clothy smell, just like my mother’s. You know? So I wanted to take it home. But once I got it here, well, it didn’t work out. It’s like I had lost the connection. It wasn’t the same after all.”

“That’s all right, Slevin,” she said. “Heavens, honey, that’s all right.” Then she worried her voice had shown too much, would make him bashful again, so she laughed a little and said, “Shall we get you a Hoover of your own for your birthday?”

He turned over on his side.

“Or we could have it made up in calico,” she told him, giggling. “A tiny stuffed calico vacuum cleaner to take to bed with you.”

But Slevin just closed his eyes, so after a while she wished him good night and left.

She dreamed she was back with Sam Wiley, her second husband and the one she’d loved the best. She’d made a fool of herself over Sam. She dreamed he was twirling on that high wooden stool they used to have in their kitchen in Paulham. He was preening the scrolls of his handlebar mustache and singing “Let It Be.” Which hadn’t even existed, at the time.

She opened her eyes and heard “Let It Be” on one of the children’s radios, sailing out across the dark hall. How often had she told them? She got up and made her way to Peter’s room — barefoot, stepping over Phoebe. Radios late at night sounded so different, she thought — so far away and crackling with static, almost gritty, as if