Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

months old. Finally he settled on the rug beside his mother’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.

A recipe for marmalade cake: From the kitchen of … with no name filled in. Someone’s diploma, rolled and secured with a draggled blue ribbon. A clipping from a newspaper: Bristle-cone pines, in times of stress, hoard all their life in a single streak and allow the rest to die. A photo of his sister in an evening dress with gardenias looped around her wrist. A diary for 1909, with a violet pressed between its pages. Washed my yellow gown, made salt-rising bread, played Basket Ball, he read. Bought a hat shape at Warner’s and trimmed it with green grosgrain. Preserved tomatoes. Went to Marching Drill. Learned progressive jackstraws.

Her vitality hummed in the room around him. She was forever doing something to her “waists,” which Ezra assumed to be blouses. Embroidering waists or mending waists or buying goods for a waist or sewing fresh braid on a waist, putting insertion on a waist, ripping insertion off a waist, tucking her red plaid waist until the tucker got out of fix, attaching new sleeves to a waist — even, for one entire week, attending a course called “Fashioning the Shirtwaist.” She pressed a bodice, sewed a corset cover, darned her stockings, altered a girdle, stitched a comforter, monogrammed a handkerchief, cut outing flannel for skirts. (Yet in all the time he’d known her, Ezra had never seen her so much as hem a dish towel.) She went to hear a lecture entitled “Thunder Tones from the Guillotine.” She pestered the vet about Prince’s ailment — an injured stifle, whatever that was. She sold tickets to socials, amateur theatricals, and Mission Society picnics. She paid a call on her uncle but found his door double-locked and only a parlor window open.

In Ezra’s slumbering, motionless household, the loudest sound came from fifteen-year-old Pearl, hitching up her underskirts to clamber through that long-ago window.

Daily, in various bookstores, he proceeded from the Merck Manual to other books, simpler to use, intended for laymen. Several were indexed by symptoms, including lump. He found that his lump could indeed be a lymph node — a temporary swelling in reaction to some minor infection. Or it could also be a hernia. Or it could be something worse. Consult your doctor, he read. But he didn’t. Every morning, still in his pajamas, he tested the lump with his fingers and resolved to call Dr. Vincent, but later he would change his mind. Suppose it did turn out to be cancer: why would he want to endure those treatments — the radiation and the toxic drugs? Better just to die.

He noticed that he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn’t yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.

His sister, Jenny, stopped by with her children. It was a Wednesday, her morning off. She took over the house with no trouble at all. “Where’s your ironing? Give me your ironing,” she said, and “What do you need in the way of shopping?” and “Quinn, get down from there.” She had so much energy; she spent herself with such recklessness. In her worn-looking clothes, run-down shoes, with her dark hair lifting behind her, she flew around the living room. “I think you should buy an air-conditioner, Mother. Have you heard the latest pollution count? For someone in your state of health …”

Her mother, bleakly speechless, withstood this storm of words and then lifted one white hand. “Come closer so I can see your hair,” she said.

Jenny came closer and submitted to her touch. Her mother stroked her hair with a dissatisfied expression on her face. “I don’t know why you can’t take better care of your looks,” she said. “How long since you’ve been to a beauty parlor?”

“I’m a busy woman, Mother.”

“How much time would you need for a haircut? And you’re not wearing makeup, are you. Are you? In this light, it’s hard to tell. Oh, Jenny. What must your husband think? He’ll think you’re not trying. You’ve let yourself go. I expect I could pass you on the street and not know you.”

Her favorite expression, it seemed to Ezra: I wouldn’t know you if I saw you on the street. She used it when referring to Jenny’s poor grooming, to Cody’s sparse visits, to Ezra’s tendency to put on weight. Ezra caught a sudden glimpse of a wide, vacant sidewalk and his various family members strolling down it, their faces averted from one another.

Jenny’s children ambled through the house, looking bored and disgusted. The baby chewed on a curtain pull. Jane, the nine-year-old, perched on Ezra’s knee as casually as if he were a piece of furniture. She smelled of crayons and peanut butter — homely smells that warmed his heart. “What are you fixing in your restaurant tonight?” she asked.

“Cold things. Salads. Soups.”

“Soups are hot,” she said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh.”

She paused, perhaps to store this information in some tidy filing cabinet inside her head. Ezra was touched by her willingness to adjust — by her amiable adaptability. Was it possible, he sometimes wondered, that children humored grown-ups? If grown-ups insisted on toilet training, on please and thank you—well, all right, since it seemed to mean so much to them. It wasn’t important enough to argue about. This is a transitive verb, some grown-up would say, and the children would go along with it; though to them it was immaterial, frankly. Transitive, intransitive, who cared? What difference did it make? It was all a foreign language anyhow.

“Maybe you could invite me to your restaurant for supper,” Jane told Ezra.

“I’d be delighted to invite you for supper.”

“Maybe I could bring a friend.”

“Certainly.”

“I’ll bring Barbie.”

“That would be wonderful,” Ezra said.

“You bring a friend, too.”

“All my friends work in the restaurant.”

“Don’t you ever date?”

“Of course I date.”

“I don’t mean just some one of those lady cooks you pal around with.”

“Oh, I’ve dated in my time.”

She filed that away also.

Jenny was criticizing their mother’s doctor. She said he was too old, too old-fashioned — too general, she said. “You need a good internist. I happen to know a man on—”

“I’ve been going to Dr. Vincent as long as I’ve lived in Baltimore,” her mother said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“We don’t all just change for change’s sake.”

Jenny rolled her eyes at Ezra.

Ezra said, “Maybe you could be her doctor.”

“I’m her relative, Ezra.”

“So much the better,” Ezra said.

“Besides, my field is pediatrics.”

“Jenny,” said Ezra. “What would you say—”

He stopped. Jenny raised her eyebrows.

“What would you say is your patients’ most common disease?”

“Mother-itis,” she told him.

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s not, um, cancer or anything.”

“Why do you ask?” she said again.

He only shrugged.

After she’d collected the ironing, and made a shopping list, and rounded up the children, she said that she had to be off. She brushed her cheek against her mother’s and patted Ezra’s arm. “I’ll walk you to the car,” he