Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“And why is she lying flat? She’s obviously having trouble breathing. Where’s that big green cushion Becky made her?”

Pearl had been skidding through time, for a moment — preparing to go by ambulance to have her arrow wound treated. She was braced for the precarious, tilting trip down the stairs on a stretcher. It was mention of Becky that set her straight. Becky was her grandchild, Jenny’s oldest daughter. “Jenny?” she said.

“How are you feeling?” Jenny asked.

“Is Cody here too?”

Apparently not. Jenny leaned over the bed to give her a kiss. Pearl patted Jenny’s hair and found it badly cut, choppy to the touch, but for once she didn’t scold. (Jenny had lovely thick hair that she tended to ignore, to mistreat, as if looks didn’t really matter.) “It was nice of you to come,” Pearl told her.

“Well goodness, I was worried,” said Jenny. “You’re the only mother we have.”

Pearl felt she had come full circle. “You should have got an extra,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

She didn’t repeat it. She turned her face on the pillow and was overtaken by a sudden jolt of anger. Why hadn’t they arranged for an extra? All those years when she was the only one, the sole support, the lone tall tree in the pasture just waiting for the lightning to strike … well. She seemed to be losing track of her thoughts. “Did you bring the children?” she said.

“Not this time. I left them with Joe.”

Joe? Oh, yes, her husband. “Why isn’t Cody here?” Pearl asked.

“Well, you know,” said Ezra, “it’s always so hard to locate him …”

“We think you should go to the hospital,” Jenny told Pearl.

“Oh, thank you, dear, but I don’t believe I care to.”

“You’re not breathing right. Where’s that cushion Becky made when she was little? The one with the uplifting motto,” Jenny said. “Sleep, o faithful warrior, upon thy carven pillow.” She gave a little snort of laughter, and Pearl smiled, picturing Jenny’s habit of covering her mouth with her hand as if overcome, as if struck absolutely helpless by life’s silliness. “Anyhow,” Jenny said, pulling herself together. “Ezra, you agree with me, don’t you?”

“Agree?”

“About the hospital.”

“Ah …” said Ezra.

There was a pause. You could pluck this single moment out of all time, Pearl thought, and still discover so much about her children — even about Cody, for his very absence was a characteristic, perhaps his main one. And Jenny was so brisk and breezy but … oh, you might say somewhat opaque, a reflecting surface flashing your own self back at you, giving no hint of her self. And Ezra, mild Ezra: no doubt confusedly tugging at the shock of fair hair that hung over his forehead, considering and reconsidering … “Well,” he said, “I don’t know … I mean, maybe if we waited a while …”

“But how long? How long can we afford to wait?”

“Oh, maybe just till tonight, or tomorrow …”

“Tomorrow! What if it’s, say, pneumonia?”

“Or it could be only a cold, you see.”

“Yes, but—”

“And we wouldn’t want her to go if it makes her unhappy.”

“No, but—”

Pearl listened, smiling. She knew the outcome now. They would deliberate for hours, echoing each other’s answers, repeating and rephrasing questions, evading, retreating, arguing for argument’s sake, ultimately going nowhere. “You never did face up to things,” she said kindly.

“Mother?”

“You always were duckers and dodgers.”

“Dodgers?”

She smiled again, and closed her eyes.

It was such a relief to drift, finally. Why had she spent so long learning how? The traffic sounds — horns and bells and rags of music — flowed around the voices in her room. She kept mislaying her place in time, but it made no difference; all she remembered was equally pleasant. She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights — how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella. She remembered a country auction she’d attended forty years ago, where they’d offered up an antique brass bed complete with all its bedclothes — sheets and blankets, pillow in a linen case embroidered with forget-me-nots. Two men wheeled it onto the platform, and its ruffled coverlet stirred like a young girl’s petticoats. Behind her eyelids, Pearl Tull climbed in and laid her head on the pillow and was borne away to the beach, where three small children ran toward her, laughing, across the sunlit sand.

2 Teaching the Cat to Yawn

While Cody’s father nailed the target to the tree trunk, Cody tested the bow. He drew the string back, laid his cheek against it, and narrowed his eyes at the target. His father was pounding in tacks with his shoe; he hadn’t thought to bring a hammer. He looked like a fool, Cody thought. He owned no weekend clothes, as other fathers did, but had driven to this field in his strained-looking brown striped salesman suit, white starched shirt, and navy tie with multicolored squares and circles scattered randomly across it. The only way you could tell this was a Sunday was when he turned, having pounded in the final tack; he didn’t have his tie pulled up close to his collar. It hung loose and slightly crooked, like a drunkard’s tie. A cockscomb of hair, as black as Cody’s but wavy, stood up on his forehead.

“There!” he said, plodding back. He still carried the shoe. He walked lopsided, either smiling at Cody or squinting in the sunlight. It was nowhere near spring yet, but the air felt unseasonably warm and a pale sun poured heat like a liquid over Cody’s shoulders. Cody bent and pulled an arrow from a cardboard tube. He laid it against the string. “Wait, now, son,” his father said. “You want to do things right, now.”

Naturally, this would have to be an educational experience. There were bound to be lectures and criticisms attached. Cody sighed and lowered the bow. His father stooped to put his shoe on, squirming his foot in without undoing the laces, the way Cody’s mother hated. The heel of his black rayon sock was worn so thin it was translucent. Cody looked off in another direction. He was fourteen years old — too big to be dragged on family outings any more and definitely too big for bows and arrows, unless of course you’d just leave the equipment to him and his friends, alone, and let them horse around or have themselves a contest or shatter windowpanes and streetlights for the hell of it. How did his father come up with these ideas? This was turning out to be even less successful than most. Cody’s mother, who was not the slightest bit athletic, picked dried flowers beside a fence. His little sister buttoned her sweater with chapped and bluish hands. His brother, Ezra, eleven years old, chewed a straw and hummed. He was missing his whistle, no doubt — a bamboo pipe, with six finger holes, on which he played tunes almost ceaselessly. He’d smuggled it along but their father had made him leave it in the car.

At this moment, Cody’s two best friends were attending a movie: Air Force, with John Garfield and Faye Emerson. Cody would have given anything to be with them.

“Now, your left arm goes like this,” his father said, positioning him. “You want to keep your wrist from getting stung, you see. And stand up straight. It was archery gave us our notions of proper posture; says so in the instruction book. Used to be that people slouched around any old how, all except the archers. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

No, he didn’t know that. He stood like something made of clay while his father poked him here and prodded him there, molding him into shape. “In the olden days …” his father said.

Cody let go of the bowstring. Thwack. The arrow hit the edge of the target, more