felt logical at the time, but sitting here at this moment, it all seems so impossible.”
“Well,” said Burt, swallowing smoke. I could still hear my fingernail tapping the glass.
“We just set out to be a family,” I told him. “We had every good intention.”
“Well,” said Burt. “Things will work out. You’ve got to have faith.”
“Faith is something the young can afford. I’ve read all the great books, and I’m not pretty anymore.”
“Whoa there,” Ned said. “If you’re not pretty I don’t know what half the men in the room have been staring at.”
“Don’t you patronize me,” I told him. “Don’t you dare. You’re welcome to resent me or despise me or feel bored silly by me, but don’t patronize me like I was some kind of little
Ned, without speaking, put his hand over mine to silence the tapping of my nail against the glass. I looked at his face.
“Ned.”
I said only that, his name.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll pay for the drinks and go home.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s nothing,” he assured me. “We’ve had an emotional day. Our only son just graduated from high school.”
He kept his hand on mine. I looked across the table at Burt, who had fixed upon me a look of direct, dreadful understanding.
After Jonathan left for New York, Bobby got his own apartment in an austere limestone building across town. He enrolled in culinary school and worked nights as a waiter. He began to talk of our opening a restaurant together.
“A family place,” he said. “I think a restaurant would be a good business to go into, don’t you? We could all work there.”
I allowed as how I might make a passable dishwasher.
“You’ll be the head cook,” he said. “It’ll be, like, the only true Southern-style place in Ohio?”
Soon he was making dinners for Ned and me at our house. He did become a good cook, and seemed to have some cogent ideas about financing a restaurant.
I told him if he wanted to open a place on his own, I’d be his first customer, but to count me out as head cook. He smiled as he had when we first met years before—a smile that implied I had just switched over to a language he didn’t speak.
That winter I found a job myself, as a secretary in a real estate office. We needed the money. Ned’s theater was faring worse than ever, now that so many malls had established themselves on the outskirts. People avoided downtown after dark. The theater flashed its pink neon on an avenue where streetlights offered only small puddles of illumination; where nude mannequins smiled behind the dark glass of an extinct department store.
Although my secretarial job was nothing exalted or even especially interesting, I enjoyed having a daily destination so much that I began to dread the weekends. In my spare time I started an herb garden in the back yard.
Bobby met me occasionally for lunch downtown, since his cooking school was not far from the office in which I worked. He had grown rather handsome, in a conventional fine-featured way, and I must admit I took pleasure in meeting him at crowded restaurants, where the din of all those hungry wage-earners put an edge on the air.
Over our lunches, Bobby spoke with great animation about the restaurant business. At some undeterminable point he had ceased imitating a clean, personable young man and had actually become one, save for odd moments when his eyes glowed a bit too brightly and his skin took on a sweaty sheen. At those times he put me in mind of a Bible salesman, one of the excruciatingly cordial Southern zealots I knew well enough from my girlhood. In his excitement Bobby could take on that quality but he always caught himself, laughed apologetically, and lowered his voice, actually appeared to retract the sweat back into his pores, so that the effect finally was boyish and charming, a young dangerousness being brought under control.
I confessed my worries to him, and indulged myself every now and then in a complaint or two about my own situation, since I hated to burden Ned. His asthma had grown much worse as business declined, and he had started drinking a bit.
Bobby said numberless times, “I’ll find backers and have the restaurant going in another year, two at the most. We can all run it. Everything will turn out all right.”
I told him, “That’s easy for you to say. You’re young.”
“You’re young, too,” he said. “I mean, you’re young for your age? You’ll love being head chef, wait and see.”
“I am not going to be head anything.”
“Yes you will. You’ll want to when you see the place I’m going to build for you. Come on, Alice? Tell me you’re behind me, and I’ll build the best restaurant in Ohio.”
A man at the next table glanced our way. He was fiftyish, trim and successful-looking in a slate-colored suit. I could see the question in his eyes: older woman, severe of face but not utterly through with her own kind of beauty, lunching with avid, handsome young man. For a moment I followed the thread of his imagination as he saw Bobby and me out of the restaurant and up to a rented room where afternoon light slanted in through the blinds.
Bobby leaned forward, his big hands splayed on the tabletop. I reached out and lightly touched his broad, raw fingers with my own.
“All right,” I said. “If you’re really all that determined to start a restaurant, count me in. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“Good,” he said, and his eyes actually glowed with the possibility of tears.
He opened his restaurant less than a year later. Perhaps he’d been too much in a rush. If he’d waited until he knew more about the business, he might have done better. But he kept insisting he was ready, and I can only speculate whether Ned’s dwindling fortunes had any bearing on Bobby’s own sense of urgency. He got backing from a rather dubious-looking character named Beechum, a man with cottony hair brushed forward over his bald spot and several heavy silver-and-turquoise rings on his thin white fingers. This Beechum owned, or claimed to own, a prosperous string of coin laundries, and envisioned, or so Bobby said, similar success in the realm of Southern cooking.
Under Beechum’s guidance, Bobby leased space in a small shopping center in the suburbs, between a discount dress store and a bakery that displayed in its window an enormous, slightly dingy wedding cake. I expressed some doubts about the location, but Bobby had compiled a list of virtues that brooked no argument.
“It’s near some major retail outlets,” he recited gravely. “Penney’s is the flagship store, and Sears is practically around the corner. There are other food stores in the area. And it’s cheap. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
I needn’t offer much detail about the restaurant’s optimistic beginnings and its immediate decline. Suffice to say that Bobby named it Alice’s, and did what he could with a fluorescent-lit, acoustic-ceilinged room that had most recently failed as a pizza parlor. He hung framed posters of New Orleans—wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter, a black man blowing a trumpet—and found old wooden tables and chairs at garage sales. I tested recipes with Bobby, debated over seasonings, though Beechum generally prevailed with admonitions about cost overruns or the timidity of Ohio tastes. The final menu turned out to be a Northerner’s version of Southern cooking: gumbo, hush puppies, frozen shrimp fixed every which way. The desserts were remarkable. I made it a point to stop by as often as I could.
Sometimes when I came for lunch I’d find one or two other parties—shoppers with bags from the discount store next door, lone salesclerks on their lunch hours—and sometimes I’d be the sole customer. On those occasions Bobby sat with me while the waitress either wiped the already clean pie case or gave in and read a movie magazine beside the refrigerator.
Through it all, Bobby never lost his Bible-salesman’s good cheer.
“Things are always slow at first,” he said. “You’ve got to let word of mouth get around. The people who leave here have all had great meals, they’ll tell ten other people. You’ve got to give it some time.”
“The food is fine, Bobby,” I said. “I’d like to think people will come to recognize a good thing.”
