Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
In the candy store, two children argued while their mother pressed a hand to her forehead. Next came the pharmacy and then the fortune-teller’s—a smudged plate glass window with MRS. EMMA PARKINS—READINGS AND ADVICE arched in curly gold letters that were flaking around the edges. Handmade signs sat propped on the sill like afterthoughts: STRICTEST CONFIDENCE and NO PAYMENT IF NOT FULLY SATISFIED. In the light from a dusty globe lamp, Mrs. Parkins herself paced the room—a fat, drab old woman with a cardboard fan on a Popsicle stick.
Jenny reached the corner, paused, and then turned. She went back to the fortune-teller’s door. Should she knock, or just walk on in? She tried the handle. The door swung open and a little bell above it tinkled. Mrs. Parkins lowered her fan and said, “Do tell! A customer.”
Jenny hugged her purse to her chest.
“Keeping warm?” Mrs. Parkins asked her.
“Yes,” said Jenny. She thought she smelled cough syrup, the bitter, dark, cherry-flavored kind.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Mrs. Parkins said.
There were two armchairs, puffy, facing each other across the little round table that held the lamp. Jenny sat in the chair nearest the door. Mrs. Parkins plucked her dress from the backs of her thighs and settled down with a groan, still gripping her fan. “Radio says the weather ought to break tomorrow,” she said, “but I don’t know if I can last that long. Seems like every year, the heat just hits me harder.”
Yet her hand, when she reached for Jenny’s, was cool and dry, with tough little pads at the fingertips. She fanned herself while she studied Jenny’s palm. It made her work look commonplace. “Long life, good career line …” she murmured, as if riffling through a file. Jenny relaxed.
“I suppose there’s something special you want to know about,” Mrs. Parkins said.
“Oh, well …”
“No sense beating around the bush.”
Jenny said, “Should I get … well … married?”
“Married,” said Mrs. Parkins.
“I mean, I could. I have this chance. I’ve been asked.”
Mrs. Parkins went on scrutinizing Jenny’s hand. Then she beckoned for the other one, which she barely glanced at. Then she sat back and fanned herself some more, gazing at the ceiling.
“Married,” she said finally. “Well, I tell you. You could, or you could not. If you don’t, you will get other offers. Surely. But here is my advice: you go ahead and do it.”
“What, get married?”
“If you don’t, see,” Mrs. Parkins said, “you’ll run into a lot of heartbreak. Lot of trouble in your romantic life. From various different people. What I mean to say,” she said, “if you don’t go on and get married, you’ll be destroyed by love.”
“Oh,” Jenny said.
“That’ll be two dollars, please.”
Searching through her purse, Jenny had an interesting thought. By Ezra’s rate of exchange, she could have bought a couple of restaurants for the same amount of money.
She married Harley late in August, in the little Baptist church that the Tulls had attended off and on. Cody gave Jenny away and Ezra was the usher. The guests he ushered in were: Pearl, Mr. and Mrs. Baines, and an aunt on Harley’s mother’s side. Jenny wore a white eyelet dress and sandals. Harley wore a black suit, white button-down shirt, and snub-nosed, dull black shoes. Jenny looked down at those shoes all during the ceremony. They reminded her of licorice jellybeans.
Pearl did not shed a tear, because, she said, she was so glad things had worked out this way, even though certain people might have informed her sooner. It was a relief to see your daughter handed over safely, she said—a burden off. Mrs. Baines cried steadily, but that was the kind of woman she was. She told Jenny after the wedding that it certainly didn’t mean she had anything against the marriage.
Then Harley and Jenny took a train to Paulham University, where they’d rented a small apartment. They had no furniture yet and spent their wedding night on the floor. Jenny was worried about Harley’s inexperience. She was certain he’d always been above such things as sex; he wouldn’t know what to do, and neither would she, and they would end up failing at something the rest of the world managed without a thought. But actually, Harley knew very well what to do. She suspected he’d researched it. She had an image of Harley at a library desk, comparing the theories of experts, industriously making notes in the proper outline form.
III
“On old Olympus’s torrid top,” Jenny told the scenery rushing past her window, “a Finn and German picked some hops.”
This was supposed to remind her of the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor … She frowned and checked her textbook. It was 1958—the start of the first weekend in May, but not a weekend she could spare. She was paying a visit to Baltimore when she should have been holed up in Paulham, studying. She had telephoned her mother long-distance. “Could you ask Ezra to meet my train?”
“I thought you had so much work to do.”
“I can work down there just as well.”
“Are you bringing Harley?”
“No.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t like the sound of this, young lady.”
On the telephone, Pearl’s voice was dim and staticky, easily dealt with. Jenny had said, “Oh, Mother, really.” But now the train was drawing into Baltimore, and the sight of factory smokestacks, soot-blackened bricks, and billboards peeling in the rain—a landscape she associated with home—made her feel less sure of herself. She hoped that Ezra would meet her alone. She rubbed a clean spot on the window and stared out at acres of railroad track, then at the first metal posts flying by, then at slower posts, better defined, and a dark flight of stairs. The train shrieked and jerked to a stop. Jenny closed her book. She stood up, edged past a sleeping woman, and took a small suitcase from the rack overhead.
This station always seemed to be under some kind of construction, she thought. When she arrived at the top of the stairs, she heard the whine of a power tool—an electric drill or saw. The sound was almost lost beneath the high ceiling. Ezra stood waiting, smiling at her, with his hands in his windbreaker pockets. “How was your trip?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He took her suitcase. “Harley all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
They threaded through a sparse crowd of people in raincoats. “Mother’s still at work,” Ezra said, “but she ought to be home by the time we get there. And I’ve put in a call to Cody. I thought we might all have dinner at the restaurant tomorrow night; he’s supposed to be passing through.”
“How is the restaurant?”
Ezra looked unhappy. He guided Jenny through the door, into a dripping mist that felt cool on her skin. “She’s not at all well,” he said.
Jenny wondered why he called the restaurant “she,” as if it were a ship. But then he said, “The treatments are making her worse. She can’t keep anything down,” and she understood that he must mean Mrs. Scarlatti. Last fall, Mrs. Scarlatti had been hospitalized for a cancer operation—her second, though up until then no one had known of the first. Ezra had taken it very hard. Mournfully trudging down a row of taxis, he said, “She hardly ever complains, but I know she’s suffering.”
“Are you running the restaurant alone, then?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been doing that since November. Everything: the hiring and the firing, bringing in new help as people quit. A restaurant is not all food, you know. Sometimes it seems that food is the least of it. I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I’m beginning to think she’s right.”
They had reached his car, a dented gray Chevy. He opened the door for her and heaved her suitcase into the rear, which was already a chaos of Restaurateur’s Weeklys, soiled clothing, and some kind of tongs or skewers in
“Yes, Harley taught me. Now I drive him everywhere; he likes to be free to think.”
They were on Charles Street. The rain was so fine that Ezra hadn’t bothered to turn on his windshield wipers, and the glass began to film over. Jenny peered ahead. “Can you see?” she asked Ezra.
He nodded.
“First he wants me to drive,” she said, “and then he criticizes every last little thing about how I do it. He’s so clever; you don’t know how far his cleverness can extend. I mean, it’s not just math or genetics he knows all about but the most efficient temperature for cooking pot roast, the best way to organize my kitchen—everything, all charted out in his mind. When I’m driving he says, ‘Now, Jennifer, you know full well that three blocks from here is that transit stop where you have to veer left, so what are you doing in the right-hand lane? You ought to plan ahead more,’ he says. ‘Three blocks!’ I say. ‘Good grief! I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ and he says, ‘That’s exactly what your trouble is, Jenny.’ ‘Between here and that transit stop,’ I tell him, ‘anything might happen,’ and he says, ‘Not really. No, not really. In all three intersections there’s a left-turn lane, as you’ll recall, so you wouldn’t have to wait for …’ Nothing is unplanned, for Harley. You can see the numbered pages leafing over inside his head. There’s never a single mistake.”
“Well,” Ezra said, “I guess it’s like a whole different outlook, being a genius.”
“It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned,” said Jenny, “but I didn’t realize it was a warning. I was too young to read the signals. I thought he was only like me, you know—a careful person; I always was careful, but now compared to Harley I don’t seem careful at all. I should have guessed when I went to meet his parents before the wedding, and all the books in his room were arranged by height and blocks of color. Alphabetized I could have understood; or separated by subject matter. But this arbitrary, fixed pattern of things, a foot of red, a foot of black, no hardbacks mingling with the paperbacks … it’s worse than Mother’s bureau drawers. It’s out of the frying pan, into the fire! The first time Harley kissed me, he had to brush off this bedspread beforehand that we’d been sitting on. Wouldn’t you think that might have told me something? Every night now before he goes to sleep he perches on the edge of the bed and brushes off the soles of his feet. These bare white feet, untouched … what could have dirtied them? He wears shoes every waking moment and slippers if he takes one step in the night. But no, there he sits, so methodical, so exact, everything in its proper sequence, brush-brush … sometimes I think I’ll hit him. I’m fascinated, I stand there watching him brush his left foot first, his right foot second, not letting either touch the floor once he’s finished with it, and I think, ‘I’m going to bash your head in for you, Harley.’ ”
Ezra cleared his throat. “It’s the adjustment,” he said. “Yes, that’s it: adjustment. The first year of marriage. I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Well, maybe so,” Jenny said.
She wished she hadn’t talked so much.
When they reached home, therefore—where their mother had just arrived herself—Jenny said nothing at all about Harley. (Pearl thought Harley was wonderful, admirable—maybe not so easy to hold a conversation with but the perfect person to marry her daughter.) “Now tell me,” Pearl said when she’d kissed her. “How come you didn’t bring that husband of yours? You haven’t had some silly kind of quarrel.”
“No, no. It’s only my work. The strain of work,” Jenny said. “I wanted to come and rest, and Harley couldn’t leave his lab.”
It was true that the house seemed restful, suddenly. After Ezra left for Scarlatti’s, her mother led Jenny to the kitchen and brewed her a cup of tea. One thing Pearl never skimped on was tea. She moved around the room, heating the speckled brown teapot, humming some old, wavery hymn. The damp weather had frizzed her hair into little corkscrews and the steam had turned her cheeks pink; she looked almost pretty. (What kind of a marriage had she had? Something must have gone terribly wrong with it, but Jenny couldn’t help imagining it as perfect, all of a piece, her parents permanently joined. That her father had left was only a fluke—some misunderstanding still not cleared up.)
“I thought we’d have a very light supper,” said her mother. “Maybe a salad or something.”
“That would be fine,” Jenny said.
“Something plain and simple.”
Plain and simple was just what Jenny needed. She loosened; she was safe at last, in the only place where people knew exactly who she was and loved her anyhow.
So it was all the odder that after supper, touring the house, she felt a flash of pity for Ezra when she looked in upon his room. Still here! she thought, seeing his boyish tartan blanket on the bed, his worn recorder on the windowsill, the stamped metal tray on his bureau heaped with ancient, green-tinged pennies. How can he bear it? she wondered, and she went back down the stairs, shaking her head and marveling.
This was what Jenny had brought with her: a change of clothes, her anatomy textbook, Harley’s letter proposing marriage, and his photo in a sterling silver frame. Unpacking, she set the photo firmly on her desk and examined it. She had brought it not for sentimental reasons but because she planned to think Harley over, to sum him up, and she didn’t want distance to alter her judgment. She foresaw that she might be so misguided as to miss him. This picture would remind her not to. He was a stiff and stodgy man; you could see it in the thickened line of his jaw and in the opaque, bespectacled gaze he directed at the camera. He disapproved of her reasoning methods—too rushed and haphazard, he said. He didn’t like her chattery friends. He thought her clothes lacked style. He criticized her table manners. “Twenty-five chews per bite,” he would tell her. “That’s my advice. Not only is it more healthful, but you’ll find yourself not eating so much.” He was obsessed by the fear that she might grow fat. Since Jenny could count every one of her ribs, she wondered if he had a kind of mad spot—if he were insane not through and through, but in one isolated area. It was the uncontrollability he feared, perhaps: he would not like to see Jenny ballooning, the pounds collecting unrestrained; he wouldn’t like to see her getting out of hand. That must be it. But she did begin to wonder if she might be gaining weight. She started stepping on the scales every morning. She stood in front of the full-length mirror, sucking in her stomach. Was it possible her hips were widening? Out in public, though, she noticed that the fleshy women were the ones who caught Harley’s eye—the burgeoning and dimpled ones, blondes, a little blowzy. It was a mystery, really.
Jenny’s grades were not very good. She wasn’t failing, or anything like that; but neither was she making A’s, and her lab work was often slipshod. Sometimes it seemed to her that she’d been hollow, all these years, and was finally caving in on herself. They’d found her out: at heart, there was nothing to her.
Packing for this trip (which Harley saw as a waste of time and money), she had strode across the bedroom to where his photo sat on the bureau. Harley was standing in front of it. “Move, please,” she told him. He looked offended and stepped aside. Then, when he saw what she wanted, his face had … well, flown open, you might say. His glare had softened, his lips had parted to speak. He was touched. And she was touched that he was touched. Nothing was ever simple; there were always these complications. But what he said was, “I don’t understand you. Your mother has frightened and mistreated you all your life, and now you want to visit her for no apparent reason.”
Probably what he was saying was “Please don’t go.”
You had to be a trained decoder to read the man.
She shook open his letter of proposal. See how he had dated it: 18 July, 1957—a form that struck her as pretentious, unless of course he happened to be English. She wondered how she could have overlooked th
Well, she had overlooked it. She’d chosen not to see. She knew she had acted deviously in this whole business—making up her mind to win him, marrying him for practical reasons. She had calculated, was what it was. But she felt the punishment was greater than the crime. It wasn’t such a terrible crime. She’d had no idea (would any unmarried person?) what a serious business she was playing with, how long it lasts, how deep it goes. And now look: the joke was on her. Having got what she was after, she found it was she who’d been got. Talk about calculating! He was going to run her life, arrange it perfectly by height and color. He was going to sit in the passenger seat with that censorious expression on his face and dictate every turn she took, and every shift of gears.
Because she knew it would make Ezra happy, she went to visit the restaurant late in the evening. The rain had stopped, but there was still a mist. She felt she was walking underwater, in one of those dreams where a person can breathe as easily as on land. There were only a few other people out—all of them hurrying, locked in themselves, shrouded by raincoats and plastic scarves. Traffic swished by; reflections of the headlights wavered on the streets.
The restaurant’s kitchen seemed overcrowded; it was a miracle that an acceptable plate of food could emerge from it. Ezra stood at the stove, supervising the skimming of some broth or soup. A young girl lifted ladles full of steaming liquid and emptied them into a bowl. “When you’re done—” Ezra was saying, and then he said, “Why, hello, Jenny,” and came to the door where she waited. Over his jeans he wore a long white apron; he looked like one of the cooks. He took her around to meet the others; sweaty men chopping or straining or stirring. “This is my sister, Jenny,” he would say, but then he’d get sidetracked by some detail and stand there discussing food. “Can I offer you something to eat?” he asked finally.