Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [120]
No, this was the high point of her day, no doubt: these slow midmorning hours, the rustling of Ezra’s paper, his spotty news reports. “Another taxi driver mugged, it says here.”
“Oh, my goodness.”
“Another shoot-out down on the Block.”
“Where will it all end?” his mother wondered.
“Terrorist bomb in Madrid.”
Newspapers, letters, photos, magazines—those he could help her with. With those she let herself gaze straight ahead, blank eyed, while he acted as interpreter. But in all other situations, she was fiercely independent. What, exactly, was the nature of their understanding? She admitted only that her sight was not what it had once been—that it was impaired enough to make reading a nuisance. “She’s blind,” her doctor said, and she reported, “He thinks I’m blind,” not arguing but managing to imply, somehow, that this was a matter of opinion—or of will, of what you’re willing to allow and what you’re not. Ezra had learned to offer clues in the casual, slantwise style that she would accept. If he were to say, for instance, “It’s raining, Mother,” when they were setting out for somewhere, she would bridle and tell him, “Well, I know that.” He learned to say, “Weatherman claims this will keep up. Better bring your umbrella.” Then her face would alter and smooth, adjusting to the information. “Frankly, I don’t believe him,” she would say, although it was one of those misty rains that falls without a sound, and he knew she hadn’t detected it. She concealed her surprise so well that only her children, accustomed to her stubborn denial of anything that might weaken her, could have seen what lay behind that challenging gray stare.
Last month, Ezra’s sister had reported that their mother had called to ask a strange question. “She wanted to know if it were true,” she said, “that lying on her back a long time would give her pneumonia. ‘What for?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you care?’ ‘I was only curious,’ she said.”
Ezra lowered his paper, and he cautiously placed two fingertips at the bend of his thigh.
After they’d finished their coffee, he washed out the cups and straightened the kitchen, which nowadays had an unclean look no matter what he did to it. There were problems he didn’t know how to handle—the curtains graying beside the stove, and the lace doily growing stiff with dust beneath the condiment set on the table. Did you actually launder such things? Just throw them in the machine? He could have asked his mother, but didn’t. It would only upset her. She would wonder, then, what else she’d missed.
She came out to him, testing her way so carefully that her small black pumps seemed like quivering, delicate, ultrasensitive organs. “Ezra,” she said, “what are your plans for this morning?”
“No plans, Mother.”
“You’re certain, now.”
“What is it you want to do?”
“I was thinking we could sort through my desk drawers, but if you’re busy—”
“I’m not busy.”
“You just say so if you are.”
“I’ll be glad to help.”
“When you were little,” she said, “it made you angry to see me sick or in need of aid.”
“Well, that was when I was little.”
“Isn’t it funny? It was you that was the kindest, the closest, the sweetest child; the others were always up to something, off with their own affairs. But when I fell sick, you would turn so coldhearted! ‘Does this mean we don’t get to go to the movies?’ you’d ask. It was your brother who’d take