Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [124]
“New Year’s Day, nineteen-fourteen,” Ezra read aloud. “I hope this little diary will not get lost as last year’s did. I hope I will not put anything foolish in it as I have been known to do before.”
His mother hid a smile, unsuccessfully. What foolishness could she have been up to so long ago? Ezra’s eyes slipped down the page to a line that had been crossed out. “There’s something here I can’t read,” he said.
“I never was known for my penmanship.”
“No, I mean you scribbled over it with so many loops and things—”
“Apple apple,” his mother said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what we wrote over words that we wanted kept secret. Appleappleapple all joined together, so no one could guess what was written underneath.”
“Well, it certainly worked,” Ezra said.
“Move on,” his mother told him.
“Oh. Um … put a flaxseed poultice on my finger … started some gartlets of pale pink ribbon … popped some popcorn and buttered half, made cracker-jack of the rest …”
His mother sighed. Ezra skimmed several pages in silence.
How plotless real life was! In novels, events led up to something. In his mother’s diaries, they flitted past with no apparent direction. Frank brought her perfumed blotters and a box of “cocoa-nut” candy; Roy paid quite a call and couldn’t seem to tear himself away; Burt Tansy took her to the comic opera and afterward presented her with a folio of the songs; but none of these people was ever mentioned again. Someone named Arthur wrote her a letter that was the softest thing, she said. I didn’t know he could be so silly. It was all in form though and I am not very mad. A certain Clark Allensby promised to visit and did not; I suppose it is all for the best, she said, but I can’t understand his actions as to-morrow he is leaving. And while she was stretching the curtains, she said, the darkie announced a young man come to visit. I looked like a freak but went in anyhow and there sat Hugh McKinley. He was heading for the seed store so just HAPPENED to stop by, and staid some while …
Ezra began to see that for his mother (or for the young girl she had been), there was a plot, after all. She had imagined a perfectly wonderful plot—a significance to every chance meeting, the possibility of whirlwind courtships, grand white weddings, flawless bliss forever after. James Wrayson came to call most shockingly late, she wrote. Stole my picture off the piano and put it in his pocket. Acted too comical for words. I’m sure I don’t know what will come of this.
Well, nothing had come of it. Nothing came of anything. She married a salesman for the Tanner Corporation and he left her and never came back. “Ezra? Why aren’t you reading to me?” his mother asked.
“I’m tired,” he said.
He took her to an afternoon ball game. In her old age, she had become a great Orioles fan. She would listen on the radio if she couldn’t attend in person, even staying up past her bedtime if the game went into extra innings. Baseball was the only sport that made sense, she said: clear as Parcheesi, clever as chess. She looked pleased with herself for thinking of this, but Ezra suspected that it had something in common too with those soap operas she enjoyed. Certainly she viewed each game as a drama, and fretted over the gossip that Ezra culled for her from the sports pages—players’ injuries, rivalries, slumps, mournful tales of young rookies so nervous they flubbed their only chances. She liked to think of the Orioles as poverty-stricken and virtuous, unable to simply buy their talent as richer teams did. Players’ looks mattered to her as deeply as if they were movie stars: Ken Singleton’s high, shining cheekbones, as described by one of her granddaughters, sent her into a little trance of admiration. She liked to hear how Al Bumbry wiggled his bat so jauntily before a hit; how Stanhouse drove people crazy delaying on the mound. She wished