Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [125]
Sometimes Ezra would quote her to his friends at the restaurant, and halfway through a sentence he would think, Why, I’m making her out to be a … character; and all he’d said would feel like a lie, although of course it had happened. The fact was that she was a very strong woman (even a frightening one, in his childhood), and she may have shrunk and aged but her true, interior self was still enormous, larger than life, powerful. Overwhelming.
They got to the stadium early so his mother could walk at her own pace, which was so slow and halting that by the time they were settled, the lineup was already being announced. Their seats were good ones, close to home plate. His mother sank down gratefully but then had to stand, almost at once, for the national anthem. For two national anthems; the other team was Toronto. Halfway through the second song, Ezra noticed that his mother’s knees were trembling. “Do you want to sit down?” he asked her. She shook her head. It was a very hot day but her arm, when he took hold of it, was cool and almost unnaturally dry, as if filmed with powder.
How clear a green the grass was! He could see his mother’s point: precise and level and brightly colored, the playing field did have the look of a board game. Players stood about idly swinging their arms. Toronto’s batter hit a high fly ball and the center fielder plucked it from the sky with ease, almost absentmindedly. “Well!” said Ezra. “That was quick. First out in no time.”
There was a knack to his commentary. He informed her without appearing to, as if he were making small talk. “Gosh. Look at that change-up.” And “Call that a ball? Skimmed right past his knees. Call that a ball?” His mother listened, face uplifted and receptive, like someone at a concert.
What did she get out of this? She’d have followed more closely, he thought, if she had stayed at home beside her radio. (And she’d never bring a radio; she worried people might think it was a hearing aid.) He supposed she liked the atmosphere, the cheering and excitement and the smell of popcorn. She even let him buy her a Styrofoam cup of beer, which was allowed to grow warm after one sip; and when the bugle sounded she called, “Charge,” very softly, with an embarrassed little half-smile curling her lips. Three men were getting drunk behind her—booing and whistling and shouting insults to passing girls—but Ezra’s mother stayed untroubled, facing forward. “When you come in person,” she told Ezra, “you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don’t have any choice but to accept it.”
A batter swung at a low ball and connected, and Ezra (eyes in every direction) saw how the field came instantaneously alive, with each man following his appointed course. The shortstop, as if strung on rubber bands, sprang upward without a second’s preparation and caught the ball; the outfield closed in like a kaleidoscope; the second-base runner pivoted and the shortstop tagged him out. “Yo, Garcia!” a drunk yelled behind them, in that gravelly, raucous voice that some men adopt in ball parks; and he sloshed cold beer down the back of Ezra’s neck. “Well …” Ezra said to his mother. But he couldn’t think how to encompass all that had happened, so finally he said, “We’re up, it looks like.”
She didn’t answer. He turned to her and found her caving in on herself, her head falling forward, the Styrofoam cup slipping from her fingers. “Mother? Mother!” Everyone around him rose and milled and fussed. “Give her air,” they told him, and then somehow they had her stretched out on