Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [126]
Ezra’s mother opened her eyes. The air was bright as knife blades, shimmering with a brassy, hard light, but she didn’t even squint; and for the first time Ezra fully understood that she was blind. It seemed that before, he hadn’t taken it in. He reeled back, squatting at the feet of strangers, and imagined having to stay here forever: the two of them, helpless, flattened beneath the glaring summer sky.
That night he dreamed he was walking among the tables in his restaurant. A long-time customer, Mr. Rosen, was dithering over the menu. “What do you recommend?” he asked Ezra. “I see you’ve got your stroganoff, but I don’t know, that’s a little heavy. I mean I’m not so very hungry, just peckish, got a little weight on my stomach right here beneath my rib cage, know what I mean? What do you think might be good for that? What had I ought to eat?”
This was how Mr. Rosen behaved in real life, as well, and Ezra expected it and always responded kindly and solicitously. But in the dream, he was overtaken by a most untypical panic. “I have nothing! Nothing!” he cried. “I don’t know what you want! I don’t have anything! Stop asking!” And he wrung his hands at the thought of his empty, gleaming refrigerator and idle stove.
He woke sweating, tangled in damp sheets. There was a certain white quality to the darkness that made him believe it was close to dawn. He climbed out of bed, hitching up his pajama bottoms, and went downstairs and poured a glass of milk. Then he wandered into the living room for a magazine, but the only ones he found were months old. Finally he settled on the rug beside his mother’s desk and opened the bottom drawer.
A recipe for marmalade cake: From the kitchen of … with no name filled in. Someone’s diploma, rolled and secured with a draggled blue ribbon. A clipping from a newspaper: Bristle-cone pines, in times of stress, hoard all their life in a single streak and allow the rest to die. A photo of his sister in an evening dress with gardenias looped around her wrist. A diary for 1909, with a violet pressed between its pages. Washed my yellow gown, made salt-rising bread, played Basket Ball, he read. Bought a hat shape at Warner’s and trimmed it with green grosgrain. Preserved tomatoes. Went to Marching Drill. Learned progressive jackstraws.
Her vitality hummed in the room around him. She was forever doing something to her “waists,” which Ezra assumed to be blouses. Embroidering waists or mending waists or buying goods for a waist or sewing fresh braid on a waist, putting insertion on a waist, ripping insertion off a waist, tucking her red plaid waist until the tucker got out of fix, attaching new sleeves to a waist—even, for one entire week, attending a course called “Fashioning the Shirtwaist.” She pressed a bodice, sewed a corset cover, darned her stockings, altered a girdle, stitched a comforter, monogrammed a handkerchief, cut outing flannel for skirts. (Yet in all the time he’d known her, Ezra had never seen her so much as hem a dish towel.) She went to hear a lecture entitled “Thunder Tones from the Guillotine.” She pestered the vet about Prince’s ailment—an injured stifle, whatever that was. She sold tickets to socials, amateur theatricals, and Mission Society picnics. She paid a call on her uncle but found his door double-locked and only a parlor window open.
In Ezra’s slumbering, motionless household, the loudest sound came from fifteen-year-old Pearl, hitching up her underskirts to clamber through that long-ago window.
Daily, in various bookstores, he proceeded from the Merck Manual to other books, simpler to use, intended for laymen. Several were indexed by symptoms, including lump. He found that his lump could indeed be a lymph node—a temporary swelling in reaction