Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [127]
He noticed that he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn’t yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.
His sister, Jenny, stopped by with her children. It was a Wednesday, her morning off. She took over the house with no trouble at all. “Where’s your ironing? Give me your ironing,” she said, and “What do you need in the way of shopping?” and “Quinn, get down from there.” She had so much energy; she spent herself with such recklessness. In her worn-looking clothes, run-down shoes, with her dark hair lifting behind her, she flew around the living room. “I think you should buy an air-conditioner, Mother. Have you heard the latest pollution count? For someone in your state of health …”
Her mother, bleakly speechless, withstood this storm of words and then lifted one white hand. “Come closer so I can see your hair,” she said.
Jenny came closer and submitted to her touch. Her mother stroked her hair with a dissatisfied expression on her face. “I don’t know why you can’t take better care of your looks,” she said. “How long since you’ve been to a beauty parlor?”
“I’m a busy woman, Mother.”
“How much time would you need for a haircut? And you’re not wearing makeup, are you. Are you? In this light, it’s hard to tell. Oh, Jenny. What must your husband think? He’ll think you’re not trying. You’ve let yourself go. I expect I could pass you on the street and not know you.”
Her favorite expression, it seemed to Ezra: I wouldn’t know you if I saw you on the street. She used it when referring to Jenny’s poor grooming, to Cody’s sparse visits, to Ezra’s tendency to put on weight. Ezra caught a sudden glimpse of a wide, vacant sidewalk and his various family members strolling down it, their faces averted from one another.
Jenny’s children ambled through the house, looking bored and disgusted. The baby chewed on a curtain pull. Jane, the nine-year-old, perched on Ezra’s knee as casually as if he were a piece of furniture. She smelled of crayons and peanut butter—homely smells that warmed his heart. “What are you fixing in your restaurant tonight?” she asked.
“Cold things. Salads. Soups.”
“Soups are hot,” she said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Oh.”
She paused, perhaps to store this information in some tidy filing cabinet inside her head. Ezra was touched by her willingness to adjust—by her amiable adaptability. Was it possible, he sometimes wondered, that children humored grown-ups? If grown-ups insisted on toilet training, on please and thank you—well, all right, since it seemed to mean so much to them. It wasn’t important enough to argue about. This is a transitive verb, some grown-up would say, and the children would go along with it; though to them it was immaterial, frankly. Transitive, intransitive, who cared? What difference did it make? It was all a foreign language anyhow.
“Maybe you could invite me to your restaurant for supper,” Jane told Ezra.
“I’d be delighted to invite you for supper.”
“Maybe I could bring a friend.”
“Certainly.”
“I’ll bring Barbie.”
“That would be wonderful,” Ezra said.
“You bring a friend, too.”
“All my friends work in the restaurant.”
“Don’t you ever date?”
“Of course I date.”
“I don’t mean just some one of those lady cooks you pal around with.”
“Oh, I’ve dated in my time.”
She filed that away also.
Jenny was criticizing their mother’s doctor. She said he was too old, too old-fashioned—too general, she said. “You need a good internist. I happen to know a man on—”
“I’ve been going to Dr. Vincent as long as I’ve lived in Baltimore,” her mother said.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“We don’t all just change for change’s sake.”
Jenny rolled her eyes