Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [32]
Cody wrote almost never, and what letters he did write were curt and factual. I won’t be coming home for spring vacation. All my grades are fine except French. This new job pays better than the old one did. Ezra sent a postcard the moment he arrived in camp, and followed that three days later with a letter describing his surroundings. It was longer than several of Cody’s put together, but still it didn’t tell Jenny what she wanted to know. There’s somebody two blocks down who’s from Maryland too I hear but I haven’t had a chance to talk to him and I don’t think he’s from Baltimore anyway but some other place I wouldn’t know about so I doubt we’d have much to … What was he saying, exactly? Had he, or had he not, made any friends? If people lived so close together, you’d think they would have talked. Jenny pictured the others ignoring him, or worse: tormenting him and making fun of his incompetence. He simply was not a soldier. But I have learned right much about my rifle, he wrote. Cody would be surprised. She tried to imagine his long, sensitive fingers cleaning and oiling a gun. She understood that he must be surviving, more or less, but she couldn’t figure out how. She thought of him on his belly, in the dust of the rifle range, squeezing a trigger. His gaze was so reflective, how would he hit a target? They say the whole bunch of us will be joining the Korean Conflict as soon as we are … Why, they’d pick him off like a fly! He’d never do more to defend himself than dodge and shield his head.
I think a lot about Scarlatti’s Restaurant and how nice the lettuce smelled when I tore it into the bowl, he wrote—his only mention of homesickness, if that was what it was. Pearl gave a jealous sniff. “As if lettuce had a smell!” Jenny was jealous too; he could have remembered, instead, how he and she used to lie on the floor in front of the Philco on Monday nights, listening to the Cities Service Band of America. What did he see in that restaurant, anyhow? Then a little knob of discomfort started nudging inside her chest. There was something she hadn’t done, something unpleasant that she didn’t want to do … Check on Mrs. Scarlatti. She wondered if Ezra had really meant for her to keep her promise. He couldn’t actually expect that of her, could he? But she supposed he could. He was a literal-minded kind of person.
So she folded Ezra’s letter and put it in her pocket. Then she slipped her coat on and walked to St. Paul Street, to a narrow brick building set in a strip of shops and businesses.
Scarlatti’s was the neighborhood’s one formal elegant eating place. It served only supper, mostly to people from better parts of the city. At this hour—five-thirty or so—it wouldn’t even be open. She went to the rear, where she’d been a couple of times with Ezra. She circled two garbage cans overflowing with wilted greens, and she climbed the steps and knocked on the door. Then she cupped a hand to the windowpane and peered in.
Men in dirty aprons were rushing around the kitchen, which was a mass of steam and stainless steel, pot lids clattering, bowls as big as birdbaths heaped with sliced vegetables. No wonder they hadn’t heard her. She turned the knob, but the door was locked. And before she could knock any harder, she caught sight of Mrs. Scarlatti. She was slouched in the dining room entranceway, holding a lit cigarette—a white-faced woman in a stark black knife of a dress. Whatever she was saying,