Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [36]
They walked up Calvert Street without talking, puffing clouds of steam. They crossed to Jenny’s house and climbed the porch steps. “Well,” said Jenny, “thank you for inviting me, Josiah.”
Josiah made some awkward, jerky motion that she assumed was an effort toward speech. He stumbled closer, enveloped her in a circle of rough plaid, and kissed her on the lips. She had trouble, at first, understanding what was happening. Then she felt a terrible dismay, not so much for herself as for Josiah. Oh, it was sad, he had misread everything; he would be so embarrassed! But how could he have made such an error? Thinking it over (pressed willy-nilly against his whiskery chin, against the knobbiness of his mouth), she saw things suddenly from his viewpoint: their gentle little “romance” (was what he must call it), as seamless as the Widow Payson’s fairy tale existence. She longed for it; she wished it were true. She ached, with something like nostalgia, for a contented life with his mother in her snug house, for an innocent, protective marriage. She kissed him back, feeling even through all those layers of wool how he tensed and trembled.
Then light burst out, the front door slammed open, and her mother’s voice broke over them. “What? What! What is the meaning of this?”
They leapt apart.
“You piece of trash,” Pearl said to Jenny. “You tramp. You trashy thing. So this is what you’ve been up to! Not so much as notifying me where you are, supper not started, I’m losing my mind with worry—then here I find you! Necking! Necking with a, with a—”
For lack of a word, it seemed, she struck out. She slapped Jenny hard across the cheek. Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. Josiah, as if it were he who’d been struck, averted his face sharply and stared away at some distant point. His mouth was working but no sound came forth.
“With a crazy! A dummy! A retarded person. You did it to spite me, didn’t you,” Pearl told Jenny. “It’s your way of making mock of me. All these afternoons that I’ve been slaving in the grocery store, you were off in some alleyway, weren’t you, off with this animal, this gorilla, letting him take his pleasure, just to shame me.”
Josiah said, “But-but-but—”
“Just to show me up when I had such great plans for you. Cutting school, no doubt, lying with him in bushes and back seats of cars and maybe this very house, for all I know, while I’m off slaving at Sweeney Brothers—”
“But! But! Aagh!” Josiah shouted, and he sputtered so that Jenny saw white flecks flying in the lamplight. Then he flung out his scarecrow arms and plunged down the steps and disappeared.
She didn’t see him again, of course. She chose her routes carefully and never again came near him, never approached any place that he was likely to be found; and she assumed he did the same. It was as if, by mutual agreement, they had split the city between them.
And besides, she had no reason to see him: Ezra’s letters stopped. Ezra appeared in person. One Sunday morning, there he was, sitting in the kitchen when Jenny came down to breakfast. He wore his old civilian clothes that had been packed away in mothballs—jeans and a scruffy blue sweater. They hung on him like something borrowed. It was alarming how much weight he had lost. His hair was unbecomingly short and his face was paler, older, shadowed beneath the eyes. He sat slumped, clamping his hands between his knees, while Pearl scraped a piece of scorched toast into the sink. “Jam or honey, which?” she was asking. “Jenny, look who’s