Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [41]
Bear in mind that we will both be at Paulham next year and could share a single apartment, buy groceries in economy lots, etc. Also, I sense that your finances have been something of a problem, and I would be glad to assume that responsibility.
The above sounds more pragmatic than I’d intended. Actually, I find I love you, and am awaiting your earliest reply.
Sincerely, Harley Baines
P.S. I know that you’re intelligent. You didn’t have to make up all those questions about genetics.
The postscript, she thought, was the most affecting part of the letter. It was written in a looser hand, as if impulsively, while the rest seemed copied and perhaps recopied from a rough draft. She read the letter again, and then folded it and set it on her bed. She went over to study her goldfish, who had left too much food floating on the surface of the water. She would have to cut down on their rations. Dear Harley, she practiced. It was such a surprise to … No. He wouldn’t care for gushiness. Dear Harley: I have considered your terms and … What she was trying to say was “Yes.” She was pulled only very slightly by the feelings she’d had for him earlier (which now seemed faded and shallow, a schoolgirl crush brought on by senior panic). What appealed to her more was the angularity of the situation—the mighty leap into space with someone she hardly knew. Wasn’t that what a marriage ought to be? Like one of those movie-style disasters—shipwrecks or earthquakes or enemy prisons—where strangers, trapped in close quarters by circumstance, show their real strengths and weaknesses.
Lately, her life had seemed to be narrowing. She could predict so easily the successive stages of medical school, internship, and residency. She had looked in a mirror, not so long ago, and realized all at once that the clear, fragile skin around her eyes would someday develop lines. She was going to grow old like anyone else.
She took paper from a bureau drawer, sat down on her bed, and uncapped her fountain pen. Dear Harley: she wrote. She plucked a microscopic hair from the pen point. She thought a while. Then she wrote, All right, and signed her name—the ultimate in no-nonsense communication. Even Harley couldn’t find it excessive.
The following evening, just before supper, Jenny arrived in Baltimore. She had burned all her bridges: quit her job, given away her goldfish, and packed everything in her room. It was the most reckless behavior she had ever shown. On the Greyhound bus she sat grandly upright, periodically shrugging off the snoring soldier who drooped against her. When she reached the terminal she hailed a cab, instead of waiting for a city bus, and rode home in style.
No one had been told she was coming, so she was puzzled by the fact that while she was paying off the driver, the front door of her house opened wide and her mother proceeded across the porch and down the steps in a flowing, flowered dress, high-heeled pumps, and a hat whose black net veil was dotted with what looked like beauty spots. Behind her came Ezra in un-pressed clothes that were a little too full cut, and last was Cody, dark and handsome and New Yorkish in a fine-textured, fitted gray suit and striped silk tie. For a second, Jenny fancied they were headed for her funeral. This was how they would look—formally dressed and refraining from battle—if Jenny were no longer among them. Then she shook the thought away, and smiled and climbed out of the taxi.
Her mother halted on the sidewalk. “My stars!” she said. “Ezra, when you say family dinner, you mean family dinner!” She raised her veil to kiss Jenny’s cheek. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Ezra, did you plan it this way?”
“I didn’t know a thing about it,” Ezra said. “I thought of writing you, Jenny, but I didn’t think you’d come all this distance just for supper.”
“Supper?” Jenny asked.
“It’s some idea of Ezra’s,” Pearl told her. “He found out Cody was passing through, maybe spending the night, and