Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [46]
Jenny wondered why he called the restaurant “she,” as if it were a ship. But then he said, “The treatments are making her worse. She can’t keep anything down,” and she understood that he must mean Mrs. Scarlatti. Last fall, Mrs. Scarlatti had been hospitalized for a cancer operation—her second, though up until then no one had known of the first. Ezra had taken it very hard. Mournfully trudging down a row of taxis, he said, “She hardly ever complains, but I know she’s suffering.”
“Are you running the restaurant alone, then?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been doing that since November. Everything: the hiring and the firing, bringing in new help as people quit. A restaurant is not all food, you know. Sometimes it seems that food is the least of it. I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I’m beginning to think she’s right.”
They had reached his car, a dented gray Chevy. He opened the door for her and heaved her suitcase into the rear, which was already a chaos of Restaurateur’s Weeklys, soiled clothing, and some kind of tongs or skewers in a Kitchen Korner shopping bag. “Sorry about the mess,” he said when he’d slid behind the wheel. He started the engine and backed out of his parking slot. “Have you learned to drive yet?”
“Yes, Harley taught me. Now I drive him everywhere; he likes to be free to think.”
They were on Charles Street. The rain was so fine that Ezra hadn’t bothered to turn on his windshield wipers, and the glass began to film over. Jenny peered ahead. “Can you see?” she asked Ezra.
He nodded.
“First he wants me to drive,” she said, “and then he criticizes every last little thing about how I do it. He’s so clever; you don’t know how far his cleverness can extend. I mean, it’s not just math or genetics he knows all about but the most efficient temperature for cooking pot roast, the best way to organize my kitchen—everything, all charted out in his mind. When I’m driving he says, ‘Now, Jennifer, you know full well that three blocks from here is that transit stop where you have to veer left, so what are you doing in the right-hand lane? You ought to plan ahead more,’ he says. ‘Three blocks!’ I say. ‘Good grief! I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ and he says, ‘That’s exactly what your trouble is, Jenny.’ ‘Between here and that transit stop,’ I tell him, ‘anything might happen,’ and he says, ‘Not really. No, not really. In all three intersections there’s a left-turn lane, as you’ll recall, so you wouldn’t have to wait for …’ Nothing is unplanned, for Harley. You can see the numbered pages leafing over inside his head. There’s never a single mistake.”
“Well,” Ezra said, “I guess it’s like a whole different outlook, being a genius.”
“It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned,” said Jenny, “but I didn’t realize it was a warning. I was too young to read the signals. I thought he was only like me, you know—a careful person; I always was careful, but now compared to Harley I don’t seem careful at all. I should have guessed when I went to meet his parents before the wedding, and all the books in his room were arranged by height and blocks of color. Alphabetized I could have understood; or separated by subject matter. But this arbitrary, fixed pattern of things, a foot of red, a foot of black, no hardbacks mingling with the paperbacks … it’s worse than Mother’s bureau drawers. It’s out of the frying pan, into the fire! The first time Harley kissed me, he had to brush off this bedspread beforehand that we’d been sitting on. Wouldn’t you think that might have told me something? Every night now before he goes to sleep he perches on the edge of the bed and brushes off the soles of his feet. These bare white feet, untouched … what could have dirtied them? He wears shoes every waking moment and slippers if he takes one step in the night. But no, there he sits, so methodical, so exact, everything in its proper sequence, brush-brush … sometimes I think I’ll