Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [47]
Ezra cleared his throat. “It’s the adjustment,” he said. “Yes, that’s it: adjustment. The first year of marriage. I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Well, maybe so,” Jenny said.
She wished she hadn’t talked so much.
When they reached home, therefore—where their mother had just arrived herself—Jenny said nothing at all about Harley. (Pearl thought Harley was wonderful, admirable—maybe not so easy to hold a conversation with but the perfect person to marry her daughter.) “Now tell me,” Pearl said when she’d kissed her. “How come you didn’t bring that husband of yours? You haven’t had some silly kind of quarrel.”
“No, no. It’s only my work. The strain of work,” Jenny said. “I wanted to come and rest, and Harley couldn’t leave his lab.”
It was true that the house seemed restful, suddenly. After Ezra left for Scarlatti’s, her mother led Jenny to the kitchen and brewed her a cup of tea. One thing Pearl never skimped on was tea. She moved around the room, heating the speckled brown teapot, humming some old, wavery hymn. The damp weather had frizzed her hair into little corkscrews and the steam had turned her cheeks pink; she looked almost pretty. (What kind of a marriage had she had? Something must have gone terribly wrong with it, but Jenny couldn’t help imagining it as perfect, all of a piece, her parents permanently joined. That her father had left was only a fluke—some misunderstanding still not cleared up.)
“I thought we’d have a very light supper,” said her mother. “Maybe a salad or something.”
“That would be fine,” Jenny said.
“Something plain and simple.”
Plain and simple was just what Jenny needed. She loosened; she was safe at last, in the only place where people knew exactly who she was and loved her anyhow.
So it was all the odder that after supper, touring the house, she felt a flash of pity for Ezra when she looked in upon his room. Still here! she thought, seeing his boyish tartan blanket on the bed, his worn recorder on the windowsill, the stamped metal tray on his bureau heaped with ancient, green-tinged pennies. How can he bear it? she wondered, and she went back down the stairs, shaking her head and marveling.
This was what Jenny had brought with her: a change of clothes, her anatomy textbook, Harley’s letter proposing marriage, and his photo in a sterling silver frame. Unpacking, she set the photo firmly on her desk and examined it. She had brought it not for sentimental reasons but because she planned to think Harley over, to sum him up, and she didn’t want distance to alter her judgment. She foresaw that she might be so misguided as to miss him. This picture would remind her not to. He was a stiff and stodgy man; you could see it in the thickened line of his jaw and in the opaque, bespectacled gaze he directed at the camera. He disapproved of her reasoning methods—too rushed and haphazard, he said. He didn’t like her chattery friends. He thought her clothes lacked style. He criticized her table manners. “Twenty-five chews per bite,” he would tell her. “That’s my advice. Not only is it more healthful, but you’ll find yourself not eating so much.” He was obsessed by the fear that she might grow fat. Since Jenny could count every one of her ribs, she wondered if he had a kind of mad spot—if he were insane not through and through, but in one isolated area. It was the uncontrollability he feared, perhaps: he would not like to see Jenny ballooning, the pounds collecting unrestrained; he wouldn’t like to see her getting out of hand. That must be it. But she did begin to wonder if she might be gaining weight. She started stepping on the scales every morning. She stood in front of the full-length mirror, sucking in her stomach. Was it possible her hips were widening? Out in public, though, she noticed that the fleshy women were the ones who caught Harley’s eye—the burgeoning and dimpled