Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [48]
Jenny’s grades were not very good. She wasn’t failing, or anything like that; but neither was she making A’s, and her lab work was often slipshod. Sometimes it seemed to her that she’d been hollow, all these years, and was finally caving in on herself. They’d found her out: at heart, there was nothing to her.
Packing for this trip (which Harley saw as a waste of time and money), she had strode across the bedroom to where his photo sat on the bureau. Harley was standing in front of it. “Move, please,” she told him. He looked offended and stepped aside. Then, when he saw what she wanted, his face had … well, flown open, you might say. His glare had softened, his lips had parted to speak. He was touched. And she was touched that he was touched. Nothing was ever simple; there were always these complications. But what he said was, “I don’t understand you. Your mother has frightened and mistreated you all your life, and now you want to visit her for no apparent reason.”
Probably what he was saying was “Please don’t go.”
You had to be a trained decoder to read the man.
She shook open his letter of proposal. See how he had dated it: 18 July, 1957—a form that struck her as pretentious, unless of course he happened to be English. She wondered how she could have overlooked the pompous language, the American courtship (as if his superior intelligence placed him on a whole separate continent), and most of all, the letter itself, the very fact that it was written, advancing the project of marriage like a corporation merger.
Well, she had overlooked it. She’d chosen not to see. She knew she had acted deviously in this whole business—making up her mind to win him, marrying him for practical reasons. She had calculated, was what it was. But she felt the punishment was greater than the crime. It wasn’t such a terrible crime. She’d had no idea (would any unmarried person?) what a serious business she was playing with, how long it lasts, how deep it goes. And now look: the joke was on her. Having got what she was after, she found it was she who’d been got. Talk about calculating! He was going to run her life, arrange it perfectly by height and color. He was going to sit in the passenger seat with that censorious expression on his face and dictate every turn she took, and every shift of gears.
Because she knew it would make Ezra happy, she went to visit the restaurant late in the evening. The rain had stopped, but there was still a mist. She felt she was walking underwater, in one of those dreams where a person can breathe as easily as on land. There were only a few other people out—all of them hurrying, locked in themselves, shrouded by raincoats and plastic scarves. Traffic swished by; reflections of the headlights wavered on the streets.
The restaurant’s kitchen seemed overcrowded; it was a miracle that an acceptable plate of food could emerge from it. Ezra stood at the stove, supervising the skimming of some broth or soup. A young girl lifted ladles full of steaming liquid and emptied them into a bowl. “When you’re done—” Ezra was saying, and then he said, “Why, hello, Jenny,” and came to the door where she waited. Over his jeans he wore a long white apron; he looked like one of the cooks. He took her around to meet the others; sweaty men chopping or straining or stirring. “This is my sister, Jenny,” he would say, but then he’d get sidetracked by some detail and stand there discussing food. “Can I offer you something to eat?” he asked finally.
“No, I had supper at home.”
“Or maybe a drink from the bar?”
“No, thanks.”
“This is our headwaiter, Oakes. And this is Josiah Payson; you remember him.”
She looked up and up, into Josiah’s face. He was all in white, spotless (how had they found a uniform to fit him?), but his hair still bristled wildly. And it was no easier than ever to see where he was directing his gaze. Not at her; that was certain. He was avoiding her. He seemed completely blind to the sight of her.
“When the Boyces come,” Ezra was saying to Oakes, “tell them