Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [53]
Once, Ezra persuaded his mother to come and visit too. He liked for the various people in his life to get along, although he knew that would be difficult in his mother’s case. She spoke of Mrs. Scarlatti distrustfully, even jealously. “What you see in such a person I can’t imagine. She’s downright … tough, is what she is, in spite of her high-fashion clothes. It looks like her face is not trying. Know what I mean? Like she can’t be bothered putting out the effort. Not a bit of lipstick, and those crayony black lines around her eyes … and she hardly ever smiles at people.”
But now that Mrs. Scarlatti was so sick, his mother kept her thoughts to herself. She dressed carefully for her visit and wore her netted hat, which made Ezra happy. He associated that hat with important family occasions. He was pleased that she’d chosen her Sunday black coat, even though it wasn’t as warm as her everyday maroon.
In the hospital, she told Mrs. Scarlatti, “Why, you look the picture of health! No one would ever guess.”
This was not true. But it was nice of her to say it.
“After I die,” Mrs. Scarlatti said in her grainy voice, “Ezra must move to my apartment.”
His mother said, “Now, let’s have none of that silly talk.”
“Which is silly?” Mrs. Scarlatti asked, but then she was overtaken by exhaustion, and she closed her eyes. Ezra’s mother misunderstood. She must have thought she’d asked what was silly, a rhetorical question, and she blithely smoothed her skirt around her and said, “Total foolishness, I never heard such rot.” Only Ezra grasped Mrs. Scarlatti’s meaning. Which was silly, she was asking—her dying, or Ezra’s moving? But he didn’t bother explaining that to his mother.
Another time, he got special permission from the nurses’ office to bring a few men from the restaurant—Todd Duckett, Josiah Payson, and Raymond the sauce maker. He could tell that Mrs. Scarlatti was glad to see them, although it was an awkward visit. The men stood around the outer edges of the room and cleared their throats repeatedly and would not take seats. “Well?” said Mrs. Scarlatti. “Are you still buying everything fresh?” From the inappropriateness of the question (none of them was remotely involved with the purchasing), Ezra realized how out of touch she had grown. But these people, too, were tactful. Todd Duckett gave a mumbled cough and then said, “Yes, ma’am, just how you would’ve liked it.”
“I’m tired now,” Mrs. Scarlatti said.
Down the hall lay an emaciated woman in a coma, and an old, old man with a tiny wife who was allowed to sleep on a cot in his room, and a dark-skinned foreigner whose masses of visiting relatives gave the place the look of a gypsy circus. Ezra knew that the comatose woman had cancer, the old man a rare type of blood disease, and the foreigner some cardiac problem—it wasn’t clear what. “Heart rumor,” he was told by a dusky, exotic child who was surely too young to be visiting hospitals. She was standing outside the foreigner’s door, delicately reeling in a yo-yo.
“Heart murmur, maybe?”
“No, rumor.”
Ezra was starting to feel lonely here and would have liked to make a friend. The nurses were always sending him away while they did something mysterious to Mrs. Scarlatti, and much of any visit he spent leaning dejectedly against the wall outside her room or gazing from the windows of the conservatory at the end of the corridor. But no one seemed approachable. This wing was different from the others—more hushed—and all the people he encountered wore a withdrawn, forbidding look. Only the foreign child spoke to him. “I think he’s going to die,” she said. But then she went back to her yo-yo. Ezra hung around a while longer, but it was obvious she didn’t find him very interesting.
Bibb lettuce, Boston lettuce, chicory, escarole, dripping on the counter in the center of the kitchen. While other restaurants’ vegetables were delivered by anonymous, dank, garbage-smelling