Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [56]
If she had heard (with her only son, Billy, blown to bits in Korea), she would have risen up, sick as she was, and shouted, “Out! Out of my life!” So she must have missed it, for she only rocked her head again and smiled and went on sleeping.
Just after Thanksgiving the woman who’d been in a coma died, and the tiny old man either died or went home, but the foreigner stayed on and his relatives continued to visit. Now that they knew Ezra by sight, they hailed him as he passed. “Come!” they would call, and he would step in, shy and pleased, and stand around for several minutes with his fists locked in his armpits. The sick man was yellow and sunken, hooked to a number of tubes, but he always tried to smile at Ezra’s entrance. Ezra had the impression that he knew no English. The others spoke English according to their ages—the child perfectly, the young adults with a strong, attractive accent, the old ones in ragged segments. Eventually, though, even the most fluent forgot themselves and drifted into their native language—a musical one, with rounded vowels that gave their lips a muscled, pouched, commiserative shape, as if they were perpetually tut-tutting. Ezra loved to listen. When you couldn’t understand what people said, he thought, how clearly the links and joints in their relationships stood out! A woman’s face lit and bloomed as she turned to a certain man; a barbed sound of pain leapt from the patient and his wife doubled over. The child, when upset, stroked her mother’s gold wristwatch band for solace.
Once a young girl in braids sang a song with almost no tune. It wandered from note to note as if by accident. Then a man with a heavy black mustache recited what must have been a poem. He spoke so grandly and unselfconsciously that passersby glanced in, and when he had finished he translated it for Ezra. “O dead one, why did you die in the springtime? You haven’t yet tasted the squash, or the cucumber salad.”
Why, even their poetry touched matters close to Ezra’s heart.
By December he had replaced three of the somber-suited waiters with cheery, motherly waitresses, and he’d scrapped the thick beige menus and started listing each day’s dishes on the blackboard. This meant, of course, that the cooks all left (none of the dishes were theirs, or even their type), so he did most of the cooking himself, with the help of a woman from New Orleans and a Mexican. These two had recipes of their own as well, some of which Ezra had never tasted before; he was entranced. It was true that the customers seemed surprised, but they adjusted, Ezra thought. Or most of them did.
Now he grew feverish with new ideas, and woke in the night longing to share them with someone. Why not a restaurant full of refrigerators, where people came and chose the food they wanted? They could fix it themselves on a long, long stove lining one wall of the dining room. Or maybe he could install a giant fireplace, with a whole steer turning slowly on a spit. You’d slice what you liked onto your plate and sit around in armchairs eating and talking with the guests at large. Then again, maybe he would start serving only street food. Of course! He’d cook what people felt homesick for—tacos like those from vendor’s carts in California, which the Mexican was always pining after; and that wonderful vinegary North Carolina barbecue that Todd Duckett had to have brought by his mother several times a year in cardboard cups. He would call it the Homesick Restaurant. He’d take down the old black and gilt sign …
But then he saw the sign, SCARLATTI’S, and he groaned and pressed his fingers to his eyes and turned over in his bed.
“You have a beautiful country,” the light-skinned woman said.
“Thank you,” said Ezra.
“All that green! And so many birds. Last summer, before my father-in-law fell ill, we were renting a house in New Jersey. The Garden State, they call it. There were roses everywhere.