Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [66]
Cody called his mother and said he’d be down for the weekend. And would Ruth be around, did she think? After all, he said, it was time he got to know his future sister-in-law.
He arrived on Saturday morning bringing flowers, copper-colored roses. He found Ruth and Ezra playing gin on the living room floor. Ruth’s reality, after his week of dreaming, struck him like a blow. She seemed clearer, plainer, harder edged than anybody he’d known. She wore jeans and a shirt of some ugly brown plaid. She was so absorbed in her game that she hardly glanced up when Cody walked in. “Ruth,” he said, and he held out the flowers. “These are for you.”
She looked at them, and then drew a card. “What are they?” she asked.
“Well, roses.”
“Roses? This early in the year?”
“Greenhouse roses. I especially ordered copper, to go with your hair.”
“You leave my hair out of this,” she said.
“Honey, he meant it as a compliment,” Ezra told her.
“Oh.”
“Certainly,” said Cody. “See, it’s my way of saying welcome. Welcome to our family, Ruth.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“Cody, that was awfully nice of you,” Ezra said.
“Gin,” said Ruth.
Late that afternoon, when it was time to go to the restaurant, Cody walked over with Ruth and Ezra. He’d had a long, immobile day—standing outside other people’s lives, mostly—and he needed the exercise.
It had been raining, off and on, and there were puddles on the sidewalk. Ruth strode straight through every one of them, which was fine since her shoes were brown leather combat boots. Cody wondered if her style were deliberate. What would she do, for instance, if he gave her a pair of high-heeled evening sandals? The question began to fascinate him. He became obsessed; he developed an almost physical thirst for the sight of her blunt little feet in silver straps.
There was no explaining his craving for the gigantic watch—black faced and intricately calibrated, capable of withstanding a deep-sea dive—whose stainless steel expansion band hung loose on her wiry wrist.
Ezra had his pearwood recorder. He played it as he walked, serious and absorbed, with his lashes lowered on his cheeks. “Le Godiveau de Poisson,” he played. Passersby looked at him and smiled. Ruth hummed along with some notes, fell into her own thoughts at others. Then Ezra put his recorder in the pocket of his shabby lumber jacket, and he and Ruth began discussing the menu. It was good they were serving the rice dish, Ruth said; that always made the Arab family happy. She ran her fingers through her sprouty red hair. Cody, walking on the other side of her, felt her shift of weight when Ezra circled her with one arm and pulled her close.
In the restaurant, she was a whirlwind. Ezra cooked in a dream, tasting and reflecting; the others (losers, all of them, in Cody’s opinion) floated around the kitchen vaguely, but Ruth spun and pounced and jabbed at food as if doing battle. She was in charge of a chicken casserole and something that looked like potato cakes. Cody watched her from a corner well out of the way, but still people seemed to keep tripping over him.
“Where did you learn to cook?” he asked Ruth.
“No place,” she said.
“Is this chicken some regional thing?”
“Taste,” she snapped, and she speared a piece and held it out to him.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I feel too full.”
In fact, he felt full of her. He’d taken her in all day, consumed her. Every spiky movement—slamming of pot lids, toss of head—nourished him. It came to him like a gift, while he was studying her narrow back, that she actually wore an undershirt, one of those knitted singlets he remembered from his childhood. He could make out the seams of it beneath the brown plaid. He filed the information with care, to be treasured once he was alone.
The restaurant opened and customers began to trickle in. The large, beaming hostess seated them all in one area, as if tucking them under her wing.
“Find a table,” Ezra told Cody. “I’ll bring you some of