Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [69]
This time he brought her jonquils. She said, “I don’t know what I want with these; there’s a whole mess in back by the walkway.”
Cody smiled at her.
He settled her in his Cadillac, which smelled of new leather. She looked unimpressed. Perversely, she was wearing a skirt, on the one occasion when jeans would have been more suitable. Her legs were very white, almost chalky. He had not seen short socks like hers since his schooldays, and her tattered sneakers were as small and stubby as a child’s.
On the drive out, he talked about his plans for the farm. “It’s where I’d like to live,” he said. “Where I want to raise my family. It’s a perfect place for children.”
“What makes you think so?” she asked. “When I was a kid, all I cared about was getting to the city.”
“Yes, but fresh air and home-grown vegetables, and the animals … Right now, the man down the road is tending my livestock, but once I move in full-time I’m going to do it all myself.”
“That I’d like to see,” said Ruth. “You ever slopped a hog? Shoveled out a stable?”
“I can learn,” he told her.
She shrugged and said no more.
When they reached the farm he showed her around the grounds, where she stared a cow down and gave a clump of hens the evil eye. Then he led her into the house. He’d bought it lock, stock, and barrel—complete with bald plush sofa and kerosene stove in the parlor, rickety kitchen table with its drawerful of rusted flatware, 1958 calendar on the wall advertising Mallardy’s oystershell mixture for layers, extra rich in calcium. The man who’d lived here—a widower—had died upstairs in the four-poster bed. Cody had replaced the bedclothes with new ones, sheets and a quilt and down pillows, but that was his only change. “I do plan to fix things up,” he told Ruth, “but I’m waiting till I marry. I know my wife might like to have a say in it.”
Ruth removed a window lock easily from its crumbling wooden sash. She turned it over and peered at the underside.
“I want a wife very much,” said Cody.
She put back the lock. “I hate to be the one to tell you,” she said, “but smell that smell? Kind of sweetish smell? You got dry rot here.”
“Ruth,” he said, “do you dislike me for any reason?”
“Huh?”
“Your attitude. The way you put me off. You don’t think much of me, do you?” he said.
She gave him an edgy, skewed look, evasive, and moved over to the stairway. “Oh,” she said, “I like you a fair amount.”
“You do?”
“But I know your type,” she said.
“What type?”
“There were plenty like you in my school,” she said. “Oh, sure! Some in every class, on every team—tall and real good-looking, stylish, athletic, witty. Smooth-mannered boys that everything always came easy to, that always knew the proper way of doing things, and never dated any but the cheerleader girls, or the homecoming queen, or her maids of honor at the lowest. Passing me in the halls not even knowing who I was, nor guessing I existed. Or making fun of me sometimes, I’m almost certain—laughing at how poor I dressed and mocking my freckly face and my old red hair—”
“Laughing! When have I ever done such a thing?”
“I’m not naming you in particular,” she said, “but you sure do put me in mind of a type.”
“Ruth. I wouldn’t mock you. I think you’re perfect,” he said. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“See there?” she asked, and she raised her chin, spun about, and marched down the stairs. She wouldn’t answer anything else he said to her, all during the long drive home.
It was a campaign, was what it was—a long and arduous battle campaign, extending through April and all of May. There were moments when he despaired. He’d had too late a start, was out of the running; he’d wasted his time with those unoriginal, obvious brunettes whom he’d thought he was so clever to snare while Ezra, not even trying, had somehow divined the real jewel. Lucky Ezra! His whole life rested on luck, and Cody would probably never manage to figure out how he did