Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [73]
“Of course I don’t want you marrying him,” Cody said. “I love you.”
“Huh?”
This wasn’t the moment he had planned, but he rushed on anyway, as if drunk. “I mean it,” he said, “I feel driven. I feel pulled. I have to have you. You’re all I ever think about.”
She was staring at him, astonished, with one hand cupped to scoop the meat cubes into a skillet.
“I guess I’m not saying it right,” he told her.
“Saying what? What are you talking about?”
“Ruth. I really, truly love you,” he said. “I’m sick over you. I can’t even eat. Look at me! I’ve lost eleven pounds.”
He held out his arms, demonstrating. His jacket hung loose at the sides. Lately he’d moved his belt in a notch; his suits no longer fit so smoothly but seemed rumpled, gathered, bunchy.
“It’s true you’re kind of skinny,” Ruth said slowly.
“Even my shoes feel too big.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“You haven’t heard a word I said!”
“Over me, you said. You must be making fun.”
“Ruth, I swear—” he said.
“You’re used to New York City girls, models, actresses; you could have anyone.”
“It’s you I’ll have.”
She studied him a moment. It began to seem he’d finally broken through; they were having a conversation. Then she said, “We got to get that weight back on you.”
He groaned.
“See there?” she asked. “You never eat a thing I offer you.”
“I can’t,” he told her.
“I don’t believe you ever once tasted my cooking.”
She set the skillet aside and went over to the tall black kettle that was simmering on the stove. “Country vegetable,” she said, lifting the lid.
“Really, Ruth …”
She filled a small crockery bowl and set it on the table. “Sit down,” she said. “Eat. When you’ve tried it, I’ll tell you the secret ingredient.”
Steam rose from the bowl, with a smell so deep and spicy that already he felt overfed. He accepted the spoon that she held out. He dipped it in the soup reluctantly and took a sip.
“Well?” she asked.
“It’s very good,” he said.
In fact, it was delicious, if you cared about such things. He’d never tasted soup so good. There were chunks of fresh vegetables, and the broth was rich and heavy. He took another mouthful. Ruth stood over him, her thumbs hooked into her blue jeans pockets. “Chicken feet,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Chicken feet is the secret ingredient.”
He lowered the spoon and looked down into the bowl.
“Eat up,” she told him. “Put some meat on your bones.”
He dipped the spoon in again.
After that, she brought him a salad made with the herbs she’d grown on the roof and a basketful of rolls she’d baked that afternoon—a recipe from home, she said. Cody ate everything. As long as he ate, she watched him. When she brought him more butter for his rolls, she leaned close over him and he felt the warmth she gave off.
Now two more cooks had arrived and a Chinese boy was sautéing black mushrooms, and Ezra was running a mixer near the sink. Ruth sat down next to Cody, hooking her combat boots on the rung of his chair and hugging her ribs. Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food—to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people’s lives. Couldn’t you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food? Look at Cody’s mother—a nonfeeder, if ever there was one. Even back in his childhood, when they’d depended on her for nourishment … why, mention you were hungry and she’d suddenly act rushed and harassed, fretful, out of breath, distracted. He remembered her coming home from work in the evening and tearing irritably around the kitchen. Tins toppled out of the cupboards and fell all over her—pork ’n’ beans, Spam, oily tuna fish, peas canned olive-drab. She cooked in her hat, most of the time. She whimpered when she burned things. She burned things you would not imagine it possible to burn and served others half-raw, adding jarring extras of her own design such as crushed pineapple in the mashed potatoes. (Anything, as long as it was a leftover, might as well be dumped in the pan with anything else.) Her only seasonings were salt and pepper. Her only gravy was Campbell