Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [77]
6
Beaches on the Moon
Twice or maybe three times a year, she goes out to the farm to make sure things are in order. She has her son Ezra drive her there, and she takes along a broom, a dustpan, rags, a grocery bag for trash and a bucket and a box of cleanser. Ezra asks why she can’t just keep these supplies in the farmhouse, but she knows they wouldn’t be safe. The trespassers would get them. Oh, the trespassers—the small boys and courting couples and the teen-aged gangs. It makes her mad to think of them. As the car turns off the main road, rattling up the rutted driveway, she already sees their litter—the beer cans tossed among the scrubby weeds, the scraps of toilet paper dangling from the bushes. This land has been let go and the vegetation is matted and wild, bristly, scratchy, no shade at all from the blazing sun. There are little spangles of bottle tops embedded in the dirt of the road. And the yard (which is not truly mown but sickled by Jared Peers, once or twice a summer) is flocked with white paper plates and Dixie cups, napkins, sandwich bags, red-striped straws, and those peculiarly long-lived, accordioned worms of paper that the straws were wrapped in.
Ezra parks the car beneath an oak tree. “It’s a shame. A disgrace and a shame,” Pearl says, stepping out. She wears a seersucker dress that will wash, and her oldest shoes. On her head is a broad-brimmed straw hat. It will keep the dust from her hair—from all but one faded, blondish frizz bordering each temple. “It’s a national crime,” she says, and she stands looking around her while Ezra unloads her cleaning supplies. The house has two stories. It is a ghostly, rubbed-out gray. The ridgepole sags and the front porch has buckled and many of the windowpanes are broken—more every time she comes.
She remembers when Cody first showed her this place. “Imagine what can be done with it, Mother. Picture the possibilities,” he said. He was planning to marry and raise a family here—provide her with lots of grandchildren. He even kept the livestock on, paying Jared Peers to tend it till Cody moved in.
That was years ago, though, and all that remains of those animals now is a couple of ragged hens gone wild, clucking in the mulberry tree out behind the barn.
She has a key to the warped rear door but it isn’t needed. The padlock’s missing and the rusted hasp hangs open. “Not again,” she says. She turns the knob and enters, warily. (One of these days, she’ll surprise someone and get her head blown off for her trouble.) The kitchen smells stale and cold, even in the heat of the day. There’s a fly buzzing over the table, a rust spot smearing the back of the sink, a single tatter of cloudy plastic curtain trailing next to the window. The linoleum’s worn patternless near the counters.
Ezra follows, burdened with household supplies. He sets them down and stands wiping his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. More than once he’s told her he fails to see the use of this: cleaning up only to clean again, the next time they come out. What’s the purpose, he wants to know. Why go to all this trouble, what does she have in mind? But he’s an obliging man, and when she insists, he says no more. He runs his fingers through his hair, which the sweat has turned a dark, streaked yellow. He tests the kitchen faucet. First it explodes and then it yields a coppery trickle of water.
There are half a dozen empty bottles lying on the floor—Wild Turkey, Old Crow, Southern Comfort. “Look! And look,” says Pearl. She nudges a Marlboro pack with her toe. She scrapes at a scorch on the table. She discreetly looks away while Ezra hooks an unmentionable rubber something with the broom handle and drops it into the trash bag.
“Cody,” she used to say, “you could hire a man to come and haul this furniture off to the dump.