Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [8]
She had heard you could not dream a smell, or recall a smell in its absence; so when she woke she was convinced, for a moment, that Beck had let himself into the house and was seated on the edge of the bed, watching while she slept. But there was no one there.
Dance? Oh, I don’t think so, she said inside her head. I’m in charge of this whole affair, you see, and all I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces. Whoever it was drew away. Ezra turned a page of his magazine. “Ezra,” she said. She felt him grow still. He had this habit—he had always had it—of becoming totally motionless when people spoke to him. It was endearing, but also in some ways a strain, for then whatever she said to him (“I feel a draft,” or “The paper boy is late again”) was bound to disappoint him, wasn’t it? How could she live up to Ezra’s expectations? She plucked at her quilt. “If I could just have some water,” she told him.
He poured it from the pitcher on the bureau. She heard no ice cubes clinking; they must have melted. Yet it seemed just minutes ago that he’d brought in a whole new supply. He raised her head, rested it on his shoulder, and tipped the glass to her lips. Yes, lukewarm—not that she minded. She drank gratefully, keeping her eyes closed. His shoulder felt steady and comforting. He laid her back down on the pillow.
“Dr. Vincent’s coming at ten,” he told her.
“What time is it now?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“Eight-thirty in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been here all night?” she asked.
“I slept a little.”
“Sleep now. I won’t be needing you.”
“Well, maybe after the doctor comes.”
It was important to Pearl that she deceive the doctor. She didn’t want to go to the hospital. Her illness was pneumonia, she was almost certain; she guessed it from a past experience. She recognized the way it settled into her back. If Dr. Vincent found out he would send her off to Union Memorial, tent her over with plastic. “Maybe you should cancel the doctor altogether,” she told Ezra. “I’m very much improved, I believe.”
“Let him decide that.”
“Well, I know how my own self feels, Ezra.”
“We won’t argue about it just now,” he said.
He could surprise you, Ezra could. He’d let a person walk all over him but then display, at odd moments, a deep and rock-hard stubbornness. She sighed and smoothed her quilt. It seemed he’d spilled some water on it.
She remembered when Ezra was a child, still in elementary school. “Mother,” he had said, “if it turned out that money grew on trees, just for one day and never again, would you let me stay home from school and pick it?”
“No,” she told him.
“Why not?”
“Your education is more important.”
“Other kids’ mothers would let them, I bet.”
“Other mothers don’t have plans for their children to amount to something.”
“But just for one day?”
“Pick it after school. Or before. Wake up extra early; set your alarm clock ahead an hour.”
“An hour!” he said. “One little hour, for something that happens only once in all the world.”
“Ezra, will you let it be? Must you keep at me this way? Why are you so obstinate?” Pearl had asked him.
It only now occurred to her, under her damp quilt, to wonder why she hadn’t said yes, he could stay home. If money decided to grow on trees one day, let him pick all he liked! she should have said. What difference would it have made?
Oh, she’d been an angry sort of mother. She’d been continually on edge; she’d felt too burdened, too much alone. And after Beck left, she’d been so preoccupied with paying the rent and juggling the budget and keeping those great, clod-footed children in new shoes. It was she who called the doctor at two a.m. when Jenny got appendicitis; it was she who marched downstairs with a baseball bat the night they heard that scary