Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [86]
Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else’s party, she gazes wistfully at other families and wonders what their secret is. They seem so close. Is it that they’re more religious? Or stricter, or more lenient? Could it be the fact that they participate in sports? Read books together? Have some common hobby? Recently, she overheard a neighbor woman discussing her plans for Independence Day: her family was having a picnic. Every member—child or grownup—was cooking his or her specialty. Those who were too little to cook were in charge of the paper plates.
Pearl felt such a wave of longing that her knees went weak.
Ezra has finished taping the glass. Pearl drifts through the other bedrooms, checking the other windows. In the smallest bedroom, a nursery, a little old lady in a hat approaches. It’s Pearl, in the speckled mirror above a bureau. She leans closer and traces the lines around her eyes. Her age does not surprise her. She’s grown used to it by now. You’re old for so much longer than you’re young, she thinks. Really it hardly seems fair. And then she thinks, for no earthly reason, of a girl she went to school with, Linda Lou something-or-other—such a pretty, flighty girl, someone she’d always envied. In the middle of their senior year, Linda Lou disappeared. There were rumors, later confirmed—an affair with the school’s only male teacher, a married man; and a baby on the way. How horrified her classmates had been! It had thrilled them: that they actually knew such a person, had borrowed her history notes, helped her retie a loose sash, perhaps even brushed her hand accidentally—that hand that may have touched … well, who knew what. It occurs to Pearl, peering into the glass, that the baby born of that scandal must be sixty years old by now. He would have gray hair and liver spots, perhaps false teeth, bifocals, a tedious burden of a life. Yet Linda Lou, wearing white, still dances in Pearl’s mind, the prettiest girl at the senior social.
“Don’t you see?” Cody has asked, and Pearl had said, “Honey, I just can’t understand you.”
Then he shrugged, and his normal, amused expression returned to his face. “Ah, well,” he said, “I can’t either, I guess. After all, what do I care, now I’m grown? Why should it matter any more?”
She doesn’t recall if she managed any reply to that.
She steps away from the mirror. Ezra comes in, bearing the trash bag. “All finished, Mother,” he says.
“It looks a lot better, doesn’t it?”
“It looks just fine,” he tells her.
They descend the stairs, and close the door, and carry their supplies to the car. As they drive away Pearl glances back, like any good housewife checking what she’s cleaned, and it seems to her that even that buckling front porch is straighter and more solid. She has a feeling of accomplishment. Others might have given up and let the trespassers take the place over, but never Pearl. Next season she will come again, and the season after, and the season after that, and Ezra will go on bringing her—the two of them bumping down the driveway, loyal and responsible, together forever.
7
Dr. Tull Is Not a Toy
“Whoever’s the first to mention divorce has to take the children,” Jenny said. “This has kept us together more times than I can count.”
She was joking, but the priest didn’t laugh. He may have been too young to catch it. All he did was shift uncomfortably in his chair. Meanwhile the children milled around him like something bubbling, like something churning, and the baby dribbled on his shoes. He withdrew his feet imperceptibly, as if trying not to hurt the baby’s feelings.
“Yet I believe,” he said, appearing to choose his words, “that you yourself have been divorced, have you not?”
“Twice,” said Jenny. She giggled, but he only looked worried. “And once for Joe here,” she added.
Her husband smiled at her from the sofa.
“If I hadn’t had the foresight to keep my maiden name,” Jenny said, “my medical diploma would read like one of