Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [96]
“That’s all right, Slevin,” she said. “Heavens, honey, that’s all right.” Then she worried her voice had shown too much, would make him bashful again, so she laughed a little and said, “Shall we get you a Hoover of your own for your birthday?”
He turned over on his side.
“Or we could have it made up in calico,” she told him, giggling. “A tiny stuffed calico vacuum cleaner to take to bed with you.”
But Slevin just closed his eyes, so after a while she wished him good night and left.
She dreamed she was back with Sam Wiley, her second husband and the one she’d loved the best. She’d made a fool of herself over Sam. She dreamed he was twirling on that high wooden stool they used to have in their kitchen in Paulham. He was preening the scrolls of his handlebar mustache and singing “Let It Be.” Which hadn’t even existed, at the time.
She opened her eyes and heard “Let It Be” on one of the children’s radios, sailing out across the dark hall. How often had she told them? She got up and made her way to Peter’s room—barefoot, stepping over Phoebe. Radios late at night sounded so different, she thought—so far away and crackling with static, almost gritty, as if the music had had to travel above miles of railroad tracks and deserted superhighways, past coal yards and auto dumps, oil derricks and factory smokestacks and electrical transformers. She switched off the radio and pulled Peter’s sleeping bag up around his shoulders. She checked on the baby in her crib. Then she returned to bed, shivering slightly, and huddled against Joe’s hulking back for warmth.
“Mack the Knife,” Sam used to sing, and “Greenfields”—yes, that had been around. She remembered how operatic he’d get, rolling his eyes, pounding his chest, trying to make her laugh. (She’d been an earnest young medical student, in those days.) Then she remembered the tender, aching line that the examining table had pressed across the mound of the baby, when Jenny was an intern bending over a patient. Six months pregnant, seven months … By her eighth month the marriage was finished, and Jenny was walking around in a daze. She saw that she had always been doomed to fail, had been unlovable, had lacked some singular quality that would keep a husband. She had never known this consciously, before, but the pain she felt was eerily familiar—like a suspicion, long held, at last confirmed.
She wore uniforms designed for male physicians with forty-inch waists; there were no maternity lab coats. On rounds, professors would give her doubtful glances and ask if she were sure she was up to this. Sympathetic nurses brought her so many cups of coffee that she thought she would float away. One of those nurses stayed with her through most of her labor. Other women had their husbands, but Jenny had Rosa Perez, who let her squeeze her fingers as hard as needed and never said a word of complaint.
And what was the name of that neighbor who used to watch the baby? Mary something—Mary Lee, Mary Lou—some fellow intern’s wife, as poor as Jenny and the mother of two children under two. She baby-sat for a pittance, but even that was more than Jenny could afford. And the schedule! Months of nights on duty, thirty-six hours on call and twelve off, emergency room, obstetrics, trauma surgery … and her residency was not much better. Meanwhile, Becky changed from an infant to a little girl, an outsider really, a lively child with Sam Wiley’s snapping black eyes, unrelated to Jenny. Though it was a shock, sometimes, to see her give that level, considering stare so typical of the Tulls. Was it possible, after all, that this small stranger might constitute a family? She learned to walk; she learned to talk. “No!” she would say, in her firm, spunky voice; and Jenny, trying to stay awake at three in the morning or three in the afternoon, whatever bit of time they had together, dropped her head in her hands. “No!” said Becky, and Jenny hauled off and slapped her hard across the mouth, then shook her till her head lolled, then flung her aside and ran out of