Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [97]
Was this what it came to—that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? She failed to see a curb and sprained her ankle, hobbled to work in agony. She misdiagnosed a case of viral pneumonia. She let a greenstick fracture slip right past her. She brought Becky a drink of water in the middle of the night and then suddenly, without the slightest intention, screamed, “Take it! Take it!” and threw the cup into Becky’s face. Becky shivered and caught her breath for hours afterward, even in her sleep, though Jenny held her tightly on her lap.
Then her mother called from Baltimore and said, “Jenny? Don’t you write your family any more?”
“Well, I’ve been so busy,” Jenny meant to say. Or: “Leave me alone, I remember all about you. It’s all come back. Write? Why should I write? You’ve damaged me; you’ve injured me. Why would I want to write?”
Instead, she started … not crying, exactly, but something worse. She was torn by dry, ragged sobs; she ran out of air; there was a grating sound in her chest. Her mother said, calmly, “Jenny, hang up. You know that couch in your living room? Go lie down on it. I’ll be there just as soon as Ezra can drive me.”
Pearl stayed two weeks, using all of her vacation time. The first thing she did was call Jenny’s hospital and arrange for sick leave. Then she set about putting the world in order again. She smoothed clean sheets on Jenny’s bed, brought her tea and bracing broths, shampooed her hair, placed flowers on her bureau. Becky, who had hardly seen her grandmother till now, fell in love with her. Pearl called Becky “Rebecca” and treated her formally, respectfully, as if she were not quite sure how much she was allowed. Every morning she walked Becky to the playground and swung her on the swings. In the afternoon they went shopping together. She bought Becky an old-fashioned dress that made her look solemn and reasonable. She bought picture books—nursery rhymes and fairy tales and The Little House. Jenny had forgotten about The Little House. Why, she had loved that book! She’d requested it every evening, she remembered now. She’d sat on that homely old sofa and listened while her mother, with endless patience, read it three times, four times, five … Now Becky said, “Read it again,” and Pearl returned to page one, and Jenny listened just as closely as Becky did.
Sundays, when his restaurant closed, Ezra drove up from Baltimore. He was not, in spite of his innocent face, an open sort of person, and rather than speak outright of Jenny’s new breakability he kept smiling serenely at some point just beyond her. She took comfort from this. There was already too much openness in the world, she felt—everyone raging and weeping and rejoicing. She imagined that Ezra was not subject to the ups and downs that jolted other people. She liked to have him read the papers to her (trouble in Honduras, trouble in Saigon, natural disasters in Haiti and Cuba and Italy) while she listened from a nest of deep blue blankets and a nightgown still warm from her mother’s iron.
On the second weekend, Cody blew in from wherever he’d vanished to most recently. He traveled on a breeze of energy and money; Jenny was