Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

“Mother?”

“You always were duckers and dodgers.”

“Dodgers?”

She smiled again, and closed her eyes.

It was such a relief to drift, finally. Why had she spent so long learning how? The traffic sounds — horns and bells and rags of music — flowed around the voices in her room. She kept mislaying her place in time, but it made no difference; all she remembered was equally pleasant. She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights — how it billows through the house and wafts the curtains and smells of tar and roses. How a sleeping baby weighs so heavily on your shoulder, like ripe fruit. What privacy it is to walk in the rain beneath the drip and crackle of your own umbrella. She remembered a country auction she’d attended forty years ago, where they’d offered up an antique brass bed complete with all its bedclothes — sheets and blankets, pillow in a linen case embroidered with forget-me-nots. Two men wheeled it onto the platform, and its ruffled coverlet stirred like a young girl’s petticoats. Behind her eyelids, Pearl Tull climbed in and laid her head on the pillow and was borne away to the beach, where three small children ran toward her, laughing, across the sunlit sand.

While Cody’s father nailed the target to the tree trunk, Cody tested the bow. He drew the string back, laid his cheek against it, and narrowed his eyes at the target. His father was pounding in tacks with his shoe; he hadn’t thought to bring a hammer. He looked like a fool, Cody thought. He owned no weekend clothes, as other fathers did, but had driven to this field in his strained-looking brown striped salesman suit, white starched shirt, and navy tie with multicolored squares and circles scattered randomly across it. The only way you could tell this was a Sunday was when he turned, having pounded in the final tack; he didn’t have his tie pulled up close to his collar. It hung loose and slightly crooked, like a drunkard’s tie. A cockscomb of hair, as black as Cody’s but wavy, stood up on his forehead.

“There!” he said, plodding back. He still carried the shoe. He walked lopsided, either smiling at Cody or squinting in the sunlight. It was nowhere near spring yet, but the air felt unseasonably warm and a pale sun poured heat like a liquid over Cody’s shoulders. Cody bent and pulled an arrow from a cardboard tube. He laid it against the string. “Wait, now, son,” his father said. “You want to do things right, now.”

Naturally, this would have to be an educational experience. There were bound to be lectures and criticisms attached. Cody sighed and lowered the bow. His father stooped to put his shoe on, squirming his foot in without undoing the laces, the way Cody’s mother hated. The heel of his black rayon sock was worn so thin it was translucent. Cody looked off in another direction. He was fourteen years old — too big to be dragged on family outings any more and definitely too big for bows and arrows, unless of course you’d just leave the equipment to him and his friends, alone, and let them horse around or have themselves a contest or shatter windowpanes and streetlights for the hell of it. How did his father come up with these ideas? This was turning out to be even less successful than most. Cody’s mother, who was not the slightest bit athletic, picked dried flowers beside a fence. His little sister buttoned her sweater with chapped and bluish hands. His brother, Ezra, eleven years old, chewed a straw and hummed. He was missing his whistle, no doubt — a bamboo pipe, with six finger holes, on which he played tunes almost ceaselessly. He’d smuggled it along but their father had made him leave it in the car.

At this moment, Cody’s two best friends were attending a movie: Air Force , with John Garfield and Faye Emerson. Cody would have given anything to be with them.

“Now, your left arm goes like this,” his father said, positioning him. “You want to keep your wrist from getting stung, you see. And stand up straight. It was archery gave us our notions of proper posture; says so in the instruction book. Used to be that people slouched around any old how, all except the archers. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

No, he didn’t know that. He stood like something made of clay while his father poked him here and prodded him there, molding him into shape. “In the olden days …” his father said.

Cody let go of the bowstring. Thwack . The arrow hit the edge of the target, more sidewise than endwise, bounced off harmlessly and fell among the tree roots. “Now! What’d you go and do that for?” his father asked him. “Did I tell you to shoot yet? Did I?”

“It slipped,” said Cody.

“Slipped!”

“And anyhow, it couldn’t have stuck in the target. Not with that hard fat tree trunk behind it.”

“It most certainly could have,” his father said. “Like always, you just had to jump on in. Impulsive. Had to have it your way. When are you going to start keeping a better rein on yourself?”

Cody’s father (who never kept any sort of rein on himself whatsoever, as Cody’s mother constantly reminded him) lunged off toward the target, muttering and grabbing fistfuls of weed heads which he then threw away. Seeds and dry hulls spangled the air around him. “Willful boy; never listens. Don’t know why I bother.”

Cody’s mother shaded her eyes and called, “Did he hit it?”

“ No , he didn’t hit it. How could he; I wasn’t even through explaining.”

“People have been known to hit a target without a person explaining it beforehand,” Cody muttered.

“What say?”

“Let Ezra try,” Cody’s mother suggested.

His father picked up the arrow and jammed it into the bull’s-eye, dead center. “Want to tell me it can’t stick?” he asked Cody. He pointed to the arrow, which stayed firm. “Look at that: steel-tipped. Of course it sticks. And spongy bark on the tree. I chose that tree. Of course it sticks. You could have lodged it in easy.”

“Ha,” said Cody, kicking a clod of earth.

“What say, son?”

“Let Ezra try,” Pearl called again. “Beck? Let Ezra try.”

Ezra was her favorite, her pet. The entire family knew it. Ezra looked embarrassed and switched the straw to the other side of his mouth. Beck waded back to them. “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes,” he said.

“Ezra? See if you can hit it, honey,” Pearl called.

Beck’s glance at Cody might have been sympathy, or else disgust. He pulled another arrow from the cardboard tube. “All right, Ezra, come on and try,” he said. “Just don’t get carried away like Cody here did.”

Ezra came over, still nibbling his straw, and accepted the bow from Cody. Well, this would be a laugh. There was no one as clumsy as Ezra. When he took his stance he did it all wrong, he just looked all wrong, in some way you couldn’t put your finger on. His elbows jutted out, winglike; his floppy yellow hair feathered in his eyes. “Now, wait, now,” Beck kept saying. “What’s the trouble here?” He moved around realigning Ezra’s shoulders, adjusting his grip on the bow. Ezra stayed patient. In fact, he might have had his mind on something else altogether; it seemed his attention had been caught by a cloud formation over to the south. “Oh, well,” Beck said finally, giving up. “Let her fly, I guess, Ezra. Ezra?”

Ezra’s fingers loosened on the string. The arrow sped in a straight, swift path, no arc to it at all. As if guided by an invisible thread — or worse, by the purest and most natural luck — it split the length of the arrow that Beck had already jammed in and it landed at the center of the bull’s-eye, quivering. There was a sharp, caught silence. Then Beck said, “Will you look at that.”