Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 10

  They had been several days into the heat the first time he had appeared at her back door. She had been sitting at the kitchen table in that coolest moment of the day, so that her coffee wouldn’t make her feel as sick and sticky as it had the day before, when she persisted in drinking it quietly after the children had had their breakfast. She didn’t mind getting up so early if it would ensure her a private moment in which she could sit with her mind blank, until the coffee jolted her into the sense of the day. The door was open to let in the cooler air from outside, and she had looked up to see Lawrence standing at the latched screen. She motioned him to stay there quietly; then she took down another cup and saucer and brought him some coffee, too. They sat outside in the lightening morning, so as not to wake the children. “I saw the light on down here,” he said. “I thought you must be up.”

  The next morning he had stopped again; this time he had wanted to tell her that his sister, Isobel, had called late the night before and was coming for a visit. Dinah had been delighted at the news and glad to see him. The morning after that, he had arrived without a message, just his company, and they sat together on the wooden steps shoulder to shoulder as if it were a long-practiced habit. It was in such a simple way that they began a trifling and unacknowledged conspiracy. No one knew that Lawrence stopped by, but surely no one would have cared; the two of them were such old friends. They discussed their families: their mothers and fathers and siblings, and especially Isobel, whose arrival had become a stable point on which to pin all the suddenly tenuous impressions of the summer.

  “I haven’t seen her in over eight years,” Dinah said, “but even so, I suppose I still think of her as one of my only women friends.”

  “She comes back at Christmas, usually,” Lawrence said. “She seems happy.”

  “Well, how is that for Buddy? Isn’t that awkward for them both?”

  The custom of having Isobel home from school for the holidays was so familiar from childhood—the excitement of it—that it evoked an undeniable pang in Dinah. She looked at Lawrence and saw that his face had closed to the discussion of his sister and Dinah’s brother. She realized that it might be an issue on which one was expected to take sides, but she hardly believed that was appropriate. She hadn’t made any judgment of Buddy and Isobel’s divorce; it had caused her a good deal less confusion and anguish, in fact, than their marriage. “Well,” she went on, a little apologetically, “they were married for pretty long. Almost six years. And, really, they’ve always been together since they were young.”

  “Oh, Lord! When was that?” Lawrence said. “No, we’re amazingly sophisticated in Enfield, Dinah. All kinds of people are getting divorced nowadays.” Dinah looked at him closely to see if this uncharacteristic cynicism was just a manifestation of the old jealousy he had had toward Buddy. They had all coveted Isobel’s exclusive attention in those days. “Well, in fact,” he went on, in a softer tone, “I think they’re glad to see each other. We went together for a long time ourselves, you know.”

  Dinah didn’t give that any real consideration, because the two of them had never made any pretense that there had been anything between them except curiosity and desire and simple affection. They had been protected against terrible vulnerability to each other by the fact that they had shared their childhoods from the earliest moments on, so they were safe from the other’s most severe censure.

  But Buddy had been so much older than the rest of them, and he had never been lightly connected with Isobel. On his part, there had always been a fearful intensity. Even in retrospect, who could tell how Isobel had ever felt, or why? She had been sought after by adult and child alike, and Dinah remembered how her own mother had so often spoken of Isobel with what Dinah could only think of as a sort of wistful admiration. “Oh, she was born forty years old,” Polly would say. “That girl doesn’t have a thing to learn!” Why had Polly repeated that so often and with such mysterious and unusual fervency?

  When Isobel and Dinah had gone off to the movies together, as girls, Polly had ostentatiously given Dinah’s spending money to Isobel for safekeeping. Dinah recounted this with infuriated pity both for her hapless mother, burdened with her own tactlessness, and for herself as her mother’s daughter. Polly had never been able to understand that she didn’t have to insult one person in order to compliment another. But, in fact, thinking about it now, Dinah understood just how wide Isobel’s knowledge of life had been, and how mature her diplomacy. When the two girls were dropped off in downtown Fort Lyman to wander through the stores before the show began, Isobel had dipped her head down over her purse so that her hair swung forward, concealing her face, and then she had looked up to return Dinah’s money to her with an expression that clearly indicated her wry amusement at the folly of mothers and of fathers. She had always had the sense not to disparage Polly in particular; her amused scorn had blanketed all the world around them. Isobel had, indeed, known all the things she needed to know. Dinah wondered if she still did, and if it would still be an attractive trait. Dinah wondered if it would be bearable.

  She had never become settled in any one way of thinking about Isobel. Dinah was protective and possessive of their friendship and at the same time wary of Isobel’s elusive affections. She had spoken with Isobel often over the years, long distance, and Dinah would be sitting in her own house and suddenly realize that she was in a room Isobel had never seen, although Dinah would have with her in that space Isobel’s light, persuasive voice. Sometimes Isobel would talk at great length about her life and her friends—all unknown to Dinah—and Dinah would feel a terrible sense of loss. Isobel would occasionally describe trips she had taken with a lover or a friend, so that Dinah, at her end, would hang up the phone when they finished the conversation and find that her usual generosity of spirit in regard to Isobel had narrowed into a slender knife of jealousy. On the other hand, Dinah could scarcely give credence to the fact that her friend lived a life and moved through surroundings with which she, Dinah, was not wholly familiar. For the most part, she didn’t believe in Isobel’s separate existence, and because of that simpleminded conviction, she did not care that Isobel was not always accessible. But she would be delighted to have her back again for a little while.

  So Lawrence and Dinah sat together every morning, not worrying particularly about conversation, just as they had sat together many years ago. One morning Lawrence had leaned over and kissed her lightly on the temple. He had said, “You know, we’re just getting older, Dinah.” They had both laughed, because that was a reasonable argument for the case that no damage could be done to either of them by further exposure to the other. They already knew all there was to know. Dinah wasn’t even surprised, because, of course, she had already thought about his body; she had thought about his long legs, which she admired now for their strength. But they had not retained the gleaming elasticity of adolescence, just as hers had not. Each hair sprouted from the skin of his lean thighs from separate, dark pinpoints against the pale color of his legs, giving the flesh a very slight, powdery look of indentation. She had considered his body with affection and sympathy, but she didn’t really take her musings any further.

  None of this, though, was any reflection of her feelings about Martin; those feelings were secure, and carefully compartmentalized. In fact, it seemed to her that Martin and Lawrence were of entirely separate times, and it might be that she was slipping alarmingly out of the immediate moment. She had been seduced into this bond with Lawrence by the peculiar state of mind into which she had been thrown, and by the compelling surroundings of her own youth. The secrecy of these few minutes alone each day with a man she found attractive was as pleasurable to her as the luxurious, heavy taste of the scalded cream in her café au lait.

  However, nothing about these quiet and private morning meetings had anything to do with the rest of her life, and Dinah never thought how Pam would view it, either. In any case, over the summer, Dinah’s initial admiration for Pam’s matter-of-fact approach to whatever proble
ms presented themselves day by day had turned into a gentle disdain of a practicality that, in Dinah’s estimation, severely limited Pam’s imagination. Dinah couldn’t believe that her own friendship with Lawrence would have anything to do with Pam’s feelings about the world. Dinah and Lawrence were innocent enough, and besides, Lawrence was her childhood friend; Dinah supposed that such an old association would always be sacrosanct.

  Pam was Dinah’s friend by virtue of their shared circumstances. It was becoming apparent that that friendship had reached what could be thought of as its saturation point. It had gone as far it could go. Neither one of them cared much any longer about gaining the other’s approval, and so their acquaintance remained just that; it had lost the momentum that might have propelled it into a true camaraderie. Those long, card-playing afternoons at the club had grown wearisome, and the two of them had fallen into the practice of showing just their small disapprovals of one another in lieu of open hostility. It came down to the simple fact that there wasn’t a redeeming affection between them that made their differences tolerable to each other. Every little thing was beginning to make them edgy.

  During their days at the pool, for instance, Dinah would find herself disproportionately aggrieved that Pam packed careful, healthy snacks for her son, Mark. Then, when David and Toby and Sarah made their assault on the various vending machines, just a shadow of a frown would crease Pam’s forehead. Dinah observed with some satisfaction that Mark never ate much of his peanuts or raisins, and she explained righteously to Pam that peanuts are a deadly treat for a young child. Much too easily inhaled and choked on. The celery sticks that Pam had so cleverly stuffed with peanut butter were intact and limply greasy by the end of the hot afternoon. The thermos of milk was foul. Dinah didn’t like herself for her own petty delight at Mark’s refusal to accept celery as a substitute for a Milky Way, or at his certainty that milk wasn’t comparable to a Coke. She didn’t like herself for being glad of these things, but there was no stopping it. She accepted the justice of Pam’s unspoken but obvious disapprobation of her casual attitude toward the eating habits of her own three children, but over the issue of Toby’s more and more obvious limp, Pam and Dinah had approached a real argument, and that would have made the rest of the summer awkward and embarrassing.

  After several days of progressively less delicate comments and questions, Pam had finally turned to Dinah at the pool and been very blunt. “For God’s sake, Dinah,” she had said with real heat this time, not tactful coercion, “I’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Van Helder. He ought to look at Toby. He’s Mark’s doctor. He’s very good, I think. I really want you to have Toby looked at! He’s just not using that right leg, and he won’t even swim today!”

  Dinah sat there quietly in a complete rage, but she continued to study the cards laid out before her on the metal table in a game of solitaire. The last few afternoons Pam had been so solicitous of Toby; she had bent and catered to his every whim. She had chatted and talked with him; she had, in effect, certified this imaginary illness of Toby’s. And the symptoms were becoming more severe because of it. “Look, Pam, if you would only stop pandering to his own idea that he’s sick, he would get better. I’ve tried to explain it to you. Please just ignore it. He wants attention, and he needs attention, and I’m doing my best to give him lots of attention apart from his being sick! Do you see what I mean? I don’t want this to become a pattern in his life!”

  Pam was terribly agitated and quite angry. “Well…Oh, well, Dinah, I simply don’t understand how you run your household!” And she had gotten up and begun to stuff towels and suntan lotion into her beach bag, making preparations to leave. The two of them were on the verge of an irreparable breach.

  Finally, Dinah reached out and detained Pam by laying a hand on her arm. She said, in the most soothing and gentle voice she could summon, “Look, Pam, he’s with my father every morning. Toby adores him, and he’s just copying him. Don’t you see? But, of course, Dad’s a doctor, you know. Well, in spite of everything else, he’s a very brilliant doctor.” Dinah knew that Pam didn’t like her father. “You don’t really believe that if he thought there was anything physically wrong with Toby he wouldn’t tell me, do you?”

  Pam went on collecting her things and Mark’s, and Dinah could see by Pam’s face that, in fact, that explanation hadn’t been especially convincing to her. But nothing more was said about it, and they gathered the children and left together, amiably enough. After that afternoon, they had taken to switching off lifeguarding duties on alternate days. The children were familiar enough with the rules and their own capabilities by now that it took only one woman to watch them, in any case.

  But Dinah couldn’t put Pam’s comment entirely out of her mind, because she had given up all pretense of in any way running her own household. She would sit each morning on the top step of the back porch with Lawrence, and above her in the upstairs bedrooms each child slept separately in his or her own heat-shrouded privacy. The conversation between Dinah and her three children had become spare; their coexistence in this house had lost its chaotic, summer quality and drawn out thin like a straight line, plain and determined. Their four lives scarcely seemed even to merge at the edges, as they should be bound to. This turn of events swept over the household beyond her control, and she would ponder it, but she had no idea if she should or could effect any change. She was slipping in and out of roles that she thought she had carefully mapped out for herself. She was alarmed by and angry at her children—when she thought of it—for their surprising and inexplicable refusal to behave as if they were her children. After Lawrence left each morning, Dinah would shudder in anticipation of her day-long and aloof involvement with them. All at once, it seemed to her that those children were regarding her with an intellectual rather than an emotional judgment. It had come as an alarming revelation that she was even to be so considered, and she bristled at the injustice of it.

  David had his secrets, but that wasn’t unexpected; he always had. Lately, even Sarah had been muted in her irrepressibility, as though she had developed a dual judgment, at age four, and recognized in herself a reservoir of ideas that she could explore independently. It was Toby, however, who could in one moment reduce Dinah to despairing inertia. She thought he flaunted the possession of his own milky-sweet summer secrets.

  Every day he, too, had a morning assignation. After Lawrence’s visit, Dinah made it her habit to rinse out the cups and quietly return to her own room to rest until the children woke up toward the middle of the morning. She had watched each day for a week now and seen Toby slip cautiously over the lawn, cross the street, and sit down to wait at her father’s door. Presently her father would join him, towering gauntly over Toby and greeting him with a restrained nod. Dinah couldn’t tell if they spoke. The two of them would make their way around the flower beds, where her father bent to inspect a plant here or there. She had first witnessed this with astonishment; it paralleled so precisely the ritual of her own childhood when she would linger with her father through the garden and tag along throughout the much more serious business of checking on the corn and tomatoes in the plots that had once been so carefully laid out behind Polly’s house. She had particularly remembered the immense pleasure her father had taken in the startling panorama of the blossoming gladioli, which speared the air with their scentless and waxy height and color. He had cut masses of them for the house, but Polly disdained them. She claimed that they had no delicacy, and Dinah thought, now, that that had been a telling point. Her father could not or would not see how gauche such blatant flowers would be to Polly’s aesthetic tastes.

  The very first morning Dinah had happened to look out and see her son with her father, she had felt the weight of nostalgic tears pressing at her eyes, until she had taken in the scene a little longer. Her father progressed slowly through his garden, his lame leg dragging behind him, and Toby, too, matched him step for step, limping alongside. Dinah had gone rigid in immediate panic. She saw a quick flas
h of an image of herself standing among her children as they silently slipped away from her. As she reached out to them to plead her dominion, her hands splayed in entreaty, it was as though her control were a tangible substance sliding through her open fingers, and she was stupefied with helplessness.

  It wasn’t until a day or so later that Dinah finally realized that Toby was limping all the time now, as well as in her father’s company. He lay on a chaise longue at the pool, scarcely moving, or he was quiet and languid on the couch at home, and when he did move, he leaned down heavily on his left leg and brought his right leg forward with great and maddening hesitation. Dinah was so angry and appalled that she couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all to him, though she had heard David ask about it. Toby had scarcely answered him; he had shrugged it off, and David had lost interest. Dinah felt betrayed on all fronts.

  Even her mother, who might not know that Toby was with his grandfather each morning, pressed her on this point. Polly’s usually inert curiosity was piqued, and she was a woman whose curiosity assumed a gently aggressive character.