Fortunate Lives Page 12

  Judith and Larry Croft had come to Dinah and Martin in abject despair in the middle of the year following Toby’s death, when Owen had been asked to leave Swarthmore. The school had been alarmed by Owen’s alternately manic then utterly withdrawn behavior, and the Crofts felt sure he was suffering from the aftermath of having unwittingly caused such a tragedy.

  “I wish they wouldn’t involve us,” Dinah had said to Martin then. “I do know they’re frightened for him. And I know it’s hard for them to ask us….” Her voice broke and she had paused. “I think they expect more than I can manage,” she said, finally.

  That first year, though, Dinah’s several meetings with Owen had oddly enough served to dispel, a little, the fog of constant distress that enshrouded her. Her surprise at feeling even a tiny bit of sympathy for Owen had served its purpose for a while, and her incessant sorrowing had lessened. She had even begun to break free of it for moments at a time.

  Martin had noticed, however, that the better she got to know Owen, the less she cared about him one way or another. While she might pity him, she didn’t like him. Dinah left Toby’s death out of the equation. “Owen peaked at about age sixteen,” Dinah had said several years ago when she had finally washed her hands of him. “It’s a clear case of ‘early bloom, early rot.’ I always think of those people as having deteriorating personalities, but usually they just become boring. There’s something a little scary about Owen.” She thought that Owen was doomed by his own nature, and therefore, as time went by, he simply didn’t interest her much.

  But now and then, when she knew Martin was going out of his way on Owen’s behalf, her husband’s insistence on such generosity of spirit wounded her in an obscure way. She said his continuing association with Owen was a forfeiture of judgment, a denial of pain, even an abdication of responsibility. And this morning she had said that the idea of his working with Owen on a day-to-day basis was a perfect blueprint for disaster.

  What she didn’t know was that when he had found out about Owen’s initial breakdown at Swarthmore, and every time he heard about Owen’s continuing problems, Martin envisioned himself in midair, launched at Owen in the damp gymnasium, tackling him and encompassing him with terrible guilt and responsibility.

  For months after Toby’s death, Martin had envied Dinah her ability to hold her grief in the forefront of her mind and move through it in all her sleepless nights, while his stupid body betrayed him and sought solace in sleep so deep and dreamless that each morning he had to become reacquainted with the actuality of the loss of his son. He would wake in the mornings rested, interested as always in the idea of the day ahead, only to be blindsided by the dismal task of discarding all the promising possibilities.

  Martin felt compelled to seek out Owen’s company, if only to test himself. He knew that it was the leap to unthinking acceptance of his son’s death that had marked his transition from grief to sorrow, and he felt sure that he had hurdled across that abyss, but somehow it was necessary to turn around and see just how far he had traveled and be sure his footing was relatively secure.

  When Martin returned in the late afternoon he settled in the kitchen with a weak Scotch and soda. Christie arrived shortly afterward, returning a sweater that David had left in her car. She stood by David’s side as he worked with Netta at the stove. Anna Tyson grew restless and querulous, and Sarah took her in hand without even being asked, whisking Anna Tyson out to the porch while Dinah came in and out, setting the table, slicing bread, moving the things she needed in the cupboards with a clatter.

  Sarah had seen the furrowed expression of concentration on her mother’s face that generally foreshadowed familial disharmony, an explosion of bad temper, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and she did what she could to forestall it. While Anna Tyson drew pictures at the table on the back porch, Sarah slipped away to phone her friend Elise and tell her that she wasn’t coming over that afternoon. “I can’t help it,” Sarah said. “We have company for dinner.” Sarah was like a seismograph within the family; she could register oncoming tremors.

  But Martin didn’t notice any discordancy in the household; he was simply relieved to be at home after spending the afternoon getting Owen settled into the little anteroom in Jesse Hall.

  Martin took a sip of his drink and reveled in an almost smug pleasure at being in the company of friends, with all the easy time of the summer days still ahead that would fit into the rooms of Dinah’s house. He had given the house over to her emotionally a long time ago. The interiors were however she had invented them—the pictures on the walls, the furniture placement. When he was preparing for a seminar to meet at home and she came into the living room while he was arranging things, she became truly distressed.

  “For God’s sake, sweetheart! You’ve lined all the chairs up straight. It’s not an auditorium in here, you know. It’s a real place. I thought that was the point of having the class here.” He would leave the room while she rearranged the chairs he had brought in from the dining room, and it was a long time before he had understood that this was a gift she had: to arrange the rooms, to place the chairs, to hang the pictures, to maintain the physical equilibrium of their domestic arrangements.

  Christie was scrubbing the built-in cutting board next to the sink, and David was washing the huge stainless-steel stockpot, which was encrusted with pink scum from the boiling beets. Netta went back and forth from one to the other, and finally she sat down beside Martin at the table. He found himself so filled with affection for his wife, his children, his house—even Bob, the cat, circling sharklike around his ankles, campaigning for an early supper—that Netta’s narrow presence appealed to his largess. He wanted to extend to her his idea that serenity could be achieved only in this particular turmoil, this remarkable domesticity. He wanted urgently to explain the chemistry of families.

  She was leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hand, her eyes lowered and ringed underneath by dark circles that made her look excessively fragile. Her fine hair was in its usual frizzled disarray, and her fingertips and nails were tinged bright red, as though she were bleeding.

  He looked around the kitchen, shadowed now at the far end, where Dinah came back and forth from the dining room, stepping over Taffy who had settled stubbornly in the center of her path. He watched his wife as she navigated through the swinging door and around the hunched yellow cat without apparent thought, just habit, and everything about her exact passage to and fro seemed to him just for a moment to be an example that—if he could only articulate it—would be the explanation for everything. The answer to a search for God, a small instance of order in the universe, the plain fact of how every human, regardless of circumstances, will live the largest portion of his life—in pieces, in small, rote moments that are not considered.

  He thought that Netta hadn’t hit upon how to do it yet, how to live any sort of daily life with her daughter. He had felt sorry for her last night at the party, surrounded by families. He attempted to put himself in her corner so that she would pay attention to what he wanted to explain, would learn to give herself over now and then to action without consideration, would relax and lapse occasionally into the mundane. “You know, Dinah has always understood houses… the things in them, how we live in them,” he said, unintentionally falling into a didactic cadence, persuasive and gentle, but deliberate—a tone and attitude that had an agenda. He gestured toward his wife, who was carrying a large soup tureen in from the dining room, and then he expanded the sweep of his arm to indicate the room, the house, the enclosure. “It’s more important than you can understand at first…. Well, for instance, when my mother sent us some antiques that had belonged to my grandmother, it threw everything out of kilter.”

  Netta straightened as he spoke, sitting back in her chair with a resolute expression on her face, as though she wanted to say something, but Martin didn’t notice and simply continued on conversationally. “I’m not sure how to explain it except that we had lived for years and years without these things,
and suddenly we had to accommodate them, because they had emotional weight as well, you see. We just put the furniture here and there, wherever any piece would fit. But Dinah couldn’t stand it. She drew all the rooms to scale on graph paper, measured all the furniture, planned it all so… cautiously. And finally she called in movers and put everything in a chosen place—I mean, she figured it out and rearranged the house. And you see, she knew how to do it. And I don’t even think she cares much about visual effect.” He paused to think about it for a moment.

  “When the movers left she insisted that I follow her through the house, and she said, ‘In case I die I’ve fixed it so you’ll know where the furniture goes if you have to move it to clean, or something.’ She’d marked the placement of everything with safety pins in the rug, or tape under the edge of a picture, or a pencil mark behind a desk. I thought it was funny then, you see. Alarming, too.” And he glanced at Netta to be sure she understood that he was illustrating the profound with the ridiculous. “But the thing is… what she knew… was that to hold on to sanity it’s absolutely necessary to believe that where the chairs go really is important. Do you see what I mean?” He leaned toward Netta enthusiastically, certain that she would understand. “There are ways in which each family defines itself. Not necessarily where the chairs go, of course.”

  Martin had thought of this often as he pondered the continuing functioning of his family after they had experienced a tragedy, and he had become ardent about his theory of the human tendency to define and cling to a structure of normalcy within one domestic unit. He and Vic or Ellen or Dinah had discussed and argued variations on this theme many times, expounding upon it, retreating from it. He smiled over at Netta, who had put both beet-stained hands flat on the table in front of her in preparation for what she was going to say.

  But Dinah, who had overheard bits and pieces of Martin’s conversation, was overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal. She was astounded that he would reveal her most vulnerable self to this most literal of people, and she turned around and went back through the swinging door into the dining room, where she couldn’t hear any more of what was said, so that she could collect herself.

  She remembered the incident exactly. After the movers had gone, she had asked Martin to come with her into the living room. She had pushed a chair to one side and explained the solution she had come up with, pointing out to Martin the little golden, rustproof safety pins fastened to the heavy oriental rug they had also inherited from Martin’s grandmother. He had laughed, and she had glanced up at him, surprised, and then laughed, too. But she hadn’t been able to give it up, this insistence on order in—or control of—her surroundings.

  For a long time Dinah had taken to readying things for the rest of her family in case she, too, might die while she was still needed. She realized she had become obsessive when she would catch a fleeting look of exasperation as she insisted to Martin or David or Sarah that they pay attention. “Here’s the shish kebab recipe written on the inside of The Joy of Cooking in case I die, or something.”

  “If anything happens to me, the red napkins and the red placemats are in the cupboard under the stairs. They’re the only ones that will all fit on the table if you’re serving twelve.”

  By now the compulsion had mostly dissipated, and she fought whatever remnants of it that remained, although only last week she had filled eight large aluminum pans with lasagna made from her own recipe, and carefully labeled and arranged them in the freezer as a barrier to catastrophe. Her lasagna, frozen and ready to be whipped out and heated up in the face of disaster, was a red herring. That’s how she had really felt as she stocked the freezer. It was magic thinking. If she was ready for the worst, it might not happen.

  As she stood stock-still in the dining room, with her hands to her face, which was flushed with embarrassment, she was visited with an image drifting across her sensibilities: Martin was driving a car, and Netta was in the front passenger seat, her hair shoulder length and blowing in dry wisps across her mouth. When she flicked her head to settle her hair on her neck, Dinah had a glimpse of David and Sarah and Toby sitting behind her in the back seat. The children were very young—Sarah’s head didn’t reach the top of the back seat—and Toby was leaning his forehead against the glass, mindlessly watching the landscape pass by.

  Then the image was gone, as though a film had run inside her mind. She lowered her hands and stood alone in the middle of the room, dismayed and perplexed. What could it be that she was having? Not daydreams, which unwind logically from an idea, and certainly not flashbacks or premonitions, and not anything as full-blown as hallucinations. It was as if, in that supercharged state of insomniacs’ exhaustion, some deep, interior part of her mind could not rest and was combining images, actualities and imaginings at random, and delivering them to her as waking dreams—flash-ins—as though she were party to an existence that might have happened.

  When Dinah went back into the kitchen, it was so filled with various guests and activity that she was able to pour herself a glass of wine and slip out the screen door without getting involved in any of the conversations. She made her way down the slate stepping-stones, around the garden, and down to the bottom of the yard. She moved slowly, considering the cedar hedges and making a mental note, as she paused now and then to sip her wine, of just where they needed cutting back.

  She couldn’t decide how she felt about being overtaken by these persuasive little moments of impossible visions—that first image of Netta making soup while her husband and her friend retreated to the bedroom, and now this. It was pleasurable, in a way, to be visited with intimations of other realities, as though it were she who was imaginary and Netta, in her Cambridge apartment, or the children, so young in the back seat of the car, who were real.

  She walked the long hedge all the way around before settling on the old garden bench that had deteriorated and been pulled around to the side of the shed just beneath the garden. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, putting her glass of wine down on the wide arm of the bench.

  The evening wasn’t hot, but the twilight was humid and heavy, and she didn’t move when she heard the screen door slam. It might be someone looking for her, but she wasn’t eager to be found. She assumed it was Christie leaving or Anna Tyson coming outside to play on the old swing set, but then she heard David and Christie in the garden. It was clear from the conversation that David was bending to tend to the plants, because his voice was muted, although she couldn’t discern the actual words Christie spoke, either. Dinah really didn’t care what they were saying. She simply remained where she was, not wanting to get up and muster cheerful small talk with the two of them.

  She rested her head against the wall of the shed and closed her eyes. She was frozen in place just like that when Christie’s voice suddenly rose in an anger so intense that her enunciation was chillingly precise. Dinah was trapped within earshot, having waited too long to make her presence known.

  “What will you do, though, if I am?” Christie said. “I mean, just exactly how will you feel if I’m not just late? Those tests are just over the counter. I mean, they’re not perfect. It could be wrong. I don’t think you even give a shit about anything that happens to anyone else in the world anymore! I don’t know what’s wrong with you!” Christie’s voice had gotten high and raspy against tears. “I’m not sure anymore about you, David! I’m not sure you’re worth caring anything about. We’ve been going together for three years, and I won’t be able to just stop caring! But I don’t like you very much. And I don’t want you to even think of me as a friend anymore. Not even that! Not even a friend!”

  “You know you’re all right, Christie.” David’s reply was devastating, because he wasn’t angry at all. He sounded like someone trying to overcome a bone-deep weariness. He sounded like someone trying to be kind, and Dinah didn’t want to hear any more. She tugged off her sandals and picked up her wineglass and slipped away in the soft grass as though she were a felon, carrying her s
hoes in her hand and hunched instinctively against being caught out. It was simply the last straw, she thought. She was vastly irritated. This was her own house, and yet she couldn’t find anyplace at all where she could retreat. She felt vexed, petty as a child, enormously cross at living in a house in which there was no place for her.

  She had finished her wine, and she let the glass dangle from her fingers by its stem while her sandals swung from her wrist. She traipsed her other hand through the cool, fleshy lace of the cedar hedge as she moved petulantly around the side yard, and only then did it dawn on her what David and Christie had been talking about, and she came to a stop and leaned into the hedge for support.

  If they ever knew she had overheard that conversation, she didn’t suppose David would have any way at all in which he could forgive her, and Christie would never look her in the face again. Yet, as she moved forward, pacing the perimeter of the shaggy hedges, she was struck with the idea of David and Christie having sex. Had she really thought they weren’t having sex? Had she ever thought about it one way or another? In the abstract, the idea of her children’s sexuality had never concerned her, but now she found her pulse quickening and her hands beginning to tremble at the idea of the stupidity of what they’d done. Oh, God! The incredible recklessness.

  She heard Christie’s car door slam, and a moment later had a glimpse of her red Toyota pulling out of the driveway, and Dinah turned and made her way very slowly back down to the garden, where David was bending to pull up weeds between the staked tomato vines. She stood for a moment without speaking, but he didn’t look up to acknowledge her, and she kept her voice very level.