Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 14

  Chapter Eight

  Uncle Buddy and The Homecoming Queen

  Sometime during the night the heat had broken and Enfield was released from its heavy atmosphere by a steady penetrating rain, so that the town no longer lay upon the rolling countryside in its own comprehensive universe. Under a blanket of such heat, even the generation of normal human emotion had built up like static in the contained environment, but overnight it was dispersed. The release of tension was so sudden that it was not altogether a pleasurable sensation. Dinah woke up in that new, bland climate cold and surprised.

  She ached from the chill that unexpectedly filled the room, and she huddled under the single, thin sheet until gradually the sound of the steady rain on the porch roof became distinct to her. The drops fell with such rapid but steady regularity that she knew it was not a shower but a drenching, persistent rain that would last the day. She retrieved the spread from the floor, where she had thrown it in the previous evening’s heat, and tried to sleep again, but the heat was all gone, and her muscles were tight because she had curled into herself during the night in an attempt to stay warm. Finally, she gave up any effort to rest, and she got up in the near-dark and went quietly downstairs. She was jumpy, with a kind of ragged tension due to her need of more sleep, and the new, unsettling chill. She stood for a moment in the kitchen and looked out the window, watching the heavy drops that didn’t even fly against the screens but only fell straight to the ground from the dead gray sky. The weather was a dreary promise; it was numbing to the spirit. She realized, too, that she was watching out into the gloom for Lawrence, who, of course, wouldn’t be running this morning. Outside was only Gilbert Street, sheathed in rain, with the leaves of the trees bending darkly against the branches under the weight of the shiny moisture that clung to them. She finally felt the chill so much that she took her raincoat from the downstairs coat closet and put it on over her thin gown. She didn’t want to risk going upstairs for her robe, because the children might awaken. She prowled the downstairs rooms uneasily.

  It made her restless that Lawrence wouldn’t sit with her that morning while she drank her coffee. Just as she had hated it, she longed now for the voluptuous heat that had held her in a trance, suspended in the summer. These first cold fronts billowing in from the west were always the earliest signal of the season’s inevitable end, and as usual, that idea filled her with unwarranted nostalgia. It strengthened her belief in the everlasting myth of an idyllic summer. As she watched the rain, her ego was pained as well; she would miss the daily routine in which she and Lawrence balanced so cautiously on the edge of sensuality. Each morning it was curiously reassuring.

  She ate some toast and had some coffee, and then she cleaned up, but she felt irritable and hungry still. Dinah was just standing at the front windows and looking out at her father’s house when Buddy’s car pulled up in front of her sidewalk. She didn’t move at first when Isobel and Buddy got out of the car; she just stood there, in sudden panic, with her gown drifting out from under her knee-length raincoat and hanging around her ankles. She hadn’t expected to see Isobel so early, and she was not at all prepared. As edgy as she was, she hadn’t entered a daytime sensibility; she was still in that hazy state that precludes the easy separation of dreams and reality. She didn’t have her wits about her. She only watched from the window, and when Isobel stood there in the rain, Dinah looked on and admired and remembered that sheen she always had about her, as though she were undercoated with a pale gold wash. Through the falling rain, and in that lifeless white light, Isobel, as she stood there shaking the water off her hair, seemed to be the only animate thing in all the world. Buddy came around the side of the car, and Isobel gave up struggling with her umbrella. The two of them dashed for the house.

  Dinah ran back up the stairs in her bare feet. She called to the children to wake them up and tell them to go down and greet the guests. She told them to tell Uncle Buddy to start the coffee. She was still coming out of a daze, and in spite of a natural nervous shyness, she was enjoying a sudden satisfaction that she felt only rarely, when everything seemed to fall into place at once. She continued to see her life in two parts: then and now. She didn’t question that perception, but the idea of having Buddy and Isobel in the house with her this morning pleased her immensely, because she had always thought of Isobel, especially, as part of the elusive past. She had begun to ponder the question her father had asked her on the steps of the post office. She still felt the blunt impact of his austere, unfair judgment and conclusions. But she thought she knew now why she did come back here again and again. She had begun to believe that it was no more than an effort to homogenize her life, to resolve the schizophrenic images of herself that she had in her mind’s eye, two ideas of herself that incessantly combated each other for dominance. She was baffled by the transition from child to adult—almost from victim to victor—and she wanted to understand and see a clear picture of how she had moved from her past to her present.

  From the bathroom she could hear the children being loud and excited downstairs, but she couldn’t hear the words they said, just the noise of it. There was nothing she could do about it right this minute; she felt she must pull herself together—gather her forces—before she went back down. The children adored their uncle; he could handle things for a while. She was so chilled that for the first time in days she ran steaming water in the shower and stood under it until she knew that in an instant the warmth would give out and she would be standing in a downpour the same temperature as the rain outside. She shut off the faucet but stayed within the curtain-enclosed tub in the remaining steam while she dried herself. It amazed her to find that her body adapted to the cold with as little grace as it had coped with the heat.

  When she was dry, she put on a long, heavy robe that had been hanging untouched on the hook since the heat had begun weeks ago. She rubbed away the filmy condensation on the mirror with the flat of her hand and looked cursorily at herself just long enough to comb her wet hair straight back from her face and clip it tightly at the nape of her neck. Dinah imagined to herself that she strove only for neatness. Long ago she had intended to abandon competition with Isobel because of the futility of it. When she came to understand that at the very center of Isobel there was absolute self-assurance, Dinah had meant to give up the battle. There had been a time when she had thought this all out very carefully; she had calculated all the angles, but then Isobel would reappear and not be in the least arrogant, would seem possibly vincible, after all, and Dinah would be—time and again—lulled into the idea of achieving a victory. Dinah didn’t think this all over now in great detail; after all, they were both grown women. Even so, Dinah’s particular kind of beauty was never more impressive than when she turned her clean, bare face to the world without benefit of makeup or the softness of her hair wisping loose to modify the striking alignment of her bones, which eight years could not alter.

  When she entered the kitchen, where everyone was gathered, she realized that despite her shower she was still in something of a fog; she wasn’t properly alert to the present. She could only embrace Isobel mechanically in a show of greeting and retreat to the perimeter of the activity, because all her impressions were still insubstantial. She sat while the room shifted with movement and voices, and she had the sudden idea that the entire scene was a Crayola drawing in which only Isobel, so vivid against the pallid morning, had been outlined in black. In fact, as she sat there seeing Isobel for the first time in so many years, it occurred to her that Isobel’s face looked exactly as if a talented child had drawn it. It was the imperfect arrangement of her friend’s features that was so compelling, even against the precision of the room itself—all straight lines and perfect angles. Dinah thought that it must be the general expectation of balance in beauty that so enhanced the crooked perfection of Isobel’s lovely face. That child who had sat down with a determination to get this portrait exactly right had concentrated so arduously on each separate feature that proportion had fallen
by the wayside—but it had worked to the advantage of the finished product. It would be impossible, thought Dinah, not to contemplate Isobel’s face repeatedly if one was given the opportunity. And, as always, Dinah felt a proprietary pleasure in the beauty of her friend. It was as satisfying to her as if she had said, “I told you so.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you again,” Dinah said across the heads of her children. “You haven’t changed at all, I don’t think. I don’t think you’ve changed a bit.”

  Isobel could only smile across to her in the crowded kitchen. She had simply begun preparing the children’s breakfast while she and Buddy waited for Dinah to dress and come down. These were children she had never met, however, and an entirely strange kitchen. Perhaps, Dinah thought, such necessary and compliant assurance and ease in the world is what really constitutes charm. She watched as Isobel made her way back and forth through the small, warm tide of animated children, and Dinah was unable to energize herself even to attempt to instigate order or calm them down.

  David was too large for his own coordination in his sudden shyness, and he was brash and boisterous and clumsy. Sarah was in the way in her desire to help Isobel with everything. But Toby set Dinah’s teeth on edge. It seemed that every sullen tension once embodied in the lost heat had resolved itself in Toby’s dark presence. He was jealous, and he was whining and complaining about his leg and then about his stomach, and he was in a cringing, clinging mood so that he hung on Dinah. At the same time he was wired with an uncertain excitement, as if his body were circuited with auxiliary power; even his dark hair seemed to bristle out around his head in morosely intense and peculiar agitation. This morning his manifestation of some obscure but genuine despair only aroused in her a quiet fury, and it was an anger she didn’t bother to explore. It wasn’t a very sophisticated anger; Dinah wanted her life—even this moment as it was being played out in the boxlike kitchen—to be sincerely coveted by her good friend Isobel.

  She sat at the edge of the room and looked at her children in the light of the immediate moment, without benefit of their complex history and with a blank mind. Just for an instant she erased the knowledge of her affection for them, and she saw that they were clearly burdensome; she was not to be envied just now. She felt uncharitable about the whole situation. Taking one look at their flushed faces, she allowed herself a rare luxury: she slid out of the present. Her mind took no account of her own past, and so she was absolved, temporarily, of any liability on behalf of these children.

  Toby was in a constant state of motion around the room, studiously ignoring Isobel. “I can’t eat anything, Mama. I just want some ginger ale. I don’t feel good. My stomach hurts.” He moved along the edges of the room, opening drawers, moving the appliances, punching the buttons on the blender. He moved jerkily, leaning against the counters and bracing himself while he pulled his leg along after him. He and Dinah regarded each other for the first time that summer with mutual and unequivocal antagonism. Dinah needed Isobel’s approval of her three children; if they would not seek it, then she would not cajole them; she would ignore them.

  Buddy took up some of the slack. He was sitting at the kitchen table, and he put Sarah on his lap to get her out of the way; now he gathered Toby into one arm and held him so that Toby leaned against his side. “You feel hot, Toby. He feels pretty hot, Dinah.”

  Dinah just glanced at them. “It’s your party today, Toby. You’d better eat some breakfast so you’ll feel well enough to go.”

  Toby hadn’t learned how to handle a celebration of himself with any grace yet, and Dinah remembered just briefly the torture of a birthday party in one’s honor. When she was aware of being her children’s mother, she loved and protected them above all else, and even against and in spite of themselves, but for the first time since their birth she found herself in conflict with her own instincts. Dinah needed to be unencumbered right now in order to deal with the subtle threat of Isobel and any success she might have had in her life. She needed that, or she needed to be the parent of three children who would render her life justifiable in Isobel’s eyes. Dinah wanted her children to be the sanction of all her choices and alliances—her way of life, her marriage—in case Isobel had ever questioned their advisability. After all, Isobel had done what Dinah’s father had wanted Dinah to do. She had chosen not to be married; she had chosen not to have children. So when David and Toby and Sarah persisted in being who they were, Dinah disregarded them as best she could. While Isobel and Buddy talked and saw to the children’s needs, Dinah looked on distractedly, as though she was still not completely awake. She sat on quietly in the kitchen and appreciated, for the moment, the blessed anonymity of being eclipsed.

  Isobel put out plates of toast for the children, and Buddy took up a piece and ate it over Sarah’s head while she still sat on his lap. Toby stood where he was, leaning against Buddy, his face pale and his brown eyes fierce and quiet. Isobel lounged against the counter and ate some toast as well.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Isobel,” Dinah said in a voice that surprised her in its plaintiveness. She lurched into the morning and made an attempt to fortify herself against the summer’s persistent reverie. “How are you? Well…” And she smiled in apology. “I really mean that. How is your job? Isobel, it’s incredible how much you haven’t changed! Really!” With one arm Dinah made a vague, pleased sweep to indicate the delightful magnitude of Isobel’s sameness. But Isobel leaned back and nibbled her toast with a mystifying look of doubt and irritation. She didn’t say anything at all right away; the children were talking to one another or to Buddy and not being listened to especially, and in the ill-lit kitchen Dinah immediately understood that there was something complicated in Isobel’s life, but she didn’t dare to ask yet what it might be.

  “Well,” Isobel said, with an oddly bitter note following so closely on the heels of her cheerful breakfast-making, “I’ve gotten eight years older, just like you have.”

  Dinah was angry that this hurt her feelings so much. Did Isobel mean that Dinah seemed eight years older? And if that was what she meant, did she also mean to hurt Dinah’s feelings? Maybe she didn’t even realize what she’d said and how it had sounded. Dinah began to remember uneasily that she always wondered these things about Isobel; Isobel’s intentions were so slippery.

  “Oh, everything is going pretty well,” Isobel continued, no longer ironic, but reflective. “I guess everything is fine.” She turned full around to Dinah to smile wholeheartedly, and Dinah believed her entirely, as she always did. “How do you suppose it happened,” Isobel went on, still pensive, “that all the things we expected for ourselves actually came true?”

  Dinah glanced at Buddy to see if he felt slighted by this last statement—Isobel was saying, apparently, that he had been unnecessary to her fulfilled expectations—but he was not even listening to them. He was contentedly reading a cereal box aloud to Sarah, and he sat there placidly with the children around him just as a cat sits with her kittens after they have eaten. Isobel was standing completely still, lost in some idea, and she shook her head slightly, so that her bronze hair swung like a polished bell.

  “Well, you’re still just lovely, Dinah. Of course! And all your pretty children…You have changed, though, I think.” It made Dinah uncomfortable to be closely scrutinized. Some mornings she was lovely, some mornings not. That was the age she was. “Dinah, you look like a grownup!” Isobel was delighted to discover this, and then she became rueful again. “And I’ve come to be known as ‘charming Isobel.’ A friend said to me the other day that she didn’t know anybody who didn’t like me.” She looked over at Dinah as if they were conspirators, but Dinah was blank.

  “That’s not altogether a compliment, you know,” Isobel explained. But Dinah didn’t see why not. Isobel intimidated her by the wily turns of her intellect. “But it’s what I had planned on, and now I have it.”

  “Well, it’s what we both planned on,” Dinah said. “In fact, I was really surprised when I began to
meet women who don’t care if people like them or not.”

  Isobel passed over all this. “But you’ve become the grownup!” she said with that deceptive generosity with which she had many times bequeathed a fleeting victory to Dinah. This time Dinah knew it was absurd, and she was surprised, because she had never known it was a contest. Isobel had always been a grownup. That old instinct—like the one between two sisters—to protect Isobel from any criticism save Dinah’s own flooded through her, and she got up and took her friend by the shoulders to shake her affectionately and then just embrace her lightly once more.

  “My God, Isobel, of course no one dislikes you! How could anyone? Why would they?”

  Isobel’s expression remained reflective, even though she smiled to thank Dinah for her loyalty. She ate a few more bites of toast and still seemed to be mulling over some thought or other.

  Dinah began to make herself busy around the kitchen in sudden nervous apprehension. She didn’t want to know of any threat to Isobel’s happiness or peace of mind. She didn’t want to believe that either one of them had changed very much in relation to the other.

  “Come on,” she said, “we can go into the living room and have some coffee while the children watch television.” Toby was right behind her, so that she stepped back into him and then leaped forward in irritation. “What, Toby? What’s the matter?”

  “Why is he limping?” Isobel asked quietly from across the room, and Dinah waved the question away but then turned her head in Isobel’s direction just to say softly, “Well, possibly this morning it’s all for your benefit.” But before she turned back to her son, she saw Buddy’s face cloud over with vexation aimed in her direction, so she stooped down to Toby with a concern only she and he knew was tense and partly counterfeit. “What’s wrong, Toby? What do you need?”