Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read online

  She and Martin spent the days strolling through the town, eating their dinner at the picnic table under the pin oak in the back yard, and visiting with her family and good friends. They were only three blocks from her mother’s house, and only one and a half blocks from the exact place in the sidewalk where Dinah had fallen her first time out on roller skates and chipped her front teeth. They were only a ten-minute walk from Dinah’s grammar school, and only a ten-minute ride from her high school in Fort Lyman. As they walked down the shady streets or sat at a meal, Dinah would often point out these remarkable coincidences to Martin and the children, these astounding circumstances of her own childhood. Everyone would walk along the sidewalk with her and regard the tree in which Alan Brooks had built a tree house one summer. “And he’s dead now,” Dinah would say, bemused. “Buddy wrote me that he died in New Orleans.” It was a mystery. But the children wouldn’t think of what she was saying, although possibly these words would one day be to them one of those bewildering facts about one’s parents that everyone accrues over the space of a childhood. Her children might one day say, “And my mother fell down and chipped her front teeth the first day she ever tried to roller-skate.” No doubt they would see in their mind’s eye the very spot in that little village where it had happened, and having gained their independence at last, with the usual struggle, they would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of having had so unexpectedly vulnerable a mother.

  Or maybe they would never think of it again. Maybe they would think of the day Sarah had been lost, or the morning their grandmother had reached down David’s throat to retrieve a piece of candy that would have choked him to death. To think of it! He would not have existed past that moment. They, too, experienced the most crucial turning points of their childhoods here. And how could they not? All winter, when the snow lay around their house in West Bradford, Dinah would urge them, “Wait, just wait until we get back to Enfield this summer.” When the children raced up and down the stairs, not holding on to the banister and making too much noise, Dinah would follow after them in great aggravation. “For God’s sake, can’t you wait until we’re in Enfield, where there’s no snow? Then you can go outside and run around.” And even though the children had seen pictures of their mother when she was a child playing in front of their grandmother’s house in the snow, and even though they spoke on the phone to their uncle and grandmother at Christmas, when there was much talk of snow for want of other conversation, David and Toby and Sarah assumed that there never was any snow in Enfield. Enfield was a place of hot sun and light and long summer days.

  The trip itself, however, always proved to be a terrible strain on the general good nature of the family. After two endless days on the road, all three children grew edgy and cross. Bribes and diversions no longer pacified them. This year, even Sarah was old enough to join in the melee.

  “Toby’s looking out my window, Mama! He’s looking out my window!”

  “Toby’s sitting in the middle. What can he do?”

  “I didn’t look out his window when I was sitting in the middle!”

  If only they were old enough and wise enough to remember to look out for the danger signals. Martin and Dinah recognized the signs forewarning each child’s anger or distress—they knew their children so well. And the children knew their parents equally well, but they weren’t so versed in the art of survival. From their vantage point, they could only see their mother’s hair swing gently from side to side as she shook her head just slightly, in a silent conversation with herself. One corner of her mouth was pulled askew; she crossed her arms and grasped her elbows tightly and stared out the window.

  “Oh, Mama, Toby’s…”

  And then Dinah half turned in her seat and stared at them in fury, and all three children were immediately filled with remorse.

  “Well, damn it, Martin, stop the car!” she said in deadly, measured calm. “Stop this damned car! There’s only one answer to this!” Her voice was so ominously low that the children looked away from her in nervous discomfort. And Dinah herself, with the blood beating in her ears, was not paying attention, either. In her rage she chose not to see the effect of her anger. “We will just put out Toby’s eyes! We will just, goddamn it, put his eyes out!” She turned to stare at them more directly, and she gripped the back of the seat with one tense hand. At last, her voice rising, she said, “Will that make you happy, Sarah? Then, I swear to God, he will never look out of your window again! That should do it…”

  Martin, of course, had not stopped the car and, in fact, was driving on placidly enough. “For God’s sake, Dinah…” he finally put in. “Look! We’re getting close,” he said to the children. “See what landmarks you can find.”

  The children gladly followed his suggestion. Sarah ground the heels of her hands into her eyes to keep from crying, and the other two observed with relief that their mother turned back to look straight ahead after directing one incensed glare at their father. The children did not take this too much to heart, though. Even Sarah, at age four, had already perceived enough to know that her mother would die—really would die—before she would put out Toby’s eyes. She quite rightly absorbed her mother’s outburst as a rebuke to herself, and she continued to wipe at her tears furtively, and so she missed the first major landmark.

  Toby spotted it, through Sarah’s window, and he bounced in his seat. “I see Aunt Betsy’s! There’s Aunt Betsy’s!” They came down the long hill and passed the bizarre diner once known as Aunt Jemima’s, which had for years been a towering black mammy whose brick skirt housed a quite ordinary bar-and-grill. Now it was Aunt Betsy’s, and the huge head loomed over the highway hideously pink, with gray rather than black hair escaping from the immovable bandanna.

  For a while, all their tension was dispelled, and it was Sarah who, having knelt on the seat to repossess her window, shrieked to them all, “Look! ‘Dale Loves Sophie to Death’! There it is!” Even though she couldn’t read she knew it well. “There it is! ‘Dale Loves Sophie to Death!’”

  Their station wagon passed beneath the railway bridge on which this legend had been emblazoned ever since they could remember. The children were finally able to believe that they were indeed close to home. And David started up the song:

  A hundred bottles of beer on the wall,

  A hundred bottles of beer.

  If one of those bottles should happen to fall—

  Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.

  Family theory had it that when the song was done, and there was only one bottle of beer left on the wall, they would be home, although this had never yet been the case. But everyone was relieved, because when the song was done they would be close enough. Martin drove over the narrow back roads smiling to himself, and Dinah noticed.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Oh, I just have always liked all this. It’s genuine Midwestern-tacky. Aunt Betsy’s diner. And things written all over the water tanks and bridges in huge letters.” He glanced at Dinah to smile at her in what he meant to acknowledge as an admittedly smug conspiracy. Not for a moment had he imagined that in being so blatantly provincial he did not also belittle himself. But Dinah was looking rigidly out the window.

  “Well,” she said, so that he could hear her but so that the children in the back seat continued their song, “you think that ‘Dale Loves Sophie to Death’ should be typed, I suppose. And tacked up on a little bulletin board in Jesse Hall. You know, there’s something about real, honest-to-God emotion—I mean real things that real people go around feeling—that you just never can understand. I mean, ‘Dale Loves Sophie to Death’ is not exactly a lower-case sentiment! I don’t think you know a damned thing about that! You just go mincing through your life with almost nothing but lower-case sentiments!” She made movements with her hands and her head, like a person taking small and hesitant little steps, and she pursed her lips to indicate her immense disdain.

  He had been watching her with a startled expression, and when he had taken it in, he
laughed at the idea of himself, rather thickset and solid, mincing into his various meetings, teaching his classes, mincing through his days. And she laughed, too, but it made her even more angry to find herself amused. She saw as well that Martin was wounded, and it made her so uncomfortable that she returned her gaze to the countryside that swept by outside her window. They both sat there in the front seat bewildered by her fury. They knew that she had been unfair, and Martin was not hurt by what she had said—he couldn’t imagine that it applied to him—but he was hurt because she was so angry.

  The day after their arrival, Martin and Dinah and the children abandoned their unpacking in the afternoon and walked down through the village to Dinah’s mother’s house. By now, it had become customary that a party of sorts would come together that evening, and Polly had made a routine of the preparations. She had bought a ham the day before, and Dinah stood at the counter scoring it in a diamond pattern and rubbing it with brown sugar. After she scored it, she would decorate it with rounds of sliced pineapple and maraschino cherries and put it in the oven to glaze. She looked out at the twilight approaching and was struck with sudden petulance.

  “This is a little like decorating my own birthday cake,” she said to her mother, who was transferring cartons of take-home potato salad to a cut-glass bowl. “Maybe you should line that bowl with lettuce leaves or something first, Mother. Don’t you think?” But then Dinah thought of her father leaving the table in a cold rage one evening with a face like ice, saying, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe we should just rent out our kitchen or turn it into a spare room, for all the use it gets.” Dinah had been aware then that some key element of her parents’ alliance was being defined for her when her mother made an eloquent sweep of her arm, palm upward, in a helpless gesture of apology and bewilderment. But her father had already left the room. With that in mind, Dinah turned to look at the potato salad once more. “No, it’s fine. We don’t know for sure that anyone will be coming by, anyway.”

  But her mother wasn’t really listening. Polly had finished with the cut-glass bowl and had deposited all the little paper cartons in the trash. Dinah did regard that salad with dismay, however, because, as usual, it looked even more gelatinous and unappetizing in the pretty bowl than it had in its own containers, and summer after summer this had perplexed her. Her mother leaned against the counter, resting her weight on one narrow hip, and smoked a cigarette. She gazed through the window with one eyebrow slightly raised, in an attitude of complete indifference to her surroundings. Dinah had come across her mother thus transfixed so often that she no longer perceived it as a mystery. She watched her for a moment in admiration, however, because, caught in the dusky light, her mother—worn out, with her flesh drawn and lined and the skin at her jaw beginning to hang a trifle loosely from the bone—was lovelier than she had been when she was younger. The bare bones of her mother were coming to light, and Dinah thought that Polly was the only woman she knew who could combine a certain brittleness with an air of languid grace. But Dinah no longer puzzled over what her mother might be thinking.

  On the porch, the children built card houses with the incomplete and abandoned packs of cards they had ferreted out of obscure drawers here and there around the house. They weren’t building with much success, however, because the floorboards were so worn that they didn’t afford sufficient purchase, and at crucial moments the bottom cards slipped out from beneath the upper construction. Polly’s house resembled her person, by now. Even though her business was interior design, and she was good at it, her own house had been left to its own silent transmutations. The bare bones of the house were also coming to light, so that the walls seemed only a thin veil over the basic construction, and the furniture had a delicate look of age.

  Martin sat at the other end of the porch with a newspaper resting on the knee of one crossed leg and talked with Dinah’s brother, Buddy, and with Lawrence Brooks, who had come across the lawn from next door, where he had lived all his life. Now that house was Lawrence’s own house. He was a lawyer and no longer just a child next door. Lawrence’s wife, Pam, idled over with their two-year-old son propped on one hip and sat down next to Dinah, and they began to chat.

  As she listened and put in a word now and then, Dinah stared out at the communal lawn shared by the Brookses’ and her mother’s houses, which sat at right angles to each other. She studied the myriad tiny crosshatched branches of the flowering bushes that grew untended around the stone patio in the center of the yard. She hadn’t much to say to Pam. Pam was so young, and her son seemed to take up both of their energies. The two women talked about the little boy, though it was apparent to each of them from the timbre of the other’s voice that neither meant to or wanted to.

  At the edge of their conversation, Dinah heard David badgering whomever he could find to come and play Monopoly with him, and Martin, who would do almost anything with David, finally got up, and the two of them went to find the board. Buddy and Martin and David and Dinah’s mother settled around the card table at last and divided the money while Pam and Dinah went to mix drinks and set out dinner. Lawrence, still seated at the darkening edge of the porch, opened Martin’s discarded newspaper and kept a casual eye on the other children.

  This was the house in which Dinah had grown up, and her childhood was so fascinating and mysterious to her in retrospect that each room was of great significance. Even the unique and musty scent of the house, a scent like no other, tantalized her with the possibility of an important revelation. So this first night back in her mother’s kitchen she could not abide the company of the innocent Pam. Dinah set out food at random and with no show at all of appreciation to Pam, who could only follow her about and try to help. And from the porch the sounds of the Monopoly game being laid out and getting under way made Dinah clench her teeth in apprehension, because David was, to his parents, like a rare gem set between them. He was not necessarily the nicest of their children, nor could it yet be said that he would be the most handsome, but he had been the first. It was not even that they loved him best; of course, he was not always lovable at all. It was just that beneath the surface of their consciousness there was an awareness of David that registered every shadow and nuance of his altering sensibilities. Their curiosity could never be assuaged by anything he might reveal about himself. They yearned after whatever it was that was at the very core of his personality, so puzzling to them was his blossoming independence. Dinah could hear his clear voice babbling above the others, and she noted the effort he made to suppress the keenness he felt for the competition. Listening to the progress of the game was a little like refusing Novocain at the dentist’s; it kept her on edge in anticipation of a painful shock.

  She turned to Pam and smiled at her. She picked up Pam’s little boy, Mark, who was getting into everything, and feigned interest in him. But after a few moments of this she was overtaken by unease, and she realized that she could not be gracious tonight. She thought she felt the beginnings of a cold amassing like clouds behind her brow, and she was anxious. She took her drink out to the patio, though the air had grown chilly, and sat at a distance from her family and friends. Here she was once more, and she sat in a lawn chair expecting the childhood comfort of early evening, with grownups nearby talking over their drinks, to descend upon her. She watched with care to see how the darkness encroached upon the margins of the yard; she impressed upon herself the phenomenon of the intricate tracery of the foliage losing its distinction, so that each tree and each bush became a shaded mass. She evoked all these familiar impressions, but the accompanying sensation of nostalgic pleasure did not surface. No mellowness spread like the warmth of alcohol through her limbs; she found she could not call up the renewed faith that all is well, that all will be well. In fact, all she was feeling was increasing irritation. The image of that ham stuck fast in her mind. There it sat, bedecked like a Christmas tree, waiting to be carved, and only Pam and her baby to attend it. Where were the grownups? So she roused herself and went back to the hous
e to set about the serving of dinner.

  A second circle had formed around the card table to see how the game was progressing, and so she, too, stopped to watch. Immediately she was aware of her son’s fragile courage hanging so vulnerably in the air when she caught sight of his shining eyes and large gestures of bravado. He made a great show of cavalierly paying a debt. Buddy sat across from him, leaning back in his chair, accepting David’s money with a grin and carefully sorting it into the proper piles. “I’m gonna clean up! Oh boy, I’m really gonna clean up!” he said with mock greed. But Dinah watched him as only a younger sibling would, knowing that Buddy didn’t play games except to win. He was flicking an imaginary cigar between his fingertips and patting his stomach with the satisfaction of a contented businessman. David relaxed and smiled at him with unassumed pleasure; Buddy’s pantomime seemed to assure him that this was only a game. Dinah could scarcely bear it.

  Her mother sat with all her bills gathered into a pile that she held in one hand and ruffled absentmindedly with her thumb. She rolled the dice with seeming indifference. Who could tell if it was real? She was looking out into the yard when the dice fell, and she looked around at the numbers on them almost in surprise and reached for her cigarette. She moved her token to St. James Place and completed a monopoly, the first of the game, and David sat up on his knees in excitement to look over the board. “Wow! You got the first one, Polly!”

  “Oh, yes, I guess I did,” she said, paying out the money for the deed. But she would win as usual, Dinah knew. Polly couldn’t lose at games, playing, as she did, with tremendous detachment and no thought given to bribing her luck, while her competitors silently tried to strike up bargains with God or fate. Polly would finally wander away from the game, uninterested even in her own victory. It was maddening.