Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 20

  When she passed by the gift shop, he got up to meet her, and they walked side by side through the parking lot. The rain had eased into a pale mist. “Pam put David and Sarah in sleeping bags on the sun porch at our house,” he said. “She thought you wouldn’t mind. They were so excited when Martin came, and just by the whole day, I guess. She thought it would be best to get them calmed down and to sleep.”

  “She’s wonderful to have done that,” Dinah said. “She always knows…” She had stopped to turn to him and tell him this with a smile of thanks, but all at once she found herself caught up in absurd and heavy sobs. “Well, she shouldn’t have to do that! Where did Buddy and Isobel go? What about Polly? She’s their grandmother!” She was managing to be very loud while continuing to cry. “Even Dad should have had the sense to do something!” But Dinah felt an almost delightful resentment clarify itself for her, like the heavy rolling out of steel plate in a mill. Then that very comforting resentment suddenly deserted her, and her crying went far beyond so sure an emotion into tears of appalling loss and sorrow. She felt a sadness large enough to have encompassed the most dire prognosis Dr. Van Helder might have given her. She stood there miserably at a loss for any way to regain control, because she no longer had a fear of Toby’s death. What she was left with was the fear that she could never make up having failed him. She knew that fear was justified.

  Lawrence was so startled and embarrassed that Dinah managed to subdue herself, and she started moving along again with intermittent, inelegant sobs. She walked along beside Lawrence, wiping the tears from underneath her eyes and tucking up wisps of hair that had fallen loose. She was bedraggled physically and spiritually.

  “It’s all right, Lawrence. I’m sorry. God! I’m just tired. Would Pam mind if we stopped to get something to eat? Do you think we could just go to Snow’s?” She knew Pam wouldn’t mind. Pam was without pettiness, without vindictiveness, without that terrible needfulness of which Dinah could not divest herself.

  Dinah had asked to stop at Snow’s Tavern because she knew it would be very nearly deserted, and she was too tired to make any effort at affability. Snow’s had enjoyed a decade of unreasonable popularity—the decade that encompassed Dinah’s and Lawrence’s adolescence and eventual departures. It had been the place everyone gathered to drink beer or to celebrate after football games. Real romances had begun and ended at Snow’s, and the owner must have sent up a prayer of bewildered thanks; he certainly hadn’t done much more. The place was as dismal now as it had been then, only now it was no longer enlivened by any promise of excitement or the probability of great fun to be had.

  She and Lawrence sat in one of the flimsy orange-stained plywood booths along the wall, and Lawrence went to get her a Scotch sour and a beer for himself. At Snow’s there were no waitresses, and it used to be that it took some time to edge up to the bar and retrieve a pitcher of beer and the large paper cups they dispensed for free. There were only a few people here tonight, one other couple, and several men sitting at the bar, each by himself. Someone had started the jukebox, which had long ago been abandoned by or bought from its franchise and was still stocked with the songs of Dinah’s own youth. There was a disco in town now, and no one would come to Snow’s for the food. Dinah wondered fleetingly why anyone else was here at all; they could be in nicer places.

  In fact, while Lawrence waited at the bar for their sandwiches, Dinah looked around at the narrow, dreary room and longed momentarily for the hygienic surroundings of a Wendy’s or McDonald’s, but she would have found the unfaltering cleanliness and cheer even more oppressive than this glum atmosphere which bordered on squalor. Some places make demands on their patrons by their very nature—Bloomingdale’s expects more than Macy’s. McDonald’s would demand infinitely more from Dinah than Snow’s, which, she realized, required no effort of any kind.

  Lawrence came back to the table to bring her her drink, and he carried his beer back to the bar to wait for their order. She sipped her drink, which had been made from a powdered mix and was vile, with half the undissolved powder settled into a sludge at the bottom of her glass. She didn’t care. She stirred it thoroughly and drank it through her straw, because tonight she wanted this drink very much.

  Before she had left adolescence and found out a little more, it had always seemed to her that dancing was far sexier than sex. And she looked around the room now, remembering how much they had danced and how addictive it had been. Dancing was all expectation; dancing was testing sex out; it was the first matching of rhythms. She and Lawrence had been natural partners for dancing—they moved as though they had the same nervous system. They had been surprisingly less successful as lovers, at least from her point of view. Dinah felt awfully mellow all at once, and she sat there waiting for Lawrence and listening to an old recording of Sam Cooke singing “You Send Me.” She remembered being on the dance floor, barely moving, held in a paralyzing embrace by some boy, usually Lawrence, while Sam Cooke’s soft persuasive voice enshrouded them in the idea of love and sentiment and sensuality. It had been wonderful to be pretty and sought after, and to have ahead of you all the things there were to know just waiting to be found out. The record ended, and another clicked down, getting ready to play, while Dinah ate the pulp from the stingy slice of orange in her drink. All of a sudden, Ray Charles was singing “I Gotta Woman,” and when the song began, with that low moan of agony and anticipation, Dinah’s whole body prickled with a knowing, cocky intimation of pure physical ecstasy and all its ramifications. That moan was like the preamble of sex, a teasing, whining, clamant music that filled her with the same amorphous eroticism it had engendered in her when she was fifteen. Lawrence brought their sandwiches, and they sat together eating for a few minutes.

  “You know,” she said, “now that I think back on it, it doesn’t seem to me that it was so bad to be young. Well, I worry about my children. David’s ten! It’s horrible to think of all the things they’ll have to go through. I mean, they will have to suffer a lot, but…well, it’s exciting. It is! To be that age.” They both knew what age she meant—not ten, but somewhere between thirteen and twenty.

  Lawrence was chewing his sandwich, so there was a pause, and a look of wistfulness became very plain on his face. “I don’t think there ever was a time—or ever will be—better than that, better than when we were in high school.”

  She hadn’t meant anything like that. She hadn’t had any notion so absolute. She thought of a word in its French pronunciation—sévère. She was appalled. “Lawrence! That’s not true! I didn’t mean that at all. You aren’t remembering it very clearly.” But she thought of Lawrence’s life, wending its way through all the hours in his own childhood house, now refurbished and rejuvenated by his own wife and his own child, but what she recognized in that image was predictability. His life, to a degree, was predictable, but, after all, predictability can be a comfort; once they had longed for it. Twenty years ago, though, the final arrangement of their lives had been open-ended. Perhaps it was a maudlin indulgence now to bemoan this apparent finality; perhaps it was arrogance to believe things were settled; perhaps it was tempting fate. And yet they both were convinced of the truth of it. The events that might astonish them now—the only things that could not be foreseen—were the unpleasant surprises.

  Lawrence offered to get her another drink, and even though she had finished eating, and they could have gone home, she nodded. She was too tired to go home to the house that would be entirely empty, because in the uninhabited rooms her ragged sensibilities would overtake her. She sat in the booth waiting for Lawrence and subsided warily into nostalgia. She knew that tonight she was unusually susceptible to a yearning for the past, a yearning to be without responsibility, and she went on longing for it even though she knew it had never existed for her. Her life had always been more complicated than that.

  On the weekends, when Dinah was fifteen or sixteen, it wasn’t uncommon for her friends to gather at her house and spend the day in her room, sitting cross-
legged on the floor discussing that night’s dates with an edge of protective scorn in their voices. An awkward moment could develop if any girl made it clear to the rest of them how much all this might matter to her, how much she might care about some boy. They gathered at Dinah’s because no limits were put on their behavior there. The girls could sit and light each other’s cigarettes one off the other, in a jaded and sophisticated manner. If they slept over, there was no curfew to obey; no one noticed if they came in drunk or disarrayed. They were treated dangerously like adults. Polly was simply uninterested, for the most part. She wandered around the house, halfheartedly doing one thing or another. Generally she spent the weekends stretched out on the long chaise in her bedroom, reading.

  But Dinah did remember one afternoon, when Polly had knocked on the bedroom door and entered with a silver tray of delicately made triangular sandwiches, carefully trimmed of crusts, and glasses of iced tea with mint in it. She passed these around to all the girls, then sat among them eating, too, and her face had about it that fey, abstracted look that was, in fact, enchanting. One wanted to pull toward oneself the fine and gossamer attention that was so seldom captured. The girls regaled her with more and more daring, more intimate stories of their lives. Polly exclaimed and nodded and smiled dreamily. Dinah thought, now, that she and her friends—who had they been, those girls?—had been alert to Polly’s air of lazy reverie because she remained so mysterious. If Polly had some secret, that had been a moment she might reveal it. She had said, all of a sudden that afternoon, and right into the conversation the girls were carrying on, “You know,” with an imploring gesture—listen with pity, she signified—“I think the very best thing about dates…oh, at Wellesley and even at Emma Willard when we were allowed out…the most wonderful part of it all was the endless…preparation. It was so lovely,” she had gone on, “to be getting ready! It could take days, you know. Planning what to wear, what to say. Would we have a wonderful time? Would it be awful? And the worst—would it be dull?”

  The girls in Dinah’s bedroom, and Dinah herself, gazed at Polly and saw her beauty and excitement as it must have been. So much had she transformed herself into that same anticipatory girl that when she was gone from the room they were left to look ahead to their own evenings with less hope. Their own expectations seemed flatter, less animate, by comparison to all the things Polly had once felt were ahead of her.

  But now that Dinah remembered it, she thought that Polly had been right. In the late afternoon all the girls—whoever happened to be around—would get into one of their cars and go out for hamburgers somewhere, all of them with their hair wound on pastel plastic rollers and their bangs and side curls molded into place and plastered to their skin with Scotch tape. Each girl tied a silky scarf over her rollers, so that Dr. Briggs said that from the rear a car full of them looked like a bunch of balloons. “Why don’t you just all grow up to be hairdressers?” he asked. He was elaborately, flatteringly disdainful of the effort they took on behalf of beauty. He would talk about the natural beauty of unadorned youth. He was very charming. He didn’t want them to waste their time, and the implication there, of course, was that their time was valuable. If Polly happened into the room during one of these bantering little lectures, she would only smile with a touch of derision.

  When all the girls were in the car together at the Monument Drive-In, where they ordered their dinner from one of the microphones at each parking place, those girls felt their own power. The boys cruising around and around in their cars could see that these girls were not available to anyone but those they chose to see. Their elaborate, cocooned heads in their colored scarves were signals of their desirability. They had to hurry. They needed their hamburgers, their french fries, and their lemon Cokes right away. They had to hurry, because they had to go right home and get dressed.

  But when their dates arrived, the boys were usually kept waiting while the girls had one last cigarette, settled back on Dinah’s bed, or changed clothes once again—swapping a skirt or a blouse; they traded off with one another. Finally, they did leave, but they went off into the evening with a faint air of regret.

  When Isobel was home, the tempo changed. She would be seeing Buddy; she was eager to get away. She dressed in a flash and never did more than brush her straight thick hair back and secure it with a tortoiseshell barrette or a plain ribbon. She had no patience with the knowing, leisurely, confidential atmosphere of Dinah’s bedroom full of girls. In fact, she hardly ever joined them there; she usually dressed next door at her own house, but she would sometimes come over to wait for Buddy and smoke a cigarette. She was like a needle, slipping in and out of the room, putting on lipstick, teasing Dinah’s father, or drawing Polly into animated conversation.

  “Oh, I’m getting married tonight, Dr. Briggs. I’m eloping.”

  “Then I’ll greet you in the morning as a daughter-in-law, I guess,” he would say. Not really taking up the game, since it wasn’t especially amusing, but catering to Isobel because he admired her so. She had gone away to school; she was planning on a career—many of them. She was getting out into the world. He had never understood his own children’s reluctance to leave home, to go to a good school, nor had they. They had only known not to leave these two parents together; they knew it would be perilous to leave them isolated in this house by themselves with no go-between. Buddy and Dinah had never said this to each other; each of them had instinctively come to feel this, independently of the other.

  Dinah sat looking around Snow’s and remembered Isobel’s influence in her life; she remembered the envy she had felt for Isobel’s possession of dull and predictable parents, and she also saw that even Isobel had been young and fatuous, simply on a different level. For a long time Dinah had been made miserable by the idea that Isobel could so easily command more of her mother’s attention, her father’s approval, and her brother’s affection than Dinah could attain through a sustained and everlasting effort. It was still true, and it was still painful.

  Her father had never attempted to hide his admiration for Isobel. She had always been able to amuse him in a way that Dinah could not, and would not have been able even to attempt. In fact, it was Dinah’s father around whom the girls, their dates, the gossip, the latest news, all orbited. He was exotic. The things he deplored! All the things he wanted them to know!

  “You girls, you girls! Don’t give up your lives to these boys. Use your minds!”

  They were so interested to hear this exhortation. They were so vain, and they had an insatiable craving for their own reflections thrown back at them through someone else’s eyes. When their dates arrived, the boys sat with Dr. Briggs to wait for whomever it was they had come to get, and they sat there intimidated. Dinah’s father would sit in his study sipping a drink, leaning back in his chair, casually dressed on the weekends, but impeccable in chino pants and Sperry Top-Siders—“I grew fond of them in med school, in the operating room. If there was much blood on the tile, they would always keep you from slipping.” He would explain how the treads were minutely cross-hatched. He would sit in his house and gently harass these vulnerable young men; he would whittle away at them with a mild, sardonic tone. “But Nixon? You ought to look at his face when he speaks. What do you really think?” He would lean back in contemplation. He would try to pin them down in other ways. What did they think, he wanted to know. “Now, take God. Whichever one”—and he would wave his hand to suggest their choices—“do you think He’s up in the heavens with his tally sheet? Right this minute?” What could they say, these young Republican Methodists and Episcopalians? They had never thought anything through in their lives, and they met his inviting smile apprehensively. They stammered out and grappled with the few ideas in which they thought they had invested. In the end, of course, all the girls could see that none of these boys was in any way superior.

  Dinah looked across the table at Lawrence. He had spent hours in that study. Over the years he must have developed a certain leeriness of her father; he
could be a terrible man. “Was my father…well”—she wasn’t sure exactly what she meant to ask him—“what did you think of him?”

  Lawrence looked straight at her, but she could see that he was embarrassed, and it surprised her. “I tell you, Dinah,” he began, rather ponderously, and Dinah wondered if she really cared what he thought of her father one way or another, “I guess that in spite of the whole mess I really do feel sorry for him.” He seemed to think that this was a magnanimous attitude, and Dinah was mystified, but she also realized that they were both getting a little drunk. She peered at Lawrence and bridled at the smug look of pity that he had assumed in relation to her own father. She didn’t say anything, however, because she was curious.

  “Of course,” Lawrence continued, “he hasn’t ever been the same since that whole thing out there at the motel, but—well!—it must have been humiliating! I mean, to have been in his position.” Lawrence didn’t seem dreadfully sorry about it. “I wouldn’t have believed it at all, I guess, if my father hadn’t been handling the whole business for him. The legal side, anyway. Well, in the end it didn’t come to much, but it could have gotten pretty ugly. You know, that man was going to sue!” This struck him as incredible, and Dinah just stared at him while she tried to puzzle this out and regain her balance. “Even though he’d already shot your dad. He didn’t have a permit for that gun, either, so he could have been backed down, I imagine, if it had come to that. No one else saw your father at the window, either, so that was a break. But for a while that woman swore she was going to testify. I’ll tell you! She was mad! And they probably thought they could collect a bundle. She could have crucified him, of course. Lord, it was a real mess!” Lawrence sipped his beer, and Dinah took a swallow of her drink. She wanted to be very quiet. “She finally just dropped out of the picture,” Lawrence said. “The thing was wrangled around so much and went on for so long that she just left town.”