Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read online

  “What’s the matter, Toby?” she asked, but not without a certain wariness.

  And, in fact, he said, “I hate eggs, Mama! You know I hate eggs. I didn’t want any, but you gave them to me.”

  It was left to her to decide if this was an accusation—she had served him the eggs—or simply an explanation. “Well, for God’s sake, Toby, don’t eat them, then.”

  He put his head down on his knees and didn’t move. She and Toby had these battles too often lately, and their warfare had left her vulnerable. She tried to coerce him. “There’s your favorite coffee cake. The butter-crunch topping. I don’t care if you eat your eggs or not, sweetie. I just put them on your plate without thinking. Come on down with me.” She won this much by retreating down the stairs, her back turned to him, so that he would have to follow if he expected any further concessions. He did follow her and resume his place at the table.

  She gave up the dishes and sat down on the kitchen stool to finish her coffee. She gazed at the children seated around the table, but she didn’t really take them in. She was thinking about Martin, who could joke with Toby; she was thinking of the letter she hadn’t finished, and she was thinking of the errands of the day. She took her purse off the counter and rummaged through it for her wallet to see if she needed to go to the bank. She glanced over an old shopping list, and she mostly just sat there with a blank mind, waiting for the children to finish so they could get on with things.

  When she looked up, she saw that Toby had removed, with surgical precision, all the eggs from his plate and carefully deposited them on his napkin. He had done this, she supposed, so that they could in no way sully his coffee cake. But the steam from his eggs had condensed all around them so that the napkin was a soggy rag, and she knew that he had achieved a small victory. She cleared up the table in a silence they all knew, and the children very wisely dispersed and played together with remarkable and uncommon good nature. She was sure they knew how deeply she begrudged them these triumphs.

  She packed the children into the car and picked up Pam Brooks and her little son, Mark, and they all went to spend the morning at the Fort Lyman Country Club, by the pool. The two women sat under an umbrella at one of the tables and played canasta with two decks of dampish cards. They kept watch over their children, who played in various sections of the pool according to their skills. Sarah spent a lot of time in the wading pool with Mark; otherwise, Dinah would stand in the waist-deep water at the shallow end with her while she paddled around fairly efficiently. It was at one of those moments, with Dinah leaning against the side of the pool where the water sloshed in the ceramic gutter, that she happened to catch sight of Toby standing in the unshaded cabana, drinking a Coke from the bottle, and stepping back and forth from one foot to another because the bricks were far too hot to stand still on. For one second Dinah could even taste the cold, sweet trickle of Coke as it made its way through the ice that would have frozen at the top of the bottle. That pungent trickle was tantalizing and more delicious than anything on earth; that’s how it had been twenty years ago when she had stood in that spot herself.

  On the way home from the club, they stopped at one of the hamburger places that had sprouted up, along with cavernous discount stores, on the road between Fort Lyman and Enfield. Dinah’s mother complained of them; she thought they were tacky, but Dinah was always happy to find food that contented her children in any corner of the country. It made life easier. Today she and Pam had seated the children in a booth and taken their hamburgers for them to the self-service counter and prepared them to order, as per each child’s wishes. Just as the two women sat down to their own lunch in the adjacent booth, Dinah looked beyond Pam’s shoulder and saw that once again Toby was quietly crying, leaning back into the upholstered booth and staring out the window into the parking lot.

  But this time she was filled with irritation. It was irritation that crept over her whenever one of her children was difficult for any prolonged period of time—any spell of several weeks—and it arose from the fear that perhaps that child had settled, this time, into his permanent personality, that he or she would be forever unhappy, or difficult, or unkind, or vulnerable. Her anger and irritation were really just her fury that the fates would play so cruel a trick on her own child. A child she must somehow protect.

  She rose from her table and went swiftly over to the children’s booth, leaning over David to grasp Toby by the shoulders and turn him toward her in a sort of shake. “What is it, Toby? What’s the matter now?” She glared down at him with terrific urgency, and so his answer was more timid than it might have been. “You put mustard on my hamburger, Mama. I only like ketchup.”

  Dinah straightened up, and out of pure vexation tears came into her own eyes. “You’re being a brat, Toby. A real brat!” She didn’t lower her voice; she meant to embarrass him just as he had embarrassed her. “I’ll go get you another hamburger, but this is the very last time I’m taking you out for a treat like this. There are people all over the world who would give anything for a hamburger like that!”

  Pam had gotten up, too, and was right at Dinah’s elbow, and she caught Dinah’s arm and smiled at her. “It’s all right. Here you go, Toby. I forgot to put mustard on mine, and I only have ketchup, so this will be a trade that’s good for both sides.” She deftly switched hamburgers, and Toby deigned to turn his gaze away from the parking lot and look down at his fresh hamburger.

  “Oh, Toby,” Dinah said, “what do you say to Mrs. Brooks?” But Toby just ducked his head, and Pam waved her hand in deprecation at the idea of being thanked.

  Dinah discovered every day how great were the variety of things that she and Pam did not have in common, and yet she had come to like Pam and to count on her. Pam was one of those few, rare people who have such a strong sense of goodness that no motivation or expectation lies beneath it. She possessed effortless virtue and self-assurance. Pam seemed really to believe in grownups, and she even believed that she herself was one.

  Dinah had scarcely ever been as impressed with anyone as she had been with Pam the day she and Pam and the four children had made a foray into one of those immense discount department stores which spread in every direction like an airplane hangar in the middle of what had once been a pasture. Row upon row of fluorescent lighting stretched across the ceiling, because there were no interior windows except those at the front of the store, plastered with signs. Cameras were strategically placed to record the influx and outgo of customers. The white light everywhere was so unforgiving that even the glossy skin of those four pretty children took on a mealy look. Dinah’s spirit shrank. As they made their way into the store, past the gum-ball machines and electric ponies that the children—all but David—begged to ride, they were stopped by a straggly-looking girl with muddy skin who insisted they check their beach bags with her at her little raised cubicle of an office. Immediately, Dinah had been filled with unreasonable guilt, and she had handed hers over with alacrity and an air of apology. But Pam just moved forward into the store, her beach bag slung over her arm, ushering Mark before her like a little sheep, until the girl stepped down out of her box and called after her. “You have to check bags and large purses here, or you can’t go in,” she said without any inflection.

  Pam stopped and turned full around to her with a surprised and dazzling smile. There was a long moment’s pause as Pam made herself understand. Then she shook her head with slight bewilderment and said, “Well, if you think that the manager of this store wouldn’t trust me enough to let me in with my purse…Well then, of course, I’ll be glad to go somewhere else.” Her voice was very pleasant; she was a kind woman. “You know, I have some things in this bag that I value very much. I couldn’t replace them, you see.” She continued to hesitate in that one spot, facing the girl, just smiling self-confidently and absently running her hand through Mark’s hair as he leaned disconsolately against her knees.

  “Oh…Well, then…” And the girl waved them on.

  Dinah had found
the incident staggering, and she had been so struck with admiration for Pam that she had related the whole thing to her mother that afternoon, but her mother had just nodded absentmindedly. Her mother had never been in a store like that.

  Now Dinah sat in a booth across from Pam and felt grateful to her, because she was sure Pam was not judging her, was not even thinking of it. Pam never generalized; she would not assume that one mistake, one loss of temper, would inevitably lead to another. She would not, in fact, assume that one mistake indicated anything, really, one way or another. Dinah hoped that Pam would never be deceived in any way by virtue of her good nature, that she would know when it was necessary to draw conclusions. But at the moment Dinah was relieved because she believed that Pam’s tremendous competence had not led her to feel either smug or superior. She and Pam did not have to be rivals; they could just be uncomplicated summer friends.

  In Enfield the days were long, and most evenings Dinah’s three children, with Mark Brooks toddling along behind, roamed around their grandmother’s house long after supper while Pam and Lawrence and Dinah and Polly sat out on the patio with their drinks. Once in a while Buddy would join them when he came over from Fort Lyman. After a while Dinah would gather up her children and they would walk back through the village to their own summer beds, where they would sleep easily after their long day. But in the late afternoon Dinah sat on her mother’s patio suffused with lethargy, yet always aware of an unsettling presumption that something was going to be made clear to her momentarily, in the fuzzy light.

  Pam was talking about Mark, about how absurd she and Lawrence were about him, monitoring his slightest progress. Her voice filled the space between the four adults sweetly, and Dinah heard the adamancy behind her self-deprecation. Mark was the finest and most fascinating child in the world, she was saying, beneath her words. Dinah remembered knowing the same thing about her own children. She looked across the patio at Lawrence, and she had known him for such a long time that it was unfathomable to her that he should be a father, that he should feel it deeply.

  “But, you know,” Polly said, “it’s hard to know about children. Well, they never tell you anything, do they? They’re mysteries to me, still.”

  Polly had arrived at one of her disconcerting moments of animation. Suddenly she would reveal herself to be, after all, tangibly connected to the world. Those moments always took Dinah unawares. And, at Polly’s words, Dinah’s mind went dizzy with the naïveté of her mother’s conclusion. To hear this from a woman who had floated through her own children’s childhood in a private, efflorescent silence! But she looked at her mother and found that she could, at the moment, only reaffirm her in her opinion that one’s children told one nothing, because Dinah could think of nothing to say to her mother on the subject. But Polly turned to her, “You know, though, Dinah, it does seem to me that you ought to do something about Toby. He walks oddly now and then, he’s developing a limp, and he’s gotten into a bad habit of stuttering. Have you done anything about his speech?”

  It always amazed Dinah that her mother would sit down and calmly impart information to her about David and Toby and Sarah as if she, Dinah, had only a passing acquaintance with them. “Well…” Polly moved her hand around their little circle, motioning them all into her affection and amusement. “Now there’s a child who will tell you everything! I imagine that’s why he stutters so,” she said fondly, “he just has so much to say! If he could only make himself clear. I’ve told him to slow down and think before he talks. Oh, I dote on him, really.” She meant it; Dinah thought that Toby was her mother’s favorite grandchild. “But he won’t listen to a thing I say to him, of course. He’s a child who wants to be seen and heard!”

  Pam looked down into her lap and turned her glass in her hands. Dinah said quietly, “Oh, he’ll be fine, Mother. All children get growing pains of one kind or another. Not to worry.” She didn’t know how to talk to Polly and explain to her that she was worried about Toby. That he was lonely this year, and not playing with the local children as he used to. Toby made a desperate issue out of the smallest incident; he wanted constant attention, and he was sometimes so sad. She didn’t know how to explain to her mother because she herself had heard Polly say to Toby, “Now just calm yourself, Toby, before you try to talk. Just take your time.” So Toby didn’t follow hopefully in his grandmother’s wake as he once had.

  Dinah had finally understood after a very long time that her mother’s ease at passing judgment was in direct proportion to her absolute lack of spontaneous or natural compassion. Her mother meant to be compassionate and could be very sorry for the masses in the abstract, but she was never touched with immediate empathy for the mundane miseries of humankind. Her innocent mercilessness in its mildest form amounted to no more than simple tactlessness. Polly was an honest woman who believed in her own good intentions. That was all Dinah had been able to determine about her, and she often sat there in the afternoons expecting her mother to reveal herself in some new way, so that Dinah could catch hold of it.

  When Buddy and Dinah were children they had often played with the Brooks children, Alan, Lawrence, and Isobel, who had for a while been Buddy’s wife. They had played in this same twilight among the trees and flowering bushes while Polly sat in a chair on the lawn with her drink, just waiting for their father to come home from work. For Polly’s two children, as they bobbed around her chair, these moments were as close to true conversation with their mother as they ever came.

  Sometimes Polly would reminisce and offer out little pieces of her past. One evening when Dinah was almost ten, Polly had begun to talk about her own days away from home, when she was at college.

  “Well, I was down at a dance at Princeton,” she had said, “I don’t remember who I was with, but I had on a beautiful dress—it was a black dress with a halter neck and one of those wide skirts, cut on the bias. I had bought it in New York just for that party. And I was very pretty, you know, but not at all glamorous or especially chic. While I was dancing with some boy there was a great stir. The band stopped playing in the middle of a song, and all the couples sort of fanned out around the stage to see what was happening. I thought there was going to be an announcement of some kind. But the most amazing thing! A girl was up there—she had just hopped up on the stage, I guess—and she started playing the drums! So the band played with her, too. I was awfully impressed. She had on a dark-blue dress, and she had that terrible color of red hair that’s mostly orange, really. Her face was a little like a pug dog…around the nose, somehow. But I thought she was the most attractive girl I’d ever seen! I would have given my soul to have been able to climb up on that bandstand and play the drums! She had such fun that she was a great hit, of course.”

  Her mother had spoken all of a sudden that evening, prompted by who knew what impulse. But Dinah remembered what she said—all those bits and pieces of her mother’s recollections—she remembered them verbatim. The words her mother had used to frame her own memories had gone spinning out into the air like winged maple seeds, and they had taken root in Dinah’s mind. So, with the growth of the host, the memory itself became enlarged beyond any action that ever engendered it. Now those memories belonged no more to Polly, their originator, but were the property of Dinah, for whom they were the only definition of her mother.

  Every now and then, Dinah would approach Buddy with these images, these ideas she had about her mother. “Don’t you remember, though, when Mother talked about the time she made herself a strapless dress out of a satin bedspread? Very daring at the time, I guess. Can you imagine her doing that?”

  Buddy would look up from his book or away from the television. “Oh, really?” he would say, raising his eyebrows in good humor. “I don’t remember that, but you’re right. It’s hard to imagine.” Then he would go back to whatever he was doing, not having tried to imagine it at all.

  But it had been Buddy who had phoned her at college when her father had been shot.

  “What do you mean, he
was ‘shot’?” Dinah had said, after she understood that he was all right but in the hospital.

  “Oh, Lord, Dinah! It was just some seedy thing in a motel. There was some other couple, too,” Buddy had answered, sounding more put-out than anything else about the whole business.

  “Do you mean Mother was with him?” Dinah had been absolutely at a loss.

  “Lord, Dinah! You know Dad!” Buddy was angry at her, which made her feel unreasonably apologetic as she tried to piece the whole thing together. “Good Lord, grow up! Of course she wasn’t.”

  When she had insisted on flying out, he had discouraged her. “You can see Dad when he gets out of the hospital. I don’t think Polly wants any company, really. Not right now, at least.” So Buddy had understood something about their mother that Dinah had not, because she had come home, anyway, and she had been useless and in the way. On the plane going home, however, she had imagined all the circumstances that might have been possible. The exotic ménage à trois. She was not altogether surprised, because her father’s nature was so extreme that, once she thought about it, she realized something just this dramatic had always been likely to happen.

  While her father was in the hospital recuperating, Dinah stayed with her mother, but she could not help her mother deal with what was quite plainly just relief. Polly’s habitual expression of mildly penitent suffering had fallen away and been supplanted by a look of almost triumphant resignation which settled over her features and her tense body. She had loosened and gone lax at every joint. In the post office and at the grocery store the whole thing was discussed and puzzled over, because her father had been shot in the hip and leg at a little motel on the outskirts of Fort Lyman. Both the man who shot him and the woman with the man were said to have been drunk. By the time Dinah saw her father, she had been made too embarrassed to ask, and he was no less fierce; he didn’t seem to feel he owed her any explanation. He wasn’t feeling guilty or apologetic at all; in fact, he even seemed amused, which fueled Dinah’s imagination like kindling.