Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read online

  It was Sarah who objected. “I only have a Big Wheels, Mama! I can’t go as fast.”

  Suddenly Dinah was feeling very tense about the evening ahead, the dinner she would serve, the dress she would wear. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of giving a party without Martin to back her up in the face of any emergency, irrationally uncomfortable, since Pam and Lawrence and Buddy and her mother—her only guests—knew her at her most casual. But she bent down to Sarah and encircled her with one arm.

  “Sweetie, David will watch you. He’ll just walk his bike down, and you won’t have to cross a street, you know. It isn’t very far.” She looked at David, but he didn’t make any sign of disagreement, and she recognized that this was one of those rare moments when she had stepped into the scope of the children’s empathy. They had caught on to her nervousness, and it crossed her mind fleetingly how foolish it was to require these three children, whom she cared about so desperately, to accommodate her in order that she might impress other people, whom she could only regard with mixed affection and wariness. But the children went along, Toby and David with their bikes, and Sarah clattering horribly over the pavement with her wide-wheeled plastic tricycle.

  Her guests arrived all at once; they had walked down together through the village from the direction of her mother’s house. Dinah saw them coming leisurely along the sidewalk. Lawrence had dropped back to walk alongside her mother, and Pam and Buddy were walking more briskly, several paces ahead of them. She sat in the living room with a glass of wine and glanced out at them through her windows. All the preparations were made, and she had no reason at all to be uneasy, but the wine was comforting even so.

  She went outside to meet them so that she could lead the way around the house to the narrow space of yard between the vegetable and flower gardens. They all sat under the oak tree and around the table, over which Dinah had simply spread an unhemmed length of brilliant green dotted swiss. Down the center of the table she had aligned six little clay pots of begonias interspersed with short, fat candles set out in miniature versions of the same clay pots. It was all very pretty, and she knew at once that it had been a mistake. Even this simple decoration said plainly that this was a party, and the inherent demand in that idea made everyone stiffen a bit. But when she brought out a huge jug of California wine and passed around plastic cups, an ease fell over the group.

  “This is nice, Dinah,” Buddy said. “It all looks so pretty.” He poured wine for everybody from the heavy bottle.

  “Well, I was just in the mood to do something special,” she said. “Thank you.”

  They began to enjoy themselves, all of them together, because it was so usual to be this way. This gathering seemed perpetual; sometimes Dinah thought it might be a way of capturing a bit of immortality at its most elusive—the imprint on time made by this particular selection of people.

  When she began to arrange the charcoal in the grill, Lawrence came over to help, and he put his arm around her waist in a companionable hug, so she leaned against him as one does with a friend. These hugs and casual touches of hands between herself and Lawrence were new since any previous summer, and she was glad they had overcome their long uneasiness with each other and could relax again. When they were sitting under the tree once more, Dinah found herself looking at Lawrence and Pam as they sat there across from her. Lawrence was still attractive, but they were of an age, and he had altered in the same ways she had: his cheekbones more prominent, small creases at his mouth and eyes. When she looked at Pam sitting beside him, so much younger than the rest of them, she felt aged all at once. She evaluated her thoughts to see if it was jealousy she was feeling, because for years she had been slightly possessive of Lawrence.

  For a long time it had been Lawrence, not Isobel Brooks, his younger sister, who had been Dinah’s closest childhood friend, even though she and Isobel were the same age and Lawrence two years older. But so much of their childhood Dinah and Lawrence had spent together in exclusion of Isobel and Alan Brooks, the oldest of the four of them. One afternoon she and Lawrence had been sitting in her bedroom playing checkers while she held her cat on her lap as she pondered the game. Lawrence knew all the strategies and often tricked her into a position where she could be triple-jumped. He almost always won.

  “I wish I were Thompkins,” Lawrence said, all of a sudden.

  Dinah had looked down at Thompkins’s notched ears and battered head in surprise, until suddenly she was paralyzed with a shock of understanding as she observed how comfortably Thompkins was nestled in the space made by the triangle of her legs as she sat cross-legged on the floor over the checkerboard. That was all he had said then, but they had played together less and less after that, and for a while she had resented and been intrigued at the same time, that he had brought such a thing out into the open between them. She had lain awake long nights thinking about it.

  All at once, about age thirteen, Dinah had become pretty after being ordinary for such a long time, and she began to gravitate to the company of Isobel, who had always been, and continued to be, lovely to look at. From that point on, and even now, Isobel was her closest friend, but since Isobel and Buddy had been divorced she had moved away from Enfield and was busy living her life all on her own.

  But not so many years—maybe three years—after that checker game, Dinah remembered quite distinctly lying awkwardly with Lawrence one summer evening, hidden by those same flowering bushes still thriving between their two houses. She had been only half undressed and very embarrassed at their mutual lack of grace. They kissed each other as best they could—she knew now that neither of them had understood a kiss—and she had just held on to him around the shoulders. But when he had moved his hands down her hips and along her thighs, and then brought them up to spread her legs a little and slip his finger gently inside her, she had forgotten all about herself and how she might be observed by him. The inside of her began to relax and tense all at once, and a shaky, liquid warmth spread over her as he pressed his hand up against her and inside her. Her arms had gone lax in their hold on his shoulders and fallen limply onto the leaves around them. But when he had withdrawn his hand to unzip his jeans and had suddenly come pounding into her it had hurt, and she came back to self-awareness with a shock. She only lay there stiffly with Lawrence between her legs, which were pressed flat against the grass—she had no notion of embracing his long back—and felt dismayed for them both. She had no idea what her response should be, and nothing occurred to her spontaneously. He had suddenly collapsed full length on top of her, and before she had revealed her own discomfiture, she realized that he was happy and pleased with himself. She lay absolutely quiet, because she didn’t know the etiquette that encompassed this, and then he started moving in and out of her again, with short, swift strokes—she lay still, but she longed to have his gentle hand play over her once more. Finally, he had rolled over next to her, with his arms and legs splayed out, exhausted. He had been smug, she thought, in a dreamy, heavy way. “You didn’t think I could do it twice, did you? I bet you didn’t think I could do it twice.”

  Dinah had been baffled, because she didn’t know what had been accomplished from his point of view. But she had smiled and risen on one elbow to lean over and hug him; she had been delighted to find out that she possessed a body he would care to fondle so urgently. For a few years her relationship with Lawrence had been like looking at herself in a mirror—he was the mirror—she adjusted herself to find the most flattering reflection.

  Now she wondered if she had been equally illuminating to him, but she thought not. She thought that while she was trying to find out what best pleased him—therefore what would best please all men—he was trying to find out what best pleased himself. In other ways, in ways of conversation, and wit, and how to have his hair cut, she may have been a mirror for him of sorts, but as soon as they were making love once more, he became entirely self-absorbed. They had been very young, and, too, it had never occurred to Dinah to find out what best pleased her. All
of her adolescence had happened at a time when mothers said to daughters, or one girl said to another, with a condescending scorn at the very edges of their voices, “Oh, well, men! It doesn’t matter what you wear or what you say. They all have one thing on their minds, of course. Any one of them will undress you with their eyes even while you’re just walking down the street!” And Dinah had tried her best, but she had never been able to undress them with her eyes.

  But even with all this behind them, Dinah and Lawrence had each remained a person of the other’s childhood. They had been very young conspirators. Dinah thought that that was so as she looked across the table at Lawrence and noted that he was still a nice-looking man but that he could never have been as attractive as she had once thought he was. Nevertheless, as Dinah talked softly to Pam sitting so near her beneath the tree, she couldn’t help but think that Pam’s face had no more piquancy than a pale, smooth honeydew melon. She had those soft, muted features—a look of dense skin—that were often described as sensuous. But Dinah didn’t think so. She thought that to be sensuous one must have all the senses available right at the surface, and it seemed only logical that the very quality of creamy waxiness that Pam’s smooth skin possessed would naturally preclude that.

  Dinah brought the shish kebabs out to the grill, but the fire was not yet ready, and they all had more wine. Polly excused herself from the gathering and went inside for a long time, so that Dinah knew she had gone to phone her father, who was just across the street. The children had returned and came darting around the corner of the house, past the little porch, like fierce, dark arrows in their intense game. They were good children, and polite children, and they did not interfere with the grownups, who sat quietly talking on the lawn and sipping wine.

  Dinah was still amazed that she had these three children of her own, and still congratulated herself on her unexpected affinity—not talent, especially—for motherhood. She watched them running across the yard, and just briefly she thought with pity of Polly, who had somehow never grasped hold of the idea that she was anybody’s mother. Dinah turned to Buddy and reached out to touch his arm and catch his private attention.

  “Do you remember, Buddy, when Mama broke her violin? Backing up like that in the doorway? Oh, I think about it every now and then…”

  Buddy stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned his neck back a bit as though he had become slightly stiff sitting in the cooling air in one position. He looked over at Dinah with what seemed to her to be a little irritation. “Oh, well…” He looked away and then back at her again, and she was surprised to realize that he didn’t want to talk about it with her. But then he said, “You know, I always thought that was one of the biggest burdens off her mind. Getting rid of that thing!”

  Dinah drew her hand back to her lap. She went blank for a moment with something that approached a kind of defensive anger, but which never quite materialized. She did understand that he was warning her against sentimentality. “That’s really an amazing thing to say! I don’t understand why you did say it.” Dinah was agitated and searching for a better response. All that she could come to at this moment, though, was the image of the episode itself. It stuck in the forefront of her mind with the persistence of an engraving, leaving her a trifle spellbound and mute with her ideas.

  When she was very young—almost four—and Buddy was approaching eleven, he and she had come racing into the house just as her mother had finished practicing her music and was coming toward them through the doorway at the other end of the hall. They had raced to her, demanding that she mediate some dispute, and as they came nearer, reaching up to her, she raised the violin away from them, above her head, and backed up out of their way. The violin had hit squarely across the door frame through which she had just come, and splintered at its tapering neck.

  Now, sitting near her brother over thirty years later, she could only look at him and wonder if he had seen the same thing. Finally, she said to him, “But, Buddy, she never played again after that.” She said it very mildly, with the slightest hint of a question in the phrasing of her statement.

  “But that’s got to have been a real relief to her,” he said, and got up to pour himself some more wine. “She started so late. How good do you think she ever could have been? She could always have bought herself another violin, you know. There was nothing especially valuable about that one.” He imparted all this with a peculiar and rather tender coerciveness, and when he sat down, a silence fell for a few minutes which Dinah felt no compulsion to fill. The limbs above their heads creaked as the large oak was forced to flex with the breeze.

  Polly came back out to them, looking serene, and she settled into her chair while Lawrence got up to get her some more wine and pass the olives and nuts Dinah had set out at the last minute. Dinah gave instructions to Buddy, so that he could grill the meat, and this time it was she who left their little group to go to the kitchen and prepare the rest of the meal.

  She busied herself with the mechanical preparations. In the early afternoon she had picked five beautiful, small, even-sized tomatoes, and now she lined them up on her cutting board and sliced them each in half across the middle, not intersecting their stem ends. She put the large skillet on the stove and began to melt four tablespoons of the unsalted butter slowly, so it wouldn’t burn without warning while her back was turned.

  All the while she moved around the kitchen she still had that vision of her mother, with her hands upraised while the violin snapped above her head. It was an idea she had had of her mother for a very long time; she had latched on to it as one more clue to Polly’s nature.

  When the butter began to bubble slightly, Dinah placed the tomatoes in the pan, cut side up, pushing them gently around until all ten halves would fit. She stood over them as they sautéed, looking for just the right translucency to set in at the cut edges before she turned them.

  It was only beginning to become clear to her that while she and Buddy were growing up, the two of them had often been witnesses to the same domestic event. An event itself subject to various interpretations, she supposed. She thought that the very selection of an interpretation by either one of them was as close as they ever were to come to mastering their own fate. Those crucial interpretations—in some instances destined to be chosen as they were—were as near as any human could come, probably, to forming his own personality. This entire thought oppressed her, and she turned her tomatoes rather dejectedly and pierced the skin of each with her bacon fork so the steam would not wilt them altogether. She elaborated on this new idea a little; it meant that no one could ever be entirely independent or free of the past. The thought that one could eventually be disburdened was an illusion she had cherished.

  Dinah added heavy cream to the bubbling tomatoes and shook the pan until the cream and the butter and the tomato juices mixed into a pale golden sauce and thickened; then she carefully tilted the skillet and transferred the contents to a large platter she had found in Mrs. Horton’s pantry. She placed the dish in the oven with a casserole of potatoes and switched off the heat, leaving the door slightly ajar so they would only stay warm and not continue to cook.

  Then she called out the back door to her guests to come and lend a hand, and all together they laid dinner out on the table and began to serve themselves. The meal was a success; everything had turned out well.

  “What are these tomatoes called?” Pam asked. “They’re wonderful!”

  “Tomatoes in cream,” Dinah told her.

  “No, really, Dinah,” she said a little crossly, “what are they called? I’d like to try them; we have so many tomatoes from the garden, now.”

  “Well, they’re called tomates à la crème,” she answered, and everyone laughed, as she had known they would. But it was true; that was what she had found them under in an old Gourmet magazine of Mrs. Horton’s. Pam just glanced at her suspiciously, not sure if the joke was on her, and Dinah was sorry. It was the first sour note between them.

  She had not made any
dessert; she had just bought a large, iced watermelon, and as she cleared the plates from the picnic table onto a tray, she called the children to come join them. She couldn’t see them in the front yard anymore now that the light was fading.

  She carried the tray to the kitchen and began a careful sectioning of the melon so that everyone would get a part of the heart. The children came around the side of the house, beneath the kitchen window, in an argument, or it sounded to her like an argument from the tones of their voices. She was about to put her knife aside and go stop them when she began to hear what they were talking about. Then she stood very still to listen.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have left me all by myself with Sarah,” David was saying. “I just had to push her on the swing the whole time or she kept starting to cry. I didn’t get to ride my bike at all.”

  Toby didn’t say anything to that.

  “Where did you go?” David was a little persuasive now.

  “Oh…I just rode around some.”

  “By yourself? How come? Where’s your bike?”

  “I guess I left it somewhere. I’ll get it in the morning,” Toby answered, seemingly unconcerned.

  They passed by the window, not angry anymore, anticipating the melon, and Dinah could hear Sarah’s Big Wheels clattering relentlessly along the front sidewalk. But still, Dinah remained where she was, with the knife poised in her hand above the melon. Then suddenly she put it down and quickly climbed the back stairs and went along the hall to her own room, where she stood at the window, peering out into the dusk. She could just make out the shiny fenders of Toby’s bike as it lay on the grass in her father’s side yard across the street. Nothing at all came to her mind; she just stood there for a moment staring out, and then she went back down to the kitchen to finish cutting and distributing the melon.