Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read online

  She kept at her writing, but she also applied herself relentlessly to harvesting blueberries and strawberries and all the garden vegetables, and laboriously canning and pickling and making jam. She baked loaves and loaves of bread—oatmeal, whole wheat, pumpernickel.

  One afternoon, while Martin sat in the cool living room halfheartedly making notes on a manuscript, she called to him from the kitchen with such urgency that he thought there must have been an accident. He went to help and found Ellen standing in the center of the room looking forlorn—as he had never before seen her.

  “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  She was standing, slowly shaking her head, and in her shorts and halter top she was too thin, too muscular. She looked like a drawn bow.

  “Well, just look!” she said. “Oh, just look at that!” And she gestured at the window, where there were at least a half-dozen loaves of bread sitting on waxed paper on the sill.

  Martin was at a loss. He stared and stared at them and then back at her, only to see her face turned to him with that widened look of expectation, so that the tension had left her features, and her expression had gone blank in anticipation of his sympathetic reaction. But he was so baffled and so naïve that his face, too, went blankly quizzical, and it infuriated her.

  She seemed to Martin to leap in one bound like a cat over to that window, and she slapped her hand lightly across each little bread loaf as she spoke. “Well, just look at them! I like them all lined up and glistening like a little train. They sometimes look like a little train in the sun, and with the copper pots hanging over them they’re just right. But look! They’ve all sunk in the middle! I took them out too soon, or the damned oven’s off again. And they’re too brown on top, too. They’re ruined! They’re just ruined!” And it ended up that Martin moved over and embraced her, and she just leaned into him in limp despair. Claire came in, too, from the garden, where she had been working, and sat down at the table to rest, while Martin stood at the window with Ellen.

  “The bread’s gone wrong, I think,” he tried to explain, although Claire hadn’t seemed the slightest bit curious. She got up and inspected the little loaves, and then turned to her sister with concern.

  “But they’ll be delicious, Ellen. They smell wonderful. They’re only a little scorched on top.” She finally understood that Martin was holding on to Ellen because she had gone absolutely still in despondency. “Oh, but, Ellen,” she said plaintively, putting a hand on her sister’s back as it was turned to her, “it doesn’t make any difference. It just doesn’t matter.” But Ellen gave no response at all. She disengaged herself from Martin and left the room.

  In the evening, when Martin was sitting by the pond with Katy and Claire, who both lay nude in the fading sunlight—their bodies not so dissimilar—on towels they had trampled down over the high grass, he finally asked her about it. “Is Ellen all right? Is that bread all right?” Claire didn’t answer for a little while, and Martin thought she wouldn’t. He just let his question drift out over the pond, but then she turned her head to the other side to look at him.

  “Maybe she’s just surprised that she’s getting older,” she answered finally. “She likes to be in charge. Well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure what it is. The bread’s fine. I don’t know what that was all about.”

  Martin was looking down at Claire’s young skin and her narrow, childlike body as she lay there on her stomach next to her daughter, with her head buried in her arms and her wet hair splayed out over the towel, and so he wasn’t listening, or caring, really, what she answered. But when he glanced up the hill and saw Ellen in her lawn chair snapping beans, he understood with perfect clarity that things had not gone as she had expected them to this summer. He knew now to expect a greater, a more dogged ferocity in the weeks to come. He remembered that at the first of summer, shortly after Claire and Katy’s arrival, Vic had spoken out into their small company one evening almost in the manner of a warning. “All the people in the house,” he had said, “anyone who comes by, they are all, for the time being, property of Ellen’s.”

  Ellen had looked around at him severely and said, “Oh, yes? And you, too?”

  “I come with the furniture,” he said lightly, and after a moment she had smiled at him, pleased.

  But when Martin saw Ellen looking down at the three of them there by the pond, then he himself suddenly saw Claire as an intruder and himself as her ally. She was a purveyor of propaganda simply by the resolute meaninglessness of her everyday existence. The reality she made for herself was both alluring and threatening, and Martin, looking up the hill, saw that he might suddenly find himself an alien in that house.

  But the morning he drove out to the Hofstatters’ in his old, blue Chevrolet to pick up Claire for their birthday shopping spree, he was optimistic; he was almost joyful. He liked giving presents. When Claire came out of the house, however, to meet the car, he was a little disappointed that she had on her usual khaki shorts, so that her thin legs projected from them like parentheses, and that she wore her old T-shirt with the subway system of Paris stenciled on its front. He was dressed as usual, too, in old jeans and a faded shirt, but he had been thinking of this as an occasion.

  “You’ve never seen Dinah’s shop, have you?” he said to Claire, because he often spoke of Dinah; he had told Claire a lot about her. “She has wonderful children’s toys. Why don’t we drive into West Bradford?”

  “The Artists’ Guild, you mean?” Claire asked in a dubious tone, and was thoughtful for a moment. “Okay. That’ll probably be fine.”

  When they arrived, it was disconcerting to see Claire make her way around the shop. She looked more than ever like a waif, especially since Martin was accustomed, in this building, to the influence of Dinah’s disheveled elegance and her authority. Claire handled a beautifully carved wooden train as though it were not, in fact, amazingly sturdy; she behaved as though she could damage it. She did linger for a while over the hand-sewn stuffed animals made in Vermont by three women who took care to embroider with great thoroughness all the eyes and noses on their creations. But she walked away from the toys while Martin still inspected them, and she drifted around the shop and stood on its small balcony, which was cleverly cantilevered out over the Green River. Wind chimes rang faintly under the eaves, and inside, every object was beautifully displayed on blond-oak platforms with raised edges so that the pottery and hand-blown glass could be set down on a bed of white crushed stone.

  Martin joined her out on the balcony. She was leaning against the railing. “You know,” she said, “the whole shop is really more beautiful than anything in it. Your wife is the best of the lot. As an artist, I mean.” She paused and looked out at the river and the little park on its other side. Her voice was oddly toneless. “Well, I’m not much of a judge, probably, but it’s a beautiful place. But, you know, all Katy really seems to want is a toy plastic shopping cart she’s seen advertised on TV.” She looked at him to see if he knew what she meant, but he didn’t. “You must know the thing I mean. It’s junk, but it has all those little pretend cans and bottles in it. It’s the only thing she’s asked for.” She smiled at him but took up her large leather purse, ready to leave, and Martin felt as if he had betrayed his wife, even though he was somewhat mollified by his notion that Claire’s smile was one of apology.

  They went to a shopping center five miles away in Bradford and hastened through the oppressively dark mall lined with benches, where a great many old people sat waiting for someone or simply keeping their places in that air-conditioned tunnel and nursing some private and unspoken fury. Martin had to be especially invigorated whenever he put himself up to shopping here for the special bargains they advertised.

  Claire had made her selections with what seemed to be slight consideration but great satisfaction, and Martin had bought all sorts of things. He had been carried away with the whole thing. They found the little cart Katy had requested and then brought all those toys back to Martin’s house to wrap in birthd
ay paper.

  When they finally finished that chore and left his house, they stopped at the bakery to pick up a cake Claire had ordered, and then they drove slowly out of West Bradford in the summer tourist traffic back toward Vic and Ellen’s. They progressed hesitantly along the main road and then through Bradford once again, stoplight by stoplight. While they sat still in the sun waiting for one light to change, Martin gazed ahead at a broad, grassless churchyard on the corner, in which some large activity was taking place. It looked like a children’s fair, and he realized with a rising, gleeful ebullience that everywhere there were grubby, dust-covered children running around with helium balloons attached to their belt loops or wrists by a taut string.

  “Let’s stop, Claire,” he said. “We might be able to fill the balloons here.” He was terribly enthusiastic, thinking how excited Katy would be to run all around the meadow with a mass of party balloons bobbing high above her in the air.

  “God, Martin. It’s so hot. It isn’t that important, really, do you think?” But his delight was so intense that he turned at the corner and parked the car in the church lot. He and Claire wandered through the crowd looking for the source of helium. It was a frantic group in that depressed section of town; the children moved about with a cocky authority that his own children did not possess. These children knew how to fend for themselves. The only advantage Martin and Claire had was their height; their status as adults brought them no special consideration. The other adults were mostly sad and pasty-looking women, hot and disheveled and defeated, who clearly had relinquished control long ago of whichever children were their own. But Martin spotted the helium dispenser and took hold of Claire’s arm to propel her in the right direction. The man filling the balloons was enjoying a letup in their popularity, and he stood leaning against the outsized plastic clown which encased the cylinder of gas. He gave them a glum look as they approached with their two cellophane bags of birthday balloons.

  “I can’t fill all those balloons. This thing is for charity. I just hire out for a fee.” He looked at them sullenly like an ill-treated dog.

  “Well, what if I gave you ten dollars to fill them? Would that seem fair to you?” Martin asked, and Claire just lagged back, seemingly offended by the whole event going madly on around her.

  “I told you, this is a charity thing. The kids get the balloons free. The church pays me.”

  “But we can’t find anywhere else to get these filled. They’re for a birthday party.”

  The man didn’t seem to have any particular greed and no sympathy on which to play, but when he realized that Martin was going to continue to stand there arguing, he straightened himself and held out his hand resignedly for the balloons, which he fitted over a spigot protruding from the clown’s grotesque smile. He turned the knob that released the pressurized gas. Martin took on the job of tying off each balloon and attaching it to a string, handing them to Claire as they accumulated. When the balloons had all been blown up, Martin turned to her to see that she was holding at least twenty balloons in each hand, and that she was absolutely radiant with the unanticipated pleasure of their buoyancy. He looked at her carefully; he had never seen her face so devoid of reserve, and when he turned to pay the man his ten dollars, he felt as if he might cry. But at the same moment, he realized that what he was feeling was an unexpected and nearly mournful lust.

  It took them some time to arrange themselves in the car. Ten or twelve balloons fitted in the back seat, pressing against the ceiling. The others were left to Claire to hold on to tightly by their strings as they were suspended outside her front window. People honked at them and waved as they resumed their slow progress, with the balloons perilously in tow.

  Martin drove along slowly, thinking of Claire when he had seen her nude, swimming and floating and diving in the deepest part of the Hofstatters’ pond. Her coloring was so odd that as she had become tanned, her skin, and even her hair, had taken on the same muddy opaqueness as the water. All those times he had not really desired her. She was a friend; she seemed very much like a tall child. But he was suddenly feeling that he was in the process of experiencing a pervasive loss that could not be appeased. It had been made clear to him, when he had turned to Claire and seen that his enthusiasm for those balloons—for the celebration inherent just in the having of them—had been communicated to her, that all those summer days without his wife he had been thoroughly bereft. Now he would have stopped the car and made love to Claire in any field, but instead, of course, they continued sedately on, with the balloons buffeting about and squeaking against each other above their heads and out the window.

  When they arrived at the Hofstatters’, Martin drove up the long driveway in sudden embarrassment. It had only just occurred to him what an imposition they might be making on Vic and Ellen’s careful schedule. But Ellen had seen them approaching, and she met them in the driveway full of goodwill. She immediately appropriated the party and made of it her own invention. She abandoned herself to its organization, although she insisted that it be held outside, so that any amount of running around would not matter. She brought out onto the grass an old wooden coat-rack and went about the business of attaching the balloons closely to its several arms. In the end she had created a glorious, multicolored, and bulbous tree, so the rest of the group sat down beneath it and left the arrangements to her. She dashed in and out of the house, and at some point she changed from her shorts into a long, flowered chintz skirt with a wide flounce at the hem, so she weaved and bobbed over the lawn as intriguingly as the beautiful balloon Katy had appropriated from the original bunch.

  After they had all had a piece of cake and Katy had opened her gifts, Vic and Ellen and another couple who had dropped by to swim sat with Martin and Claire in the yard drinking champagne that Martin had bought for the festivity.

  The balloons had been untied from their tree trunk and given over to Katy, who, just as Martin had expected, did drift through the meadow with all of them tied by their strings to her wrists. But it was somewhat disappointing, because the balloons were apparently too porous to be inflated with helium, and they floated limply now, not so far above her head. An obscure memory flickered through Martin’s mind just then. One year when he had been in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, he had been edging through the crowds on Canal Street with friends when they realized that they were being bombarded with water-filled balloons dropped from many stories up by some drunken revelers. He had thought they were balloons, but when he noticed one broken on the sidewalk he realized that they were, in fact, condoms. Now he had driven twenty long miles from Bradford to the Hofstatters’ with balloons that had had a remarkably prophylactic effect on his own rather doleful desire.

  When he looked at Claire and poured more wine, he discovered that his desire had dissipated, that he felt instead overwhelmingly depressed, with a longing for his own home, his own wife, his own children. He had a heartsick need for that quiet and continual celebration of the spirit when it is bound fast by the expectations and wants and demands of other people whom one desires above all else to please and cherish and be nurtured by in turn.

  Chapter Six

  The Folly of Mothers and Fathers

  Now that the full heat of summer had slipped up the Mississippi Valley and dropped down over Enfield, Ohio, Dinah’s perspective became as limited as the visible horizons. Her boundaries were as definite in the heavy atmosphere as if she existed inside an immense overturned teacup. At night, when the heat did not abate, she lay early in the dark, still as stone, with the sheets thrown off and the windows and shades up so that, with an elaborate system of fans and closed-off rooms, she could feel a faint movement of the air. But her mind could not move off into thoughts of its own accord; she had to motivate and steer her thinking with a will. She found that her imagination was as encompassed by the heat and humidity as if she were asleep and possessed by a dream.

  As the summer evolved, she began to think that her actions did have the insubstantiality of the actions of
dreams. She awoke early each morning as soon as the light came through the unshaded windows, and because of the moisture that had settled into the room overnight and made the sheets cool to the touch, she would look out at the glistening leaves—each one glittering deceptively in minute movements on the distant branches—and be persuaded of coolness. She counted the clarity of the atmosphere as a seductive trick. She expected to be able to see the heat as one can in the East, where it hovers honestly like a fog, or in the South, where it shimmers up warningly from the ground. Enfield sparkled in the transparent mornings, and each summer she finally remembered that she had to school herself daily against the hope of relief, because, once she began to move about, the debilitating temperature would hinder her again.

  She lay in bed until she saw Lawrence make his morning circuit of the village; he jogged resolutely through the quiet streets; she could even see his bare back and shoulders shining with sweat. Then Dinah would get up and perfunctorily pull her hair back from her damp temples and wrap it in a twist at her neck. She had no need to dress up for Lawrence; he had always, since childhood, been privy to her company at its best and worst. When they were very young friends of eight or nine years old, Lawrence had often sat chatting with her in the kitchen, where she stood wrapped only in a towel, drooping her head over the sink, while Polly washed and then combed out her long hair. It never occurred to her now to adopt an artful modesty. So she would only slip a light robe over her nightgown and go down barefoot to the kitchen while the children slept. She tried to believe she was surprised every day when Lawrence showed up on the steps after running his five miles, but each time she would have to consider the fact that she had taken two cups and saucers from the cupboard before he appeared. He would put an arm around her shoulders in a friendly hug, and she would scald the cream and pour it into the cups simultaneously with the coffee. They would sit together on the back steps and sip the steaming mixture, even though it made them much hotter.