Dale Loves Sophie to Death (12 page)

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

N
ow 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.

They had been several days into the heat the first time he had appeared at her back door. She had been sitting at the kitchen table in that coolest moment of the day, so that her coffee wouldn’t make her feel as sick and sticky as it had the day before, when she persisted in drinking it quietly after the children had had their breakfast. She didn’t mind getting up so early if it would ensure her a private moment in which she could sit with her mind blank, until the coffee jolted her into the sense of the day. The door was open to let in the cooler air from outside, and she had looked up to see Lawrence standing at the latched screen. She motioned him to stay there quietly; then she took down another cup and saucer and brought him some coffee, too. They sat outside in the lightening morning, so as not to wake the children. “I saw the light on down here,” he said. “I thought you must be up.”

The next morning he had stopped again; this time he had wanted to tell her that his sister, Isobel, had called late the night before and was coming for a visit. Dinah had been delighted at the news and glad to see him. The morning after that, he had arrived without a message, just his company, and they sat together on the wooden steps shoulder to shoulder as if it were a long-practiced habit. It was in such a simple way that they began a trifling and unacknowledged conspiracy. No one knew that Lawrence stopped by, but surely no one would have cared; the two of them were such old friends. They discussed their families: their mothers and fathers and siblings, and especially Isobel, whose arrival had become a stable point on which to pin all the suddenly tenuous impressions of the summer.

“I haven’t seen her in over eight years,” Dinah said, “but even so, I suppose I still think of her as one of my only women friends.”

“She comes back at Christmas, usually,” Lawrence said. “She seems happy.”

“Well, how is that for Buddy? Isn’t that awkward for them both?”

The custom of having Isobel home from school for the holidays was so familiar from childhood—the excitement of it—that it evoked an undeniable pang in Dinah. She looked at Lawrence and saw that his face had closed to the discussion of his sister and Dinah’s brother. She realized that it might be an issue on which one was expected to take sides, but she hardly believed that was appropriate. She hadn’t made any judgment of Buddy and Isobel’s divorce; it had caused her a good deal less confusion and anguish, in fact, than their marriage. “Well,” she went on, a little apologetically, “they were married for pretty long. Almost six years. And, really, they’ve always been together since they were young.”

“Oh, Lord! When was that?” Lawrence said. “No, we’re amazingly sophisticated in Enfield, Dinah. All kinds of people are getting divorced nowadays.” Dinah looked at him closely to see if this uncharacteristic cynicism was just a manifestation of the old jealousy he had had toward Buddy. They had all coveted Isobel’s exclusive attention in those days. “Well, in fact,” he went on, in a softer tone, “I think they’re glad to see each other. We went together for a long time ourselves, you know.”

Dinah didn’t give that any real consideration, because the two of them had never made any pretense that there had been anything between them except curiosity and desire and simple affection. They had been protected against terrible vulnerability to each other by the fact that they had shared their childhoods from the earliest moments on, so they were safe from the other’s most severe censure.

But Buddy had been so much older than the rest of them, and he had never been lightly connected with Isobel. On his part, there had always been a fearful intensity. Even in retrospect, who could tell how Isobel had ever felt, or why? She had been sought after by adult and child alike, and Dinah remembered how her own mother had so often spoken of Isobel with what Dinah could only think of as a sort of wistful admiration. “Oh, she was
born
forty years old,” Polly would say. “That girl doesn’t have a thing to learn!” Why had Polly repeated that so often and with such mysterious and unusual fervency?

When Isobel and Dinah had gone off to the movies together, as girls, Polly had ostentatiously given Dinah’s spending money to Isobel for safekeeping. Dinah recounted this with infuriated pity both for her hapless mother, burdened with her own tactlessness, and for herself as her mother’s daughter. Polly had never been able to understand that she didn’t have to insult one person in order to compliment another. But, in fact, thinking about it now, Dinah understood just how wide Isobel’s knowledge of life had been, and how mature her diplomacy. When the two girls were dropped off in downtown Fort Lyman to wander through the stores before the show began, Isobel had dipped her head down over her purse so that her hair swung forward, concealing her face, and then she had looked up to return Dinah’s money to her with an expression that clearly indicated her wry amusement at the folly of mothers and of fathers. She had always had the sense not to disparage Polly in particular; her amused scorn had blanketed all the world around them. Isobel had, indeed, known all the things she needed to know. Dinah wondered if she still did, and if it would still be an attractive trait. Dinah wondered if it would be bearable.

She had never become settled in any one way of thinking about Isobel. Dinah was protective and possessive of their friendship and at the same time wary of Isobel’s elusive affections. She had spoken with Isobel often over the years, long distance, and Dinah would be sitting in her own house and suddenly realize that she was in a room Isobel had never seen, although Dinah would have with her in that space Isobel’s light, persuasive voice. Sometimes Isobel would talk at great length about her life and her friends—all unknown to Dinah—and Dinah would feel a terrible sense of loss. Isobel would occasionally describe trips she had taken with a lover or a friend, so that Dinah, at her end, would hang up the phone when they finished the conversation and find that her usual generosity of spirit in regard to Isobel had narrowed into a slender knife of jealousy. On the other hand, Dinah could scarcely give credence to the fact that her friend lived a life and moved through surroundings with which she, Dinah, was not wholly familiar. For the most part, she didn’t believe in Isobel’s separate existence, and because of that simpleminded conviction, she did not care that Isobel was not always accessible. But she would be delighted to have her back again for a little while.