Dale Loves Sophie to Death (13 page)

So Lawrence and Dinah sat together every morning, not worrying particularly about conversation, just as they had sat together many years ago. One morning Lawrence had leaned over and kissed her lightly on the temple. He had said, “You know, we’re just getting older, Dinah.” They had both laughed, because that was a reasonable argument for the case that no damage could be done to either of them by further exposure to the other. They already knew all there was to know. Dinah wasn’t even surprised, because, of course, she had already thought about his body; she had thought about his long legs, which she admired now for their strength. But they had not retained the gleaming elasticity of adolescence, just as hers had not. Each hair sprouted from the skin of his lean thighs from separate, dark pinpoints against the pale color of his legs, giving the flesh a very slight, powdery look of indentation. She had considered his body with affection and sympathy, but she didn’t really take her musings any further.

None of this, though, was any reflection of her feelings about Martin; those feelings were secure, and carefully compartmentalized. In fact, it seemed to her that Martin and Lawrence were of entirely separate times, and it might be that she was slipping alarmingly out of the immediate moment. She had been seduced into this bond with Lawrence by the peculiar state of mind into which she had been thrown, and by the compelling surroundings of her own youth. The secrecy of these few minutes alone each day with a man she found attractive was as pleasurable to her as the luxurious, heavy taste of the scalded cream in her café au lait.

However, nothing about these quiet and private morning meetings had anything to do with the rest of her life, and Dinah never thought how Pam would view it, either. In any case, over the summer, Dinah’s initial admiration for Pam’s matter-of-fact approach to whatever problems presented themselves day by day had turned into a gentle disdain of a practicality that, in Dinah’s estimation, severely limited Pam’s imagination. Dinah couldn’t believe that her own friendship with Lawrence would have anything to do with Pam’s feelings about the world. Dinah and Lawrence were innocent enough, and besides, Lawrence was her childhood friend; Dinah supposed that such an old association would always be sacrosanct.

Pam was Dinah’s friend by virtue of their shared circumstances. It was becoming apparent that that friendship had reached what could be thought of as its saturation point. It had gone as far it could go. Neither one of them cared much any longer about gaining the other’s approval, and so their acquaintance remained just that; it had lost the momentum that might have propelled it into a true camaraderie. Those long, card-playing afternoons at the club had grown wearisome, and the two of them had fallen into the practice of showing just their small disapprovals of one another in lieu of open hostility. It came down to the simple fact that there wasn’t a redeeming affection between them that made their differences tolerable to each other. Every little thing was beginning to make them edgy.

During their days at the pool, for instance, Dinah would find herself disproportionately aggrieved that Pam packed careful, healthy snacks for her son, Mark. Then, when David and Toby and Sarah made their assault on the various vending machines, just a shadow of a frown would crease Pam’s forehead. Dinah observed with some satisfaction that Mark never ate much of his peanuts or raisins, and she explained righteously to Pam that peanuts are a deadly treat for a young child. Much too easily inhaled and choked on. The celery sticks that Pam had so cleverly stuffed with peanut butter were intact and limply greasy by the end of the hot afternoon. The thermos of milk was foul. Dinah didn’t like herself for her own petty delight at Mark’s refusal to accept celery as a substitute for a Milky Way, or at his certainty that milk wasn’t comparable to a Coke. She didn’t like herself for being glad of these things, but there was no stopping it. She accepted the justice of Pam’s unspoken but obvious disapprobation of her casual attitude toward the eating habits of her own three children, but over the issue of Toby’s more and more obvious limp, Pam and Dinah had approached a real argument, and that would have made the rest of the summer awkward and embarrassing.

After several days of progressively less delicate comments and questions, Pam had finally turned to Dinah at the pool and been very blunt. “For God’s sake, Dinah,” she had said with real heat this time, not tactful coercion, “I’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Van Helder. He ought to look at Toby. He’s Mark’s doctor. He’s very good, I think. I really want you to have Toby looked at! He’s just not using that right leg, and he won’t even swim today!”

Dinah sat there quietly in a complete rage, but she continued to study the cards laid out before her on the metal table in a game of solitaire. The last few afternoons Pam had been so solicitous of Toby; she had bent and catered to his every whim. She had chatted and talked with him; she had, in effect, certified this imaginary illness of Toby’s. And the symptoms were becoming more severe because of it. “Look, Pam, if you would only stop
pandering
to his own idea that he’s sick, he would get better. I’ve tried to explain it to you.
Please
just ignore it. He wants attention, and he needs attention, and I’m doing my best to give him lots of attention
apart
from his being sick! Do you see what I mean? I don’t want this to become a pattern in his life!”

Pam was terribly agitated and quite angry. “Well…Oh, well, Dinah, I simply don’t understand how you run your household!” And she had gotten up and begun to stuff towels and suntan lotion into her beach bag, making preparations to leave. The two of them were on the verge of an irreparable breach.

Finally, Dinah reached out and detained Pam by laying a hand on her arm. She said, in the most soothing and gentle voice she could summon, “Look, Pam, he’s with my father every morning. Toby adores him, and he’s just copying him. Don’t you see? But, of course, Dad’s a doctor, you know. Well, in spite of everything else, he’s a very brilliant doctor.” Dinah knew that Pam didn’t like her father. “You don’t really believe that if he thought there was anything physically wrong with Toby he wouldn’t tell me, do you?”

Pam went on collecting her things and Mark’s, and Dinah could see by Pam’s face that, in fact, that explanation hadn’t been especially convincing to her. But nothing more was said about it, and they gathered the children and left together, amiably enough. After that afternoon, they had taken to switching off lifeguarding duties on alternate days. The children were familiar enough with the rules and their own capabilities by now that it took only one woman to watch them, in any case.

But Dinah couldn’t put Pam’s comment entirely out of her mind, because she had given up all pretense of in any way running her own household. She would sit each morning on the top step of the back porch with Lawrence, and above her in the upstairs bedrooms each child slept separately in his or her own heat-shrouded privacy. The conversation between Dinah and her three children had become spare; their coexistence in this house had lost its chaotic, summer quality and drawn out thin like a straight line, plain and determined. Their four lives scarcely seemed even to merge at the edges, as they should be bound to. This turn of events swept over the household beyond her control, and she would ponder it, but she had no idea if she should or could effect any change. She was slipping in and out of roles that she thought she had carefully mapped out for herself. She was alarmed by and angry at her children—when she thought of it—for their surprising and inexplicable refusal to behave as if they
were
her children. After Lawrence left each morning, Dinah would shudder in anticipation of her day-long and aloof involvement with them. All at once, it seemed to her that those children were regarding her with an intellectual rather than an emotional judgment. It had come as an alarming revelation that she was even to be so considered, and she bristled at the injustice of it.

David had his secrets, but that wasn’t unexpected; he always had. Lately, even Sarah had been muted in her irrepressibility, as though she had developed a dual judgment, at age four, and recognized in herself a reservoir of ideas that she could explore independently. It was Toby, however, who could in one moment reduce Dinah to despairing inertia. She thought he flaunted the possession of his own milky-sweet summer secrets.

Every day he, too, had a morning assignation. After Lawrence’s visit, Dinah made it her habit to rinse out the cups and quietly return to her own room to rest until the children woke up toward the middle of the morning. She had watched each day for a week now and seen Toby slip cautiously over the lawn, cross the street, and sit down to wait at her father’s door. Presently her father would join him, towering gauntly over Toby and greeting him with a restrained nod. Dinah couldn’t tell if they spoke. The two of them would make their way around the flower beds, where her father bent to inspect a plant here or there. She had first witnessed this with astonishment; it paralleled so precisely the ritual of her own childhood when she would linger with her father through the garden and tag along throughout the much more serious business of checking on the corn and tomatoes in the plots that had once been so carefully laid out behind Polly’s house. She had particularly remembered the immense pleasure her father had taken in the startling panorama of the blossoming gladioli, which speared the air with their scentless and waxy height and color. He had cut masses of them for the house, but Polly disdained them. She claimed that they had no delicacy, and Dinah thought, now, that that had been a telling point. Her father could not or would not see how gauche such blatant flowers would be to Polly’s aesthetic tastes.

The very first morning Dinah had happened to look out and see her son with her father, she had felt the weight of nostalgic tears pressing at her eyes, until she had taken in the scene a little longer. Her father progressed slowly through his garden, his lame leg dragging behind him, and Toby, too, matched him step for step, limping alongside. Dinah had gone rigid in immediate panic. She saw a quick flash of an image of herself standing among her children as they silently slipped away from her. As she reached out to them to plead her dominion, her hands splayed in entreaty, it was as though her control were a tangible substance sliding through her open fingers, and she was stupefied with helplessness.

It wasn’t until a day or so later that Dinah finally realized that Toby was limping all the time now, as well as in her father’s company. He lay on a chaise longue at the pool, scarcely moving, or he was quiet and languid on the couch at home, and when he did move, he leaned down heavily on his left leg and brought his right leg forward with great and maddening hesitation. Dinah was so angry and appalled that she couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all to him, though she had heard David ask about it. Toby had scarcely answered him; he had shrugged it off, and David had lost interest. Dinah felt betrayed on all fronts.

Even her mother, who might not know that Toby was with his grandfather each morning, pressed her on this point. Polly’s usually inert curiosity was piqued, and she was a woman whose curiosity assumed a gently aggressive character.

“Do you think you’re putting too much pressure on Toby about something or other, Dinah?” her mother had asked her one afternoon as the two of them sat reading the evening paper on Polly’s porch while the children played in the yard. Dinah sat there a moment, hopelessly depressed by her mother’s uncanny ability to phrase this question so disingenuously that there was no satisfactory answer to it. She didn’t answer at all and just looked out at the children instead. David was lying on the ground reading a comic, and Sarah was digging a system of canals with one of Polly’s silver teaspoons. Toby was wandering around in his own world, oblivious of the rest of them. Dinah repressed her fury as she watched Toby move around the yard with such apparent and truculent difficulty.

“Well,” Polly persisted, “he’s under some sort of strain, Dinah. His stutter is even worse, and that limp…I remember when Buddy did that. Isn’t that odd?” she said, suddenly led away from the mainstream of her thought and sounding a bit vague, like a very old woman all at once. Dinah was caught by this note unexpectedly, in the middle of her resentment. She glanced over at her mother with involuntary compassion to see the narrow, aristocratic regularities of her mother’s profile held dead still and starkly outlined against the gentle, muted movement of the tree-filled landscape. “It was just after you turned two, I think, and your father was away in the army. He was stationed at Fort Dix, you know. Buddy was just nine.” She seemed to think she had explained something, but Dinah drew no conclusions; she just let her mind go blank. Her senses registered the trace of moisture that lay over her skin like a coating of oil, irritating and emotionally defeating. “You were everywhere,” Polly added. “I’ve never known a child who made her presence more felt. That’s when I first hired Jeannie. She used to come every day.” Jeannie was a local woman who had always been in and out of the house doing various jobs of cleaning and baby-sitting. She came regularly now only once a week. “That’s when Buddy stopped using his left hand and arm. He’s right-handed, of course, so I didn’t pay much attention, at first. But, you know, I don’t think children do those things
intentionally
. I helped him exercise it for hours a day. He was so jealous of you, and he was feeling absolutely deserted. He needed all that attention, and it finally worked.”

The implications of all this information—so unexpectedly offered—were inescapable. This must mean that in some way Dinah had to be responsible for the past as well as the present, she thought.

She got up and went to stand at the porch rail. She stood there for a while, just gazing into the yard, until she was sure she wouldn’t cry in pure frustration. She felt suffocated at the idea that she would be forever imprisoned in her mother’s mind as her two-year-old self. How could she ever rectify what wrongs she may have done? The injustices she may have perpetrated? She thought she might cry at the impossibility of ever, ever making herself clear—of ever justifying herself—to her own mother, who should know her so well. Her own mother should know her at least as well as Dinah herself knew her own children!