Dale Loves Sophie to Death (17 page)

“So few people have your special knack for making such absolute judgments!” Dinah said. “Even if he’s a
terrible
dog, he’s still lost!” Dinah was depressed by her own lack of control. Irony was lost on her father, and he would not brook disagreement, or even pay attention to it; she and he would only reach another impasse.

Her father was seldom angry, and now he was only hugely irritated; she was a bother to him just now. “For God’s sake, Dinah, why don’t
you
find out where he lives?”

“Well!” she said. “I don’t even live here!” That was all she thought to say, and she left them as they resumed their walk to the post office; she crossed the street to the little grocery store. As she entered the market, other answers crossed her mind. “
I
can’t do that, Dad,” she should have said, her voice mild and quite reasonable. “I’m with you.” She might have said that to him and to her mother. When she looked out over the tomatoes piled in a pyramid in the market’s window, she saw her parents still discussing something, and still being wooed by the hopeful dog.

That evening she thought with charity even toward herself about that trifling incident and her overreaction to it; she saw that these little matters were always the trials of summer. The long sunny days and the soft nights were never enough to counterbalance her self-righteousness. It still seemed to her that she was the only member of the family who was bound to put an order to all their lives, to set them straight in their pattern. Then she wouldn’t be needed any longer; she could relax, and they could all know how much each of them was loved by all the others. Everything would be much easier.

Buddy came by in the evenings sometimes, to eat dinner with her and his niece and nephews. He had come the past few nights, and he appeared that afternoon just as Dinah was starting to fix dinner. She was only making a chef’s salad. He came into the kitchen with the evening newspaper and sat at the table reading the front page while Dinah ran cold water over the steaming hard-boiled eggs before she tried to peel them. She suspected that Buddy’s company these past few days was due to his own restless anticipation of Isobel’s homecoming.

Dinah began peeling the eggs under running water, but they wouldn’t peel, and she was angry every time a sliver of hard-cooked white came away with the brittle shell. Buddy got up and hovered behind her. Finally, he took an egg from the colander and one of Mrs. Horton’s teaspoons from the drawer and tapped the shell into minute fragments with the spoon’s back. After this careful preparation, he slipped the shell and its underlying membrane off the egg as easily as if he’d unzipped its coat. Dinah noticed this with aggravation, but she left the rest of the eggs for him to do and began laying down layer upon layer of Boston lettuce in the salad bowl. She and Buddy had acquired from their father the infuriating habit of interfering in the most mundane busywork carried out by any other person. It was kindly meant. They could not believe—not one of the three of them—that they couldn’t make life easier for some other person if only that other person would follow their example or advice. Oddly enough, in Dinah’s view, since she thought they were so little alike, Martin and Polly dealt with this trait in the same manner. They listened docilely enough and agreed with any suggestion wholeheartedly; then they proceeded with whatever they were doing just as they liked.

In this case, Dinah’s aggravation was momentary; she enjoyed having Buddy there in the kitchen with her. When he was in his teens and she had just become old enough to assess him, to wonder what he was like, he had had the lanky height of her father and something of the same edginess and restrained tension. There had been an uneasy promise about him like that of a tightly drawn wire under incessant strain. But he had thickened and become one of those tall, kind-faced, burly men—the sort Dinah would dare to stop on a city street to ask directions. He had become the kind of man who wore a beautiful suit and then didn’t button the jacket, as though he wished he didn’t have it on. He looked content; he looked successful; he had become an avuncular, well-pleased man, she thought. He finished the eggs and dried his hands and settled back at the table with the paper.

“Listen, Buddy,” she said. “I hope you’ll come to Toby’s party tomorrow at Dad’s. You could just come for lunch. Polly’s coming, too. Would you mind? You’re much easier around the two of them than I am.” It was embarrassing to be making such a blatant appeal. “Isobel will be there. She’s coming in tonight. Will that make any difference?”

“Oh, no. In fact, I’m meeting her at the airport. She’s always coming and going. I’ll be glad to see her.” He leaned back in his chair and folded the paper. He had fallen into an awkward discomfiture, and Dinah was puzzled. She wasn’t sure if he meant he was coming to the party or not.

“Will you come, then?”

He rearranged his big body in an apparent attempt to stall for time, in an attempt
not
to say something. She was so curious about this that she turned around from the sink and leaned back against its edge to wait for him to speak.

“You know,” he said, “all this would be so much easier for you, Dinah, if you could just get it into your mind that some people are…just bad people.”

She turned back around to her salad making and began to scrape garlic from the garlic press. She knew, of course, that he meant their father. Buddy had decided very early just how he felt about his father, but Dinah thought that might be due in some part to the natural rivalry between boys and their fathers. “Oh, well,” she said, with not much inflection at all, “it’s not that simple. I really don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Damn, Dinah, it
is
that simple!”

“You can’t really think that”—and she heard a mortifying quaver in her own voice. “No one sets out to be a
bad
person! Who would intend that?”

“Intentions don’t have anything to do with it! Christ! No one sets out to be an
old
person either! Who would intend
that?
The point is…well, the point is that it’s not worth it to try so hard to get things to work out. It’s a waste of your time.” He seemed almost to be pleading with her, but she was slightly baffled. “Well,” he went on, “this really isn’t worth talking about either, I guess. But your life could be easier. It could be a lot less complicated. And, by God, Dinah, having you worry about us all the time is hard as hell on the rest of us! I just wish you wouldn’t expect so much. It’s just going to make you tired in the end.”

Dinah went on assembling the salad, with her back to him. She had made a little stack of ham slices on the cutting board and was carefully shaving them into slivers with Mrs. Horton’s French knife. Her feelings were hurt.

“I’d like to come to Toby’s party, though,” he said, and she even resented it that he was offering her mollification. She thought that she, too, had learned a little about life. She wasn’t grateful for his brotherly admonition.

Buddy turned a page of the paper and shook out the crease with a snap. “I’ve been worried about Toby, in fact,” he said. “How’s that limp? What did the doctor say about it?”

“
Dad’s
a doctor!” She paused and measured oil into the cruet with care. “Toby’s fine. This party will cheer him up, I hope.” But by now she and Buddy were put out with each other. Dinah’s voice was crisply matter-of-fact and polite, and every line of Buddy’s frame, as it was arranged precariously over the small kitchen chair, suggested disapproval. He read the paper with aggressive interest and obviously refrained from comment only with inordinate restraint.

Dinah called the children in to dinner and carefully served their plates with all the ingredients of the salad meticulously segregated, and each one’s favorite bottled dressing dribbled over everything. She tossed the remainder of the salad in the wooden bowl, with the garlic-laden oil-and-vinegar dressing she had mixed. When she did this, all the fragile, julienned cheeses and meats disintegrated, and the whites and the yolks of the carefully peeled and sliced eggs fell apart and were dispersed among the lettuce leaves. This was just how she liked it: a fine, pungent mélange. If Buddy preferred his salad beautifully arranged and sparingly sprinkled with dressing, he wouldn’t say so, and she didn’t care. She was irritated at him. Life was
too
easy for him. He didn’t worry enough. He lacked the resonant contemplation of the married, the child-bound, the intimately connected. It struck her as a willful and selfish disassociation, and she resented him for it. So she heaped his plate full and gave him his dinner, and they sat for a while just eating while the children talked.

Chapter Eight

Uncle Buddy and The Homecoming Queen

S
ometime during the night the heat had broken and Enfield was released from its heavy atmosphere by a steady penetrating rain, so that the town no longer lay upon the rolling countryside in its own comprehensive universe. Under a blanket of such heat, even the generation of normal human emotion had built up like static in the contained environment, but overnight it was dispersed. The release of tension was so sudden that it was not altogether a pleasurable sensation. Dinah woke up in that new, bland climate cold and surprised.

She ached from the chill that unexpectedly filled the room, and she huddled under the single, thin sheet until gradually the sound of the steady rain on the porch roof became distinct to her. The drops fell with such rapid but steady regularity that she knew it was not a shower but a drenching, persistent rain that would last the day. She retrieved the spread from the floor, where she had thrown it in the previous evening’s heat, and tried to sleep again, but the heat was all gone, and her muscles were tight because she had curled into herself during the night in an attempt to stay warm. Finally, she gave up any effort to rest, and she got up in the near-dark and went quietly downstairs. She was jumpy, with a kind of ragged tension due to her need of more sleep, and the new, unsettling chill. She stood for a moment in the kitchen and looked out the window, watching the heavy drops that didn’t even fly against the screens but only fell straight to the ground from the dead gray sky. The weather was a dreary promise; it was numbing to the spirit. She realized, too, that she was watching out into the gloom for Lawrence, who, of course, wouldn’t be running this morning. Outside was only Gilbert Street, sheathed in rain, with the leaves of the trees bending darkly against the branches under the weight of the shiny moisture that clung to them. She finally felt the chill so much that she took her raincoat from the downstairs coat closet and put it on over her thin gown. She didn’t want to risk going upstairs for her robe, because the children might awaken. She prowled the downstairs rooms uneasily.

It made her restless that Lawrence wouldn’t sit with her that morning while she drank her coffee. Just as she had hated it, she longed now for the voluptuous heat that had held her in a trance, suspended in the summer. These first cold fronts billowing in from the west were always the earliest signal of the season’s inevitable end, and as usual, that idea filled her with unwarranted nostalgia. It strengthened her belief in the everlasting myth of an idyllic summer. As she watched the rain, her ego was pained as well; she would miss the daily routine in which she and Lawrence balanced so cautiously on the edge of sensuality. Each morning it was curiously reassuring.

She ate some toast and had some coffee, and then she cleaned up, but she felt irritable and hungry still. Dinah was just standing at the front windows and looking out at her father’s house when Buddy’s car pulled up in front of her sidewalk. She didn’t move at first when Isobel and Buddy got out of the car; she just stood there, in sudden panic, with her gown drifting out from under her knee-length raincoat and hanging around her ankles. She hadn’t expected to see Isobel so early, and she was not at all prepared. As edgy as she was, she hadn’t entered a daytime sensibility; she was still in that hazy state that precludes the easy separation of dreams and reality. She didn’t have her wits about her. She only watched from the window, and when Isobel stood there in the rain, Dinah looked on and admired and remembered that sheen she always had about her, as though she were undercoated with a pale gold wash. Through the falling rain, and in that lifeless white light, Isobel, as she stood there shaking the water off her hair, seemed to be the only animate thing in all the world. Buddy came around the side of the car, and Isobel gave up struggling with her umbrella. The two of them dashed for the house.

Dinah ran back up the stairs in her bare feet. She called to the children to wake them up and tell them to go down and greet the guests. She told them to tell Uncle Buddy to start the coffee. She was still coming out of a daze, and in spite of a natural nervous shyness, she was enjoying a sudden satisfaction that she felt only rarely, when everything seemed to fall into place at once. She continued to see her life in two parts: then and now. She didn’t question that perception, but the idea of having Buddy and Isobel in the house with her this morning pleased her immensely, because she had always thought of Isobel, especially, as part of the elusive past. She had begun to ponder the question her father had asked her on the steps of the post office. She still felt the blunt impact of his austere, unfair judgment and conclusions. But she thought she knew now why she
did
come back here again and again. She had begun to believe that it was no more than an effort to homogenize her life, to resolve the schizophrenic images of herself that she had in her mind’s eye, two ideas of herself that incessantly combated each other for dominance. She was baffled by the transition from child to adult—almost from victim to victor—and she wanted to understand and see a clear picture of how she had moved from her past to her present.

From the bathroom she could hear the children being loud and excited downstairs, but she couldn’t hear the words they said, just the noise of it. There was nothing she could do about it right this minute; she felt she must pull herself together—gather her forces—before she went back down. The children adored their uncle; he could handle things for a while. She was so chilled that for the first time in days she ran steaming water in the shower and stood under it until she knew that in an instant the warmth would give out and she would be standing in a downpour the same temperature as the rain outside. She shut off the faucet but stayed within the curtain-enclosed tub in the remaining steam while she dried herself. It amazed her to find that her body adapted to the cold with as little grace as it had coped with the heat.