Suncatchers (45 page)

“Oh—the banjo,” Dinah said. “Now that other one was up here somewhere, maybe here? I thought so.” She ignored Troy's high-pitched objection as she gathered up the matching pair and then turned up another card to continue her turn. Perry had always admired her tough playing in these little games. Whenever he played with Troy, he tried hard to remember where the cards were only to keep from choosing a match. His goal was always to avoid the spectacle of his son in the throes of defeat.

“The book—the book—now where did I see it?” Perry saw Dinah's head bent over the cards, her finger running back and forth above the rows. She turned up a card. “Nope—wrong choice. Okay, your turn.”

Troy raised up on his knees and reached over to the last row. “It was right there!” he said, gloating. “You shoulda remembered the
book
, Mom. That's what Dad writes.” He added the pair to his stack.

“Yes, Dad does write books, doesn't he?” Dinah said, but her voice had a sharp-edged sound. “That's about all he
does
do.” Troy was busy deliberating over the location of the other chair card and didn't respond, but Perry remembered wondering at the time what Dinah had meant—if she had meant anything at all. He puzzled over it only a few seconds, however, and then gave up. Wasn't it a funny verb construction, he thought, to use the helping verb
does
with the verb
do
?
Does do, does do, does do
—the phrase kept repeating itself. So much so that he almost missed Dinah's next equally mystifying remark.

“Look at these two chairs, Mom. One of 'em's a different color—they used to be exactly alike, didn't they?” Troy held the two cards up for Dinah to see.

“I bet that's the card that got lost that time,” Dinah said. “We found it in your windowsill, remember? It probably got faded by the sun.” Then she looked over to the window and sighed. “Lots of things end up different from how they start out,” she said.

At the time Perry assumed she was disappointed about some little development in her small world of womanly concerns—some dress that didn't fit right anymore or some recent tiff with her mother. He wondered now, as he recalled it all, if she had been thinking of something bigger, something involving him maybe. But why hadn't she ever brought it up for discussion if that was the case? Surely a woman couldn't expect a man to figure out the maze of her mind with just a few cloudy intimations, a couple of overheard innuendoes. Of course, if he were going to be fair, he knew he would have to admit his resistance to discussing problems. Dinah
had
tried it several times, and, well, it never worked out. She had always ended up an emotional wreck.

Perry closed the little book. This would substitute for the birthday card he had given to Willard, he decided. He had already wrapped Dinah's birthday gift in brown paper and addressed it neatly. Now he cut off a shorter length of the brown paper and set about wrapping the book. What would Dinah think when she received it? What would go through her mind before she opened it, when she saw the return address? Would she laugh when she began reading it? Would she be cold and angry? Would she mail it back with sarcastic comments written in the margins—things like “Oh, sure, I'll believe this when the North Pole thaws,” or “Too bad you didn't think of this years ago”?

He would mail them both today. That would allow plenty of time, since her birthday was on Saturday. I
will so
mail it, he thought to himself as he ran a thick strip of packaging tape around the brown paper. He wouldn't go to all this trouble and then back out at the last minute. That would be something a teenager would do. But even as the thoughts ran through his mind, he envisioned the spiral notebook beside the bed where he slept each night. “Dear Dinah,” each page began. He had been writing in it since August, off and on, usually at bedtime and always in pencil. It had started after a conversation with Dinah at the end of the summer, after he had talked with Troy one Sunday night.

“Mom wants to say something,” Troy had said.

“Sure, okay. Put her on,” Perry had replied, trying to sound casual.

Dinah had taken the phone and said something to Troy then, her hand covering the mouthpiece, and had waited a brief interval before addressing Perry.

“There, he's gone upstairs,” she said at last. “Perry, I'm worried about Troy.”

“Worried? Why?” Perry felt his stomach tighten. Dinah never worried. That had always been Perry's function in their marriage.

“He's . . . well, he's having a real hard time right now. Maybe he's just dreading school and fourth grade and all, but it's got me concerned.”

“Well, what is it? What's wrong?” Perry had asked. “He sounded pretty normal on the phone just now. He said he liked the Rollerblade skates I sent him for his birthday and told me about the party and all.”

“I noticed that. I was listening to see how he'd be, talking to you. But you should have been watching him like I was. It's strange—he
sounded
all right, but it was like that electronically produced music. They say it sounds like the real thing, and I guess it does, but every time I hear it, I
know
it's not real instruments playing, but I don't know how I know. When I try to put it into words, I can't. Something just isn't right—either it's too subtle to catch, like I can
feel
it but can't hear it, or else it's too big, like it's the whole huge experience that isn't right and trying to explain it is too big a job. It's the same with all those pictures in magazines of tiny replicas of things—cars, furniture, and all. The first glance and you know it's a copy, yet when you examine it, you can't say why you knew it exactly. All the details are there in the right scale, down to the littlest things—but something's not right. You know it's not the real thing.”

The “wash of words”—that's what Perry used to call Dinah's explanations when they were first married. He had been away from it for so long now that he had forgotten that sensation of being splashed and finally deluged with her words, the taking away of his breath with the suddenness of it all. It was different from Eldeen's monologues. Eldeen's were always specific, aimed at communicating particulars about people or places or events, whereas Dinah's might start out specific but always veered off into half-formed comparisons, irrelevancies, and always, always
feelings
. Actually, the music and replica analogies were pretty good, much more clearly expressed than most of what she came up with.

“ . . . and he hardly blinked his eyes the whole time,” Dinah was saying now. “It's like he's on automatic pilot or cruise control—just sitting there opening his mouth like a ventriloquist's dummy or something. The words come out and they're the right ones, the expected ones, but it's his face and his posture and just his whole
appearance
that isn't right. And he's started bringing home the
weirdest
books from the library.”

“Like what?” Perry wished Dinah would slow down.

“He knows right where they all are. He goes straight to the aisle—the five hundreds in the children's room—and drags them all off the shelf, sprawls out right there in the aisle and just
pores
over them. Books about hurricanes and volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes. Then when I ask him which
story
books he wants to check out to bring home, he sets his mouth that way—you know—and says he's checking
these
out. Then he brings them home and just loses himself in them for hours at a time it seems.”

Perry wanted to believe that nothing was really wrong, that Dinah was just being an alarmist. He used to lose himself in strange books when he was Troy's age. But then he remembered how insecure and troubled he was at Troy's age. What if Troy felt that same way inside?

“Then two days ago,” Dinah continued, “I was so relieved to see him with his crayons and markers out, coloring and drawing, and I thought, ‘Well, good—he's coming out of it,' but
do you know
what he was drawing? One picture was a tornado ripping the world upside down! There were little houses and people and animals just flying all over inside this gigantic tornado. And another one was a volcano erupting, with all kinds of black stuff gushing out the top, headed straight for a peaceful-looking little town.
And
I saw him out in the backyard yesterday, down on his hands and knees trying to look down inside a big crack in the ground and feeling around, kind of digging with his hands—we haven't had rain in weeks and weeks—and when I went out later, I walked over to where he'd been and there were three of his G.I. Joe men stuffed down inside that crack headfirst. He's a
disturbed
little boy, Perry.”

“Well, I don't know. I went through a fascination with shipwrecks and floods and things like that when I was a boy.” Perry hoped he sounded calmer than he felt.

“Fascination? Your mother said you used to have nightmares about being drowned.”

When had his mother told Dinah that? Perry wondered. “Well, yes, I guess it was a combination of horror and fascination—like you were the time we watched
Psycho
,” he said. Dinah had sat on the couch with her eyes squeezed shut, clutching his arm till she almost cut off the circulation, but when he had suggested turning off the television, she had refused. “No, of course not!” she had said. “I want to see it all.”

“You're getting off the subject, Perry,” Dinah said. “What about Troy? I don't think it's normal for him to be so obsessed with all these violent acts of nature.”

“Well, it's better than drawing pictures of people slashing other people's throats or shooting them with guns. I don't think we need to worry . . . it'll probably—”

Dinah interrupted with a cry of impatience, then a frustrated sigh. “Oh, I should have expected this. It's easy for
you
to say ‘don't worry.' You're hundreds of miles away!
‘Don't worry'!
” She broke off with a mocking laugh. “That's what every therapist in the world says when you unload everything that's bothering you. ‘Don't worry about it.' ‘Try not to think about it so much.' ‘Worry causes stress'—blah, blah, blah. I should've known that's what you'd say. Not because you mean it, though. It's just your easy way out. The same old philosophy you've always been so good at—ignore it and it'll go away.”

Perry could picture Dinah cradling the receiver under her chin, throwing her arms about dramatically, pacing back and forth. What was this about therapists, though? What kind of therapist? Was she going to some shrink? Perry felt his heart thudding. He wished he had some answers for Dinah.

“Well, I don't know what else . . . have you tried talking to him?” Perry asked, knowing how weak it sounded. “Tried to find out if he's got something on his mind?”

If only conversations didn't move so fast—if he weren't always expected to respond immediately. He needed time to prepare an answer, especially with Dinah. But he had learned a long time ago that she always interpreted pauses of silence as a lack of interest, so he always tried to come back with something quickly, even though it usually fell far short of what needed to be said. He could think of brilliantly insightful, pungently pithy replies later—long after Dinah had exploded over what she once called his “thin, wispy” side of a conversation. “You leave me sitting high in the air on one end of the seesaw!” she had ranted. “You and your pitiful little thin, wispy comments—no wonder we can't have a decent conversation.” He remembered getting lost in the metaphor, another one of her inept attempts at figurative language. If his end of the dialogue seesaw was so feeble, how could he hold
down
one end and leave her in the air on the other end? She hadn't thought it through obviously.

“ . . . so let me know when you have another one of your
inspired
ideas on how to help Troy,” she was saying when he returned to the present, and after that all he heard was the enraged drone signaling the telephone's broken connection. He listened to it for a long time. Broken connections—wasn't that the story of his life?

It had been that very night, back in August, that he had begun his nighttime letters to Dinah, recording things he thought of later that would have served as better answers. He had written about a variety of subjects eventually, but in the beginning it was all mostly about Troy. He had tried to find ways of describing how much he loved Troy, how much he wanted his son to have what he himself had never felt as a child. Even as he wrote, however, he knew it was a selfish act. He was pretending to write to Dinah, but he was really writing to himself. He knew she would never see a word of it.

But this little book was different, he told himself as he descended the porch steps toward his Toyota a few minutes later. He had intended all along to mail this—and he
would
. The spiral notebook beside his bed, well, that was therapeutic, that was all. A series of purgative mental exercises to prove to himself that he could think through a problem, discern likely causes, and draw up a workable course of action. The very fact that he used a pencil spoke for the fact that it wasn't anything permanent or really serious. But this—he had imagined it from the beginning as a conclusive, definite act. In spite of the niggling taunts of that inner voice, he had formed a clear image of himself at the post office window, letting the postal worker take it, weigh it, receive his money, stamp it, and carefully place it into a bin.

Perry passed Hardee's, the Texaco station, Thrifty-Mart, the bank, the G.O.O.D. Country Store. Farther on he drove past Wal-Mart, Darlene's Kreamy Kones, Arbuckles' Hardware, Bo-Nat's Barber and Beauty Shop. Finally, he saw in the distance the small brick building housing the post office, next to the flapping green and yellow pennants of Melvin's Used Cars. He depressed the accelerator a little more, driving now with devoted, single-minded fervor, eager to get the business done so he could put it out of his mind and get back to his chapter revisions.