Suncatchers (56 page)

He waited a while, trying to come up with the appropriate words to say. He could say what he had said to Jewel that night on the steps: “It's been a hard day for you.” But had it been? He had gotten the impression that Dinah was generally doing fine. He hadn't taken much stock in Troy's account of her crying at night. Kids imagine strange things when they go to bed in a dark room.

“Dinah.” When he spoke her name, she grew quiet. “Dinah, why are you crying?” He said it softly.

She inhaled raggedly, then answered in a broken voice, “I don't know.”

They sat in silence for a time. He heard her blow her nose, an indelicate honking sound, and squelched the desire to make a joke out of it. “Dinah, won't you blow, Dinah, won't you blow, Dinah, won't you blow your horn?” he could have sung. But he didn't, of course.

“What's wrong? Are you okay?” Perry asked.

“In a sense, yes, but strictly speaking, no.” It was her old habit of repeating his words but in a different context. He'd forgotten how often she used to do that, always playfully in their happy years together, but later on, with blatant sarcasm. Once, a year ago, Troy had asked Perry why some parents let their children believe in Santa Claus, and Perry had replied, “So if the children don't like their presents, they can say it's his fault.” Later that day Perry had heard Troy ask Dinah why she always left the room when Dad entered, and she had sighed heavily, then replied, “If I don't like his presence, it's his fault.”

“What's wrong?” Perry asked again.

Dinah took a long breath and let it out slowly. “I don't even know how to answer that,” she said in a small voice.

“Is it something at work?”

“No, work's fine,” she said.

“Is it something about Troy?”

“Well, no, not exactly, but . . .”

“But what? Is Troy having some kind of trouble?”

Her voice suddenly grew stronger, more aggressive. “Is Troy having some kind of
trouble
? Perry, Troy is a nine-year-old boy who lives with his mother and wonders every single day of his life why his . . .”

Perry didn't press her to complete the sentence.

“I think it's safe to say that Troy is having some kind of trouble, yes,” she continued. “Did
you
ever have any trouble when you were a kid, growing up with only a mother around?”

The question hung in the air like stultifying vapor.
Trouble, trouble, trouble
—the word echoed inside Perry's head. A picture of hideous witches stirring a noxious concoction leapt to his mind. “Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.” But what was a nasty gruel of newt's eye, adder's tongue, and goat's gall compared to what Perry had experienced growing up? He would have gladly drunk the witches' hell-broth, the whole cauldronful, in exchange for a normal childhood.

But Troy was far more resilient, more confident, more rugged than Perry himself had been as a child. There was no possible way Troy could be wandering in the same emotional wasteland Perry had gotten lost in. His nights couldn't possibly be as long and black as Perry's had been, his days as full of frightful insecurities. He suddenly felt a knot in his stomach. What if Troy were suffering the same way he had? What if he were lying in bed right now wondering if anybody would care if he suddenly disappeared?

He realized after a while that he didn't know whose turn it was to say something. Had Dinah asked a question? Or had he? He heard a slight rustle on the other end of the line and wondered if maybe Dinah was crying again.

“Dinah.”

“Wait a minute, Troy's here. He says he's thirsty.” He heard her lower the receiver. “Use the glass there in the sink,” she said. So she was in the kitchen. All along he had been imagining her in the den. “It's Daddy,” he heard her say. “No, not now. He'll call you tomorrow,” she said. Then, “Okay, just tell him hi and then off to bed.”

“Dad, is that you?” It struck Perry that at the moment Troy's voice sounded anything but resilient, confident, rugged. But the boy was tired and sleepy. What could he expect?

“Hey there, Troy. So someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, huh?” Troy didn't laugh. Maybe he didn't even catch the allusion to the song.

“Off you go,” Dinah said from the background. She paused, then added, “Yes, I'll come see you in a minute.”

After a few moments, Dinah spoke again. She sounded exhausted. “I feel so tired, Perry. I feel like I can't drag myself from this chair. Some days I feel like my feet weigh a ton, like it's a major accomplishment to pick them up. I wonder what quicksand feels like.”

“A lot of points,” Perry said.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.” He berated himself silently. How could he be so dumb? How could he tell her at a time like this that he had won the Scrabble game at Jewel's house less than an hour ago, barely beating out Willard in the end and that
quicksand
had been the word that had earned him eighty-four points? What would she say if he went into an enthusiastic explanation of how Eldeen had claimed the left center Triple Word Score with her word
sand
, spelling it vertically, and had scored fifteen points, but then
he
had added the word
quick
to
sand
, beginning in the top left corner, which was another Triple Word Score square and had accumulated eighty-four points, counting the Double Letter Score for the letter
C
? What would Dinah have to say to Eldeen's outcry, “Perry's just too smart for the rest of us, that's what!”? He was glad Dinah hadn't been there to offer her own opinion of Perry's intelligence.

“What do you mean, a lot of points?” Dinah asked.

“There are a lot of points to consider,” Perry said.

“Like what?”

“Like have you been to a doctor? Maybe you just need to take some vitamins or something. Have you been getting enough sleep? Are you eating right? Getting any exercise?”

“A doctor would just tell me what I've already heard a thousand times. ‘You're reacting to stress. Get your mind off your worries.'”

“So who's told you that a thousand times?” An old suspicion stirred inside him. Was Dinah going to some kind of therapy sessions?

“Oh, everybody,” she said wearily. “I was so tired last night—you'll like this—that I sat on the sofa in the den and watched a whole basketball game on TV. I couldn't even get up the energy to change the channel.”

“Who won?”

“Who cares? I didn't mean I really
watched
it.”

“Not even the coaches?”

She laughed a short humorless laugh. “Not even the coaches.”

How many years ago was it, Perry wondered, that they used to watch sports together on television? Sometimes Perry would watch for a few minutes to see what the score was before flipping back to another channel, and during that time, Dinah would study the coaches pacing along the sidelines. “They act like this is the
biggest
deal!” she would say. “Like somebody's really going to care who won this game a year from now.” She had other similar comments for the sportscasters, whose frenzy made her laugh. “I'd be mortified to be a grown man acting that way,” she'd say. Other times she'd watch for a few minutes, then say something like “I wonder how he treats his wife. Or if he even has one. He probably didn't act that excited when his first kid was born.”

“Can I do anything to help?” Perry asked now, then immediately sensed how insincere he must sound. He might as well have said, “Can I give you a ride to Pluto on my magic carpet?”

“Can you do anything to help?” Dinah repeated. “Now, that's a tempting offer.” Was she making fun of him? He couldn't tell. “What do
you
think, Perry?” she continued. “Do you think there's anything you can do to
help
?”

“If I were . . . you know, closer, I . . . I could, well, I'd be glad to . . .” But what
could
he do? Did she have something in mind?

“Well, yes, now that's very true,” she said. “If you were . . . you know, closer, you . . . well, you could . . .” This time there was no doubt that she was making fun of him. He suddenly thought of a tribe of Australian aborigines roasting a kangaroo over an open pit. How carefree their lives must be. And the Indians living with their alpacas high in the Andes Mountains of South America—their main concern was to keep from slipping off those rocky precipices. What did they know of broken relationships and wounded feelings and the steady throbbing knowledge of personal failure?

“Are you going anywhere for Christmas Day?” Perry asked after another hollow, silent interval.

“We'll eat dinner at Mother's,” Dinah answered. “That will take all of an hour, the way she does it. Then we'll open her gifts to us, and she'll open ours, and that'll take another thirty minutes. Then she'll want us to stay all afternoon and on into the night, and we'll want to come home, and we'll probably both end up mad at each other.”

“Well . . .” It seemed to Perry that she was determined to see only the bleak side of life tonight. “I guess I'll talk to you later,” he said. “I just wanted to see how things were going. Troy doesn't exactly fill me in on all the details, you know.” He made an effort to chuckle, but it caught in his throat. “I guess you can get back to addressing your eleven cards,” he said.

“Right,” Dinah said. “I guess that's what I can do all right.”

After they hung up, Perry sat for several minutes, his hand still resting on the telephone receiver. The two little black buttons had been depressed. The line was cut. Somewhere, he thought—many, many places, in fact—there were people, all kinds of people, like Spaniards, Danes, Irishmen, Thais, Laplanders, Turks, Tahitians, Egyptians, all going about their daily routines totally unaware of the icy weight in the pit of Perry Warren's stomach in Derby, South Carolina.

36

Shining Trophies

“Look at all them umbrellas!” Eldeen said, pointing to the wall as they stepped inside the vestibule on Sunday night. “That's one thing I like about rainy church days. Isn't that just the cheerfulest sight—all them different colors and sizes? Funny, them looking so perky when they're used on rainy days and all. They look like a row of little youngsters waiting in line to march into church.”

“Somebody's going to need to mop up the floor out here after church,” Jewel said. “It's a shame, too, because Nina and Jarvis just waxed it yesterday afternoon.”

“Isn't that the way it goes?” Eldeen said, stamping her black boots on the mat. “Seems like from the time I was a little girl, it's never rained at the right time. It's always too early or too late or too much or too little or right before a ball game or right after a big washing when all the clothes are hanging out on the line to dry—or right after you got your floor all spick-and-span, and then everybody tracks through and messes it up again. My mama used to get so provoked over that! 'Course, that's looking at it from a human standpoint. God plans it all. Like it says in the Bible, ‘He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,' and ‘to every thing there is a season.'” Perry didn't understand the connection between the two verses.

“Well, it sure is a good thing the rain held off till tonight,” Jewel said, adding her blue umbrella to the others along the wall.

Perry couldn't remember anyone even talking about what they would have done if it had been raining like this during the special program that morning, but maybe he hadn't been paying attention when the subject was brought up. He thought now about how inconvenient it would have been for the choir members to have had to walk around the side of the church in a downpour during Fern Tucker's story, when they all went back to the Sunday school rooms to put on their coats and scarves and then reenter from the rear of the sanctuary to stand in scattered clusters along the center and side aisles like carolers in a Dickens scene. Then by the time they had changed again from their caroling clothes into their long white robes and once more trekked around to walk sedately down the aisle for the finale, their shoes would have been soaked and the ladies' hairdos would have gone limp. And the children would have gotten their costumes all wet, maybe even muddy, tramping around the building before the pantomimed nativity scene. They would have dripped all over the new burgundy carpet, and the wise men's decorated paper headgear would have sagged.

“I was about to get worried about you,” Willard said as they filed in to sit beside him in their regular pew.

Jewel smiled. “We just took our time,” she said. “It was nice for a change not having to be here early. I even took a nap.”

“Me too,” Eldeen told him. “There's nothing better than a nap on a rainy afternoon! Why, I might still be sleeping if Howie hadn't of knocked so loud on the door when he came to pick up Joe Leonard. He does these real fancy knocks like he's playing the drums. Rap-a-diddle-rap-a-diddle-rap-rap. I don't see how in the world he does 'em. Here, Perry, let's sit that box here on the floor between us.” Then, leaning over to Willard again, she poked his leg and pointed to the box. “You should just
see
the things we brought for the White Elephant party! 'Course, I don't think anything could beat them neon green stockings I took home last year!” She turned back to Perry. “They had these silver sequins all over 'em and was just the
tackiest
things you ever saw.”

As Brother Hawthorne walked to the pulpit, Eldeen emitted a snort of laughter and whispered loudly to Perry, “And you should of just seen the sunglasses Brother Hawthorne got last year! Earl Vanderhoff was the one who brought 'em. They was gigantic purple things with pink rhinestones in the corners!” She began shaking so hard Perry could feel the pew vibrate.