Fortunate Lives (29 page)

“Oh, I know, but I’ve been behind you for about ten miles, and I noticed when you began to slow down. I could tell you were
having trouble. Actually, I’ve figured the odds on these things. Grown women in Volvo station wagons are not a big risk. I
think it’s the middle-aged guys in those kind of anonymous green sedans who worry me most. Those cars that are always dusty
and dented. I mean, it’s like they’re designed that way. Born to be a heap. You know? And some guy’s driving who has on a
white T-shirt and his elbow out the window….” The girl straightened away from the car and mimicked a man slouching at the
steering wheel. She pretended to take a long drag from an imaginary cigarette while steering casually with the other hand.
Dinah laughed, and the girl dropped her arms to her sides and grinned back at her. “Why don’t you pull in front of me and
I’ll follow until you turn off? In case you don’t feel as well as you think?”

Dinah pulled ahead, and in a few miles turned off into the graveled lot at Carmichael’s, flashing a wave at the girl, who
tooted her horn and accelerated up the long grade of the mountain. While Dinah sorted through the heavy wool blankets, she
felt sure that the girl who had stopped to offer her help had parents who had no idea that they had a daughter so kind, so
clever, so responsible in the world. So adult. Dinah let herself think about the incident, but she didn’t allow a single thought
of its cause to enter her mind. The memory of the girl loping back toward her along the highway cheered her through the rest
of that day, and she completed every chore on her list.

In the next few days she was at loose ends. Until David had enough time off work to try on his jeans and slacks and shirts
and jackets, to see if they needed to be altered, there weren’t any more preparations for his leavetaking with which Dinah
could busy herself. She made a halfhearted
attempt to get back to a book Ellen had persuaded her to review for a new local literary magazine, but she knew she would
do the author a disservice if she read his book now. Her attention was vague and indirect, having the quality of a pointillist
painting. At the end of a day she had a memory of a cohesive unit of time, but, in fact, during that day each moment registered
more or less out of context. She was reluctant to allow herself periods of long, uninterrupted musings. She wasn’t sleeping
well, and she put her fuzzy-headedness down to that.

She began to think it was important—perhaps only for herself—that there be some sort of occasion to mark David’s transition
from living at home to a life of his own. After all, David would leave them only once, and it seemed to her imperative that
the family do something together, something that David could enjoy and could add to the picture of how his life had been.
It was possible that David was taking leave of them with such ease because he simply didn’t understand how much they loved
him. He would be able to think back and say to himself that when he had gone off to school his freshman year, his parents
and his sister had… and Dinah was at a loss. She couldn’t think of anything appropriate, and one part of her unkindly wanted
David, at about age thirty-four, to look back and think, “When I went off to school my freshman year… I was an ungrateful
little shit.” This was not in any way admirable, Dinah knew that, but she had come to a flinty peace with herself these past
few months over the fact that her maternity was not selfless.

She considered a surprise party, but most of David’s friends were going off to school also, and she imagined each family would
mark the transition in its own way. She thought briefly of the customs of some of the early Irish immigrants to the United
States. The families held an “American Wake,” on the night before the final leave-taking, to give form to the agony of the
coming separation. They had accorded dignity to the grief of having to live on
as childless parents and parentless children—an unnatural condition because the lost children and absent parents were alive
in the world, but lost forever to each other. For almost five minutes, one late afternoon, this appealed to Dinah as an appropriate
ceremony, but then she snapped out of her gloomy reverie and decided she didn’t really think any sort of celebration was worth
the trouble, given David’s current state of mind.

She didn’t allow herself to ponder what connection there might be between Netta and Martin—that seemed to her a separate issue
altogether, and certainly boded a different sort of regret. The very evening Ellen had first mentioned it to her, when they
had all sat around eating pizza, Netta and Martin hadn’t returned from the office until long after Vic and Ellen had gone
home, and Dinah had helped David put Anna Tyson to bed in Sarah’s room. When Netta and Martin had arrived, David had offered
to drive Netta home so he could carry Anna Tyson up the steep stairs of Netta’s apartment.

“I’ll drive them, David,” Martin had said, uncharacteristically brusque. “You’ve got to be at work tomorrow.”

Dinah had turned away when she saw Netta reach out and lightly touch Martin’s arm in thanks, and Dinah also saw David’s face
close down in anger. “I’ll drive them, Dad,” he said, his voice overloud and hollow. Dinah was stunned for a moment by sheer
humiliation. Did her own children know of some alliance between their father and Netta? Dinah went upstairs, not waiting for
Martin.

When Martin had come up to bed, she was awake and had no hope of sleeping. Sometimes it struck her as strange that, at a designated
hour, she took off the clothes she wore in the daytime and put on clothes to wear at night, and then lay in bed staring at
the ceiling or at the soft outlines of the windows until it was time to change into a new set of clothes and move through
the daytime hours again. It seemed like such an arbitrary arrangement—and so much laundry.

That night, though, she had turned her head on the pillow to look at Martin as he settled down next to her. “Listen, Martin…”
she began at the exact moment that he said, “Dinah, did you… ?”

They both stopped. “What?” she said.

“Did you notice the bruises on Netta’s arms?” he asked her. “When she was leaning across the table? And on her neck?”

“I didn’t. No,” Dinah said, pushing the bedspread away and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “I’m going to read
for a while. I’m not sleepy.”

“Okay,” Martin said, rolling over on his side into his pillow. “I hope you can get some sleep later. ‘Night, love.”

Dinah went down the stairs, cursing him silently, loathing him, mimicking him with the fury of the insomniac for the sound
sleeper. “I hope you can get some sleep later,” she said aloud, softly, with a singsong, high-pitched mockery, cocking her
head back and forth with each word, drawing her lips back over her teeth in disdain, like a child in the schoolyard.

Dinah and Martin had been married long enough to have run the course of dealing with the other’s seeming infatuations with
someone else. Each one had suffered through long periods of jealousy and speculation. They had attended the requisite number
of parties where Dinah had glimmered and glittered and tested the waters of her own attractiveness, and Martin had flirted
quite seriously with someone else’s wife. Years ago. All of that posturing seemed to have happened so long ago; it was so
tedious in retrospect. Pointless, after all. And Dinah felt fairly certain that Martin was interested in too many other things
to take the risk of being involved with anyone other than herself. Besides, they did love each other, and they had honor and
affection and humor and tragedy between them, and the constant awareness of the fragility of family life. Why would Martin
tempt fate? But when she returned to bed that
night, she didn’t sleep well, just in snatches during the hours toward dawn.

Dinah found herself, in the last week of August before school started, browsing through the rows of David’s neglected garden,
stooping here and there to pull up weeds, bending to stake the tomatoes firmly, shooing Duchess away so that she wouldn’t
trample the flowers and strawberries. The cats taunted the poor dog as they followed Dinah sinuously through the rows, stopping
to shake off any bit of water that clung to an impeccably clean paw. Duchess paced the perimeter of the plot, sometimes shifting
her front paws excitedly, wagging her tail unctuously, and crooning low in her throat to Dinah, begging to join her in the
center of the garden.

“Oh, Duchess! Lie down! No! Stay! Lie down! That’s a good girl.” And Duchess settled restlessly with her head on her paws,
eyeing the cats, who shot her narrow-eyed glances from among the foliage. Dinah looked at the woebegone dog and laughed, and
began to sing to her from the row of tomatoes she was tying up:

Lie down Duchess.

Just leave me alone.

If you stay right where you are,

You’ll get a bone.

Dinah was making up silly words to the tune of an old Eric Clapton song called “Lay Down Sally.” The air was brilliant with
its lack of humidity and haze, and the temperature was so moderate that it was one of those days that David had once characterized
as having no weather at all. She was glad to remember his phrase. He was right. It was one of those rare days when one is
not conscious of being a separate creature on the planet. She went ahead singing
to the dog, making up unclever lyrics, enjoying herself wholeheartedly.

Stay there Duchess.

Stay just where you are.

You’re not missing anything.

I won’t go far.

Don’t move Duchess.

Lie there in the yard.

Pulling up this bishop’s-weed

Is really hard.

It was a good, sexy sort of tune, with a funny, offbeat, Southern rhythm, and she liked the sound of it in the vivid green
yard. It reminded her of fraternity parties, of stepping into a room ahead of some boy, moving toward the band, slightly shimmying
her shoulders from side to side with the beat and then turning to dance—not just with her partner, but for the onlookers,
the boys standing along the wall with sweating paper cups of beer in their hands. She had been a terrific dancer. She straightened
among the tomato plants singing bits and pieces of the real song, emphasizing the funky beat, doing a dance that had been
called “The Jerk” when she was nineteen.

She undulated from side to side, while weaving her arms back and forth with a flick and curl of her wrists. She raised and
crossed her hands above her head in a whiplash motion, and sang on to the next verse. Then she changed to a version of another
dance, almost a bump and grind, taking small steps that turned her slowly in a circle while she swung her hips and shoulders
in opposition to each other and in double time to the beat.

She continued to dance among the staked vines and hum the tune, with her lower lip caught between her front teeth, while she
looked down at her intricate footwork in
admiration until she heard something and dropped her arms and went still in embarrassed alarm.

David and Anna Tyson were standing at the edge of the garden plot clapping, and David was grinning at her while Anna Tyson
looked on somberly. Dinah put her hands up to her face in surprise, and then she laughed.

“God, David! That’s not fair.”

“Hey, you’re great. If you got it flaunt it. I can’t dance at all. I always feel like a fool,” he said, still grinning. “Netta
had to go to the dentist, so Anna Tyson and I were going to work in the garden. Do you mind some company?”

“Sweetie, it’s your garden. I’d love some company.”

David dispatched Anna Tyson to get baskets and paper bags for zucchini and tomatoes, and he waded in among the rows, bending
over and swinging back and forth to pull up the heavy-leafed and shallow-rooted weeds that were choking the zinnias. Anna
Tyson helped for a while, and then wandered off to play on the old swing set. Dinah and David remarked to each other occasionally
about the flowers or vegetables, and the whole atmosphere was easy and companionable. Eventually Anna Tyson grew tired and
lagged after them in the garden. Her face was flushed with heat, and she had that glazed look of exhaustion that young children
get. Dinah took pity on her.

“Why don’t we take a break and go up to the house where it’s a little cooler? I have some chocolate milk, Anna Tyson. And
Sesame Street
is on.”

The three of them made their way up the slope of the yard, Dinah and David on the grass, and Anna Tyson determinedly jumping
two-footed up one slate step to the next.

“Netta won’t let me watch
Sesame Street
,” she said, looking at Dinah to see if perhaps Dinah would.

“Well, I always watch
Sesame Street
,” Dinah said, “so I’m sure your mother won’t mind if you watch it with me.”

“That’s all right, Anna Tyson,” David said. “I’ll read you one of the books you brought.”

Anna Tyson’s face puckered in reproach. “I want to watch
Sesame Street
. Sometimes I watch it at Melissa’s, and Netta doesn’t care.”

“David,” Dinah said softly, “it won’t hurt for her to watch this once. She’s so tired I think she’ll probably fall asleep
if she lies down on the couch to watch television.”

He looked worried. “The thing is, Netta thinks that all those images flashing on and off the screen so fast aren’t a good
way to teach. She thinks that the whole concept of that show undermines a child’s own ability to figure out how to learn in
his own way.”

Dinah looked at David to see if he found this amusing, since he had loved the show himself when he was Anna Tyson’s age, but
clearly he didn’t. “Umm. Well… It won’t make any difference if she watches it for one hour. And I promise you she’ll be asleep
in about fifteen minutes.”

Dinah settled Anna Tyson on the couch in front of the television with a glass of chocolate milk and a straw before rejoining
David in the kitchen. He had poured tall glasses of iced tea for both of them and was sitting at the table. Dinah was delighted
with the afternoon, with David’s company, with the plethora of vegetables in piles on the counter and filling a brown paper
grocery bag sitting on the floor.