Fortunate Lives (3 page)

And that day David had possessed joy, too. She had been so pleased for him. Despite Toby’s death, that had still been a time
when Dinah believed in happy coincidence. She had thought that David’s discovery of those two abandoned kittens meant that
they would be a source of special solace to him and that they would be more than usually his own.

The two new cats had become hers, of course, by default. It was she who was most in the house; it was she who fed them and
checked their water. One day she had taken them along to the Vet Clinic to get their shots, and Melissa had not been behind
the reception desk. While she waited to get the attention of a tiny, pert girl who was busily flipping
through a box of file cards, Dinah had stood at the high counter idly contemplating a display of various parasitic worms suspended
in jars of formaldehyde and arranged along the counter next to the flea collars.

“Be with you in a sec!” the girl said over her shoulder. At last she got up and came over to the counter, standing on her
toes to peer over it at the wire carrying cage at Dinah’s feet. “Oh, you have two little kitties, don’t you? Have we seen
you before?” Her name tag said
Annie.

“Yes,” Dinah said. “But I haven’t brought these kittens in before. My account is under Howells.”

From the bank of filing cabinets Annie retrieved Dinah’s folder, glancing through it to check the information. “Neither one
of those is Taffy, then?” she asked.

“No.” Dinah agreed.

Annie stretched up on tiptoe again to look at the kittens. “Aren’t they
cute
! What are their names?”

“Well,” said Dinah, “the striped one’s Bob and the tortoiseshell is Ray.”

Annie glanced up at her intently for a moment, and then bent over the chart to write the information down. “What
unusual
names for little kittens,” she said as she was writing.

“Oh, well… you know… they’re the comedians.”

Annie didn’t respond for a moment; her face went solemn while she turned the pages back to be sure the carbon had copied.
Then she smiled brightly at Dinah. “Oh, I know! Kittens can just be so funny!”

The feline Bob and Ray weren’t ever funny, though. They were fierce in practicing their survival skills. They tumbled and
skidded across the wooden floors, but they were so clearly purposeful, so determined, that their kittenhood was never amusing.
Sarah and David lost interest when the kittens proved to be unaffectionate—not at all mean, but diffident. Dinah, though,
had been fascinated. In that long period of time, which she still thought of as being
“after Toby’s death,” they distracted her, and she watched them by the hour. Bob was distrustful, and Ray was affronted by
every human foible that he witnessed around him, especially hers. He glared at her if she dropped a glass or slammed a door
or made any sudden noise. If she forgot to feed him, he found her wherever she was in the house and reminded her to give him
dinner with a soft tap-tapping of his padded paw, claws scrupulously sheathed.

The two kittens slept curled together, but as they grew into cats they became less and less a pair. Bob went off on his own,
tucking himself into a tight ball to sleep on the tops of bookcases or in the depths of a closet during the winter, and disappearing
for weeks at a time during the summer. Ray took it upon himself to guard her behavior, and for a while this seemed to her
miraculously coincidental. For a while it was with him, not Toby, that her daily wars were waged. If she sat down for a moment
to get some of her own work done and she failed to notice Ray come into the room, he would knock some object off a table or
a mantel.

“Oh, Christ!” she would shout at him, leaping up explosively, but he would only turn his back with a flick of his tail and
direct all his attention to washing his leg. It was Ray who knocked the iron off the board onto the floor when she had left
it turned on. She had come back into the room to discover him sleeping on its accustomed resting spot while a thin stream
of smoke rose into the air from the hot iron plate lying flat on the wood floor. He curled up quietly in her chair at the
kitchen table and was outraged if she didn’t notice him before she sat down. She had often dropped a plate or let a fork clatter
to the floor as she leaped forward after almost sitting on him. But he always slipped away just in time.

In retrospect Dinah could never pinpoint that one instant in which she stopped measuring the progression of the days from
the moment of Toby’s death. The end of her
active
grieving slipped up on her and caught her unawares, leaving her oddly at loose ends, uneasy and fearful. On some level was
the belief that, as long as she held on to her overwhelming grief at his loss, then Toby might not really be gone.

Nevertheless, eventually and unwittingly, she loosened her grip on her fury and sorrow, and all the other elements of her
life receded into their proper perspective. Over the years she stopped regarding Ray’s intrusion, his persistent guardianship,
as particularly coincidental or significant one way or another. She automatically made her way around him when she was working
in the kitchen; it became a habit to hold any book she was reading up in the air so that he could not settle on it and prevent
her from turning the pages. And despite all his apparent devotion to her he repelled any affection she extended toward him.
If she put him on her lap, he would remain only so long as she held him beneath her hand.

His behavior interested David. “His choices are pretty limited. Bob’s never around, and how would you like it if you had to
have Taffy as your best friend?”

Dinah had laughed, but she thought David was probably right. She had become Ray’s main focus of interest by a process of elimination.
Once, when the cat was just a little over a year old, Dinah was working at her desk, and she had straightened up for a moment
and rolled her chair backward a little to stretch her legs, Ray had let out a terrible hiss and a warning screech because
he had settled on the rug just behind her, and she had unwittingly rolled onto a bit of his fur before he jumped out of the
way. He was incensed, but so was she. She hadn’t known he was there, and the awful sound he made had caused her skin to prickle.
She swiveled all the way around in her chair and matched his furious glare.

“You stupid, stupid
beast
! What the hell do you think?” And quite unexpectedly she began to cry, a deep, alarming
sobbing. “You don’t
own
this place! You think you’re God’s own cat, don’t you? You’re just a pest! And I don’t
care
if I roll over you and squash you flat! I can’t have any peace in my own house!” And she had raised her hands to her face,
trying to stop her own weeping. “You’re driving me crazy! I’m
sick
of thinking about you and you’re driving me crazy!” Although she yelled straight at him, crying and shouting, he didn’t even
flinch. She turned her chair again and bent forward, laying her face against the cool wood of her desk and weeping on and
on, not thinking at all about the cat but simply given over to grief. When she finally rose from her chair the cat regarded
her with disdain. You’re loud and raucous, he seemed to be thinking. You are all alone in your own room yelling at a cat.

But as time passed, Ray’s preoccupation with her became merely a function of the household, a part of the secret life of her
days when she was home alone. If the house were otherwise inhabited, she bent the shape of her hours to encompass her husband
and children and friends. And this summer the intensity of the lives lived within the rooms of her house was shifting and
dissipating in a way that she could not understand.

Sarah, now twelve, was still willing to answer some of the questions Dinah asked her directly, but David, at eighteen, revealed
as little as he could without being rude, as though any knowledge she might have of him bequeathed to her some sort of power
over him. And while the life of the family inevitably drew in around him as they waited through the warm months before September
when he would leave for college, Dinah grew increasingly desperate to be given a little access, once again, to some part of
David’s state of mind.

It seemed to Dinah that he was unreasonably intent on his absolute privacy. At one point, on her way out the door, Dinah had
leaned back around the doorframe into the kitchen, where David was finishing his breakfast. “I’m going
to the grocery,” she said. “Is there anything special you need or anything particular you’d like for dinner?”

He gazed up at her in silence, with his eyebrows drawn together in pained outrage. “I don’t know why,” he said, “you need
to know
everything
about my life!”

Dinah only sighed and pulled the door firmly closed behind her, but in the car she found that her eyes smarted with tears.
What had she done to warrant such resentment?

Another day, though, when he came home from work, David sat amiably with her in the kitchen, drinking a beer while Dinah stood
at the sink, sipping a glass of wine and washing lettuce for dinner.

“Oh, guess what!” he said. “I saw a girl who’ll be in my class next year. We were in the same tour group after my interview.”

“You did?” said Dinah, not remembering to make her voice sound less avid. “Did you speak to her? Is she a girl you might go
out with?”

“Of course I spoke to her. She was having lunch with her mother at the restaurant. They were on their way to Manchester to
go shopping.” He had waited tables three summers in a row at The Green River Café, and just this week he had managed to be
put on the shift that served lunch and afternoon tea instead of the breakfast shift, which started at 5:30 in the morning.

Dinah didn’t notice David’s expression tighten, and she decided that the extra sleep this week had improved David’s mood.
She was amazed to be getting so much information from her son, whose life she could no longer envision, who no doubt had all
sorts of thoughts and did all sorts of things that she could not possibly imagine. This was not a prurient interest on her
part. She would have been as intrigued to find out that he was reading Dostoevsky as she would have been to discover the nature
of his love life. She only wanted to continue to know him. She dried her hands on a kitchen
towel and moved a few steps toward him where he sat at the table.

“How do you know it was her mother? Did she introduce you?”

“Nope. I just leaped to that conclusion, Mom. It was just a shot in the dark.” He was careful to keep humor in his voice,
but Dinah was so eager for particulars, for one little way to hold on to her oldest child, that she didn’t even notice.

“Well, I mean, it could have been her aunt or someone. It could even have been her sister. Her mother could have had a daughter
when she was twenty and had another when she was forty. Or it could have been just a friend.” She was very serious about finding
out every detail of this encounter, about having it accurately filed away in her mind.

“Oh, my God! That’s what the writing on the napkin meant!” David said. He looked alarmed.

“A napkin?”

“Yeah. I was just clearing the table, but I did notice that someone had written on a napkin in lipstick. It said, ‘Help! I’m
being kidnapped.’ I should have
known
!”

Dinah laughed, and David went off to take a shower. But she was left with an abiding curiosity about the girl in the coffee
shop, the girl’s mother, David’s conversation with them, all his movements and all the ideas he had had in his own day.

This particular evening at the dinner table, both the children were being especially forthcoming, chatting to her with a gently
forced animation that she welcomed and accepted. Within their small group was the clear acknowledgment that it was she among
them who was most wounded this morning when she had finally had to have the cat, Ray, put to sleep. She had taken the cat
to the clinic earlier in the week because he had stopped eating and his eyes were running. A new vet had checked him over
and had given
Dinah antibiotics for the cat and diagnosed him as having pneumonia. But it worried Dinah that she could coax the tablets
down his throat so easily.

This morning she had awakened to a strange sound in the bedroom. She had thought Martin was snoring, but he was sleeping silently,
turned on one side. Finally she looked over the side of the bed and discovered Ray, pulling himself along the rug toward her
bed, too feeble to walk and gasping for air. The cat had come to get her.

She had jumped out of bed and said loudly to Martin to call the vet. He turned over slowly, coming awake, unable to make out
what was going on.

“The cat is sick,” she said. “I’ll take him to the clinic. Call Dr. Randolph and tell her to meet me over there!” She put
her raincoat on over her nightgown and took her pillow from the bed and put it down next to the gasping cat. She was very
careful as she eased him onto it.

“But Dinah, it’s only six-thirty. They don’t even open until eight.” Martin couldn’t see the cat on the other side of the
bed, and he wasn’t fully awake. But Dinah stood up and turned to him in a barely controlled rage that startled him.

“Just call the vet. Tell her,” Dinah said very slowly so as to be entirely understood, “that she killed my cat! Tell that
woman that she God damned well did kill my cat!”

But at the clinic Dinah’s anger ran out, leaving her limp and vulnerable in the quiet building. She was terribly sad as she
sat holding Ray on her lap, stroking his ragged fur while the vet injected him with a fatal dose of the anesthetic Somlethal.
His head sank forward, and his heart stopped in seconds. And Dinah had no doubt that it was better, as she sat looking down
at him, than to have let him slowly suffocate. Nevertheless, she felt she had betrayed him, not by having him killed, but
by witnessing him there on the floor of her room, so desperately in need, so utterly without dignity. No longer God’s own
cat.

Dinah had been unable to move except to shake her head at the vet to signify that she would not leave yet, and the doctor
withdrew, nodding in agreement. For a long time Dinah had sat in her nightgown and raincoat in the little examination room
with Ray across her lap, not thinking about the cat at all, but brought face to face once again with the terrible recognition
of inevitable sadness. She had thought then that there are a few things no one ever tells women. She supposed it wasn’t a
conspiracy; maybe it was a kindness. When she was pregnant the first time a few people had at least suggested some of the
possibilities. Martin’s mother had told her that her life would never again be the same, not altogether in a congratulatory
tone.