David rolled the dice and landed on a railroad. He had two already, and now was beside himself with delight. “I’ll get you, Uncle Buddy! Now I’ll really get you if you land on me! You’ll have to pay me a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars!” Buddy covered his face at the grim prospect and sadly shook his head, and Dinah understood with gratitude that her brother was using all his charm to align himself with David, so that David could withstand the suspense of this intolerable game.
But Martin didn’t play games, didn’t know about games, really; he was so innocent of some things, and he was watching his son with an air of censure. Dinah felt suddenly as though those four people were frozen in the moment: her mother abstracted, Buddy all pretense, Martin the epitome of thought and propriety, and David open to anything, ready to head in any of their directions. And, sure enough, Martin frowned across the table at his son. “Don’t be so rude to Buddy, David. You shouldn’t gloat. That’s one of the first things to learn about playing games. Otherwise, you’ll hurt people’s feelings.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Dinah said. “What a pompous ass you are sometimes, Martin. Great God!” And in a frenzy of frustration at them all she glared into their crestfallen little group. “Not one of you—not a single one of you—has any idea how to play this asinine game!” And she stalked from the room while they all stared after her.
“Dinah, you talk like some kind of sailor,” her mother said, mildly. Dinah left the room in a fury, going straight to the kitchen, and instead of carving the ham into careful slices, she hacked it savagely into chunks that were scarcely manageable when eaten buffet-style on paper plates.
Two weeks later, when she drove Martin into Columbus to catch his plane back East, she considered various ways of apologizing to him for the foul and dismal temper she had vented at him over the past long days. She looked at his clean head, which she so loved, silhouetted against the car window, and she wanted to weep at the misunderstanding between them. She was sure she was coming down with a flu, and she simply couldn’t think. There was no one, no others but the children, to whom she was more tied. But then, as they passed through the familiar fields and the little towns, she could not think how to isolate that misunderstanding; how could she name it?
Now, as she suffered all the physical miseries of the flu, she also ached with a regret at having left a chink uncovered in their carefully constructed foundation of experience and tolerance. She lay in bed staring at the walls, awash in something similar to guilt, only much worse. There was self-loathing, there was fear, and, oh, there was a kind of homesickness she felt at this slight loss of herself, because she might have weakened a profound connection.
She looked at the picture, directly across from her, of that girl running. She was growing more beautiful each summer, and Dinah studied her intently. The girl’s endearingly long upper lip was almost ready to smile, but she was clearly giving no thought to the camera. Caught in midstride as she was, she was involved only with herself; she was thinking about her next step. Dinah studied the picture for a long while, so that by the time her fever returned and she began to drift into a light sleep she had become convinced that she did, indeed, know this girl. The girl was Sophie, beloved of Dale, loping steadily toward him, or perhaps away from him, through that neighborhood, to be loved or not to be loved to death.
Chapter Two
Summer Time
For himself, Martin could scarcely bear this leave-taking each summer, always the same, their two weeks in Enfield culminating in an obligatory kiss at the departure gate. He walked away leaving Dinah standing alone and unhappy, but what he thought they both longed to do was to stay—somewhere, in the car, standing on the asphalt, simply stay—just to talk and talk to each other. His vision was of the many words spilling from their mouths and taking a physical shape, all those words entwining them vinelike in what would be the final explanation. They would be enclosed in an arbor that would be the exact definition of themselves. Then they could sigh with relief. They could hold hands and smile. But it never happened, and these summers they parted mute with bewildered misery, feeling at once that they were being forced apart, and yet each anxious to be away from the other. In two days, a week, many times over the summer, they would telephone, and little pieces of apologies, of curiosity and best wishes, would be passed back and forth over the wires, so that at summer’s end they had the illusion once more of having made a concrete alignment, a familiar bridge, a bond.
And in the airport with Dinah, and as he took his seat on the plane, Martin was visited with his usual apprehension and fear of death, and also he was plagued by that now familiar but equally unsettling hollowness in his stomach at the prospect of taking up his life alone. That feeling approached sorrow and self-pity, and yet it was also comprised of the few, small lingering doubts about himself and the way he had chosen to live his life. The stretch of solitary time before him seemed shiny and glamorous with possibilities, and yet he did not hunger after change; he didn’t like to anticipate the unknown. He had never liked uncertainty, so he buckled his seat belt and sat back in his padded chair in a quandary.
Whenever Martin was in transit, he was more or less a man absolutely free. All the thoughts that tied him either to one place or to another fled his mind; therefore, the trip was a gentle interlude. Once the plane left the ground, his mind went idle; he was fairly undisturbed. But as he glanced at the people in the seats around him and saw the stewardesses at the front of the plane bend to each passenger with some question or instruction, he did, as usual, become preoccupied with his appearance. He could never believe he looked like a man who should be on a plane, because Martin was just old enough, at thirty-eight, so that he could remember airports as exotic places. As a child he had relished his own self-importance when boarding those large passenger planes among the beautifully dressed travelers, and he had stared out the window over the wingspan to see the propellers putt-putt-putt and then become a transparent blur of motion. He could not lose that notion of air travel even now, when he observed that across the aisle a couple in jeans and with backpacks at their feet took it none too seriously. It seemed that it was no more to them than taking the bus.
Still, he considered how he must look to the stewardess. Once, when his mother had come to meet him at the train station where he arrived on a trip home from graduate school, she had been laughing when he had finally made his way through the crowd and reached her. “Oh, Martin! You’ve gained some weight! Martin, your face looks like the full moon coming up over the bay!” He was trimmer now, but he did not have a look of authority or importance, even though, in his real life, these were qualities he possessed in some small way. This failure of his to match up to himself had always disappointed him. He was tall enough, but because of his thick torso and rather short legs, he looked stocky and bearlike—sometimes an endearing trait, he knew. His features, though, were so innocent and exactly arranged that his sweet, pale face set atop his wrestler’s body was as surprising as the black dot in an exclamation point. His looks belied a mildly severe nature, and on airplanes he would have been pleased to look severe. He would have liked to look like a man who needed a drink to unwind. He didn’t know that he had aged, and that his round, choirboy’s face had elongated a bit with the pull of gravity. He had finally developed a faint air of irritation not so uncommon in people who otherwise have a look of boundless good nature. The stewardess accorded him due respect, though he didn’t perceive it, and no one else was paying attention, anyway.
Vic met him at the airport, and he had not brought Ellen along just so he and Martin could discuss the Review. And they did discuss it all the way home. Aside from the two seminars he would teach at the college, most of Martin’s summer would be given over to discussions just of this sort, and he was weary in the car as they passed through the Berkshire Mountains to West Bradford. He was relieved to be quiet at last and back in his house when Vic dropped him off. But he was perplexed, too, when he was left there alone. He opened the shades, e
ven the ones over the windows that looked down on the town’s single commercial street, and, most particularly, at a college bar and Laundromat adjacent to it. He had never found these buildings offensive; they weren’t so very near, just easily seen from the height of the house. The house was silent, but Dinah’s energy seemed to emanate from every corner and cubby of those rooms, and he was unnerved. When Martin was in this house he liked it; he always had, but now the rambling shell of the building shrouded him in a peculiar eroticism. He was more aware of his wife’s impact on these rooms now that she was not in them. His family’s artifacts were everywhere around him, and that was what buildings were to Martin: simply containers. He had no other vision of them, though he had tried at various times in his life to think of them apart, as art in themselves. But now, when he sat down in a chair, he never even considered the color of the woodwork or the very walls and the manner of their construction. He sat in a chair in his living room with the tall trees swaying in the yard outside and was aware only of the remnants his family had left behind them.
What puzzled him unaccountably was the unperturbed order settled into every cranny, up the stairs, into the bathrooms, bristling at him from the closets and the cupboards. In the usual course of events this was a household state seldom attained, and even then attained only after the expenditure of great energy and fury, and always attained temporarily.
“We’re terrible in this place together,” Dinah often said when they were in the midst of battling back the disorder that occasionally enveloped their lives so that they had to stop and put things right just to get on with their work. “You only understand neatness, and I only care about basic sanitation. You’d think it would work out so that we complemented each other, but instead we never really get the place either neat or clean!”
When the house was put in a state of domestic efficiency—with every towel folded, beds made, sinks clean—the arrangement was tenuous. And it seemed ominous to Martin, just for a moment, that throughout the summer, with only its lone inhabitant, the household would function with a calm and gloomy regulation.
As he walked around in his house, he found numerous plastic bins filled with carefully sorted toys. Each year, before they made the trip to Enfield, Dinah rearranged and straightened and cleaned all the rooms, because she didn’t want him to suffer from her habit of casual disarray. He discovered plastic building blocks in one bin, miniature cars in another, and so forth. In the kitchen there were two laundry baskets beside the clothes dryer. One was filled with clean clothes, through which he would sift this week, finding what he needed, and then he would deposit those same clothes, once he had worn them, into the companion basket—only to begin all over again after doing a wash. The drawer from which he took a paper napkin to set the table for his meals was full of wire closures for plastic bags, substitute tops for open soda bottles, checked-off grocery lists:
Milk ½ & ½
granola bars
chicken
tomatoes
Toby’s sd. drsg.
chick-peas (4)
He was overwhelmed with the sweet triviality of these things left behind, in the same way he would have been affected if his family had all gone off to war. In their bedroom he was even more overcome. Dinah’s books were shoved beneath the draped quilt which covered her round night table. A basket by her bed still enclosed a plethora of small articles she gathered throughout a day and deposited there at night when she emptied her pockets; she would sort them eventually. There was a book of matches, though she didn’t smoke, a child’s rubber eraser in the shape of a little car, spools of thread, a large cat’s-eye marble, etc. He sat on the edge of the bed transfixed, heady with the presence of his wife. He remembered when he had fallen in love with her, or at least he remembered the feeling of being in love with her, when there had been a sultry kind of tension between them, and now he would certainly say he loved her—he did love her—but that struck him as too simple a description. It was more as though she and he anticipated the other’s moods and longings so exactly that they forever wore the other’s persona like a cloak. Martin played the radio or the television most of the time the first few days of every summer to dispel the uncanny silence.
Into the second week, though, he fell into the rituals of isolated domesticity he had developed over the many summers of Dinah’s absence. The world beyond the house became suddenly erotic to him as well, so that even at the grocery store as he was sorting through the onions he might look across the aisle at a stringy girl choosing among the bell peppers and be stunned by desire. Ordinary people all at once seemed extraordinary in their mundane surroundings; their images leaped out at him from a hazy background like those photographs from SX–70 cameras in which the colors are more than real.
He grew even trimmer, because there was no comfort in having his meals alone at the kitchen table without his family. He took up his summer life as usual, relying more and more on Vic and Ellen. He spent a great deal of time with them, often bringing food to their house to be cooked and shared with them for dinner. Ellen’s sister, Claire, was there for the summer—or perhaps forever; Martin had long ago stopped asking Vic and Ellen for information about themselves when he had at last discovered that they would only look back at him with a smile—ironic and mysterious. It baffled him, but it stifled his curiosity.
When he and Dinah had first come to know the Hofstatters, the four of them had been inseparable. They had all, for a while, felt that they had found soulmates—two happy couples, intelligent, young—and then subtly Dinah’s disaffection began to settle into a solid enough persuasion so that Martin became aware of it. At first he had suspected jealousy, because Ellen was many things that Dinah was not. She was petite and exact and careful in her housekeeping, just as Vic was so precise in all his habits. Ellen had a mind and temperament like glistening, cool metal. She could be sharp; she was slightly inflexible. Martin knew that Dinah did not think he particularly admired those traits or even thought much about the difference between the two women. He thought Dinah might be jealous solely on her own behalf, because Ellen possessed qualities of order and emotional discipline that Dinah had longed for all her life. But one day Dinah had walked quietly into Ellen’s kitchen while Ellen shelled peas at the sink and found Martin, taken unawares, contemplating Ellen’s brown legs, muscular and supple in her brief red shorts. Dinah had looked at those legs, too, with a cool eye—his conspirator—until Ellen turned from the sink and the moment was over. When he thought about Dinah’s detached and aloof assessment, Martin decided her new and private disenchantment could not be due entirely to jealousy, after all.
During those long evening conversations, over glasses of beer, about what America really meant, or the particular sort of world view that must be brought to the writing of great literature, Dinah began to grow more silent. When Ellen leaned her elbows onto the table, with her hair swinging forward in its long, curly triangles against her forearms, and spoke in her soft, intense, persuasive voice, he had begun to notice more and more that Dinah retreated into the haven of her bentwood chair. And one day his suspicions of Dinah’s inexplicable disdain had been absolutely confirmed. They had all been working in the Hofstatters’ garden, and Martin looked in the direction of the two women to see if it was almost time to stop. Ellen had bounced on her haunches as she stooped to gather beans from their intricate vines, and she began to sing some song in a gentle voice, but Martin saw a look cross Dinah’s face which pronounced it all artifice—the entire enterprise. There were the four of them working in this rural garden while the sun went down, and Dinah’s expression proclaimed it all artifice. And so, gradually, their association with Vic and Ellen had waned.
But Martin didn’t see artifice in the lives of his two friends; alone, he took pleasure in their company in the summers. And he knew Ellen had a special interest in him, just as Vic did. An unusual intimacy had come about over the years; he felt more than ordinarily included in their lives. He would arrive, for instance, ju
st as Ellen had lost her bra in the pond while she and Vic swam, and she would sit in the rowboat glimmering and topless, her breasts drooping a bit and touchingly vulnerable to scrutiny, while Vic dove and searched through the muddy weeds. She and Martin would chat quite naturally, but always for some reason—the flash of her white, white teeth in a small smile, a raised eyebrow—he understood that he was meant to know this was not just common friendship. Vic would emerge nude, guileless, and dripping, with the sodden brassiere held aloft in triumph, and Ellen would turn her back while he fastened it for her. Martin enjoyed this special informality, and it fascinated him, because he knew that Dinah would view it with scorn, but he couldn’t think why.
In his own house, however, he still longed for his family. He would dream of his wife and wake to find she wasn’t there. Her clothes hanging in the closet made him sad with yearning. He thought and thought about her, and her incredible energy seemed to have remained behind her, like thwarted intentions. He found her bedraggled winter night-gown on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, over the hot-water bottles suspended from their plastic tops, and it made him intolerably melancholy. It was as personal to him as her skin.
Martin wasn’t a man who noticed buildings or paintings or clothes, and he had not even been aware that, day after day, Dinah had washed her flannel gown and worn it again that night. He hadn’t known until he woke up one morning to find the bed empty of Dinah, and the house, too, he had thought after looking. He finally came upon her enclosed in her bathroom. When he called her name, she didn’t answer, and so he rattled the door and called her again.
“It’s all right, Martin,” she finally answered him, but her voice was full and tight in her throat, so he knew she was crying. He had only been able to stand at the door, sleepy and irritated and puzzled, not knowing how to proceed. But she opened the door and leaned against the doorjamb in that ragged flannel gown printed with little candlesticks, and held her hands over her face and wept as heartily as Martin had ever seen her.
Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 3