“I don’t feel good. You said I could call Daddy before my party. Can’t we call him now?”
Dinah stayed as she was a moment, stooping there, looking at the determination and self-righteousness on Toby’s face. It was so peculiar, this morning, to be slewing uncontrollably back and forth in time. She meant well by Toby; his well-being was as involved with her own as if they were the same person, but she was so oddly distracted by Isobel’s presence, and by Isobel’s unexpected vulnerability, that she could not consider Toby at all in any way right now. She could only make promises to him to buy herself time, because the evocation of her own youth had overcome Dinah this morning in the damp, chill air.
“We will call Daddy. Okay? You let us talk and have our coffee in the living room without bothering us, and then we’ll get ready for your party, and we’ll give Daddy a call.” Toby looked at her with embarrassed scorn; she was underrating him; she was talking to him as if he were so much less wise than they both knew he was. She could only turn her expression into a mute plea, and so he subsided sullenly into a kitchen chair and turned a wan interest toward the miniature television on the counter.
Buddy slowly disengaged himself from Sarah, and the three adults made their way out of the kitchen and into the living room. Dinah carried a tray with cups and saucers, and she made a return trip to the kitchen to get the coffee and to heat the cream. While she stood over it watching carefully so that it wouldn’t boil over, she experienced a pleasant nostalgia at the idea of Buddy and Isobel sitting together in the Hortons’ living room. That seemed fitting, and it pleased her to be the connection between them; she was necessary now to their involvement. She had been ambivalent about their marriage and then about their divorce, but since she cared so much about each of them she had carefully not asked questions in either instance. She sometimes wondered how complicated their separation had been. They could have simply fallen out of love, and she assumed that if that was mutual, it might be an easy process. But she was glad to be the link between them once again, even briefly.
Dinah and Isobel had always been ambitious in one way or another, and they had their own plans and ideas, but growing up as they had in Enfield, they had always had to circumvent the town’s high and paralyzing expectations for them. They were pretty girls, easy-limbed and pleased with themselves; anything could have been anticipated on their behalf. They showed such promise; people wished them well and were excited by the prospect of their having great, perhaps unqualified joy in their lives. There used to be girls about whom such things were conjectured, and it had been hard not to believe for a while that Dinah and Isobel might attain absolute happiness devoid of responsibility, as only a woman would be able to. No one expected anything of the sort from any boy. The handsome, brilliant boys who came on the scene would certainly be likely to have a good future, but that was a different expectation altogether—solid and earthbound—and only acquired with plodding difficulty. Joy was not presumed. Dinah and Isobel were, from the beginning of their adolescence, objects of almost frivolous speculation. Something on the order of a bolt out of the blue was expected for those two girls, and Dinah’s father had always been thrown into a frenzy of disapproval if he began to suspect that either girl took this too seriously. And, in fact, his caution was justified, because those enormous expectations were debilitating in so many ways. It was not really expected that either girl would have control over her own fate. It might have been that, alone—that presumption of dependency—that had finally forced Isobel out on her own. Certainly, it would have been hard for her to bear; it would surely rankle. But when they were young, she and Isobel hadn’t understood all the ramifications of their celebrity. They had come shimmering across Enfield’s limited panorama in their disarming and flexible youth, and for a little while they had captured the town’s attention with the poignant hopefulness of all the possibilities in their lives. And still, early that morning, even Dinah had felt a surge of delight and a sudden frisson of recognition when she had caught her first glimpse of Isobel in such a long time. There she was: a golden girl. In Dinah’s mind there was not so much difference now, really, because Isobel still seemed to her to be a woman of endless promise and potential.
She came back into the living room and put the coffee and scalded cream down on the tray and was arranging the cups so that she could easily balance them when she passed them, when she had that alarming sensation, straight out of childhood, of being the odd man out. The impression was so extreme that she looked around sharply, thinking to catch a signal or a glance passing between Buddy and Isobel. She saw nothing at all, and she realized that they hadn’t even been talking to any purpose during her absence. But that was just what it was! They were at ease, and they were smug and complacent, and in an instant she understood why Isobel had been able to be so self-effacing when they were chatting in the kitchen. Isobel had spent the night with Buddy! Dinah was so affronted by this new and absolute certainty that she had consciously to keep from registering dismay. She was desperately depressed by what she considered to be their sly hypocrisy. She didn’t care anything about the fact that they had made love, but she did care that the whole night through, restless or at peace, they had shared a bed. They might have awakened together whenever the rain had begun; one of them may have gotten up to shut a window so that the other wouldn’t be chilled. Even in sleep, one registers the comfort and discomfort of one’s partner. But she herself, sleeping singly in the wide double bed, had curled up for warmth. Those two would have the familiarity of a whole night behind them. Having shifted to the other’s weight and accommodated themselves, when necessary, to the other’s repositioning, they would be bound, by morning, to be more lenient toward the other’s flaws. But not to hers.
This notion so infuriated Dinah that she was rigid for a moment as she bent over her tray. All at once the exact reason she had come back here to this town time and again became clear to her! She grasped the sudden idea with her mind and held it as if it were a prism that would send out irradiations of light from all its sides. She had come back because she wanted an apology! She wanted an absolute, blanket apology from Buddy and from Isobel and from Polly and from her father! She wanted from each one of these people an acknowledgment of all the injustices of her childhood, of all the misfortunes they might have prevented. She wanted to resuffer all her illnesses and be adequately consoled; she wanted an admission that at one time or another some one of them might have ignored her, hurt her, deceived her. And she had no doubt that this was her just due even though she, too, might have inflicted an injustice now and then. She had paid in plenty for it by now, and she was therefore exempt from any more responsibility. Isobel was right. Dinah saw clearly now that she was probably the only grownup in all the world, save Martin, and because she was a grownup she had had to contend with a terrible fate—she had mortal children, and she had to recognize it and deal with it every moment of her days. Now she wanted everything else resolved so that she could get on with adjusting to her perilous situation. She was possessed by a need to find the right place for all the free-floating resentment that had traveled with her through the years like a cloud. She bent over the tray, icy with indignation, but she had no idea, really, of acting on it. All she did was pour out coffee for the three of them, and she took her own cup to the rocking chair in the bay window.
No one spoke while they took their first sips of coffee, and Dinah knew herself to be powerful with the knowledge that this was not a friendly silence. Isobel and Buddy sat at ease in their chairs, while Dinah’s entire intellect had gathered itself into one spare judgmental beam, which she turned on them through a haze of hindsight. She twisted her coffee cup nervously in its saucer with the intention of imposing rationality on her runaway emotions. She considered the transparent and slight ring of coffee that always remained on a saucer under the china cup. Why was it always there? Was the china so porous that it couldn’t entirely contain the liquid? But at last she looked up, and without any purpose clearly
in mind she said out into the room, “You know, it’s interesting to be here all together. Well…there’s something I’ve always wondered about, and now that you’re both here…” Isobel looked up restlessly; she had been absorbed in other concerns altogether. It was clear she hadn’t been thinking of the people in this room at all. Dinah looked at Buddy, too. “I’ve always wondered about the time I was the Homecoming Queen. You remember? That weekend both of you were home from school?” She tried to give the title an ironic twist, to disparage the idea, but in fact her voice trembled. No matter with what disdain she meant to look back on that event, she had never forgotten being chosen. No one does. But as she finally faced these two with it, she was horrified to realize that she was going to have to fight tears.
“Oh, Dinah!” Isobel said. Dinah was surprised to see her so blatantly reveal irritation; usually she was harder to pin down.
“Well…I’m sorry…but I want to know. I mean, what really happened that weekend?” Dinah sat there dead tired of her own timorousness in any confrontation. Her fear of battle only served to make her grudges run deeper. She was very tempted now to let this issue pass, but she managed to sit quite still and let the question remain in the room.
Buddy leaned back comfortably in his chair, and his features assumed a look Dinah hadn’t seen since childhood; they assumed an expression of delighted culpability. He couldn’t seem to prevent himself from smiling sheepishly, and he put his cup down and rested both large hands on his knees in the manner of an artful storyteller. “Lord, Dinah! Do you still remember that, too?” He was apparently pleased at the whole thought, and she was so shocked that she didn’t say anything. She got up to make a circuit of the room, offering more coffee. Isobel wasn’t watching either of them; she was looking out the windows at the steady rain.
“You know, Dinah, why didn’t you let Lawrence be your escort that night?” Buddy didn’t ask this with heat but with the condescending amusement of a big brother, and at this Isobel glanced at Dinah—their eyes caught—but Isobel’s glance was noncommittal. Buddy hadn’t ever developed the knack of avoiding heavy sailing. Dinah thought briefly that it was odd that so many men lack that innate radar that would warn them of rough water. Sometimes the lack was endearing.
“God, Dinah, I had to come all the way back from Baltimore and drive you around the football field! Dad insisted. Nothing else would do!”
Dinah just let that glance off her mind; she couldn’t believe her father had interceded on her behalf. In the beginning, her father had only made good-natured fun of her for caring about the pageant at all, but then over the space of a few weeks he had embraced the entire concept as a new cause. Eloquently and adamantly, he had refused to have anything to do with it, but even then, and even though she was mortified by his eccentric passion, she had known that these spates of furious intellectual partisanship were necessary to her father’s very idea of himself. He would not be her escort, as was customary for Fort Lyman High School Homecoming Queens, because it was an absurd and sexist and perhaps tribal custom by its very nature. He had never understood that he was a grown man, an independent man, a doctor, an outlander who could afford his condescensions. Dinah must live as a native of her own hometown, an equal to her peers, and this ritual which he so abhorred was absurd perhaps, but it was also a custom of her country.
“Still, I think the only thing that really got me to come all the way back here,” Buddy was saying, “was that you were going to be home, Isobel, and—damn!—I don’t think you even went to the game. I don’t think we went out at all the whole time I was here, did we?” For a moment a vague and woeful shadow moved over Buddy’s face. “I think you spent that entire weekend in one of those goddamned interminable conversations with Dad! I remember that, by God!” And he shook his head in baffled recollection, but then seemed to come around again to his cheerful and puzzling complacency. “Oh, Lord, Dinah! You were really something that weekend!” He was so amused, and it turned Dinah’s mind right around. She went full circle from her narrow focus of self-righteousness into the realm of rationality and real life in which the possible consequences of this conversation finally became clear to her.
“Oh, well, Buddy…” she said, really out into the air, just a vague wisp of a truce floating in the room. This wasn’t worth the price. Suddenly she didn’t care much about any sort of apology. She was afraid if Buddy remembered it all now, that in the end he would be embarrassed and dismayed, and she realized with a pang that he had never before recounted it to himself. She realized with a certain wonder how little time he must ever have spent in speculation, puzzling over what she was like. She had spent a great deal of time wondering what he was like, her own brother. But she didn’t want this conversation to continue, because she was one of those rather cowardly people for whom it is less painful to suffer embarrassment themselves than to have to stand by cringing and witness a justified discomfiture in someone else.
Isobel had arrived home from boarding school two days before the whole festivity of the Fort Lyman Homecoming had begun. Right away and unwittingly, she had diminished Dinah’s ingenuous pleasure and anticipation. Dinah remembered sitting in her bedroom watching Isobel’s cunning, foxlike face with that curious gleaming expression it took on as she shared all sort of confidences and told Dinah amazing anecdotes about her decadent life away at school. Dinah had been disheartened even then, as she had had to reckon with the immense differences in their lives at that age. On the night of the Homecoming game, the night Dinah would be presented to everyone in the stadium as their queen, would be handed an armful of roses and kissed by the captain of the football team—before it all began—Isobel came over to chat with Dinah while she prepared for it.
Sitting now, curled in a rocking chair in the Hortons’ living room and wrapped in her own soft, heavy robe, with her own mind, her own bones, her own blood encased in her showered thirty-six-year-old skin, Dinah was suddenly knocked almost breathless by the involuntary assumption of her sixteen-year-old self. At once she became the same girl in her bedroom, leaning into her mirror to rub a thin film of Vaseline over her teeth just as she had been instructed to do by the pageant coordinator, who was otherwise the third-and sixth-hour gym teacher. She had been told to do this to prevent her smile from sticking to her teeth in case of nervousness.
As she had looked into the mirror, she had been Isobel behind her, lounging casually on the foot of the bed, dressed in flannel slacks and a creamy Shetland sweater. She had on very plain, gently fluted, circular earrings that she said all the girls wore. Isobel had bought her own, she said, and pretended they were a birthday present. Even though Dinah had been touched that Isobel had confided this small charade, she had still been filled with dismay, because it was all so far outside her experience; she couldn’t hope to touch it; she couldn’t hope to catch on. Isobel sat there serenely, and her hair was held cleanly in place by a plain black velvet band, so that her lovely narrow face pierced the picture reflected in the mirror like an arrow. Dinah had contemplated her own complicated, beauty-shop, tulip-shaped hairdo with sinking expectations. There was Isobel, relaxed and comfortable; she appeared to be accustomed to her clothes, which had only pointed up the fact that Dinah, incredibly adorned, was not.
Isobel had declined all their invitations to go to the game; she chose to sit with Dr. Briggs in the library and drink Scotch and listen to jazz. She had said she already knew how beautiful Dinah looked, and after all, she didn’t know anything about football. Buddy and Dinah had been standing just inside the library door while Buddy tried one more time to persuade her to come along, when Polly descended the stairs, beautifully dressed and bespeaking anger with every movement and gesture she made. She stopped outside the library door to pull on her gloves. “You see,” she said with that terrifying exactitude of enunciation that indicated her infrequent but wholehearted disapproval and disdain, “your father has always and will always just manage to miss the point! He never has learned to be the sort of person he i
magines he is—an aristocrat, I think!” She said this with breathtaking scorn and the most passion Dinah had ever heard her muster. “Do you see what I mean? He hasn’t really got the slightest drop of sophistication in his blood! Now, that’s odd, isn’t it, since it’s the only ambition he’s ever really had. To be sophisticated. Even just to be jaded.” She turned around and looked in at him through the library door. “Well, it’s not something you’re ever going to pick up, and you weren’t born with it, by God!” The whole company had been stunned; even in retrospect, it stunned Dinah. It was the most Polly had ever given away about herself. Her father had sat perfectly still, and finally Isobel had smiled at Dinah and wished her good luck. Just as Dinah and Buddy and Polly were leaving, her father slammed the library door with a furious bang. Buddy’s face had gone immobile and frozen across the cheekbones.
And Dinah was the Homecoming Queen. She waved and smiled; she accepted the roses; she was kissed by the football captain; but the event progressed for her in unsynchronized motion. At one moment she felt speeded up, as though she were moving through a tunnel at a terrifying acceleration, and then the proceedings would take on the nightmare aspect of slow motion, hideously exaggerated, so that she had the alarming notion that her frozen smile hung luminously over the stadium long after she had taken her seat, just like the Cheshire cat’s. By the end of the game she was sick and sad sitting there on the dais surrounded by the pretty princesses of her court. She might have been sick; she had felt terrible, and she had been unable to believe, anymore, that this event was special or fun. She was supposed to go on to the dance with Lawrence, but she asked him to pick her up later at home, and she would go back with him if she felt better. She was encircled by friends and teachers, and she had seen from their faces that she must look as peculiar as she felt. Her mother had already left the game in her own car, and so Dinah asked Buddy to drive her home in the borrowed convertible before he returned it, and he had sullenly agreed.
Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 15