Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  Dinah sorted through the garish medallions, the brilliant beads, the rings and bracelets, and saw them as they really were. She could not remember now how those small children would perceive them—she had lost the feeling of fluttery anticipation that had kept her awake the night before. She knew she was reacting to David as if he had been the one to tell her that there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no tooth fairy. She set the carton containing all the trinkets and decorations out in the garage where no wandering child would discover it by mistake, and she wondered if, indeed, she had become foolish even in the eyes of her guests. She wondered if David was right, if the whole party was viewed as too much bother and was tolerated only on her behalf.

  But she continued to rehearse the rest of the day in her mind while she took a tomato from the basket she had brought up from the garden and rinsed it off under the tap. She was hungry, and she merely bent over the kitchen sink, where the lettuces still soaked, salting and eating the tomato out of hand. For a moment she gave up thinking about David; she gave up wondering what she had done that was not to be forgiven and gave herself over to sating her appetite. She was so involved in the pleasure of her lunch of that sun-warmed tomato that she didn’t notice anyone at the door. When she looked up, a wistful-looking young woman was observing her carefully through the screen.

  Tomato juice dripped down Dinah’s chin and ran down her wrist beneath her watchband as she straightened from the sink in surprise, and she was at once embarrassed and irritated. A little girl who couldn’t have been more than four sagged into the woman’s side as though the two of them had been standing there for some time, and it occurred to Dinah with dread that they were probably Seventh-day Adventists. Weren’t they always the ones who brought some child along with them? She thought so. She took her time rinsing her hands under the tap and drying them on a paper towel. She had given up random kindness over the past few years, and she frowned slightly as she went to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have guests arriving this afternoon, and I really don’t have time to talk with you now. Why don’t you leave some literature for me? If I’m interested I’ll send a donation.”

  The little girl didn’t look at Dinah, but the woman smiled gently at her. Dinah was sure that smile bespoke persistence. “I ought to tell you,” she continued more firmly, “that I’m really not interested in discussing my religious beliefs with you. To tell you the truth, I think any sort of proselytizing is a real intrusion on my privacy.”

  Dinah was becoming quite passionate, and she hadn’t meant to give even that much emotion away to this woman. She was disappointed in herself; it was pointless ever to explain anything to these people. In one more minute, this woman would launch into her spiel, and Dinah would be forced either to stand there and hear her out or to shut the kitchen door in her face. That must be why they brought children with them, Dinah thought. It’s hard to shut the door in a child’s face, although not this particular child, perhaps, whose face was still half buried in her mother’s skirt, but whose expression at the moment was unusually truculent.

  “Dinah,” the young woman said a little breathlessly, “I’m Netta Breckenridge and this is my daughter, Anna Tyson.”

  “Oh… Of course!” Dinah said, realizing that she was supposed to know who these people were but having no memory of anyone having mentioned them to her. And she still wondered what they were doing at the door in the middle of this of all days. “I’m so sorry,” she said as she unlatched and held open the screen. “We get all sorts of people… I thought that…”

  “I guess we must be early,” Netta said. She was a small woman, but she moved into the room with the kind of languid drift of someone much taller and longer-limbed. Her ankle-length skirt rippled with each step, her sleeves fluttered gently, and her daughter dragged like an anchor in her mother’s wake as Netta crossed to the table and sat down. She settled slowly while all her clothes seemed to billow around her and finally come to rest. “Oh, I hope we’re not the first to get here. Martin said the party started in the afternoon.” While Anna Tyson tugged at her arm, Netta sighed and arranged her skirt around herself until at last she was comfortable. She leaned her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand while Anna Tyson sprawled halfway across her lap. Netta seemed perfectly at ease.

  “Well… but it isn’t even noon,” Dinah said before she could stop herself, but she hadn’t offended Netta, who turned a sweet smile on Dinah once again.

  “Oh, yes. I understand,” she said kindly, as if Dinah had confessed some failing of her own and was being pardoned for it. Netta’s voice was dreamy and whispery, like a sleepy child’s.

  Dinah stood there stranded in the kitchen and studied Netta. She was one of those women who were considered attractive in academic circles. She had a thin, distracted look of disorganization, as though she had too many things on her mind. Her hair was light brown and cut short and had once been permed, but today it straggled around her face in a limp frizz, giving her a woebegone look. And just as Dinah had this uncharitable thought, Netta swept her hand through her hair, as though it were shoulder length, and shook her head backward in that characteristic gesture of women with very long hair who are settling it behind their shoulders.

  “Do you have some chocolate milk by any chance?” Netta asked, with a glance down at her daughter. “There’s so little she likes to eat, and I know chocolate milk isn’t good for her. I mean, it’s like a bribe. But she’ll be so tired later if she doesn’t have something now. I do make it with whole milk, though. I don’t really believe it could possibly be healthy to deprive children of every sort of animal fat.” And she shrugged elaborately in a conscious gesture of bewilderment. “But none of them agree. All those experts. I’ve learned to trust my own judgment, pretty much.”

  Dinah looked at Netta more closely. With her down-slanted pale eyes and too long, pointed face, she was almost elfin. We don’t have chocolate milk,” Dinah said apologetically in spite of herself, “but we have just plain milk.” She paused for a moment. “Oh, but it’s low-fat, I’m afraid.”

  “Well…” Netta drew this word out a bit so that it encompassed a tiny sigh of disappointment, “if you have cocoa powder or baking chocolate and sugar I can make her some chocolate milk. It’s the only thing she’ll accept in the middle of the day.”

  “I’m not sure….” Dinah was nonplussed, and she turned to the sink and began lifting the lettuce, head by head, and setting it to drain in a huge colander, leaving behind brackish, gritty water floating with tiny insects and several curled slugs. She opened the drain and made sure that the water was emptying before she looked back at Netta.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to look.” As she began searching the cupboards, Duchess came rushing up the back steps, back from her walk, whimpering gutturally and wagging all over, as though she had been abandoned for days and had finally found her home again. Martin always let her off her leash when he reached the corner of the yard, and she made a dash for the door while he followed more sedately. Dinah was relieved. Martin would know how to dislodge this woman from the kitchen table and get her to go home.

  By now, Netta and Anna Tyson had established a kind of determinedly huddled, martyred presence at the corner of the table—like refugees—and Duchess was busily greeting them with enthusiasm. Martin didn’t even notice them right away, though, when he came into the room.

  “I’ll go on and get the ice,” he said, “and if there’s anything else we need just write it down.” He coiled Duchess’s leash and dropped it into the basket on the windowsill, and then he saw Netta, still resting her chin dreamily in the palm of her hand while Anna Tyson moved in even closer to avoid Duchess.

  “Oh, Netta! You didn’t have any trouble finding the house?” As he moved toward the table, she straightened up and smiled and extended her hand. Martin was oddly awkward all at once, Dinah thought. He took Netta’s hand in a regular handshake and then covered it with his other hand in a sort of
avuncular pat. His shoulders hunched forward in a protective manner that Dinah had never seen before, although Netta was so small that Dinah imagined Martin felt as outsized as she did. Netta’s minimal presence made one want to take up less space in the room.

  He turned to Dinah. “So you’ve met Netta? And Anna Tyson? Anna Tyson is four years old, and I’ve told her all about Moonflower. Netta’s a visitor this year in the Philosophy Department. She’s a Fennel Doyle Scholar. We’re publishing one of her articles in The Review.”

  “Oh… that’s wonderful!” Dinah said. “Yes, we’ve met.” She smiled fiercely at Martin, who looked pleased with himself. “And they can stay for the party this evening?” Dinah asked in as neutral a voice as she could muster.

  “Absolutely!” Martin said. “Everyone should have one visit with Moonflower.” Meanwhile, Anna Tyson had flipped over against her mother’s knees and was arching backward across Netta’s lap, staring blankly back at Martin.

  “Well, I’m not sure how late we can stay,” Netta said, lifting her hand in a slight gesture of demurral, but Dinah interrupted her.

  “It’ll be just wonderful for Anna Tyson,” Dinah said with the same note of cheer that had alerted David earlier in the morning to his mother’s mood. “In fact, Martin, Anna Tyson needs some chocolate milk. It’s the only thing she’ll have for lunch, but we don’t have any. Netta offered to make it out of baking chocolate. I’m in such a rush, why don’t I let you help her. There’s bound to be some somewhere in the cupboards.”

  Dinah dropped the uneaten half of her tomato into the garbage disposal and turned it on under rushing water and said loudly over the noise it made, “You’ll need sugar and vanilla. We probably have some vanilla, but I don’t have any idea where. I never bake,” she confessed to Netta, with dissembling warmth. “It might be with the spices. And you’ll need the double boiler. It’s behind the big skillets in the corner cupboard next to the stove. I think I’ll go up and shower and get dressed, since I don’t know if Ellen is going to get here or not, and I may have a lot to do. But before you go out for ice, please check with me in case I remember anything else I forgot to buy. We might need more white wine. It’s on the counter. See what you think!” And with a brilliant smile at them all, she walked out of the room through the swinging door, while the disposal still churned loudly under the running faucet.

  Upstairs Dinah waited tactfully outside Sarah’s door while her daughter ended a somber and murmured conversation on the phone. After she had hung up, Dinah entreated her to make some sort of crown for Anna Tyson.

  “Oh, great!” Sarah said. “With what?”

  “Just use poster board and aluminum foil. Anything. Lots of glitter. The prizes are wonderful, Sarah. They’re so intricate! You’re really gifted at that sort of thing, sweetie… ,” but Sarah shot her a baleful look, and Dinah let the enthusiasm drop out of her voice. “Sarah. Just get it done! Before your friends come over! This whole fucking day is falling apart,” she said in an exasperated undertone, feeling her control begin to unravel as she turned away from her daughter. “And be sure to put her name on it!” She was halfway down the hall toward the bathroom before Sarah said a word.

  “God, Mom! She can’t read!” But Sarah only muttered her reply, and Dinah felt a momentary relief at her own tiny rebellion. The use of the brutal, short, now meaningless obscenities or vulgarities that her younger friends or her East or West Coast friends and her own children tossed into the air without a thought gave her enormous satisfaction. Dinah had absorbed bits and pieces of her mother’s upper-middle-class Southern upbringing and her father’s snobbish aversion even to slang, so when she spoke any of those words—fuck, shit, crap—they made a surprising chunk in the rhythm of her sentence. She flung them out into a room with relish—she enjoyed the explosion, the furious crunch and hiss of their sound, the surprising release of tension to be had from their utterance.

  And anyone listening paid attention and was distressed, even her own children, and especially Martin. “That sounds so ugly when you say it,” he had said to her once in the midst of some outburst of hers.

  “Oh, please! Men use language like that all the time. For God’s sake, most of our friends use much more graphic language than I ever do. Why doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.

  “They don’t. Not when they’re mad. I don’t know why it bothers me, but it just does. It bothers me when anyone loses control like that. It’s really unpleasant. The children hate it. They leave the room. I don’t think you have any idea how you sound.”

  She had silently granted him that—it was language she, too, was unnerved to hear when it was used in anger. She had been slightly abashed; she was sorry to some degree, but not entirely. “Well,” she said, before realizing that what she was about to tell him was something she had thought for quite a while. She turned slightly away from him so that he wouldn’t see the censure on her face. “The thing is, Martin, that you don’t need it! You’ve never had a proper sense of outrage.”

  Gradually, of course, Martin had picked it up, too. If he stubbed his toe, or the hot water ran out in the middle of a shower, or Duchess slipped her collar and went streaking off across the fields. “God-damned-mother-fucking-son-of-a-bitch!” he would mutter to himself, but within earshot. And when Dinah heard him, or on that rare occasion when she was struck by her own words, she did recognize that in theory they had slipped just a notch lower in her private measure of their effort to hang on to all that was civilized. In the abstract she was disappointed in herself, but in practice she never regretted her words for a moment.

  She left Sarah to deal with the extra crown, and she spent far more time than usual soaking in the bathtub before carefully putting on eyeshadow and mascara and polishing her fingernails and toenails with some of Sarah’s nail polish, which she had always considered a bit tacky in any shade. This color was brilliant; it was labeled British Red.

  When Martin rapped lightly to ask what else he should get besides ice, she kept her voice neutral and was glad to have the door between them. She knew the puzzled look of apology that would cross his face if she confronted him with his unmentioned invitation to an extra child to this carefully planned party.

  She put on low-heeled sandals and a deep blue muslin sundress that Vic and Ellen had brought her from Mexico. It had a scooped neck, short, pleated sleeves, and the bodice was fitted just below her breasts. The skirt, cut on the bias, fell narrowly past her waist to flare extravagantly around her calves, and the hem and bodice and sleeves were embroidered elaborately with intricate pale blue, coral, and metallic gold and silver flowers and birds. Dinah rarely wore the dress because she didn’t trust the dry cleaner not to destroy it. But today she hoped it would make her feel festive.

  She walked through the rooms, seeing to one thing and another. Vic and Ellen had arrived after all; and while Ellen had disappeared upstairs to arrange Moonflower, everyone else had congregated on the screened porch off the kitchen. Christie and David were doing a rough run-through of some of the children’s songs, and Anna Tyson was stretched out asleep in the wicker swing with her head in Netta’s lap. Netta, so small, gently swayed back and forth, the very tips of her toes barely brushing the floor. As the swing moved backward, she swung her feet beneath it just as a child would do. While Vic and Martin were sitting and chatting with her, Dinah found the chocolate-streaked double boiler pan and a smaller pan scummed with scalded milk left to soak in the kitchen sink.

  As she scrubbed at the milk with steel wool, she realized that she could hear David and Christie quite clearly through some trick of acoustics—they were all the way across the long kitchen and outside the window, but their voices were low and tense and embarrassingly audible. “Oh, Jesus, Christie! It’s impossible… I’m not mad, but I’m sick of you asking me about it….”

  Dinah flinched at the lack of charity in David’s voice, but she was curious in spite of herself and froze there at the sink to find out whatever it was that Christie could be ask
ing him. She felt mildly relieved that she was not the only one from whom David withheld information. But before anything else was said, David got up and moved away to sit with the group at the far end of the porch, and Christie stayed where she was, trying out chords on the guitar. Dinah began to take things out of the refrigerator to let them come to room temperature.

  She had made potato salad the way it used to be made before potatoes became chic—with sweet pickle and onion and green olives; and she had blanched and marinated an assortment of vegetables—green beans, carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, zucchini, broccoli. She had roasted a turkey and glazed a ham the day before, and Martin had grilled a beautiful London broil. The menu for this party never varied, and Dinah had the timing down to a science. It was plain fare that children would eat without being squeamish and that adults would enjoy. The meats were sliced, the eggs boiled and stuffed, the garnishes assembled, and she was arranging trays of vegetables when she realized that Christie had moved down to the other end of the porch, too, and now Dinah could hear the general conversation, with Netta’s soft voice rising and falling as the primary note in the flow of sound.

  Ellen joined Dinah just then in the kitchen. “I’ve got the pulley working fine, I think, although Moonflower’s a little the worse for wear.” She washed her hands at the sink. “I don’t suppose anyone will notice, though, but I think we’d better use the spider tonight. I restrung the wire with a nylon fishing line, and it should show less, but it could be that light will reflect off it, or something.” When Dinah didn’t make a sound, Ellen realized that she hadn’t heard anything she had said.