Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  “Maybe we could help you get whatever you need when we move David into his dorm,” Martin said, and Netta glanced up at him and smiled a smile that was like her voice, wistfully sweet, the impression of it lingering for a moment after it had disappeared.

  David stood against the counter. “We could go in anytime. We don’t have to wait that long. You wouldn’t even have to go if you could tell us what you want us to get.”

  “Really? Are you serious? Because that would be wonderful. No, I need to go, too, but that would just be wonderful, David, to have you and Martin help me. It’s been so long since there was anyone I felt I could ask, because all our friends were mutual—Bill’s and mine, I mean.”

  Dinah looked away and met Christie’s gaze, which turned into a quick glance of pure appeal, but Dinah turned away from that, too, because she simply couldn’t sort it all out. There was something disturbing in the air. It was startling to her to imagine David so separate from them that he could be helping strangers move in and out of apartments on streets Dinah had never seen, living a life of which she would not catch a glimpse.

  Gradually everyone in the kitchen became involved with Netta’s beets. She stood at the sink, watching water run over them in the colander, and finally Dinah moved over next to her, edging her aside, and began cleaning them with a vegetable brush.

  “What should we do with the greens?” Netta said. “There weren’t any beets at Price Chopper, so I went to The Whole Grain Elevator and they had these. Aren’t they beautiful? But the woman thought I was buying them for the greens. She said they’re delicious and don’t have a trace of pesticide on them.”

  Sarah began to look through The Joy of Cooking for basic directions for boiling beets. “I can’t believe this!” Netta had said when she had searched through various other books. “Even Julia doesn’t say anything about how long to boil them. She says canned beets can be substituted in most recipes!”

  Martin got out Dinah’s stockpot, filled it with hot water from the tap, and put it on to boil.

  “My mother always says that cold water comes to a boil faster, Mr. Howells,” Christie offered from where she still stood right inside the back door.

  “Right, Christie,” David said. “That really makes sense, doesn’t it?” David spoke as if he were teasing her, but there was an unmistakable edge of derision in his voice.

  “I never said I could cook, David,” Christie snapped back. The room went silent while the implication of what she might have said she could do hung awkwardly in the air. Everyone but Netta and Anna Tyson picked up on it and was embarrassed, especially Christie. “Well, I’ve got to go. But what about tonight, David? Are we going to the movie or do you want me to see if everyone can come over to swim?” Christie had lowered her voice and aimed her question only at David so that the rest of the family could pretend that any disagreement between the two of them had not been overheard.

  “I don’t know,” David answered. “Why don’t I call you later,” and he didn’t even look at her. She picked up a light jacket she had dropped on the kitchen counter and pushed open the screen door.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said with sugary exaggeration, pretending that she wasn’t mocking David’s rudeness, “I’m going over to Meg’s and then I’m having a party at my house. I’ll call you if we’re short of guests.”

  Dinah looked at her in surprise. It was the first time she had discerned anything much about Christie’s personality, and Dinah was startled to find that just as Christie let the screen door fall shut behind her, she glanced at Dinah again with some sort of mute appeal as she went off down the steps.

  “It says here to ‘chop the greens coarsely and let them simmer gently in the water in which they are washed,’” Netta read aloud from a dog-eared, spiral-bound cookbook she had found among the others.

  “They’re awfully sandy, Netta. Do you think it’s worth it?” Dinah began to lift the severed leaves one by one under running water, while Netta dropped the scrubbed beets into the pot on the stove. Dinah was finding that she had to rub the sand away with her thumb, and even so she could still feel a persistent gritty residue. The entire sink and the counter around it were spattered with sand and mud and seeping red juice that exuded even from the cuts across the leaf stems. She was absorbed in this project for a bit until she looked up and realized that Sarah had disappeared, and that David and Martin were sitting at the table drinking coffee on either side of Anna Tyson, who had put her cheek down on the placemat in front of her and fallen fast asleep. Netta had drifted away from the boiling beets and was leaning on a chair, discussing some point of her article that was to be published in The Review.

  “It’s not my field, but I assumed that’s what your intention was,” Martin said.

  “No,” Netta said severely, and with a slight frown. “It is exactly my point that Foucault doesn’t take into account—”

  “I’ll get out of your way here, Netta,” Dinah interrupted. “Too many cooks, you know.” She hated black coffee, but she poured a cup anyway, not wanting to linger long enough to scald milk. “I hope all those cookbooks aren’t in the way. Sarah left them out, but you can put them back if you need the room. Where did she go? I need her to vacuum. And David, would you put away the extra chairs we set up on the porch for the party? You can stack them in the garage if you would. I’m going to straighten up the living room. We didn’t quite finish last night. I could use a hand, Martin, taking the extra leaves out of the table. Do you want to help me now?”

  Dinah walked off down the hall, stopping to take a sip of coffee while she waited for Martin. She had no inclination to treat Netta as a guest. Usually the disorganization of a party lingered in her household for a week or so because she wasn’t a particularly ardent housekeeper, but this morning she launched into more than business as usual.

  Martin stored the extra leaves of the table in the attic, and Dinah followed him up the narrow stairs to find the protective flannel sleeves that fit over them to keep the wood from being scratched.

  The tension this year in their summer household unnerved Martin. He couldn’t fathom Dinah’s emotion; his sympathy was primarily with his son. The situation reminded him of his own leave-taking almost thirty years ago when his mother had unwittingly burdened him with the knowledge of her expectations of their continued connection. He had felt suffocated and guilty when almost everyday he had received in the mail from her some clipping from the local paper, a brief note of affection, or a recounting of the current gossip.

  In his freshman year, when she had baked him a birthday cake and sent it on a Greyhound bus, he had discarded it right outside the station before any of his friends discovered it. He remembered her intimidating assumption of their familiarity, when, in fact, she knew nothing about his life as he had lived it at college. So many people—including his father—had warned him of the inadequacies of his Mississippi education that he had been afraid to unpack his trunk the entire first year of classes. He liked to know that he could pull his belongings together and leave in no more than ten minutes if it came to that, if he flunked out.

  The summer before he left, when she had overheard his father warning him of all the pitfalls of an eastern education, his mother had waved her hand in dismissal of everything her husband was saying. “Oh, heavens, Theo, no school can possibly require more than brilliance!” But Martin hadn’t been grateful to her; he had preferred his father’s uncertainty about his abilities and his warnings against hubris. Because in all of her reassurance, in her faith in him, in her claustrophobic insistence of her knowledge of his character—in all of this—hadn’t he sensed some kind of alarming idea of his beholdenness to her?

  And it was still true, really. He had been irritated when Dinah had reminded him to call his mother over the weekend, and then he had been surprised that he was insulted when his mother had sweetly hurried him off the phone because her bridge group was meeting. He had been injured in the same way, although certainly not to the same degre
e, when his mother had seemed to take it as a matter of course when he had, indeed, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard.

  He showered, and before he left to meet Vic at The Review office, Martin folded the extra chairs on the porch and stacked them away neatly in the garage because he had seen David’s expression when Dinah had breezily issued instructions for the day. His whole face had tightened, his eyes becoming slightly hooded, his mouth drawn in—it was an expression amazingly like Dinah’s when she harbored a resentment. He knew that David had no intention of doing anything his mother asked him this morning.

  Dinah stripped the beds and found Sarah and set her to work with the vacuum. Sarah was surprisingly agreeable. “I think they invented Bremner wafers to make people look like pigs,” Sarah offered as she unwound the cord. “Did you notice last night that everyone was covered with little flakes of white crumbs?”

  But Dinah didn’t even smile. She went off to straighten the guest bathroom and put out fresh towels. She was passing through the kitchen with a basket of dirty laundry, on her way to the washing machine in the basement, when Netta stopped her. She and David were at the table chatting while Anna Tyson had her chocolate milk.

  “Oh, Dinah, I couldn’t find the chopping blade for your Cuisinart. Don’t you think that would be the simplest way to dice the beets?”

  Dinah was struck by the bitter odor permeating the air. She could even taste it on the back of her tongue. “What’s that smell? Is something burning?”

  Netta got up and gingerly peered into a skillet that was steaming on a front burner. “Oh, I don’t think these greens worked,” she said, bemused. “They aren’t burning, but they don’t look very good, do they?”

  Dinah leaned over to look at them. They were a slippery mass, all the leaves wilted around the prominent center veins so that they seemed mildly anatomical. “Maybe you should take them off the heat,” Dinah said. “I don’t think you should use the Cuisinart for the beets, Netta. I mean, it won’t dice them for you, and you’ve got to peel them anyway.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It was such a long time ago that I made this soup, I’ve forgotten what I did. How do you peel beets?” Netta was wearing another of her long, flowing skirts and a sort of little girl’s blouse, the kind Dinah had worn at summer camp years and years ago, with short sleeves and one breast pocket. Netta’s hair, in the steamy humidity of the kitchen, still frizzed around her long face, and she was oddly appealing, but Dinah didn’t give in. She set the laundry basket down by the door to the basement and took the time to fix herself café au lait. She sat down at the table, crossing her legs as she settled back in her chair.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s probably like peeling boiled yams. They have a kind of thick, soft skin.” She wasn’t going to offer another thing, even though she was aware of David’s indignation. He didn’t glance at her as he got up to lend a hand to Netta, who seemed to be bewildered as she stood looking into the pot of still-boiling beets.

  “I’ll pour them into the colander for you,” he said to Netta. As he emptied the pot slowly into the wide stainless-steel colander, a pinkish mist rose in the air, tingeing the shiny white cupboards above the sink, and pink water splattered over the counter next to the stove.

  “You know what?” Anna Tyson said to Dinah suddenly, with a note of challenge. Dinah shifted in her chair to look at her, not bothering to answer or even to assume an air of interest. She was wary of Anna Tyson. “My crown wasn’t like anybody else’s.” She looked directly at Dinah, waiting for a response, but Dinah couldn’t think of anything to say. She was sorry Anna Tyson had noticed the difference. Sarah had made the last-minute crown out of aluminum foil that had been applied to the cut-out cardboard too hastily, giving the finished product a forlorn, crumpled look.

  Anna Tyson continued. “Netta told me that Moonflower and the spider are just puppets.” At once Dinah was less sorry for Anna Tyson and mildly offended, as she always was when children called their parents by their first names; it struck Dinah as an unusually grating affectation. “But I know why my crown was different.” Anna Tyson had lowered her voice to a tone of confidentiality. Dinah was so disheartened at the idea of explaining to this four-year-old that the charade of Moonflower was meant with every good intention that she didn’t respond at all; she only looked off into the center of the room, hoping Anna Tyson would lose interest in the conversation.

  “Moonflower knew that silver is the color I like best. Netta wouldn’t let me be a silver fairy on Halloween. I went as a California Raisin. I wore a brown paper bag that Netta wrinkled up.” By now Dinah was paying full attention, and Anna Tyson looked at her solemnly for a moment without saying anything, and then she continued. “But I wanted to get the silver princess costume they had at the store.”

  Dinah smiled delightedly at Anna Tyson. The little girl had developed the logic of one of life’s survivors, Dinah thought, remembering the pathetic Reynolds Wrap crown with ANNA written on it in red glitter, so shabby compared to the gilded, sequined, gold crowns she had found for the other children. Nevertheless, she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t in some way legitimize Moonflower and therefore countermand Netta’s instructions to her daughter about how to view the whole phenomenon of the party the night before. Anna Tyson gazed back at Dinah soberly and then smiled, too, leaning back and swinging her feet separately beneath her straight-legged chair in a rhythm that established a sort of skittering, satisfactory rocking motion as the chair creaked with her movement and inched minutely back and forth on the tiled floor.

  Dinah was entirely satisfied for the first time in two days, and she swung her crossed leg from the knee to match the rhythm Anna Tyson had established. The two of them looked at each other and laughed at Dinah’s silliness. And Dinah continued to swing her leg without even realizing it as she watched David and Netta across the room dealing with the beets. The counters, the chopping board, Netta’s palms and fingertips, and David’s T-shirt were stained with the oozing, beautifully rosy beet juice. The two of them looked harassed, and David seemed to be personally affronted. Netta made that gesture once again of shaking her hair back, and some of Dinah’s contentment evaporated. It would be a terrible chore to remove the red stains from the Formica countertop, and it would be she who would do it. And the cutting board would retain the splotchy beet color until the surface wore away.

  Franklin M. Mount

  Dean of Freshmen

  Harvard College

  12 Truscott Street

  Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

  Dear Mr. Mount,

  David had an amazing imagination when he was a child. He and Toby, and eventually their sister Sarah, lived whole imaginary lifetimes every day after school and all through the summers in their own backyard or in the basement, where they built forts and cities with cardboard boxes and old rug samples if it was too cold outside.

  I tried hard not to destroy the days’ fantasy. I really made an effort not to blunder into the amazingly detailed and ordered world they created, and I pretended to whatever role they needed me to pretend. Sometimes I was an evil witch who made them come to dinner and turned their macaroni and cheese into worms and their salads into man-eating plants. Sometimes I was a creature called Sweet Penelope, with a cotton candy voice, so stupid in my naïve good-heartedness that David and Toby had to rescue me from the various hazards and traps the monsters in that afternoon’s world had constructed.

  But I always, always knew to stop the game if, at age four or five, or even six and seven, the children’s fantasy edged toward conviction. Well, you see, I always understood that the children were enchanted and excited by the possibility of their mother transmogrified, but that they would have been terrified had they believed in the reality of it.

  But you know, I don’t know what happens to the imagination of young children. By the time David was about eleven, if he had one of his friends home after school, he wouldn’t play those games with Toby anymore. Sometimes, tho
ugh, if he was just with his brother, he would still throw himself into the whole thing.

  By the time he was twelve, it seemed to me that he didn’t even believe he had ever invented a world for himself. Don’t you think that’s odd? I mean, it happened to all my children, but it must be that the energy that fired so much creative thought was just diverted somehow. I have no idea, these days, what either one of my children imagines.

  Netta turned when she felt Dinah’s glance on them, and she smiled in a way that transformed her face. She held up a clear bowl of diced beets. “They’re really beautiful, aren’t they?” she said to Dinah. “There’s such sensual pleasure in something so simple as this, isn’t there? I’ve always thought that there’s genuine beauty in something intrinsically basic.” She turned back to dicing the beets that David was peeling, and David was less tense all of a sudden. He looked at her and smiled. “I mean, just this simple root vegetable,” she said. “Domesticity has its own… oh… elegance….”

  Dinah watched Netta inexpertly cut up the remaining beets, now and then repeating that little habitual shake of her head. “You must have had your hair cut recently, Netta?” she said pleasantly enough. “I bet you had very long hair. I know how odd it felt when I had mine cut after college. It’s like taking off skates after an hour or so of skating, don’t you think? You still feel elevated. I had let mine grow below my waist….”

  Netta looked over her shoulder at Dinah, surprised. “No,” she said. “My hair has always been short. It would be so much trouble to wear long hair.”

  The kitchen was quiet, and Dinah made no more attempts at conversation. She had that rather light-headed feeling that follows a night of intermittent insomnia. She merely sat idly, just resting, until she would have to rouse herself to clean up the kitchen when Netta was done with her soup. Suddenly she had a horribly intimate but vivid fantasy of Netta and her life before she came to West Bradford. She could see Netta’s friend Celia and Netta’s husband, Bill—both of whom had slowly taken shape in her imagination as those sort of wispy, grayish, thin people with stringy hair. He would have that long-limbed, hollow-chested, saintlike look, and Celia would have that starved look of knobby knees and elbows. The two of them had retired to the bedroom to have the kind of listless, sweatless sex that Dinah always assumed those passionless-looking people must have, while poor Netta earnestly battled the beets in some tiny kitchen in Cambridge.