Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  “You have no right to behave the way you are, David.” She kept her voice even, but her anger was immense, terrifying, and gathering momentum. She stepped back a half step, afraid for just a moment, and hoped that he would say something, but David kept his face turned toward the earth. Her voice had a tremor when she spoke again. “I would never have thought that you were capable of cruelty like that. I never would have! It’s amazing! It’s just amazing! Oh, and you think you know so much. How could you do that to her?”

  But David still didn’t look up. He didn’t move at all, and she could see only a slice of his profile, the corner of his mouth pulled taut, the particular shape of his lowered eyelid. She felt such grief all at once that she turned to one side and bent forward slightly with her arm across her waist, as if the pain were localized and physical. “And, oh my God, how could you do this to me? To your father? How dare you? How dare you? How dare you let me know? How dare you take such a stupid risk? You’re too old… you’re too old not to take care of birth control! And you’re too young—Christie’s too young…. My God, I don’t see how you can do this to us.”

  Dinah didn’t even try not to cry; she stood wiping at her tears with the backs of her hands. “We’ve taken care of you for eighteen years—oh, that’s what we’re expected to do, that’s what we must do, and you have the nerve to risk your future and Christie’s future! How come you get that right and we don’t? How come, Goddammit, that you don’t have to be responsible ever—ever—for how we are? If we’re all right? If we’re happy or sad or scared or lonely? My God! We’ve spent eighteen years trying to keep you… to keep you from putting a key in an electric socket! To keep you whole! To keep you well! To keep you…” And then she gave up; she was weeping too hard to be articulate.

  David slowly stood and faced her, and his face was streaked with tears and blotchy with misery. “Christie’s okay. She’s okay.” He sounded quiet and defeated, and then he suddenly made an odd, childish motion of clenching his hands at his sides and making an abrupt backward shake of his arms. It was a gesture Dinah remembered from David at age two—it was determined refusal; it was his childhood embodiment of NO! And his voice gained resonance. “But why don’t you get a fucking life of your own? This is not your business! You don’t need to care about me! I can’t stand to have you care about me!”

  Dinah stood there staring at him for a moment in shock, and her anger resolved itself into a tight knot of breathtaking outrage. “It may surprise you—I mean, it really may amaze you to know that I once had a life all of my own. My own life! Everything revolved around me! Oh, yes! Really!” And she drew that last word out in a nasty mockery of her children’s language, a powerful disavowal of its potency. “Really!” She repeated with a pause, and then she continued, all her fury still audible in her voice. “That’s how it seemed to me. And then I had children!”

  “Oh, God! So now we’ve got to be your life!” David was bent toward her belligerently, his voice raised. “There’s no way I can ever leave here, is there, without feeling like shit? Without feeling guilty!” He was close to crying now, and Dinah realized what they were saying to each other and was horrified. She settled back on her heels and reached her hand out to him in the beginning of an apology, in a gesture to halt him, but he didn’t notice, and he went on. “And especially me, because Toby’s dead. He was always causing some sort of trouble. You and he were always having some kind of argument. You would have been so glad to have him leave if he just hadn’t died, and I could have gone, too. But now… we both know that I was always the one you counted on. I was always your favorite! So how can I ever go away? How can I ever leave you alone?”

  “Oh, no, David,” she said, not in denial, but in a whisper of entreaty. She was appalled. He would hate himself someday—if he ever had children of his own—for believing these things about his brother, about her, about himself. She moved toward him and embraced him, reaching up to hold him lightly around his shoulders, and he leaned his head down against the top of her head and horrified her even further with the peculiar gasping sound of male sobbing. “Oh, no, David!” She thought about Toby and Sarah and David and how terribly she loved them. She was assailed with the misery of her helplessly tenacious maternity. She wanted to be a better person than she was; she could not bear to be causing her child such pain. She wanted to explain herself to him, to relieve them both in some way of the injury they had done each other. “Oh, David,” she said with an awful sense of desperation. “That’s not true, sweetie! That’s not ever how it was! You don’t understand at all. You were never my favorite child.” And they were marooned there, holding on to each other, baffled and heartbroken in the burgeoning garden.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LIFE AS A GIRL

  ELLEN WAS SO PRETTY, Dinah thought. Years ago she had been intimidated by Ellen’s beauty, but recently she had forgotten to notice what her friend looked like, and although Ellen was heavier now than when they had all first met over fifteen years ago, she had thickened sleekly. She wore her extra weight like velvet; her flesh flowed over her delicate bones with tiny ripples at the joints much like velvet when it is flexed. Dinah watched Ellen as she led the rest of them, all the while chatting back over her shoulder, her movements seemingly considered, all her gestures elegantly constrained and contained, a whole world described by the brief fanning out of her plump, tapering fingers, a shrug of her soft, round shoulders. Dinah felt ungainly by comparison, uselessly tall, too lean and overboned. Her own hands and feet and knees and elbows seemed to her grotesquely articulated and hazardous—likely to fly out in any direction uncontrollably.

  Dinah had tried to salvage something of this day by including Ellen and Anna Tyson in place of Martin and David, and now Dinah and Sarah, who was leading Anna Tyson by the hand, followed in Ellen’s wake through the crowds of people streaming toward the auditorium—the Shed—at Tanglewood. Ellen glided placidly against the throng, making way for the rest of them, nimbly avoiding being jostled along the path, her eyebrows raised in a sort of amused expectation that the masses would part before her. She was luxuriant, like a smug, spayed cat. Her pointed face, so delicately pink in contrast to her abundance of curly, loose, silvery hair, almost formed a double chin when she glanced back at them, but Dinah was charmed. And even if Ellen was a bit heavy, no one—not anyone at all, Dinah thought—would ever think of her as fat. Every move she made, and every facet of her manner—her soft, light voice, her intense posture while listening to someone else speak, her every habit—bespoke sensuality.

  Dinah was mollified under the pale blue sky. She offered Sarah a tentative smile, which Sarah returned. It struck Dinah, too, that her own daughter was uncommonly pretty in her sleeveless, drop-waisted, midcalf-length linen dress that Dinah noticed was the current style for many of the girls between twelve and eighteen milling through the crowd. Dinah had tried subtly to discourage Sarah from wearing this intrinsically unattractive outfit, but as she took in the scene she realized that on these young girls the odd, dreary dresses only heightened one’s awareness of the loveliness of their youth.

  Sarah had added a wide-brimmed straw hat with a white ribbon around the crown and streamers down her back that mingled with her long, pale hair. Her face was bare of makeup and was not so much beautiful as it was endearing. Sarah had large, light brown eyes, wide set, with a slight droop of her right eyelid that was a sweet eccentricity of feature. Although her brows were far darker than her hair, they were finely arched, and the bridge of her nose was narrow and scooped as opposed to her brother’s, which was broad and straight. She was slight, with fragile wrists and ankles, small hands with beautifully tapering fingers, and she was small like Ellen, only a little over five feet, not at all like Dinah, who was almost five feet nine.

  Dinah towered over their group, with Anna Tyson holding on to Sarah’s hand bringing up the rear, and she was unusually self-conscious. She felt tall and conspicuous, which was odd because she knew she was an attractive woman, and
of all the insecurities she had ever had during her life as a girl, she had never been unhappy about her height. She looked around at the crowds, though, and lost interest in herself. She relaxed, slouching into a comfortable walk and ambling along behind Ellen as they struck out across the lawn, with all their picnic paraphernalia, in search of a place where they could settle onto the grass and eat their lunch.

  It was Sarah’s thirteenth birthday, and months ago Dinah had ordered box seats for this Sunday afternoon concert so that she and Martin and David and Sarah would have an unimpeded view of Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Chorus in Bach’s Magnificat. Afterward, they were to have a celebratory dinner at The Candlelight Inn in Lenox. But at breakfast Netta had appeared at the screen door like a wraith—such a common occurrence lately that Dinah no longer hurried upstairs to dress but remained in her comfortable, tattered robe and ducklike corduroy clogs.

  David got up from the table and ushered her in, but she had only stepped just inside the room. Enshrouded by an air of urgent pathos, she gave the impression of a person always forced to remain excluded, a woman destined to cling to the verge of every occasion. Dinah had fought her rising irritation, because Netta was impervious to hints or even outright insults, and Dinah’s vexation would only double back upon herself. Besides, her mean-spiritedness toward Netta was truly unkind—Dinah knew it was so; Netta was pitiful, literally to be pitied, Dinah had instructed herself, although she couldn’t summon any sense of commiseration. Netta’s presence in her household—something about her always askew, a bit bedraggled—evoked in Dinah a kind of foreboding, a gloomy lassitude.

  On his way to refill his coffee cup, Martin had taken Netta’s elbow solicitously and moved her along to the table. When Dinah grudgingly took a good look at her, even she was surprised at Netta’s bleak expression, the tense mouth, the shattered and bleached look around the eyes. “Are you all right, Netta? Where’s Anna Tyson? Is everything okay?”

  “Oh… Anna Tyson’s in the car. She fell asleep on the way over here. Bill called. Well… he called back every time I hung up. He and Celia have probably already left the apartment by now. They’re driving in from Cambridge today, and they want to take Anna Tyson with them on a camping trip up into Vermont this week.”

  Netta’s whispery voice was flat and shocked, and Dinah looked around the table at the plates of S-for-Sarah–shaped pancakes she had put down in front of her family, each stack of three with a lighted yellow birthday candle in it, gutteringly aflame and burning down rapidly around the tiny, curling black wicks. She bent forward and blew her own out, concerned in spite of herself, especially on Anna Tyson’s account.

  Dinah removed the candle and put her plate in front of Netta, and got up to get her some coffee and start more pancakes for everyone. As she passed behind Sarah, who was sitting at the table with her unopened presents arranged around her place, Dinah bent forward to embrace her in passing, leaning her cheek down to her daughter’s temple and hugging her shoulders in a brief gesture of encouragement, meaning to assure her that this was a day that would be devoted to her in just a minute. But Sarah stiffened slightly and shook her head in dismissal, with a peculiarly condescending half-smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. Dinah stood at the stove feeling unusually rebuffed and puzzled, wondering what Sarah meant to indicate.

  “I told him no,” Netta said. “I told him Anna Tyson was staying with me, and then Celia got on the phone and begged me to let Anna Tyson come. She even wanted to speak to her.” Netta glanced around the table imploringly, as if she sought absolution. “But I said no,” and her voice shuddered downward into an almost inaudible range. “And I didn’t even tell Anna Tyson. I didn’t even ask her. Well, she was asleep, of course. Bill phoned about eleven, and I’ve been up all night talking with him.”

  David leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “That’s ridiculous!” he said. “You don’t have to agree to something like that. God! Why didn’t you call here last night? It must have been terrible to be by yourself and get a call like that!” Dinah looked at David in surprise. Netta had somehow tapped into David’s easily accessible outrage; he was furious, as if this had something to do with him.

  “Netta,” Martin said, “you don’t even have a legal separation.” He was calm, holding his knife and fork poised over his pancakes, and Netta gazed back at him vacantly. “What I mean is that I don’t think you’re obligated to do anything you don’t want to about Anna Tyson until you’ve got all the legalities worked out. You should do whatever you think is best.”

  Netta slid her plate aside, resting her elbows in its place, and put her head down into her hands, swaying in a gentle negative. “I don’t have the right to keep Anna Tyson away from her father. He loves her, too. She must need him. Oh, God! I don’t have any idea what to do. The thought of seeing Celia and Bill… Oh, God! The idea of seeing them together is just overwhelming. I don’t know….” And although her face was bent toward the table, her voice was full of tears. “I don’t think I can do it, and I really thought I’d be able to. I mean, I’ve imagined meeting them and talking things over. But I always thought it would be in Cambridge. I thought West Bradford was… oh, I don’t know… a safe place. And I never thought it would be about Anna Tyson. I know that was stupid of me. I didn’t want to think about it.”

  She had latticed and templed her fingers supporting her forehead and hiding her eyes, but now she lowered her head further, cupping her face from chin to hairline in her open palms. The room stilled at her resigned and inescapably poignant posture of being the sole source of comfort to herself. Netta sat at their table in a state of hopeless isolation while they regarded her with a kind of horrified awe.

  But their mutual discomfort galvanized everyone at once. Dinah turned back to the stove to find that the skillet was smoking, and she moved it off the burner. Martin took a sip of his orange juice, and Sarah unfolded her napkin into her lap and looked across the table at David, who was so disturbed that he got up and stood for a minute and then walked out of the room, pacing the dining room and returning, still unnerved. “Well, Netta, you don’t have to meet them when they come,” he said. “I don’t see why you have to be here just because they want you to. Why do you think you have to fulfill their expectations? Just leave a message on your answering machine, or something. A note on the door.” He sounded angry at Netta, although Dinah realized that it was the same odd, hollow-voiced anger that he had fallen into off and on all summer; she didn’t think he realized that he was angry at all, but Netta’s head sank even lower onto her hands, and her shoulders shook with weeping.

  “Oh, David…” Dinah said, finding herself in the perplexing position of protecting Netta from further anguish, “you know, it’s really more complicated than that, sweetie…”

  But David brushed her voice away with an abrupt flick of his hand. “Look, if they’re coming here why don’t we go get the rest of your things from the apartment in Cambridge. That way at least you’ll know you won’t have to see either one of them, and you never agreed to have them come get Anna Tyson anyway, did you?”

  Netta stilled at the table but didn’t lift her head from her hands. Dinah was appalled by David’s proposal but waited for Martin to object. Anything she said to David these days seemed to be unbearable to him, but the moment stretched out in silence, and she realized that Martin was meticulously cutting his stack of pancakes into even-sized squares as he always did before he ate a single bite. He was gazing at his plate, attentive to his task, and all at once, after twenty-one years of marriage, this was a habit of his that Dinah could no longer bear.

  “Eat the damned things before they get cold, Martin!” she snapped at him with a crack of her temper across the kitchen.

  He glanced at her in surprise, and then looked down at his plate, mystified, wondering what had possibly angered his wife. “Oh… Well, I was just cutting them up so that there’d be syrup on every piece.” His voice
wasn’t defensive or apologetic, only kindly explanatory in the face of her unreasonableness. He had been listening to the conversation around the table, but he hadn’t let what they were saying catch his entire attention because everyone seemed painfully overwrought. He had puzzled out a method for equally sectioning the nongeometric S-shaped pancakes.

  “… and this would be the perfect day for you to get the rest of your stuff, Netta,” David was saying. “The pans and things you need.” He was less angry now but intense, back in his chair, leaning across the table toward her.

  She had looked up at last, shaking her head backward in a reflexive movement. “I couldn’t get everything in my car, though…” she said musingly, experimenting with the possibility.

  “Well, we have the station wagon and Dad’s car. Or one of us could drive the Hofstatters’ van.”

  “I can’t, David,” Netta said softly, shaking her head and looking at him apologetically. “I’m just not up to it. I didn’t sleep all night. It wouldn’t be safe for me to drive….”

  “Look, we could even take some of my stuff in and leave it with a friend of mine in Boston so I won’t have to make two trips when I move into the dorm. Dad and I can each take a car, and you and Anna Tyson can ride with one of us.” David’s anger had been transformed into enthusiasm, and Dinah didn’t dare say a word; she still waited.

  “Oh, David, it’s a good idea, but Anna Tyson’s exhausted, too, and I don’t think I should take her back to that apartment without even explaining….”

  Dinah had looked to Martin again, but he seemed completely unaware of what was going on around him, while Sarah was watching David with her whole attention. Finally Dinah broke into the conversation as delicately as she could. “David, I know you’ve forgotten that this is Sarah’s birthday, but we have tickets… we have reservations at the Candlelight….”