Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  She didn’t allow herself to ponder what connection there might be between Netta and Martin—that seemed to her a separate issue altogether, and certainly boded a different sort of regret. The very evening Ellen had first mentioned it to her, when they had all sat around eating pizza, Netta and Martin hadn’t returned from the office until long after Vic and Ellen had gone home, and Dinah had helped David put Anna Tyson to bed in Sarah’s room. When Netta and Martin had arrived, David had offered to drive Netta home so he could carry Anna Tyson up the steep stairs of Netta’s apartment.

  “I’ll drive them, David,” Martin had said, uncharacteristically brusque. “You’ve got to be at work tomorrow.”

  Dinah had turned away when she saw Netta reach out and lightly touch Martin’s arm in thanks, and Dinah also saw David’s face close down in anger. “I’ll drive them, Dad,” he said, his voice overloud and hollow. Dinah was stunned for a moment by sheer humiliation. Did her own children know of some alliance between their father and Netta? Dinah went upstairs, not waiting for Martin.

  When Martin had come up to bed, she was awake and had no hope of sleeping. Sometimes it struck her as strange that, at a designated hour, she took off the clothes she wore in the daytime and put on clothes to wear at night, and then lay in bed staring at the ceiling or at the soft outlines of the windows until it was time to change into a new set of clothes and move through the daytime hours again. It seemed like such an arbitrary arrangement—and so much laundry.

  That night, though, she had turned her head on the pillow to look at Martin as he settled down next to her. “Listen, Martin…” she began at the exact moment that he said, “Dinah, did you… ?”

  They both stopped. “What?” she said.

  “Did you notice the bruises on Netta’s arms?” he asked her. “When she was leaning across the table? And on her neck?”

  “I didn’t. No,” Dinah said, pushing the bedspread away and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “I’m going to read for a while. I’m not sleepy.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, rolling over on his side into his pillow. “I hope you can get some sleep later. ‘Night, love.”

  Dinah went down the stairs, cursing him silently, loathing him, mimicking him with the fury of the insomniac for the sound sleeper. “I hope you can get some sleep later,” she said aloud, softly, with a singsong, high-pitched mockery, cocking her head back and forth with each word, drawing her lips back over her teeth in disdain, like a child in the schoolyard.

  Dinah and Martin had been married long enough to have run the course of dealing with the other’s seeming infatuations with someone else. Each one had suffered through long periods of jealousy and speculation. They had attended the requisite number of parties where Dinah had glimmered and glittered and tested the waters of her own attractiveness, and Martin had flirted quite seriously with someone else’s wife. Years ago. All of that posturing seemed to have happened so long ago; it was so tedious in retrospect. Pointless, after all. And Dinah felt fairly certain that Martin was interested in too many other things to take the risk of being involved with anyone other than herself. Besides, they did love each other, and they had honor and affection and humor and tragedy between them, and the constant awareness of the fragility of family life. Why would Martin tempt fate? But when she returned to bed that night, she didn’t sleep well, just in snatches during the hours toward dawn.

  Dinah found herself, in the last week of August before school started, browsing through the rows of David’s neglected garden, stooping here and there to pull up weeds, bending to stake the tomatoes firmly, shooing Duchess away so that she wouldn’t trample the flowers and strawberries. The cats taunted the poor dog as they followed Dinah sinuously through the rows, stopping to shake off any bit of water that clung to an impeccably clean paw. Duchess paced the perimeter of the plot, sometimes shifting her front paws excitedly, wagging her tail unctuously, and crooning low in her throat to Dinah, begging to join her in the center of the garden.

  “Oh, Duchess! Lie down! No! Stay! Lie down! That’s a good girl.” And Duchess settled restlessly with her head on her paws, eyeing the cats, who shot her narrow-eyed glances from among the foliage. Dinah looked at the woebegone dog and laughed, and began to sing to her from the row of tomatoes she was tying up:

  Lie down Duchess.

  Just leave me alone.

  If you stay right where you are,

  You’ll get a bone.

  Dinah was making up silly words to the tune of an old Eric Clapton song called “Lay Down Sally.” The air was brilliant with its lack of humidity and haze, and the temperature was so moderate that it was one of those days that David had once characterized as having no weather at all. She was glad to remember his phrase. He was right. It was one of those rare days when one is not conscious of being a separate creature on the planet. She went ahead singing to the dog, making up unclever lyrics, enjoying herself wholeheartedly.

  Stay there Duchess.

  Stay just where you are.

  You’re not missing anything.

  I won’t go far.

  Don’t move Duchess.

  Lie there in the yard.

  Pulling up this bishop’s-weed

  Is really hard.

  It was a good, sexy sort of tune, with a funny, offbeat, Southern rhythm, and she liked the sound of it in the vivid green yard. It reminded her of fraternity parties, of stepping into a room ahead of some boy, moving toward the band, slightly shimmying her shoulders from side to side with the beat and then turning to dance—not just with her partner, but for the onlookers, the boys standing along the wall with sweating paper cups of beer in their hands. She had been a terrific dancer. She straightened among the tomato plants singing bits and pieces of the real song, emphasizing the funky beat, doing a dance that had been called “The Jerk” when she was nineteen.

  She undulated from side to side, while weaving her arms back and forth with a flick and curl of her wrists. She raised and crossed her hands above her head in a whiplash motion, and sang on to the next verse. Then she changed to a version of another dance, almost a bump and grind, taking small steps that turned her slowly in a circle while she swung her hips and shoulders in opposition to each other and in double time to the beat.

  She continued to dance among the staked vines and hum the tune, with her lower lip caught between her front teeth, while she looked down at her intricate footwork in admiration until she heard something and dropped her arms and went still in embarrassed alarm.

  David and Anna Tyson were standing at the edge of the garden plot clapping, and David was grinning at her while Anna Tyson looked on somberly. Dinah put her hands up to her face in surprise, and then she laughed.

  “God, David! That’s not fair.”

  “Hey, you’re great. If you got it flaunt it. I can’t dance at all. I always feel like a fool,” he said, still grinning. “Netta had to go to the dentist, so Anna Tyson and I were going to work in the garden. Do you mind some company?”

  “Sweetie, it’s your garden. I’d love some company.”

  David dispatched Anna Tyson to get baskets and paper bags for zucchini and tomatoes, and he waded in among the rows, bending over and swinging back and forth to pull up the heavy-leafed and shallow-rooted weeds that were choking the zinnias. Anna Tyson helped for a while, and then wandered off to play on the old swing set. Dinah and David remarked to each other occasionally about the flowers or vegetables, and the whole atmosphere was easy and companionable. Eventually Anna Tyson grew tired and lagged after them in the garden. Her face was flushed with heat, and she had that glazed look of exhaustion that young children get. Dinah took pity on her.

  “Why don’t we take a break and go up to the house where it’s a little cooler? I have some chocolate milk, Anna Tyson. And Sesame Street is on.”

  The three of them made their way up the slope of the yard, Dinah and David on the grass, and Anna Tyson determinedly jumping two-footed up one slate step to the next.

&n
bsp; “Netta won’t let me watch Sesame Street,” she said, looking at Dinah to see if perhaps Dinah would.

  “Well, I always watch Sesame Street,” Dinah said, “so I’m sure your mother won’t mind if you watch it with me.”

  “That’s all right, Anna Tyson,” David said. “I’ll read you one of the books you brought.”

  Anna Tyson’s face puckered in reproach. “I want to watch Sesame Street. Sometimes I watch it at Melissa’s, and Netta doesn’t care.”

  “David,” Dinah said softly, “it won’t hurt for her to watch this once. She’s so tired I think she’ll probably fall asleep if she lies down on the couch to watch television.”

  He looked worried. “The thing is, Netta thinks that all those images flashing on and off the screen so fast aren’t a good way to teach. She thinks that the whole concept of that show undermines a child’s own ability to figure out how to learn in his own way.”

  Dinah looked at David to see if he found this amusing, since he had loved the show himself when he was Anna Tyson’s age, but clearly he didn’t. “Umm. Well… It won’t make any difference if she watches it for one hour. And I promise you she’ll be asleep in about fifteen minutes.”

  Dinah settled Anna Tyson on the couch in front of the television with a glass of chocolate milk and a straw before rejoining David in the kitchen. He had poured tall glasses of iced tea for both of them and was sitting at the table. Dinah was delighted with the afternoon, with David’s company, with the plethora of vegetables in piles on the counter and filling a brown paper grocery bag sitting on the floor.

  “I haven’t talked to Dad about this yet, Mom, because I really just decided it,” David said across the oak table, “but I think I’m going to request a deferment from Harvard for next year.” He glanced up at her. Dinah’s face was immobile while she tried to absorb what he had said, and so his voice became explanatory, persuasive. “I mean, what’s the point of going so soon? I don’t have any idea what I want to do. And at Harvard you have to choose your major by the end of your freshman year, and I don’t think I can know by then what I want to do.”

  “Oh, David. Requesting a deferment’s a major decision to make. Have you really thought about it? All your friends will be gone. Well, Christie will be here, but you don’t have any job….”

  “They already said I could stay on at the café. And I could get some reading done. Reading on my own. I think it’s the right thing for me. I mean, I’m not going to Harvard for any reason except because they admitted me.”

  “Well, David, your decision is what counts, but I don’t think you’ve thought it out entirely. You don’t have any other real plans, like a year in Europe or anything. I think working at the café during the winter could get real stale real fast.” Her voice was gentle, though, not at all reproachful, and David looked up and smiled at her.

  “I know. I’ve thought of all that. I’ll see what Dad thinks. I could make some money toward tuition, too.” He pushed back from the table and took his glass to the sink. “I’d better get Anna Tyson home. I won’t be back for dinner. I’ll probably be home late.”

  When they had gone, Dinah stood at the sink washing the dirt off the tomatoes and zucchini and yellow squash, and putting some in a basket for Martin to give to Helen LaPlante. Dinah looked out the window and studied the garden as, row by row, it was lost in the dusk, and she forgot that David had fairly well abandoned it. She imagined the seasons ahead through which it would pass under his tutelage. He would plow it under as it died back, mulch it against the winter, gaze out at it from his bedroom window upstairs in January and February when it would be protected under a blanket of snow. She imagined the life he would be leading, books they would discuss, dinners she would fix when Christie came over and when Sam and Ethan were home for holidays. And then in the spring, he would till the plot, start the seedlings, and ready the garden once again for the growing season.

  In her contentment she let herself drift cautiously into thoughts of Martin and Netta. She wondered if the odd flash-ins she had experienced—the image of Martin and Netta together in the car, for instance—had been some sort of subliminal early-warning system. But she thought not. Her every instinct was baffled by Ellen’s information, because now that she considered the possibility from every possible angle, she was certain that Martin was not involved in any sort of real intimacy with Netta. Dinah loved Martin, and she knew she could never, ever be attracted to a man who was sexually—or even emotionally—interested in a woman as wretchedly and earnestly literal as Netta Breckenridge.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LOSING WEIGHT

  IN THE COURSE OF their marriage, Dinah and Martin Howells had slowly evolved an unspoken code of behavior that was peculiar only to themselves. Over the years the landscape of their domestic life had been delineated in greater and more intricate detail; it had become its own country with its requisite legends and myths, heroes and villains, victors and victims, customs and religion. Toby, of course, during his lifetime, and Sarah and David had absorbed and become part of the family lore, its mystique, and all its etiquette, even in its quirkiness. They adhered to it without a thought, although not one of the four of them realized they shared fairly rigid ideas of the right and the wrong way to live one’s life.

  When David, for instance, was called into the principal’s office several weeks before his graduation from West Bradford High School and told that he would possibly be the recipient of three prizes during the ceremony, but that he and Ted McWayne, who had not distinguished himself otherwise, had come within one vote of each other by an outside panel in a competition for the Harold J. DeLong Book Prize, David had, without a moment’s hesitation, suggested it go to the other boy. That night at dinner he told Dinah and Martin and Sarah about the fact that he had won, but the notion of spreading this news beyond the family never once crossed any of their minds. They all operated more or less on a principle of oblige without the noblesse.

  Martin’s father, who had been a captain in the army in World War II, had steadfastly refused to accept the Veterans’ Housing Benefit, even when the family was hard-pressed, because he had never left Staten Island, had never been engaged in real warfare. It made no difference to him that, had he ever mentioned this subtlety of patriotism to friends or colleagues of his in Sheridan, Mississippi, they would not have admired him for it, would probably have thought him a fool.

  Dinah’s parents had honed through the years an equally individualized integrity. When she arrived home from her first year at Ohio State with her sorority letters on the rear windshield of her Volkswagen, both parents expressed disapproval, even disdain. And her father had been beside himself when the festivities of her brother’s wedding to the daughter of good friends had been covered lavishly by the local press. “By God, the two of them have their pictures all over the newspapers! It’s all a bunch of who-shot-John!”

  Dinah’s brother Buddy had said to her in the aftermath of one of these outburts, “What do you think? One of the Briggses was once on a ‘Wanted’ poster, or something?” She had laughed, but they had both understood that their father abhorred any sort of public display of one’s private life.

  Over time, Dinah and Martin unconsciously combined their separate legacies and established the mores of their own marriage, and now each of them was amused or dismayed at those customs and prejudices of his or her own parents that Dinah and Martin had discarded.

  So, although the Howellses were indifferent about having their pictures in the paper, it would never have occurred to Martin, for example, to wear or carry his Phi Beta Kappa key, and he would have been hard-pressed to admire anyone who did. Neither he nor Dinah would have considered displaying any degrees or honors or personal photographs from their own academic careers, graduations, or wedding on the walls of any of the public rooms of their house, although snapshots of the children in small frames placed on end tables or on a bookcase were perfectly all right.

  They both took a dim view of vanity licens
e plates. Whenever Dinah was parking at the grocery or on Carriage Street, and caught sight of an acquaintance’s sporty Mercedes convertible with the license plate “ALL MYN,” she was offended. And the only decals that would ever grace any windshield of the Howellses’ cars were the ones that allowed them to get rid of recyclable waste in the West Bradford landfill and certified that they were entitled to use the town park.

  It was fine—when it was necessary—to buy a comfortable, safe car, but, even had they been able to afford one, they would have thought it tasteless to own an expensive car designed purely for pleasure. These facets of deportment and taste were symptomatic of a wider-ranging attitude: comfort was desirable, but excess or ostentation was very nearly immoral and just plain tacky. If other people were immoderate, however, no criticism was ever to be made of them; and above all, one honored one’s word, one’s promises, and adhered, in spite of any difficulty, to a tradition of honesty tempered by compassion.

  Therefore, when David began to think that he would be staying on in West Bradford through the following school year, he could no longer avoid considering his longstanding relationship with Christie Douglas and how inexcusably unkind he had been to her over the last part of the summer. He had managed to rationalize his behavior thus far by persuading himself that he would be leaving her anyway, that he would be meeting people from all over the country—all over the world. Now he had to come to terms with the fact that he had been avoiding explaining this to her; he had been cowardly in putting off a possible confrontation.