Fortunate Lives (17 page)

“You know you’re all right, Christie.” David’s reply was devastating, because he wasn’t angry at all. He sounded like someone
trying to overcome a bone-deep weariness. He sounded like someone trying to be kind, and Dinah didn’t want to hear any more.
She tugged off her sandals and picked up her wineglass and slipped away in the soft grass as though she were a felon, carrying
her shoes in her hand and hunched instinctively against being caught out. It was simply the last straw, she thought. She was
vastly irritated. This was her own house, and yet she couldn’t find anyplace at all where she could retreat. She felt vexed,
petty as a
child, enormously cross at living in a house in which there was no place for her.

She had finished her wine, and she let the glass dangle from her fingers by its stem while her sandals swung from her wrist.
She traipsed her other hand through the cool, fleshy lace of the cedar hedge as she moved petulantly around the side yard,
and only then did it dawn on her what David and Christie had been talking about, and she came to a stop and leaned into the
hedge for support.

If they ever knew she had overheard that conversation, she didn’t suppose David would have any way at all in which he could
forgive her, and Christie would never look her in the face again. Yet, as she moved forward, pacing the perimeter of the shaggy
hedges, she was struck with the idea of David and Christie having sex. Had she really thought they weren’t having sex? Had
she ever thought about it one way or another? In the abstract, the idea of her children’s sexuality had never concerned her,
but now she found her pulse quickening and her hands beginning to tremble at the idea of the stupidity of what they’d done.
Oh, God! The incredible recklessness.

She heard Christie’s car door slam, and a moment later had a glimpse of her red Toyota pulling out of the driveway, and Dinah
turned and made her way very slowly back down to the garden, where David was bending to pull up weeds between the staked tomato
vines. She stood for a moment without speaking, but he didn’t look up to acknowledge her, and she kept her voice very level.

“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.

E
LLEN 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.”