Fortunate Lives (18 page)

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….”

But Sarah caught the brief expression of disdain that crossed her brother’s face at his mother’s words. He settled his shoulders
against the back of his chair and crossed his arms tightly over his chest in a posture Sarah had come to recognize as his
way of controlling his impatience toward his parents. She knew from watching him over the past year that their parents were
often foolish, often absurdly sentimental, and that he was having a harder and harder time forgiving them for it.

She trusted his opinion even when she envied him, because in the small world of the teenagers in West Bradford—a world which
she was about to join—it seemed to her that he was the recipient of so much approval. What she admired most was his indifference
to the whole business. Sarah could see that he had achieved a kind of star status in his own realm, but either he didn’t know
it or he knew that it wasn’t in the least important. Sarah knew it wasn’t important, too, but she only
knew
it; she didn’t believe it.

When she was with her friends at the college hockey game and David and Sam came in late, pausing for a moment to unzip their
jackets and glance around the bleachers to decide where to sit, three high school girls sitting two rows down from Sarah had
grasped each other’s arms and leaned toward one another. “I swear to God I’m going to save myself for David Howells!” one
of them said, and the three of them laughed together and continued to watch David and Sam as they found their friends in the
stands. Various older girls had attempted to befriend her so they could come by her house to see David, but Sarah had carefully
studied David’s genuine indifference to his social status and pretended to it herself, which really did work; it really did
enhance her desirability as a friend or girlfriend.

Now and then she could feel the atmosphere around herself become supercharged when a collective attention focused on her:
a group of teachers in the school cafeteria suddenly glancing her way with beneficent expectations. Adults genuinely interested
in her when she came through to pass the cheese and crackers at one of her parents’ dinner parties. Her parents’ guests didn’t
merely nod and thank her; conversation stopped momentarily and they turned to ask a question and listen to her expectantly.

“Another one of those gorgeous Howells children,”
she had heard a woman she vaguely recognized say to another when she made her way past them on the Carriage Street sidewalk.
The limelight David inhabited in this last year he would really live in West Bradford was wide enough so that the soft edges
illuminated her, too. There was no one, therefore, whose wisdom she trusted more than she trusted David’s, because she knew
from everything her parents had ever said that they would disapprove of her desire for popularity and acclaim. They would
think her frivolous. But she also knew beyond a doubt that they didn’t understand the real world of political life in which
she had to operate.

“It doesn’t matter about my
birthday
!” she said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a birthday! You know this is much more important, Mom. This is Netta’s
real life
!” David met her glance with a surprised and dazzling smile that entirely opened his expression, lighting his face with a
look of unusual pleasure. In someone less sternly featured, it would have been a cartoon smile, with the corners of his mouth
curling up, his eyebrows lifted in delight. Ever since he was a child, that smile had been an amazing transformation of his
strong features, but these days its appearance was more and more rare.

“Goddammit, Sarah!” Dinah finally exploded. “Your birthday is
your
real life! This is the only day you’ll ever turn thirteen! We’ve planned this for
months
! All of this…” and she gestured around the room with a sweep of her arm to indicate the overheated atmosphere, “… this is
not
your responsibility!” She leaned across the table toward her daughter, unconsciously venting all of her aggravation on Sarah
in what she thought was Sarah’s behalf.

But it was Martin at whom Dinah was really angry, so angry that it made her face tingle with suppressed rage. When she had
told him about the conversation she had overheard between David and Christie, a pained expression had crossed his face as
he looked away from the baseball
game he was watching on television and absorbed what she was saying. They had been propped in bed, side by side, late on the
same evening of the afternoon when Dinah had overheard that conversation. She had been trying to read, or at least to appear
to read, while she considered how to tell Martin that Christie might be pregnant. Dinah had still felt bruised from her confrontation
with her own son that afternoon, still baffled, and she was both horrified and terribly saddened at the situation Christie
and David might be in.

Martin had turned to listen to her as she began relaying Christie and David’s conversation, but he had glanced back toward
the television for just a second when a roar arose from the crowd at Fenway Park. He hadn’t turned fully away from her—he
had merely been distracted—but she reached over and flicked off the remote control and the screen went black. He had started
to say something, perhaps to apologize, but she had glared at him, and his face had set in resignation as he heard her out.

“Oh, Christ!” he said, but quietly with a note of resignation. He rubbed one hand beneath his jaw, running his fingers along
the sides of his face and brushing his thumb over the cleft of his chin as though he were assessing his need of a shave. Dinah
was familiar with that gesture from other times in their lives, moments of anxiety and pain. “Jesus Christ! How could they
be so stupid? I mean, it’s hard to think of David being so irresponsible!” And she could hear that he was as anxious as she.
Then he dropped his arm and lifted both hands helplessly, palms up, and she immediately felt abandoned. “Well, Dinah… I don’t
know what we can do unless David asks us to do something. It sounds like Christie hasn’t told her parents anything yet. It
seems to me that most of all it has to be
her
business.”

“What the hell do you mean? You mean it’s all
Christie’s
fault?”