Dale Loves Sophie to Death (11 page)

Each summer Martin accomplished the greatest portion of what he considered to be his work. Not his job, because his job was teaching, and he enjoyed it, but the
Review
was his work. The four of them, Vic and Ellen and Dinah and Martin, had conceived the idea; they had planned it as a collective editorial effort, but both women had drifted away from the project and from each other. Martin had never taken time to ponder this; it hadn’t seemed unusual as it had happened. Dinah was increasingly involved with the Artists’ Guild shop, and Ellen became more and more wrapped up in her own writing, which she regarded as strictly her own affair. She did not intend it for publication, in any case, so the
Review
could not be a useful instrument for her, and Vic and Martin never even saw her work. She did mail it off to a few friends across the country, and to favored ex-professors. The
Review
became a thing of Vic and Martin’s making, and it gave them great satisfaction, but the work was often tedious. So Martin thought of his summer as a time in which he truly labored.

This summer, though, a new intensity of purpose suffused the air like pollen. Ellen moved about these days taut-limbed and with severe and controlled intentions—setting up for herself more and more arduous tasks and insisting on completing them by her own arbitrary schedule. Her tension was picked up by everyone in the household, even the visitors and carpenters and plumbers, who did their work in half the time and departed. Her tension was picked up by all but Claire and Katy. Therefore, Martin gradually realized that there was an eccentric insistence in Ellen’s behavior that had as its focus Claire’s blithe disregard for the gravity of everyday life. Claire proceeded through each day as need be. Of course, she cooked and ate and cleaned and cared for her daughter. She did all the irritating or pleasant chores of any day, but she went along with comparative frivolity; she never acknowledged or even seemed to think of any long-term goal.

Martin had always watched Ellen with wonder as she ran her household. She laid out her days like playing cards, he thought, so that one felt she must be bound to complete the deck. Each task was carefully thought out in relation to something else. “You know, I can’t bear it—it almost makes me ill—to have anything in my house that isn’t beautiful of its own accord,” she had said to Dinah one night years ago. So she persuaded herself of the beauty of things which had always seemed quite ordinary to Martin. She even insisted that Vic mow the lawn with an old-fashioned push mower she had found in a junk shop, because she said it pleased her by its simplicity. “I don’t see why all the objects we’re forced to live with, just because of a sort of imposed civilization, shouldn’t have aesthetic value. Well, the thing is, I think I’m diminished in some way if I allow myself to use inferior tools—or inferior methods.” Martin had known at the time of that discussion that Dinah would be intimidated and irritated at once by even such a notion. As it turned out, the reverse was true, also. Ellen had been ill at ease in Dinah’s house with its almost systematic chaos. In those early days, when the two women had been friends, Ellen visited Dinah at the shop, where tranquillity reigned. But this summer Martin observed Claire and Ellen and began to think that Ellen’s passion for perfection amounted to an obsession. As this came home to him, he realized that Ellen herself perceived his slight disenchantment, and it seemed to drive her into a frenzy of worthwhile activity.

She kept at her writing, but she also applied herself relentlessly to harvesting blueberries and strawberries and all the garden vegetables, and laboriously canning and pickling and making jam. She baked loaves and loaves of bread—oatmeal, whole wheat, pumpernickel.

One afternoon, while Martin sat in the cool living room halfheartedly making notes on a manuscript, she called to him from the kitchen with such urgency that he thought there must have been an accident. He went to help and found Ellen standing in the center of the room looking forlorn—as he had never before seen her.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

She was standing, slowly shaking her head, and in her shorts and halter top she was too thin, too muscular. She looked like a drawn bow.

“Well, just look!” she said. “Oh, just look at that!” And she gestured at the window, where there were at least a half-dozen loaves of bread sitting on waxed paper on the sill.

Martin was at a loss. He stared and stared at them and then back at her, only to see her face turned to him with that widened look of expectation, so that the tension had left her features, and her expression had gone blank in anticipation of his sympathetic reaction. But he was so baffled and so naïve that his face, too, went blankly quizzical, and it infuriated her.

She seemed to Martin to leap in one bound like a cat over to that window, and she slapped her hand lightly across each little bread loaf as she spoke. “Well, just
look
at them! I like them all lined up and glistening like a little train. They sometimes look like a little train in the sun, and with the copper pots hanging over them they’re just right. But
look!
They’ve all sunk in the middle! I took them out too soon, or the damned oven’s off again. And they’re too brown on top, too. They’re ruined! They’re just ruined!” And it ended up that Martin moved over and embraced her, and she just leaned into him in limp despair. Claire came in, too, from the garden, where she had been working, and sat down at the table to rest, while Martin stood at the window with Ellen.

“The bread’s gone wrong, I think,” he tried to explain, although Claire hadn’t seemed the slightest bit curious. She got up and inspected the little loaves, and then turned to her sister with concern.

“But they’ll be delicious, Ellen. They smell wonderful. They’re only a little scorched on top.” She finally understood that Martin was holding on to Ellen because she had gone absolutely still in despondency. “Oh, but, Ellen,” she said plaintively, putting a hand on her sister’s back as it was turned to her, “it doesn’t make any difference. It just doesn’t matter.” But Ellen gave no response at all. She disengaged herself from Martin and left the room.

In the evening, when Martin was sitting by the pond with Katy and Claire, who both lay nude in the fading sunlight—their bodies not so dissimilar—on towels they had trampled down over the high grass, he finally asked her about it. “Is Ellen all right? Is that bread all right?” Claire didn’t answer for a little while, and Martin thought she wouldn’t. He just let his question drift out over the pond, but then she turned her head to the other side to look at him.

“Maybe she’s just surprised that she’s getting older,” she answered finally. “She likes to be in charge. Well, I’m not sure. I’m not sure what it is. The bread’s fine. I don’t know what that was all about.”

Martin was looking down at Claire’s young skin and her narrow, childlike body as she lay there on her stomach next to her daughter, with her head buried in her arms and her wet hair splayed out over the towel, and so he wasn’t listening, or caring, really, what she answered. But when he glanced up the hill and saw Ellen in her lawn chair snapping beans, he understood with perfect clarity that things had not gone as she had expected them to this summer. He knew now to expect a greater, a more dogged ferocity in the weeks to come. He remembered that at the first of summer, shortly after Claire and Katy’s arrival, Vic had spoken out into their small company one evening almost in the manner of a warning. “All the people in the house,” he had said, “anyone who comes by, they are all, for the time being, property of Ellen’s.”

Ellen had looked around at him severely and said, “Oh, yes? And you, too?”

“I come with the furniture,” he said lightly, and after a moment she had smiled at him, pleased.

But when Martin saw Ellen looking down at the three of them there by the pond, then he himself suddenly saw Claire as an intruder and himself as her ally. She was a purveyor of propaganda simply by the resolute meaninglessness of her everyday existence. The reality she made for herself was both alluring and threatening, and Martin, looking up the hill, saw that he might suddenly find himself an alien in that house.

But the morning he drove out to the Hofstatters’ in his old, blue Chevrolet to pick up Claire for their birthday shopping spree, he was optimistic; he was almost joyful. He liked giving presents. When Claire came out of the house, however, to meet the car, he was a little disappointed that she had on her usual khaki shorts, so that her thin legs projected from them like parentheses, and that she wore her old T-shirt with the subway system of Paris stenciled on its front. He was dressed as usual, too, in old jeans and a faded shirt, but he had been thinking of this as an occasion.

“You’ve never seen Dinah’s shop, have you?” he said to Claire, because he often spoke of Dinah; he had told Claire a lot about her. “She has wonderful children’s toys. Why don’t we drive into West Bradford?”

“The Artists’ Guild, you mean?” Claire asked in a dubious tone, and was thoughtful for a moment. “Okay. That’ll probably be fine.”

When they arrived, it was disconcerting to see Claire make her way around the shop. She looked more than ever like a waif, especially since Martin was accustomed, in this building, to the influence of Dinah’s disheveled elegance and her authority. Claire handled a beautifully carved wooden train as though it were not, in fact, amazingly sturdy; she behaved as though she could damage it. She did linger for a while over the hand-sewn stuffed animals made in Vermont by three women who took care to embroider with great thoroughness all the eyes and noses on their creations. But she walked away from the toys while Martin still inspected them, and she drifted around the shop and stood on its small balcony, which was cleverly cantilevered out over the Green River. Wind chimes rang faintly under the eaves, and inside, every object was beautifully displayed on blond-oak platforms with raised edges so that the pottery and hand-blown glass could be set down on a bed of white crushed stone.

Martin joined her out on the balcony. She was leaning against the railing. “You know,” she said, “the whole shop is really more beautiful than anything in it. Your wife is the best of the lot. As an artist, I mean.” She paused and looked out at the river and the little park on its other side. Her voice was oddly toneless. “Well, I’m not much of a judge, probably, but it’s a beautiful place. But, you know, all Katy really seems to want is a toy plastic shopping cart she’s seen advertised on TV.” She looked at him to see if he knew what she meant, but he didn’t. “You must know the thing I mean. It’s junk, but it has all those little pretend cans and bottles in it. It’s the only thing she’s asked for.” She smiled at him but took up her large leather purse, ready to leave, and Martin felt as if he had betrayed his wife, even though he was somewhat mollified by his notion that Claire’s smile was one of apology.

They went to a shopping center five miles away in Bradford and hastened through the oppressively dark mall lined with benches, where a great many old people sat waiting for someone or simply keeping their places in that air-conditioned tunnel and nursing some private and unspoken fury. Martin had to be especially invigorated whenever he put himself up to shopping here for the special bargains they advertised.

Claire had made her selections with what seemed to be slight consideration but great satisfaction, and Martin had bought all sorts of things. He had been carried away with the whole thing. They found the little cart Katy had requested and then brought all those toys back to Martin’s house to wrap in birthday paper.

When they finally finished that chore and left his house, they stopped at the bakery to pick up a cake Claire had ordered, and then they drove slowly out of West Bradford in the summer tourist traffic back toward Vic and Ellen’s. They progressed hesitantly along the main road and then through Bradford once again, stoplight by stoplight. While they sat still in the sun waiting for one light to change, Martin gazed ahead at a broad, grassless churchyard on the corner, in which some large activity was taking place. It looked like a children’s fair, and he realized with a rising, gleeful ebullience that everywhere there were grubby, dust-covered children running around with helium balloons attached to their belt loops or wrists by a taut string.

“Let’s stop, Claire,” he said. “We might be able to fill the balloons here.” He was terribly enthusiastic, thinking how excited Katy would be to run all around the meadow with a mass of party balloons bobbing high above her in the air.

“God, Martin. It’s so hot. It isn’t that important, really, do you think?” But his delight was so intense that he turned at the corner and parked the car in the church lot. He and Claire wandered through the crowd looking for the source of helium. It was a frantic group in that depressed section of town; the children moved about with a cocky authority that his own children did not possess. These children knew how to fend for themselves. The only advantage Martin and Claire had was their height; their status as adults brought them no special consideration. The other adults were mostly sad and pasty-looking women, hot and disheveled and defeated, who clearly had relinquished control long ago of whichever children were their own. But Martin spotted the helium dispenser and took hold of Claire’s arm to propel her in the right direction. The man filling the balloons was enjoying a letup in their popularity, and he stood leaning against the outsized plastic clown which encased the cylinder of gas. He gave them a glum look as they approached with their two cellophane bags of birthday balloons.

“I can’t fill all those balloons. This thing is for charity. I just hire out for a fee.” He looked at them sullenly like an ill-treated dog.

“Well, what if I gave you ten dollars to fill them? Would that seem fair to you?” Martin asked, and Claire just lagged back, seemingly offended by the whole event going madly on around her.

“I told you, this is a charity thing. The kids get the balloons free. The church pays me.”

“But we can’t find anywhere else to get these filled. They’re for a birthday party.”