Dale Loves Sophie to Death (18 page)

When she was dry, she put on a long, heavy robe that had been hanging untouched on the hook since the heat had begun weeks ago. She rubbed away the filmy condensation on the mirror with the flat of her hand and looked cursorily at herself just long enough to comb her wet hair straight back from her face and clip it tightly at the nape of her neck. Dinah imagined to herself that she strove only for neatness. Long ago she had intended to abandon competition with Isobel because of the futility of it. When she came to understand that at the very center of Isobel there was absolute self-assurance, Dinah had meant to give up the battle. There had been a time when she had thought this all out very carefully; she had calculated all the angles, but then Isobel would reappear and not be in the least arrogant, would seem possibly vincible, after all, and Dinah would be—time and again—lulled into the idea of achieving a victory. Dinah didn’t think this all over now in great detail; after all, they were both grown women. Even so, Dinah’s particular kind of beauty was never more impressive than when she turned her clean, bare face to the world without benefit of makeup or the softness of her hair wisping loose to modify the striking alignment of her bones, which eight years could not alter.

When she entered the kitchen, where everyone was gathered, she realized that despite her shower she was still in something of a fog; she wasn’t properly alert to the present. She could only embrace Isobel mechanically in a show of greeting and retreat to the perimeter of the activity, because all her impressions were still insubstantial. She sat while the room shifted with movement and voices, and she had the sudden idea that the entire scene was a Crayola drawing in which only Isobel, so vivid against the pallid morning, had been outlined in black. In fact, as she sat there seeing Isobel for the first time in so many years, it occurred to her that Isobel’s face
looked
exactly as if a talented child had drawn it. It was the imperfect arrangement of her friend’s features that was so compelling, even against the precision of the room itself—all straight lines and perfect angles. Dinah thought that it must be the general expectation of balance in beauty that so enhanced the crooked perfection of Isobel’s lovely face. That child who had sat down with a determination to get this portrait exactly right had concentrated so arduously on each separate feature that proportion had fallen by the wayside—but it had worked to the advantage of the finished product. It would be impossible, thought Dinah, not to contemplate Isobel’s face repeatedly if one was given the opportunity. And, as always, Dinah felt a proprietary pleasure in the beauty of her friend. It was as satisfying to her as if she had said, “I told you so.”

“It’s wonderful to see you again,” Dinah said across the heads of her children. “You haven’t changed at all, I don’t think. I don’t think you’ve changed a bit.”

Isobel could only smile across to her in the crowded kitchen. She had simply begun preparing the children’s breakfast while she and Buddy waited for Dinah to dress and come down. These were children she had never met, however, and an entirely strange kitchen. Perhaps, Dinah thought, such necessary and compliant assurance and ease in the world is what really constitutes charm. She watched as Isobel made her way back and forth through the small, warm tide of animated children, and Dinah was unable to energize herself even to attempt to instigate order or calm them down.

David was too large for his own coordination in his sudden shyness, and he was brash and boisterous and clumsy. Sarah was in the way in her desire to help Isobel with everything. But Toby set Dinah’s teeth on edge. It seemed that every sullen tension once embodied in the lost heat had resolved itself in Toby’s dark presence. He was jealous, and he was whining and complaining about his leg and then about his stomach, and he was in a cringing, clinging mood so that he hung on Dinah. At the same time he was wired with an uncertain excitement, as if his body were circuited with auxiliary power; even his dark hair seemed to bristle out around his head in morosely intense and peculiar agitation. This morning his manifestation of some obscure but genuine despair only aroused in her a quiet fury, and it was an anger she didn’t bother to explore. It wasn’t a very sophisticated anger; Dinah wanted her life—even this moment as it was being played out in the boxlike kitchen—to be sincerely coveted by her good friend Isobel.

She sat at the edge of the room and looked at her children in the light of the immediate moment, without benefit of their complex history and with a blank mind. Just for an instant she erased the knowledge of her affection for them, and she saw that they were clearly burdensome; she was not to be envied just now. She felt uncharitable about the whole situation. Taking one look at their flushed faces, she allowed herself a rare luxury: she slid out of the present. Her mind took no account of her own past, and so she was absolved, temporarily, of any liability on behalf of these children.

Toby was in a constant state of motion around the room, studiously ignoring Isobel. “I can’t
eat
anything, Mama. I just want some ginger ale. I don’t feel good. My stomach hurts.” He moved along the edges of the room, opening drawers, moving the appliances, punching the buttons on the blender. He moved jerkily, leaning against the counters and bracing himself while he pulled his leg along after him. He and Dinah regarded each other for the first time that summer with mutual and unequivocal antagonism. Dinah needed Isobel’s approval of her three children; if they would not seek it, then she would not cajole them; she would ignore them.

Buddy took up some of the slack. He was sitting at the kitchen table, and he put Sarah on his lap to get her out of the way; now he gathered Toby into one arm and held him so that Toby leaned against his side. “You feel hot, Toby. He feels pretty hot, Dinah.”

Dinah just glanced at them. “It’s your party today, Toby. You’d better eat some breakfast so you’ll feel well enough to go.”

Toby hadn’t learned how to handle a celebration of himself with any grace yet, and Dinah remembered just briefly the torture of a birthday party in one’s honor. When she was
aware
of being her children’s mother, she loved and protected them above all else, and even against and in spite of themselves, but for the first time since their birth she found herself in conflict with her own instincts. Dinah needed to be unencumbered right now in order to deal with the subtle threat of Isobel and any success she might have had in her life. She needed that, or she needed to be the parent of three children who would render her life justifiable in Isobel’s eyes. Dinah wanted her children to be the sanction of all her choices and alliances—her way of life, her marriage—in case Isobel had ever questioned their advisability. After all, Isobel had done what Dinah’s father had wanted Dinah to do. She had chosen not to be married; she had chosen not to have children. So when David and Toby and Sarah persisted in being who they were, Dinah disregarded them as best she could. While Isobel and Buddy talked and saw to the children’s needs, Dinah looked on distractedly, as though she was still not completely awake. She sat on quietly in the kitchen and appreciated, for the moment, the blessed anonymity of being eclipsed.

Isobel put out plates of toast for the children, and Buddy took up a piece and ate it over Sarah’s head while she still sat on his lap. Toby stood where he was, leaning against Buddy, his face pale and his brown eyes fierce and quiet. Isobel lounged against the counter and ate some toast as well.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Isobel,” Dinah said in a voice that surprised her in its plaintiveness. She lurched into the morning and made an attempt to fortify herself against the summer’s persistent reverie. “How
are
you? Well…” And she smiled in apology. “I really mean that. How is your job? Isobel, it’s incredible how much you haven’t changed! Really!” With one arm Dinah made a vague, pleased sweep to indicate the delightful magnitude of Isobel’s sameness. But Isobel leaned back and nibbled her toast with a mystifying look of doubt and irritation. She didn’t say anything at all right away; the children were talking to one another or to Buddy and not being listened to especially, and in the ill-lit kitchen Dinah immediately understood that there was something complicated in Isobel’s life, but she didn’t dare to ask yet what it might be.

“Well,” Isobel said, with an oddly bitter note following so closely on the heels of her cheerful breakfast-making, “I’ve gotten eight years older, just like you have.”

Dinah was angry that this hurt her feelings so much. Did Isobel mean that
Dinah
seemed eight years older? And if that was what she meant, did she also mean to hurt Dinah’s feelings? Maybe she didn’t even realize what she’d said and how it had sounded. Dinah began to remember uneasily that she always wondered these things about Isobel; Isobel’s intentions were so slippery.

“Oh, everything is going pretty well,” Isobel continued, no longer ironic, but reflective. “I guess everything is fine.” She turned full around to Dinah to smile wholeheartedly, and Dinah believed her entirely, as she always did. “How do you suppose it happened,” Isobel went on, still pensive, “that all the things we expected for ourselves actually came true?”

Dinah glanced at Buddy to see if he felt slighted by this last statement—Isobel was saying, apparently, that he had been unnecessary to her fulfilled expectations—but he was not even listening to them. He was contentedly reading a cereal box aloud to Sarah, and he sat there placidly with the children around him just as a cat sits with her kittens after they have eaten. Isobel was standing completely still, lost in some idea, and she shook her head slightly, so that her bronze hair swung like a polished bell.

“Well, you’re still just lovely, Dinah. Of course! And all your pretty children…You have changed, though, I think.” It made Dinah uncomfortable to be closely scrutinized. Some mornings she was lovely, some mornings not. That was the age she was. “Dinah, you look like a grownup!” Isobel was delighted to discover this, and then she became rueful again. “And I’ve come to be known as ‘charming Isobel.’ A friend said to me the other day that she didn’t know anybody who didn’t like me.” She looked over at Dinah as if they were conspirators, but Dinah was blank.

“That’s not altogether a compliment, you know,” Isobel explained. But Dinah didn’t see why not. Isobel intimidated her by the wily turns of her intellect. “But it’s what I had planned on, and now I have it.”

“Well, it’s what we both planned on,” Dinah said. “In fact, I was really surprised when I began to meet women who don’t care if people like them or not.”

Isobel passed over all this. “But you’ve become the grownup!” she said with that deceptive generosity with which she had many times bequeathed a fleeting victory to Dinah. This time Dinah knew it was absurd, and she was surprised, because she had never known it was a contest. Isobel had always been a grownup. That old instinct—like the one between two sisters—to protect Isobel from any criticism save Dinah’s own flooded through her, and she got up and took her friend by the shoulders to shake her affectionately and then just embrace her lightly once more.

“My God, Isobel, of course no one dislikes you! How could anyone? Why would they?”

Isobel’s expression remained reflective, even though she smiled to thank Dinah for her loyalty. She ate a few more bites of toast and still seemed to be mulling over some thought or other.

Dinah began to make herself busy around the kitchen in sudden nervous apprehension. She didn’t want to know of any threat to Isobel’s happiness or peace of mind. She didn’t want to believe that either one of them had changed very much in relation to the other.

“Come on,” she said, “we can go into the living room and have some coffee while the children watch television.” Toby was right behind her, so that she stepped back into him and then leaped forward in irritation. “What, Toby? What’s the matter?”

“Why is he limping?” Isobel asked quietly from across the room, and Dinah waved the question away but then turned her head in Isobel’s direction just to say softly, “Well, possibly this morning it’s all for your benefit.” But before she turned back to her son, she saw Buddy’s face cloud over with vexation aimed in her direction, so she stooped down to Toby with a concern only she and he knew was tense and partly counterfeit. “What’s wrong, Toby? What do you need?”

“I don’t feel good. You said I could call Daddy before my party. Can’t we call him now?”

Dinah stayed as she was a moment, stooping there, looking at the determination and self-righteousness on Toby’s face. It was so peculiar, this morning, to be slewing uncontrollably back and forth in time. She meant well by Toby; his well-being was as involved with her own as if they were the same person, but she was so oddly distracted by Isobel’s presence, and by Isobel’s unexpected vulnerability, that she could not consider Toby at all in any way right now. She could only make promises to him to buy herself time, because the evocation of her own youth had overcome Dinah this morning in the damp, chill air.

“We will call Daddy. Okay? You let us talk and have our coffee in the living room without bothering us, and then we’ll get ready for your party, and we’ll give Daddy a call.” Toby looked at her with embarrassed scorn; she was underrating him; she was talking to him as if he were so much less wise than they both knew he was. She could only turn her expression into a mute plea, and so he subsided sullenly into a kitchen chair and turned a wan interest toward the miniature television on the counter.

Buddy slowly disengaged himself from Sarah, and the three adults made their way out of the kitchen and into the living room. Dinah carried a tray with cups and saucers, and she made a return trip to the kitchen to get the coffee and to heat the cream. While she stood over it watching carefully so that it wouldn’t boil over, she experienced a pleasant nostalgia at the idea of Buddy and Isobel sitting together in the Hortons’ living room. That seemed fitting, and it pleased her to be the connection between them; she was necessary now to their involvement. She had been ambivalent about their marriage and then about their divorce, but since she cared so much about each of them she had carefully not asked questions in either instance. She sometimes wondered how complicated their separation had been. They could have simply fallen out of love, and she assumed that if that was mutual, it might be an easy process. But she was glad to be the link between them once again, even briefly.